Torarie Durden has a big responsibility, and he understands that. The Morehouse College graduate is the head of marketing at Walmart business, a Fortune 1 company.
After Walmart announced its $800,000 grant to the RICE Center to assist Black-owned businesses in the Atlanta area, Durden spoke to rolling out about his role.
How can small-business owners get involved with Walmart?
If you’re a small-business owner, or run a nonprofit, or know someone who does, you can go to business.walmart.com to learn about how we can help your small business right now.
If you’re looking to be a vendor or supplier to Walmart, there’s a corporate site corporate.walmart.com/suppliers, where you can go and read about what it takes to become a vendor of choice for Walmart.
The biggest part is for Walmart business, which is the part I lead, we know we’re already a part of people’s lives. The key is to find out how we can help them with their work, their business, their passions. That’s what we’re doing on business.walmart.com.
JAY-Z refused to lend his cousin $4800, thoughts on this?
MORE: https://t.co/45BpLBQu8g pic.twitter.com/yc050ZDcnc
— HotNewHipHop (@HotNewHipHop) October 3, 2023
Jay-Z’s refusal to give his cousin a loan of $4,800 despite having a net worth of $2.5 billion has become a viral discussion after his interview with Kevin Hart. Where do you stand on lending money to a family member?
So I went to business school at Harvard right after Morehouse in Georgia. So a lot of my answer would come from the notion that if you don’t have a business plan, you don’t really have a business, you just have an idea.
Ask yourself, “Would you invest in everyone’s idea?” No. No one would. What you invest in are the fundamentals. Do you understand your product? Do you know how you’re going to make it? Do you know how you’re going to market it? Do you know who your ideal customers [are]?
The answer I would give to Jay-Z or Kevin Hart is what we’re actually trying to do at Walmart, which is help businesses understand how to grow, how to go from an idea to a concept, from a plan to a business, because it’s not fair to tell people to take their hard-earned money and invest in your idea. But it is fair if you can scale up and get the ball moving.
Businesses take investments all the time. Just be clear: At the kitchen table [what] your cousin scribbled on a piece of paper is not a business, that’s an idea. But when they go take those steps of understanding how and where to buy, how to give, how they’re going to source their products and how do you want to hire? Now you have a business plan. Now that’s investable. I think it’s important particularly in our communities that we go from asking people to invest in our idea or our dream, to asking people to invest in our business. Those are two very different concepts, in my opinion.
