Harrison Blair, president and CEO of the Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce, is transforming how entrepreneurs connect with essential resources in a city renowned for its business deals. As leader of the nation’s first Black chamber, he’s built a powerful ecosystem where business owners access mentorship, trusted partnerships and data-driven insights that help them avoid costly mistakes.
A Dallas native with an educational background spanning Prairie View A&M, Texas State, and currently Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business, Blair follows in the footsteps of his grandfather and father who dedicated themselves to improving Dallas communities. His leadership has facilitated remarkable success stories, from multi-million dollar mergers to technology acquisitions, while his board service with Dallas District 4 Park & Recreation and the Texas Association of African American Chambers of Commerce extends his community impact beyond the Chamber itself.
What are three great reasons to be a part of the Chamber?
Well, for one, you want connection to great information. There’s a huge source of information on the Internet, but which sources can you trust in the era and the age of fake news – that’s number one. Number two: You don’t want to give your life savings to somebody who might be on a beach, sipping my ties in a country with no extradition laws.
So you want to make sure you find a trusted partner who can actually help you to scale and grow your business, and you want them to have their credentials and all their licenses, and you hope that a Chamber of Commerce uses that service that they’re recommending to you almost like a program.
Part three, you always want to dig your well before you need water. So you want to start talking to the Chamber because they have, or they should have, connections to policymakers.
They should have connections to bankers, and all the different types of funding and resources that exist. Every time I come across a small business owner, and I ask them, have you heard of a CDFI or an MDA or an MDDA, they always tell me no, I’ve never heard of these things before, and I got to explain that this is capital that was set aside just for them and programs that were created with them in mind.
And so those are three major reasons that you really want to come to a Chamber of Commerce. But they all stem back to one thing, and that’s making sure that you have support in a community.
Where can new members find mentors and experienced board members who can provide vision and guidance?
We have happy hours, and people know happy hours. They love them. They go to them. You get alcohol and light bites. You make connections with folks. But we try to influence relationship building because I am trying to push people to their mentor, or their next opportunity, or their next partner.
We had these two black women in 2024 come to a happy hour. They’re both in cosmetics. One is a student at SMU. Her and her mom were making these face creams that they would sell overseas, and they were doing 250K in revenue. Then there was a black woman in Frisco who had this red lipstick that was selling like gangbusters. She’s doing 10 million dollars in revenue every year with this cosmetic line that she has.
They decide over drinks and light bites, and us encouraging people to figure out who does what in the room that they could have a business together. They both wanted to be in the other’s market. The international business wanted to be more national and stateside. The national business wanted to be in international markets.
So they came to us and asked us for M&A help, and we got them one of the attorneys who served on the board for a very long time. M&A attorney did great work, and by the end of this year these two women are going to be making about 45 million dollars, and that’s because they not only found each other, but they came to the chamber to get a mentor.
I’ll give one more example. We had a developer who was from Lagos, Nigeria. This guy is Tony Stark by all Tony Stark measurements. He’s a true genius, but every time he would take his app to a different firm or a different type of company, they might take a piece of it and try to sell it for themselves or try to get investments for themselves.
And so he really came to the Dallas black chamber out of desperation. “I hope you guys can help me,” was what he was saying, and so, after working with us for 3 years, not only did he get invested in Austin with a 5 million dollars deal, but now he sold his company to a publicly owned and traded company for 50 million dollars.
And what’s better is we helped him negotiate the deal so that he gets basically paid from the company about $300,000 a year, and on top of all of that, all the profits and revenues that come from the business he sold. He gets to keep, because it’s a publicly traded company, and that was one of the deal points that weren’t as important to them. They just want to own and control the software.
So those are the kinds of opportunities. We had a mentor for this young man who’s in tech, because God knows you don’t want me trying to mentor your tech product or try to nurture it. I can sell it. We can white glove it, white label it. But you want mentors who are in your industry, and, most importantly, people who understand where you come from.
They understand you. You don’t have to spend an hour explaining who you are. You can spend that hour on your product or on your business or on your vision. So that’s why it’s really important that people choose a Chamber of Commerce that gets them.
How can networking in the Chamber eliminate some of the mistakes that others have made, so that you can skip those mistakes?
Well, for one, I see a ton of different businesses who come to the chamber, who are looking to get financing for a particular deal, and they don’t know any bankers. They don’t know any types of capital. They don’t know any hard money lenders, and so they’re in a state of desperation because they need the money yesterday, but they came to talk to us, and now they want heaven and earth to move overnight.
But what we learn is when you’re networking, and you get to start out from scratch, and you’re trying to build your idea and you get started with partners in a network, now all of the good ideas from that network are coming to you and those mentors that you’re looking for. There are people at the Chamber who just get a kick out of helping businesses scale and grow. It’s almost like watching LeBron dunk a ball.
They get a kick out of it. It’s what they get out of bed to do. You’re going to be around people who have been looking for you. There are a bunch of business leaders who have been very successful, and they want to see the next generation, and they’re doing everything they can to get that next generation through the gates of opportunity.
So, they’re waiting for folks to come here, and one of the biggest mistakes I see is somebody will go and sign a lease and get that franchise and sign everything up, and they do it by themselves, or they may do it with their partner, but they’re not doing it within a network, and so they may give money to experts who won’t help them.
Can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a nonprofit start, and they’re newly minted, and they got their cousin, who’s an accountant to help them, and they never mailed the first year’s taxes off, but they never mailed the forms in to say that they are a legitimate nonprofit. And so now they’ve got even bigger problems. They got to pay double or triple now to fix what was already ruined in the beginning.
So those are just some of the mistakes that I see happen, but most importantly, just missing the knowledge or access to a new opportunity that you might not have known about. You might be getting ready to become an HVAC specialist, or you might be getting ready to open that kind of company.
But the real opportunity might be in pressing and minting new doors. You don’t know until you find out from those entrepreneurs and those business leaders who are in the room, and those policymakers who will tell you policy is headed this way, and wherever policy goes, business is right behind it.
The final thing that I think is really important is data. Data is the oil that drives the New World. If you don’t have it, you’re not going to be able to make really good clean decisions. And so now the Chamber is giving targeted data. We can use a number of tools and AI to really pinpoint where a business should go, and I can’t tell you how many times a business will call me and say, “Harrison, I’m moving to Dallas. I need a place where my kids can go to school, where they’ll feel comfortable.
I want to be in a predominantly black neighborhood that has good housing stock, and I want to make sure that it’s got resources for employees and team members, and I almost forgot I want an office space that has enough for at least a floor for me and my company to really thrive in this particular community.”
We now have the tools and the resources to figure out all of the places that the person may want to go, but also benefits that they may get. If you move into an opportunity zone, or you invest in a business or a nonprofit there, there are a lot of different opportunities that a Chamber can help a business or a nonprofit leader with.
