Willie Trowsdell Jr. doesn’t sound like someone who needs help running his business.
He owned his first house at age 17, and Trowsdell spent seven years developing home sites in Toronto with his partners, until he felt stable enough to leave his 25-year job with Sherwin-Williams.
Five years later, he and wife Wilda started W&W Development Co., a $13 million-a-year company that specialized in 3,000-square-foot luxury homes. Then the recession hit.
“In three years, I think we only built one house,” says the 58-year-old Trowsdell. “We normally do between 22 and 25 a year.”
With more free time available, Trowsdell attended
Partnership for the Minority Business Accelerator’s midsummer meet-and-greet. There, he bumped into program specialist Tobin Buckner, whom he’d met years earlier.
Buckner wanted him to participate in the PMBA program. “I told him, ‘I don’t have time,’ ” Trowsdell says. But Buckner pushed back: “You really need to.”
Still, Trowsdell wasn’t sold. He took the application but didn’t fill it out.
Buckner made one last attempt, calling just before the filing deadline. “Will you do it for me?” he asked.
“I took it down there at the last minute on the very last day,” Trowsdell recalls.
However reluctant he may have been, program manager Veronica Cook-Euell says Trowsdell missed only one workshop in 14 months. “He came to everything,” she says.
Backed by Kent State University, the Akron Urban League and Akron SCORE, PMBA provides training, mentoring and support services to minority-owned companies with annual revenue between $50,000 and $2.5 million in Summit, Medina and Portage counties. The yearlong program aims to increase the number of small to midsize minority-owned firms in the region, create awareness of supplier diversity programs and develop shared best practices.
As a member of PMBA’s second class, Trowsdell enhanced his blueprint reading via a Turner Construction course, learned the value of networking and social media, updated his website and created a business plan. “I think his counselors helped us refocus our goals,” Wilda Trowsdell says.
The couple owes their current 17-house Cuyahoga Metropolitan Hoursing Authority project to the program for convincing them pursue the various government certifications required.
“PMBA was a lifesaver because those certifications are very much needed now,” Wilda says.
The best advocate is someone who’s been there, says Cook-Euell. “This is exactly what I would have wanted when I was out there,” says the former small-business owner. “These are the things I would have needed. So sometimes we have to be the change we want to see.”