The Birmingham Metro Black Chamber of Commerce (BMBCC) was established nearly a decade ago as the only sanctioned central Alabama affiliate of the Alabama State Black Chamber of Commerce, according to their website.

In his first year as BMBCC president, Antonio Boswell said it’s important to provide small business owners with more options for growth as the organization works to help the local economy rebound from COVID.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

How does the BMBCC differ in its function from an organization like the Birmingham Business Alliance, which absorbed the city’s chamber of commerce in 2009?

I think it’s important to have choices. It’s important to have options. Being a member of the Birmingham metro for about seven or eight years and being a member of the Alabama State Black Chamber of Commerce for about five or six years, I’ve seen different people come and go. Different organizations can offer different things, different environments, different situations. But I think it’s important that we have options and that we have choices for different people who are at different points of life and different points of their business.

So, although we may offer some of the same things, I think that our style and our energy may be a little different than anyone else’s, because our membership is a little different than anyone else’s.

What are your priorities for the organization coming into your first year as president?

They will remain the same as in the past year. We’re going to try to help business to grow and sustain in every facet of their business. But also, being a member of the chamber for so many years, I’ve seen people come and go. And I’ve seen that here in Birmingham, we have a lot of people that we call solopreneurs. And some of these are organizations, their focus is a little bit larger than what a solopreneur needs.

So, we will still offer pretty much the same services, our focus will be the same. But I want to try to focus on solopreneurs, whose goals may be a little bit smaller than some of these larger companies. Or people whose ambition is a little bit larger than just being a sole proprietor or solopreneur or wanting a true small business.

The term small business covers a lot, if we’re talking about from one person to 500. So, the person who wants to get to that 500-person level, may not need or want the same things as the person who just wants to run their businesses alone. So, I would like our focus to be on like solopreneurs, people who are truly wanting a small and micro business, helping them to understand how to run their business, how to grow their business, how to sustain their business, how to make the right connections, and how to get opportunity. And I think more importantly than that, how to be ready for the opportunity.

And how would you say that working within those goals benefits the region as a whole?

We can look up the stats on small businesses and how many people they employ. But I think sometimes you have to break it down to the individual. So, I want to reach individuals who have goals, who have dreams, to help them plan.

Anytime we can help an individual be successful, we also help the community to be so successful. Because one person can be the match that starts a huge blaze. We help that one person, we help their family, we help their community, we help their church, we help the schools in that community.

Helping one person really helps the community as a whole. And our chamber has always been about the community. We go to schools and we mentor. So if we can help an adult we hope that in turn that adult can help a child, and that child can help someone else. And then hopefully it will be like falling dominoes. We help one person and they hit the next domino, and everything falls and everything comes into place. And our community can not only survive, it can thrive.

On that note, are there any projects coming up that you’re excited about?

So [this week] we have our first network meeting. It will be featuring Dr. Melva Tate, who is also on our executive board. She’s going to be doing a presentation on artificial intelligence and how to use it to grow your business. And she’s going to be talking about artificial intelligence [AI] and how to use it in your day to day and not to be afraid of it. So, we’re looking forward to that. I think AI is growing, and a lot of people don’t really understand it. Some people are really afraid of it, and I think those may be the people who watch Terminator.

So, we’re going to do that. And again, we are also in a rebuilding phase. A lot of our members suffered through COVID. A lot, a lot of our members lost their business during COVID. And they never returned. They never rebounded. A lot of our leadership suffered doing COVID.

So, our chamber took some hits during COVID, but our foundation is still here. We’re trying to make our foundation stronger. We’re trying to reach out to people in our neighborhoods, our community, and our city so we can make the right connections.

After this week, we’ll be scheduling more events. We’re working on more things to reach out to the community to let them know that we’re still here. I still think we can help small businesses, micro businesses, and solopreneurs navigate through being successful and sustainable.

So, you touched on this a bit, but there were several articles that came out in 2020 about how black owned Birmingham businesses were hit particularly hard during the pandemic. How are they rebounding?

So, the pandemic hit a lot of people hard, business wise and health wise. And I like to compare business wise to the health. If you already had ailments, if you already had a sickness, and you got COVID, you were far worse than the person who was healthy. So, if your business was already struggling before, then your business probably struggled even more after the pandemic hit.

So, a lot of our businesses were in the growing stages. So, when the pandemic hit, like for my business for example, everything that I had booked for that year dried up. I do events, I do headshots, all of that business totally dried up. I had nothing booked. I had no money coming in. My business was new, my business is small. Thank god that I had the chamber who got me ready to get some assistance. But if it was not for that, my business would have gone away and never come back.

So, I’m personally thankful to members of the chamber, who helped to set up my business, legally, financially, and it actually helped me to survive COVID. A lot of people did not survive. So, I’m starting to see a few people come back, but most people have not come back. We have a new generation of people who didn’t suffer through COVID because they didn’t have a business in COVID. So, they’re here now, they’re starting to grow. But I want to make sure that they have the opportunity to grow and put the right things in place. So if anything else happens they can survive it.

It’s important to try to survive. It’s important to try to make the right connections. It’s important to not just get information but get the right information that’s going to help not only where you want to be, but what you are currently. We’re starting to see businesses open back up. I’m starting to see businesses open up but a lot of them are still continuing to fail.

So, we have a lot of people in the world, a lot of people in the city offering programs, tutoring, and coaching. But we still see the same amount of businesses, Black or white, continue to fail. And I believe that’s because they’re not making the right solid, substantial connections that they need to make.

And I know that our chamber is going to be the connection that’s going to give you something tangible to connect to. Because we have people have been in business for years. They’ve gone through the ups, they’ve gone through the downs. And that’s why I have selected certain people to be on my executive board. Everyone on my executive board has been in the game for a while. They’ve gone through the ups. They’ve gone through the downs. And if nothing else they can mentor new business owners on what could happen, what’s going to happen, and how to spot it.

So, what do you see coming down the pipeline economics and businesses wise?

My background is not finance at all; my background is actually media. So, I look at things from a different point of view. From my point of view, I see a lot of the people who want to start a business, they still lack the knowledge on how to get funding and how to grow and sustain. I also think it’s going to be a time where people have to start tightening their belts and being more efficient. And in the terms of media promotion and marketing, I think more of an authenticity is going to sell more so than what we’ve been seeing over the last couple of weeks.