The Carolina-Duke rivalry has sparked countless hugs and tears, jeers and high-fives. But who knew it would also spark a meaningful business partnership?
Brandt Smith is the founder and president of SGS Contracting, a Durham-based company managing the renovations of the Wilhelmenia Rueben-Cooke Building on Duke’s West Campus.
Smith found an unlikely mentor years ago in the construction business with UNC-Chapel Hill football great Donnell Thompson, who owned several construction companies after stellar college and professional careers in the National Football League.
Smith worked part-time with Thompson’s construction company in Chapel Hill after graduating from Hampton University in 2003. Thompson took him under his wing.
“He opened my eyes,” Smith said. “He helped get interviews and took me to meetings. I started to enjoy not being stuck inside behind a desk. With construction work, you’re outside every day. I wanted to be on full-time.” Smith went from one employee in 2013 (himself) to 10 today.
Smith’s story is an important one to highlight in August, Black Business Month. The month was started in 2004 by the entrepreneurs Frederick E. Jordan and John William Templeton to recognize, acknowledge and celebrate Black-owned enterprises’ impact and contributions to America’s economy.
The decades-long partnerships between Duke and local business owners of color have resulted in the awarding of contracts to Black entrepreneurs like Smith, as well as Tim Catlett, the founder and chief executive officer of 38-year-old Progressive Business Solutions. The Raleigh-based company’s janitorial paper goods and cleaning supplies have been replenishing the janitorial closets at Duke Health since 2008.
Duke’s new relationship with Progressive Business Solutions changed the company’s trajectory.
A Company’s Trajectory
Catlett was anticipating laying off seven of his 17 employees because of the 2008 economic crisis.
“I had put together a list of the employees we were laying off. We got the Duke contract less than two weeks before laying people off,” Catlett said.
Cyril “CJ” Broderick, president and chief executive officer of the Greater Durham Black Chamber of Commerce and a Duke alum, chairs the city’s workforce development board.
Broderick said that historically, especially in the South, Black entrepreneurship has been “an expression of freedom.”
“It was how income was generated for families, and provided employment for the population,” Broderick said. “The Black entrepreneur was more likely to hire Black folks and retain Black folks. It was how communities were sustained and stabilized.”
Catlett says entrepreneurship enables him to hire community members. He likes being the one making while decisions while creating a legacy that outlasts him.
“You look at yourself as a contributor to the community,” explained Catlett, who began as a small business operating in the basement of his home in 1988 with one employee, “me.” He now presides over a 30,000-square-foot space, with 23 employees.
Broderick says numbers indicate that about 3,000 of the nearly 40,000 businesses in Durham are Black owned, but the actual figure is around 6,000.
“Many Black folks are afraid to say their businesses are Black because it puts a target on their backs and people deciding they won’t shop at their places anymore,” he explained.
Catlett and Smith pointed to other challenges unique to Black-owned enterprises: lack of capital, access to traditional institutions and private investors, and retaining quality employees.
Work at the Rueben-Cooke Building started last year and will be completed in 2027. There’s a lot of work to be done by the SGS project team that includes two superintendents, an assistant superintendent, an assistant project manager and an assistant superintendent, a project engineer and project manager, who coordinates the activities of the different trade contractors at the site, and creates the sequence of work activities, along with scheduling and costs, and conferring with Duke’s architects and engineers.
“It’s a lot of problem-solving,” Smith explained.
Impactful Work
Smith grew up in Southwest Durham and graduated from Hillside High School. He knows about the city’s Black business history. He often visited Duke Hospital growing up because his father, Dr. Ira Smith, is an obstetrics-gynecologist who owns an Ob-GYN clinic and often worked at the hospital.
Smith is also aware that West Campus was designed by a Black architect, Julian Abele, and the building his company is helping to renovate was named to honor Wilhelmenia Rueben-Cooke, one of the first five Black students admitted to Duke.
“I can’t put it into words,” he said. ”The exact reason I came back here was to do projects like this. It’s impactful beyond words.”
This story illustrates Duke’s HomeGrown initiative, an institution-wide commitment to help people in our community get ahead and help families stay in the community they call home – through better jobs and more opportunities for local businesses.
