We have to accept facts around our current situation as Black people and the Black community. The majority of us are some limited-thinking, self-serving, opinionated, status-seeking, emotional weak-minded characters.

We didn't use to be this way as Black people and a Black community. One hundred years ago, our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents had moved from the Jim Crow South to up North, and we built up our urban centers from Baltimore to Harlem to Cleveland to St. Louis to Chicago to Denver to Seattle to Los Angeles. We had Black merchants, we had our own Negro Leagues in sports and civic societies, and we had something else that was important – we had supply chain and logistics.

Many of you may have heard of the watermelon man or the catfish man in your Black community growing up but did not think of the supply chain our Black folks put in place. Someone had to grow that watermelon, put it on a truck, and drive it up to Baltimore to sell on the streets. Someone had to raise catfish in Mississippi to put it in a water truck and drive up to Chicago to buy live catfish from the butcher shop. Black entrepreneurs in Chicago had their potato chip brand, their ice cream brand, their hair care brand that they would manufacture and ship to corner stores near Chicago public housing projects to sell to the Black community; we had real complex supply chain going on in the Black community 100 years ago.

Today we got weak-minded Black people doing weak-minded stuff while the rest of the world is becoming more advanced by the day. India and China were places people defecated in the same water source they drank from 25 years ago – today, these are the leaders and cutting edge of technology and rapidly growing as world economic powers. We got Black folks 25 years and older doing follower stuff watching people on YouTube talking about flipping homes, buying Bitcoin, penny stocks, buy garbage learning courses on how to get rich quick, or pay for online relationship counseling. At the same time, our communities are dilapidated with crime, unemployment, and poverty out of control.

When someone like me try to offer Black folks information on Dream and Hustle, I get all kind of stupidity and goofy stuff. Black folks say Dream and Hustle be too technical, talking over people's heads and things are theories or pipe dreams. Meanwhile, I got people from Singapore and Taiwan to Lithuania and Netherlands and throughout Africa, reaching out adopting the very things I try to communicate to Black folks in our communities.  

Want to Be a Boss, Then Be a Boss

All this weak-minded stuff has Black people, especially ADOS lost in the sauce of the global economy. Do you know what personally bothers Ed Dunn? It's when I think of Frank Lucas, Larry Hoover, Big Meech and Freeway Ross. I think about these kingpins when I get into an Uber/Lyft ride to the Marta station to take a flight somewhere and see my Black driver watching Boyce Watkins/Claud Anderson weak asses instead of the road. When I go to Kroger or Publix here in Atlanta, I think about these bosses and see stuck-up sistas working Instacart or some grocery shopping gig looking at her mobile phone tapping away, not realizing she acting funny towards a good Black man in her presence. I reflect on how these kingpins decided to own their work and how fast these bosses figured that out quickly versus the weak-minded Black folks we got today.

You want to boss, you want to be a kingpin or a queen bee, you got to realize young and fast if you doing errand-runner stuff, making someone else rich when you are doing 90% of the hard work to make it happen. You taking corners to push your wholesale product on those corners, recruiting enforcers and generals and runners setting up the transactions and transport lines and some "middle person" who hooked you up at the beginning still acting as your boss and you owe them?  

In 2021, you driving the local folks to the Marta station, you grocery shopping for local folks in your community, you delivering food from local restaurants -  your basic behind didn't realize young and fast you can take this operation over and own it yourself? Talking about unionizing a gig worker job instead of taking over the market you serving?

We can do better and can revive and rebuild what we had in place 100 years ago. But you got to think and move like a mogul, a kingpin, a queen bee and realize there is no mindset level less than that.

Understanding Economics

Many characters claim to be about "black economics," and some of you with limited education follow and pick and choose who you think is the thought leader. No offense, but your limited-thinking behinds don't determine or decide anything in the grand scheme and ecosystem. The leaders of men choose that path to be leaders of men – hyenas do not determine who is the lion king.

There is one thing about economics I find missing in many Black conversations about rebuilding the economy and creating jobs, and bringing back our communities. I want you to understand this one thing because it is the most important thing to understand about urban economics. If you know the product/service mix, that's all you need to know about economics and how we can move towards progress.

There is a false belief manufacturing drives economic output; if that was true then Detroit would still be a prosperous city in 2021, wouldn't it? There is an additional false belief owning real estate is also crucial to driving economic output – we had about a 3-4 year real-estate collapse cycle since 2000. Many Black people believe we need to focus on buying the block or creating products to drive economies and are way off the mark.

Services drive economics, especially local economics; they are not driven by product. The product is a commodity like a throw-away iPhone. The service is what creates jobs, create transaction volume, and transfer of money throughout a community. You make a hair care product and distribute it through the black community – you are just selling a product. The distribution line creates jobs to ship to stores, the store hiring a retail staff to sell it, the beautician using the hair care product as a hairstyling service that drives the economic activity. Auto maintenance, repairing cracked phone screens, food preparation, rental agent – these are services, and the core of local economics.

Now that you understand services are the backbone of local economics, you should know why it's a problem you are performing gig economy services in your community. Why are you performing a local rideshare/delivery service in your local community for a firm in Silicon Valley that do not even hire or promote Black folks within their company? Why are you reserving space in your home in your local community for a Silicon Valley firm that does not employ or promote Black folks within their company?

It's time for you to be that boss, that kingpin or queen bee in your community and use the hands and the gift God and your ancestors gave you and do for your people, your community. It's time to take those corners back, and now we are going to discuss the work.

Collectiveness and Datasets

Many Black folks will say we had this same argument repeatedly about what we have to do for ourselves, but we cannot get together as a people. Dream and Hustle been going through the same thing for 15 years; Black folks want to hear inspirational and aspirational BS, but when it's time to roll up the sleeves, these Black folks disappear and become invisible. Some of them are on the Internet hiding behind aliases, talking sideways while hiding their hands attacking real efforts to improve our situation.

The reality is we did not have the talent and technical agility and actual work and research done at Dream and Hustle. We got a bunch of simple-minded clowns looking for an "example Black success story" they can reference over and over like what we saw published in that garbage Black Enterprise magazine. We didn't see it published in Black magazines or Black media or Black intellectual talk was we, the people are the solution we are looking for; we are the change we seek. The reason why is simple – we had charlatans that wanted to make everything be about themselves, from the megachurch pastor to the Black social justice activist trying to build a personal brand instead of helping the people.

There are two things I want you to understand to look at the big picture approach of taking over gig economy work and turn it into a service economy within our community. I want you to think collectives, and I want you to think datasets.

Collectives

We are defining collectives as co-op or employee-owned operations. The reality is Black folks doing gig economy work don't got the money to launch on their own. The main reality is Black folks doing gig economy don't trust that other broke-ass Black person who is talking up Boyce Watkins and Claud Anderson instead of putting in their work in their community.  But the most important is the belief that Black folks believe everybody isn't meant to be a boss. That's some weak-minded stuff we need to take out of our heads.

We can create collectives with technology such as event sourcing, blockchain distributed ledger with a stored unit of value to develop modern co-ops and collectives. The co-op technology already been created and the platform is already there - we will discuss all this in a future article.

A  collective will brainstorm or "event storm" all the work events that have to be done within a company and assign an asset value. The co-op operates by paying the business expenses first, including salary.  Co-op dividend distribution is based on the percent of events recorded by each employee-owner.

Collectives co-op are critical as they should be a stepping stone. The goal should be to create a service economy organization as a co-op first, and then the original employee-owners convert to a company/franchise to spread out to other markets, then sell shares or go public trading and cash out on the stock. That is a realistic growth strategy from going co-op to gong public with the original employee-owners reaping the benefits.

It is very realistic in 2021 for gig workers to create a co-op to deliver groceries and transport people. As the co-op grows, move to a formal corporation with a board, and co-op employee-owners become shareholders. The last phase is to sell the shares by going public and cash out for retirement or start another venture. That is very real now in this day and age.

Data Sharing

As you are working that gig job for chump change, it should have occurred to you how much of the work you are doing. You should have asked yourself what the other side got that prevents you from doing this on your own?

The one thing preventing you from doing this on your own is the data. You are missing the customers, the vendors, and the matching technology to connect customers and vendors and the orchestration to coordinate the best approach to moving stuff around efficiently.

Let me explain something– you don't need to build a mobile app; this can get done on a website with QR codes and API connectivity to a database. You can manage most stuff using Office 365 subscription, which is very advanced in 2021, not the old Word or Excel you may be used to thinking about. A mobile app is a novelty; it's the work you put in and getting the payment that matters.

No one gives a sh*t about ride-sharing apps having little cars on a map moving around; that's a cute animation. You can provide updated text stating the vehicle is coming around fading in and out effect between status transition. The customer wants to get to point A to point B. The customer wants to trust the person behind the wheel; that's what matters.

It's the data you need and the workflow, which is more on the data processing side behind the scene. The dataset of products a store stock to create shopping lists for online delivery; the dataset of address destinations in your local community quickly sets a transportation price; that's the real jewel here.  So as we talk about examples of taking over ownership of a gig economy job, we will talk more about the dataset.

Membership and Payments

I strongly recommend considering a membership model like Sam's Club and Costco. You do not want random customers or random folks all up in your operation in the Black community. You have to remember the first sentence in this article – we got folks with a messed-up mindset that need clearing out of our community to change our situation for the better.

You charge a monthly fee to be part of the service, and the customer is assigned a rate for the service they request. The reason why is simple; you need stable, reliable, and predictable customers as a Black-owned company starting up in our community.  You will also need to fire or cancel customers and cut them off your business. That's why you need the monthly membership program.

Why would you deliver groceries to a random person who cannot pay $7/month? Those non-paying cats be the ones talking the most nonsense and giving your business a hard time. Focus on quality customers who are willing to pay a premium for your Black-owned co-op and what you are trying to do for your community and your people; everybody else can kick rocks.

In terms of payments, use event sourcing for payment and billing. This means you have the customer perform an action such as leave the car, pick up a package or food, and the driver or working press a button that triggers an event such as customer_received_delivery, and that event triggers the payment charge from a stored credit card on Stripe for the service. This is the most efficient method to collect a payment, based on event sourcing that I spoke about in a previous Dream and Hustle article.

If a customer has a problem with their order, you focus on adjustments and refunds after the original money has been collected. If you see a customer's pattern always asking for adjustments and refunds, then cancel that customer quickly. Do not tolerate Black folks acting sh*tty and petty towards Black-owned business; cut them off and focus on real customers and build up our communities with the ones that want to work with us.

Scenarios of Taking Ownership of Gig Work

Let's go over a few scenarios of how to approach transforming a gig economy job into a service economy contribution to our communities. Please pay attention to the dataset model and structure data, which is the piece you will need to establish as the core.

Grocery Shopping Service. The data points you are going to need are all of the products and their UPCs. However, you can start small such as "box of grits" in your first dataset, then, later on, refine your dataset to the brand of grits. But your strategic goal is to create shopping lists as modules for the black community. People with diabetes, people who need to eat gluten-free, and have active lifestyles, need to be available on your service. The second orchestration is to create scheduling for delivery or pickup. Some people don't want you coming to their house, so make pickup locations where they can drop through while driving home or a short distance from their house. Plenty of out-of-business, closed fast food spots with built-in freezers in the hood that can serve as food delivery stations.

Ride-Sharing Service. That data points you need are addresses. You want to group addresses into zones and provide honest attributes about those zones, such as if they are far away, crime occurs in those zones, or this zone is an entertainment district that busy all the time. Your customers need pre-determined destinations such as the county hospital or doctor's office, the gym, supermarket, the train station, and that's likely going to be the majority of your ride services. You will have to orchestrate where to place vehicles to transport based on patterns you recorded over time. Vehicle positioning will require analytical formulas that have to calculate which driver is closer or available but focus on having the customer create preset routes so you can do better zone optimization management versus random driving trips.

Real Estate Sharing Service. You will need property listings as the dataset with pictures and terms with a contract created between you, the customer, and the property owner. I recommend you create a full-service rental for both apartments and short-term stay to maximize revenue opportunity. Do commercial space and banquet rental as well. What is very important is creating photo and video evidence of an apartment's state before and after. You take a picture of everything, print it out, and have the customer initial this is the original state. Then you take pictures after and upload them to a cloud service as record-keeping. You will need time/reservation orchestration to hold the property and send out reminders of move-in and move-out and ask for feedback and reviews.

Edge Distribution Service. Logistics is a critical urban revitalization component we will need. Supply chain management is the #1 thing we discovered in Tokyo as our takeaway and the most serious of all. Edge distribution is controlling the supply chain in micro-warehouses to move products to local corner stores or deliver. You will need data on the community stores to distribute products to and need data on entrepreneurs looking to move their product. If an entrepreneur wants their Alibaba-made hairbrush in a corner store, they send you a box of 100 to initially distribute ten at ten stores and see how they sell. You need to track trends and give that entrepreneur instant feedback to help them order more and help them advertise and market where the demand is. So you are not just a distributor; you are a rainmaker for Black-owned ventures selling products. One more thing – you don't have to focus on physical products – QR code shopping posters or digital 80' flat screens are another way to distribute through the hood.

Meal Delivery Service. You will need all the menu items from every restaurant in your area. Usually, this is self-managed by the restaurant, and you need to send a reminder each time to update menu items. However, you can also offer a recommendation engine where you recommend food from a new restaurant or a hidden gem restaurant a customer never tried before. You don't have to focus on vehicle delivery; you can create sidewalk cafes to deliver food to where people order from multiple restaurants on that block. You can also deliver directly from food prep kitchens and even allow caterings to focus on cooking more orders instead of the caterer driving from event to event—lots of opportunities instead of merely delivering a food order as a gig worker.

Your takeaway from this article and the examples is 2021 has many opportunities for us to start creating ventures and focus on our communities. We need to be realistic about the environment around us with the eviction crisis, unemployment, and economy falling and start looking at how we will handle ourselves through these crises. We have a lot of potential within ourselves and among ourselves as a community and a people.

We can start as co-ops. We can collect data and refine it and analyze for more opportunities. We can own 100% of the service economy work we are doing within our community, servicing our people. The mindset has to change – it's time to take ownership.