Sometimes minority business owners run out of ideas and connections to take their businesses to the next level.
Craig Fowler, a managing director at Bank of America, has been working with minority businesses for a long time and understands the potential challenges. One of his most recent initiatives to help minority businesses nationwide grow to scale is the M&A Minority Business Enterprises Summit, an annual event held at Bank of America’s headquarters in Charlotte, N.C.
“It helps educate minority business owners to consider acquisitions and mergers, as a way to use private equity to build their business,” Fowler said of the summit, “which they may have never considered doing.”
The event brings together MBEs, private equity capital providers, along with diversity professionals that are interested in growing minority businesses.
Oftentimes, Fowler said what’s missing from the conversation are corporate development players – people who work with divestitures. He gave this example. When Monsanto spun off its NutraSweet division and Arnold Donald bought it, that created a minority-owned business of significant size.
“We invite major corporations to this event, so we can find out if they have the divestiture opportunities that a minority business owner could buy,” he said. “And then we have private equity capital providers there that could help them.”
At Bank of America, Fowler is a managing director of BAML Capital Access Funds (CAF), a division focused on private equity investing in emerging and underserved U.S. markets. Fowler’s team manages capital for the bank but also for some public pension funds. CAF has managed and advised on over $1.1 billion of capital since 2002.
Fowler said the CAF team focuses on a double bottom line – economic and social impact.
“What we’ve been able to do on a national basis for the last several years is invest in private equity funds that are targeting these underserved markets and actually helping to create jobs throughout the country,” he said, “and helping to create wealth for ethnic minority and women professionals.”
Fowler joined Bank of America in 1997 as an investment officer with the bank’s Small Business Investment Company. In this role, he made mezzanine and equity investments in small and minority-owned businesses throughout the Midwest.
“Being a person who has always been community-minded, the economic development aspect appealed to me,” he said.
Before joining Bank of America, Fowler was a corporate relationship manager and vice president with Mercantile Bank (now US Bank), lending to small and middle‑market companies.
During his 15 years in commercial banking, he said he became somewhat of a specialist in private, federal, state and local programs geared toward economic development.
“I developed a strong network working with minority business owners,” he said. “And I was able to do a lot in that area to help start and grow businesses.”
When he made the switch to work in private equity funds, he said he expanded his business skills as well as his network relationships.
“It took me to being focused globally,” he said. “It is a continuation of my work with minority businesses in the Midwest. We are investing in minority companies that are creating jobs in the minority community throughout the country.”
Fowler serves on the board of the National Association of Investment Companies (NAIC), the industry association for investment companies dedicated to investing financial resources in an ethnically diverse marketplace.
However, Fowler is also tireless in his work to grow minority business locally. In 2006, Fowler helped to found the Center for the Acceleration of African-American Business, and he still sits on its executive leadership team.
He also serves on the board of the St. Louis Local Development Company, the city agency that oversees the SBA 504, Micro Loan and Urban Enterprise Loan programs. And he is a board member of various private equity portfolio funds’ advisory boards.
Fowler holds a BS in business administration from the John M. Olin School of Business at Washington University, and he is a graduate of the Venture Capital Institute. As an alum, he said he nudges the university to keep focusing on entrepreneurship in its courses. Fowler encourages students who are interested in becoming an entrepreneur to learn business through internships or working with a large company.
“There’s a need for entrepreneurship more so than when I was in college,” he said.
“I was educated to some extent to go work for a corporation. Those opportunities have changed. There is more of a need for individuals to look at other avenues. For those who have the mentality to start their own companies, they should explore it.”
