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This episode follows the career highlights of Willie Watkins, a mortician.

Willie doesn't like the word mortician. He starts the podcast explaining that he is an undertaker and then provides his definition of what an undertaker does. It is unlike anything you have ever heard because Willie Watkins understands how to grab a person's attention. He does that when he speaks and he does that when he stages funerals because he learned as a child that presentation matters.

The ceremonies honoring the dead that he saw as a child in Scottdale, GA motivated him to seek employment in the funeral industry. He landed his first job at age eight. He spent almost every weekend from that point of time until he was nearly 30, working funeral services.

He had a very successful real estate career before achieving his dream of founding a funeral home.

The shifting racial composition in southwest Atlanta, GA neighborhoods meant there were a record number of homes being sold by white people and an equal record number of Black people ready to buy them. Willie was the first Black mortgage representative for a nationally recognized real estate company. He lived a flashy lifestyle and helped a lot of Black people find financing to buy homes. However, he still worked for a small mortuary company on Saturday and Sunday, because that was his first passion. Willie quit his real estate job to start a funeral company. However, the timing of his decision put him in a precarious financial situation. The bottom fell out of the housing market and Willie didn't have the money needed to start his funeral home.

He got funding by turning to a segment of the African American community that few know.

Numbers running was a bedrock industry in places with large Black populations. It was big business in Atlanta and Auburn Avenue was a major hub for kingpins. Few can remember their names or how their underground businesses supported churches and politicians. Willie does. He describes entrepreneurs who both flourished on Auburn Avenue and ran numbers. He also explains how the numbers runners were connected to his business.

Willie's podcast story is more than a look at his life and business successes. This episode opens a pipeline to the people and companies that made Atlanta's Auburn Avenue economically functional. He explains one of the reasons Black business owners could flaunt racially limiting financial and property owning laws of the times and set up their own system of financial support.

Willie is an example of the type of business excellence based on hard work and a vision. But his story and his legacy are unique among Black business leaders in the south. He has not only created a company that he has efficiently scaled, but has done so while retaining the memories about Black entrepreneurs and communities from the 1960s through the 1980s. His humor, success and respect for the past make this podcast valuable because of the stories Willie tells and the names of Black business leaders who helped to make Auburn Avenue memorable.

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Kent Matlock’s success is partially based on the fact that he has been guided by extraordinary men and women. Each of those influential people was focused on actions that were for the good of the greater community. But those actions also affected Kent as a developing professional in Atlanta.

His first major life event took place at age 13. That’s when he morphed from being an average inner-city young person into a changemaker. Kent’s parents had moved him, and two siblings away from their urban Chicago, Ill neighborhood and into the rural, racially mixed town of Brownsville, TN. That transition forced Kent to do a hard reset on his communication skills. Brownsville taught him lessons about character that have influenced him for decades.

Several colleges tried to recruit him when he graduated from high school. He only applied to and was accepted by, one of them, Morehouse College. The school’s president, Dr. Hugh Gloster became the first of Atlanta’s extraordinary leaders who saw something special in Kent. He placed Kent in Morehouse’s public relations department. That position led to contact with Anheuser Busch beer and Kent’s first corporate job as the “Bud Man on Campus.”

Morehouse College helped Kent find his calling in life. The close-knit college community also introduced him to Coretta Scott King. Though not in Kent’s class, both of Mrs. King’s sons attended Morehouse while Kent was a student. She immediately impressed the aspiring advertising professional with her grace and iron will. Her goal during the early years of their professional friendship was to have her late husband’s birthday recognized as a national holiday in the United States. A few years later, Kent played a minor role on teams from Georgia Pacific and Coca-Cola that aligned with Mrs. King as she pressed to achieve her goal.

It was rare to spot Black or brown people in the advertising industry, working for major brands or targeting Black consumers, when Kent founded his advertising and public relations company, in the mid-1980s. He credits former mayors Andrew Young and Maynard Jackson for allowing people like him to find professionally successful mentors within their own culture. One of the people who mentored Kent was fellow Morehouse alum and long-time Georgia Pacific corporate executive, Curley Dossman, Jr. Kent explains that Curley has helped him navigate the corporate decision-making process for 30 years.

Kent relied on the backdrop of Atlanta’s strong Black business community as he provided insights that helped his clients market to and motivate Black consumers to buy their products. He became one of the few Black advertising professionals who helped brands tap into what researchers McKinsey & Company described as the $1.98 trillion worth of buying power that exists in the African American community.

During this 30-minute podcast, Kent explains his passion for his industry. He discusses the reasons it’s still difficult for Black and brown people and women advertising executives to land good positions at major firms. He also talks about how the dollar-and-cents value of inclusion has little to do with diversity and equity. Kent is candid about specific decisions in his personal life and why giving back to community organizations has allowed him to reap bushel-loads of emotional dividends.

This podcast shows why he is a rare entrepreneur and how his success has changed lives for both consumers and advertisers in a meaningful way.

This is a story about storytellers.  Janis Ware has published the Atlanta Voice for 42 years.  It's a newspaper written for the African-American audience in Atlanta, GA.  

But there's more to her life's work.  It starts with her father, J. Lowell Ware an immensely talented and hardworking man who honored a deathbed request that changed his life.  Lowell was far-sighted, creative and had an extremely strong personality.  When he paid his only daughter's college tuition at the University of Georgia - she had planned to work with him only long enough to pay off her debt to him. It didn't work that way.

Instead, her father directed her to get a real estate and real estate broker's license and she discovered her passion for financial literacy.  She also developed a talent for flipping properties at a time when white Atlanta residents were moving to the suburbs.  She asked for and received 75 separate houses as donations to a community organization she and her father created.  They rehabbed the homes and sold them to families who wanted to live within the city limits.

Janis also talks about the incredible shifts that have taken place within the print industry and how those shifts have affected the reading habits of her audience.  Her ability to adapt is both admirable and amazing, but the good news about this story is that there is a third generation in the family that has already started to take the reigns of publishing the paper.  The younger generation is also adding ideas and potential streams of income to an Atlanta publication that has served its audience for 57 years - and counting.