Capitalist View of Diversity

Never been a fan of diversity for diversity’s sake alone. Didn’t make much sense from a business perspective. But my experience with the Indonique Tea & Chai Cafe in New Orleans was an eye opener. 

We were open for nearly a year doubling customer count each month and turning a profit by month 12. But my employees and I all noted there was hardly a single black face in the crowd. In a city that’s nearly 3/4 black, this was an issue. Even with our impressive run up to profit in a less than a year, without African demographic, we were leaving a lot of money on the table. 

Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, one of my employees asked if I noticed half our customers were African American. Being me, I looked around and commented loudly, “Yeah and look at all those colored folks”, to which everyone of every color had a good laugh. A female customer, young professional black woman, near me shook her head laughing and just said “George”. I had to sit down and get her perspective on the subject. This is rarely done in real life. We’re all too damned uncomfortable with the subject. And that's a pity because her response was really enlightening.

“We didn’t know of we’d be accepted”. And before I could respond she followed her comment with an  apology for having stereotyped everyone at the cafe. She continued that there were places everyone’s been to where they weren’t accepted and was sure I’d experienced the same thing. She was right, I had, everyone has. 

“So what changed”, I asked?

“We just noticed a lot of different kinds of people in here and thought we’d try. Everyone was so nice and what I really liked was that your employees didn’t treat us or talk to us differently”. 

This was interesting stuff for me. I never gave diversity a second thought at the cafe. There was no diversity training involved, no earthy crunchy hippy talk. I looked around the cafe for clues and decided that our diversity advantage was that we just hired really nice intelligent people. No training required. Their parents did that for us. I suppose that’s one lesson to be learned here. You can’t change a cat’s stripes. Hire good people. No brainer right?

The second lesson learned was the most enlightening for me. Diversity starts with trust and has a very real business need. Gaining trust allowed me to make the “Look at all the colored people” remark without consequences. If you want to make a demographic comfortable, find a way to get them in so that you can shine. For us, a few comfortable customers through word of mouth doubled our business.

If I had to do it over again, I’d hired black college students to sit in and outside the cafe. Or maybe host events for a few traditionally black organizations. Waiting for it to happen naturally takes way too long. The word of mouth that filled our seats with every kind of customer in the city grew exponentially. And with exponential growth, you want to start early before someone else does. 

Final note: Our firm takes diversity seriously and incorporates it into every business strategy plan as a common sense approach to achieving profit.