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Baseball's pitch for diversity: "America's Game" is scoring with minority vendors
Ebony, July, 2004
IF you ask Towanda J. Scott, she'll tell you in no uncertain terms that baseball saved her life--specifically her business life. And she's not the only one who has benefited, considering the varying degrees of success that several minority-owned and women-owned companies have had as a result of relationships with Major League Baseball (MLB) and its Diverse Business Partners Program.
With a company that provides a variety of uniforms for workers in the Atlanta Braves organization, Scott, the president of ASAP Career Apparel in Atlanta, had to work her way up the ladder from sales representative to general manager to the point that she was navigating comfortably as vice president when, without warning, what appeared to be her bleakest period actually turned out to be a beneficial, life-changing experience.
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"In 2000, while I was still making my way to the top, the company did very well, to the point that our sales figures were unheard of for a distributor," says Scott, who at the time had no thoughts of ownership. "We did so well that a larger company later made a deal to acquire all of our national accounts. After being with the company for 10 years, I had the choice to go with the acquisition or get another job. I had no plan B."
But, unexpectedly, an opportunity knocked that put her in charge of her own destiny. The owner accepted a buy-out deal and decided to join the acquisition team as a liaison, and he offered Scott the chance to buy the remaining assets of the company, including the local and regional accounts.
Thanks to the reputation she had established at Turner Field (home of the Atlanta Braves), representatives submitted a commitment letter (one also was submitted by Ford Motor Co.) and she was able to get a bank loan to acquire the company's remaining assets and continue the business. "Baseball has been a saving grace for me," says Scott, whose company supplies about 80 percent of the uniforms for the staff at Turner Field--from security personnel to ushers to ticket takers. "If it had not been for baseball's commitment, we wouldn't be here."
There are others who can make the same claim. Since the inception of baseball's diversity program, MLB has spent millions of dollars with minority suppliers, who supply a wide range of goods and services, including advertising, office supplies, floor covering and janitorial necessities. Observers say the program is not only providing much-needed opportunities, but with baseball's visibility, it's showing other companies the benefits of working with minority vendors. Baseball's inclusion of minority vendors is even more significant when you consider that some research studies indicate that less than one-third of the companies polled actually work with minority vendors.
"For us, diversity is important because it's good business," says Wendy Lewis, vice president of Strategic Planning for Recruitment and Diversity. "We all realize that the marketplace today is very different from what it was 10 years ago, dramatically different from what it was 50 years ago. So America has become a place of color, a place that has become very feminine in terms of gender, and baseball realizes that supplier diversity is a way to start those relationships in meaningful ways. And we've decided to move forward aggressively."
As part of that approach, MLB continues to cultivate new and existing partnerships, and has begun to focus on what it calls "second-tier" relationships, whereby baseball will request its primary (first-tier) suppliers to purchase from minority-owned firms. The first target is food service, specifically concessionaire contracts, hoping to boost minority representation in the food industry.
Ralph G. Moore, president of RGMA in Chicago, has participated in baseball's diversity program for six years and says the latest evolution of the program is important on several levels. "We work with a lot of major businesses around the country, but this is probably the most important project we have ever had from the standpoint of the visibility that baseball has," Moore says." I think the fact that baseball has become a leader in minority diversity is really raising the bar for all of the other sports. There's a need to go beyond employment diversity and beyond philanthropy into the whole issue of vendor diversity, which I think is the foundation for economic empowerment for minority communities."
Major League Baseball agrees, already having signed historic partnership agreements with both the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC) and the Women's Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC), which give "America's Game" increased access to diverse vendors. But MLB has taken its commitment a step further to ensure minority vendor participation. Lewis says each team's utilization report is reviewed annually and if a team's base of vendors is out of line with the diversity in its marketplace, then steps (including meetings with local councils) are taken to get the proper balance.
