Kevin Brown Selected to Minority Leadership Program

By Kevin Brown, Hood MBA Candidate

This spring, I was selected to participate in the Frederick County Future Minority Business Leaders Program. The program has been very exciting, informative and inspiring. It is an eight-month program that meets for two hours once a month. Each meeting, we have a topic of discussion, and we have multiple experts come in for each topic.

The first meeting, the speaker was Rick Weldon, the vice president of operations for the Frederick County Chamber of Commerce. He spoke about the importance of having a well-developed elevator pitch. When he finished his presentation, he helped the class develop and perfect their own elevator pitches and even made himself available by email to continue to help us.

In our second meeting, Michael Dailey from Next Level Performance Consulting gave the class the Myers/Briggs personality test. We discussed our results of the test and matched our leadership styles with the type of industries that would be best for us. The lecture he gave was very informative and helped us identify our leadership styles and also helped us train to become stronger leaders.

The topic of the most recent meeting we had was, “What does success look like?” In this session, we had a panel of successful businessmen and women in Frederick County. The panel included lawyers, doctors and business owners in the community. They explained what they think they did differently from other people in their field to become successful. Then they completed the session with a question and answer time.

Topics in future meetings will include how to start your own business, marketing without much money, and how to put yourself in the right place with the right people.

In the past couple of months, I have met some amazing current and future business leaders in the community. I have also learned a lot about leadership, the kind of leader I am and what will make me a stronger leader. I’m excited about what I’m going to get from the rest of the program and the leaders that I will meet.