Forbes: The Enterprise Zone · Oct 7, 2026 · 48m · 36m saved
With Don Cravins Jr., President and CEO of the National Minority Supplier Development Council
Only about 200,000 of the 4.6 million Black-owned firms in the US have employees, Don Cravins Jr. said, and those are the firms big companies can actually give contracts to.
Most of the debate over diversity programs is about who companies hire. Cravins said his organization was never in that business. It connects minority-owned suppliers with large corporate buyers, a practice he said has been caught up unfairly in the backlash against DEI.
"Now, we don't have a numbers problem, but we definitely have a scale problem." — Don Cravins
Don Cravins Jr., President and CEO of the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC), on Forbes' The Enterprise Zone, previously led the federal Minority Business Development Agency at the under secretary level and served as a Louisiana state legislator. His council has more than 400 corporate members.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 48 minutes of audio, 12 minutes of reading.
Here are the 14 lessons that matter.
Key Takeaways
Supplier diversity predates DEI by decades, and Cravins said it is about resilient supply chains, not hiring
Certification gets a minority firm seen, not a contract
More than 400 corporate members are still doing the work, quietly, even as some companies pull back out of legal fear
Some members left because the council's research and business case were weak, Cravins said
The Minority Business Development Agency still exists but has been left a skeleton, and only Congress can abolish it
Only about 4% of Black-owned firms have employees, so the problem is scale, not numbers
A coming wave of baby boomer business sales is a chance to buy rather than start
190 of the council's certified firms do $100 million or more in revenue a year
The old system was not good either, Cravins said, with Black men getting less than 1% of federal contract dollars
Minority businesses that do not use AI will be replaced, he said, while tariffs are raising suppliers' costs
1. Economics as Silver Rights
The host, a Forbes senior writer, said the NMSDC is a nonprofit set up in 1972 under Richard Nixon to connect small and midsize businesses with large corporations. Cravins said he has kept to economics while others in his community focused on civil rights, voting and criminal justice.
"I've tried to keep my lane, which is really focused on economics, on the silver rights as I like to say, and so you don't get all the prime time doing that work sometimes, but it's still very important work." — Don Cravins
A conservative investor, and why
He called himself a pretty conservative investor and traced it to growing up in the Deep South. His Creole grandmother kept money at home because she did not trust that a bank would keep it for her.
"You have people in the south who are still waiting for that day that maybe this could all go away, or that something could be taken from them that they'd worked very hard for, and fortunately and unfortunately some of that stuff still lives in Don Cravens Jr." — Don Cravins
The host said check-cashing stores in the North Philadelphia neighborhoods he grew up in show the same distrust of banks.
