Supplier Diversity Grows the Business Pie

Women-owned businesses and corporate employers find themselves on the same page in the fast-growing field of diversity outreach efforts: More should be done, and much more can be.

by Charles Molineaux

May 1, 2008

For experienced testimonials about the value of corporate diversity initiatives, one can find few persons as enthusiastic, or as experienced, as Monica Maldonado.
 
     “I could probably be the biggest spokesperson for diversity and supplier diversity,” she proclaims, “because I really believe in it.” As president of Interprint Communications Inc., a Decatur-based graphics company, for 25 years, Maldonado has run a company that qualifies as both a minority business enterprise and a woman business enterprise. “We’ve been dealing with supplier diversity programs since the get-go.”

     Much has changed since she and her company made their first inroads into the corporate world in the early 1980s via a General Motors diversity initiative. Today metro Atlanta is seen by diversity advocates as not merely as a major corporate center rich in opportunity but also as a hotbed of vigorous inclusion initiatives where corporate citizens appreciate the value of making room for women- and minority-owned companies as business partners.

     Leaders of the Georgia Women’s Business Council, the local arm of the national Women’s Business Enterprise National Council, repeatedly cite that welcoming aura. The national council, the leading third-party certifier of
women-owned businesses, will hold its national Women in Business conference and business fair in Atlanta in June.

      “We have a lot of major corporations in this city who are already locked into the supplier diversity field,” says Kathy Homeyer, director of supplier diversity at UPS and a corporate co-chairwoman of the conference. “So they understand the economic impact of minority- and women-owned companies that can really drive their business.”

     But while minority- and women-owned businesses enjoy progress in getting bigger slices of the business pie and their corporate customers celebrate the growing numbers of MBEs and WBEs that they’ve managed to bring on board, both groups see ongoing growth that co-exists with opportunities yet to be exploited and progress yet to be made.

     Advocates also look at signs of a slowing economy and posit a newly urgent need for diverse businesses to hang together. At The Home Depot, Supplier Diversity Director Michelle Johnson muses, “The reality is, the further we grow, the more that we see that there’s a gap, and we need to continue to work harder to fill that gap.”

Continue reading this article in the May 2008 issue of Atlanta Woman .