Welcome to AwarePreneurs, the world's longest running social entrepreneur podcast. If you could take a moment and hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps our guests help more social entrepreneurs. Thank you so much. Today Our guest is Dr. John E. Harmon and our topic is you're in business to win. John E. Harmon, Sr.

Is the founder, president and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey, aaccnj, the state's leading organization advocating for black owned businesses and economic empowerment. A former chairman of the National Black Chamber of Commerce and a current board member of the US Chamber of Commerce, John has spent more than 27 years building bridges between government, corporate leaders and entrepreneurs to advance equity and opportunity. He is the host of the award winning Pathway to Success TV show and the Empowerment Hour radio program and the author of Power Moves the Life and Legacy of a Black Chamber Executive. John, welcome to the show.

Paul. I'm delighted to be here and looking forward to the conversation today.

Reading that bio like, I want to talk to this guy.

I do too.

So, John, what would somebody want to know about? We'll get into your professional accomplishments, but if somebody wanted to know a little bit about you and your background and how you got into this work, what would they need to know?

Yeah. Well, again, thank you for the invite and the question. I'm a father of three adult sons. Unfortunately, my sons lost their mother a little coming up on five years ago and so we had to plow through that. I'm born in the city of Trenton, New Jersey. I'm one of seven kids, the only one to complete college. I worked in banking in New York for just under 10 years or so. I also ran my own transportation company for 16 years.

And I think I want to underscore all that by saying, you know, God has blessed me, has blessed me. I have what we would deem unmerited favor. Paul and I have not taken his blessings for granted. And I try to live life every day helping people where I can, somewhat by the golden rule, if you will.

Beautiful. So we'll get into what the Black Chamber of New Jersey looks like. But before now, but before we get into that, like, give us a sense of how did you start to get into this work of combining economic empowerment and, you know, a chamber as a vehicle for doing that? Like, was that something that came to you? Did you come up with that idea? How did that start?

You know, Paul, again, that's a great question. And to the listeners today, in order to it doesn't always have to be your idea. Let me start with that. I was fortunate to join a group of about 20 people who had already started the framework of creating the Metropolitan Trenton African American Chamber of Commerce in 1997. So I was one of the 21st founding members of that group. And so, Paul, I was just around the table trying to hear, contribute where I could. But the goal was Trenton population was a little south of 90,000 people. We had a black mayor, black city council, but the blacks were not really part of the economy, notwithstanding being about 51 or 52% of the population or higher at that time.

And so this group was trying to be the economic resource partner with the state, with the county, and clearly with the local municipality. And so that's how it started. And ironically, two years into his existence, the chairman, who was the chief visionary and. And the president both decided to move on. The chairman started a charter school, and the president had an existing insurance practice and he wanted to spend more time on his business. So by default, I became the president.

By default, the last person standing phenomenon, right?