Today we’d like to introduce you to Christina Long.
Thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, how did you get started?
As a Wichita, Kansas, native, my professional career has always been about uplifting equity in communities of color. I was previously the Cultural Affairs Reporter for The Wichita Eagle, where I was able to cover Wichita’s ethnic and minority communities as holistic communities. With declining readership and advertisers, the industry changed, so I accepted a position with Wichita Public Schools, where I led the Family and Community Engagement Office. There, I trained principals and teachers on ways to get the community involved in schooling to support student success. I still had a desire to write, and so, as part of a series of promises I planned to keep to benefit my life during my 30s, in 2013, I decided to launch a T-Shirt company that transitioned into a full-scale graphic design and communication services company before its 2nd anniversary, which is called CML Collective, LLC. That company allowed me to meet several business leaders and, as a result, led me to a task force that was focused on growing entrepreneurship in Wichita. I conceptualized a half-day entrepreneurship event called the Create Campaign Forum to bring, particularly Black entrepreneurs, together with entrepreneurship support organizations to build relationships and grow businesses. The Forum drew 77 Black entrepreneurs, more than double our expected turnout, and participants continued asking for more services.
In 2017, Create Campaign was structured as a 501c3 nonprofit organization. We expanded the Forum to Kansas City and drew a sizable group of entrepreneurs to work with. We continued growing Create Campaign programming to include additional workshops and trainings. In 2018, Commerce Bank in Wichita gifted us our headquarters building; in 2018, we held another Forum in Kansas City, as well, leading to my convening of the KCK Entrepreneurship Work Group, which grew to more than 30 groups working to determine ways to cultivate stronger entrepreneurial activities in KCK. That same year, we launched a microloan fund, the Create Capital Fund, which broadened credit criteria to provide business capital to diverse entrepreneurs with credit challenges. That program served as a blueprint for additional microloan programs that exist today.
In 2020, we pivoted due to COVID-19 and presented programming virtually, leading us to serve entrepreneurs in Omaha through business consulting and some of our entrepreneurship development curriculum. By 2021, we were invited to house a nationally recognized, multi-week business series called the Spark Community Business Academy. The course is 12 weeks and allows entrepreneurs to commit to 60+ hours of working ON their business, not just in their business. Create Campaign has improved upon the national model, graduating 90 percent of our participants, who have taken their learning and applied it in the following ways: 11 LLCs have been structured; one business acquisition has occurred. One company secured a registered trademark through the US Patent and Trademark Office; one went on to win a citywide pitch competition, and three have expanded their current brick-and-mortar locations or have moved into a brick-and-mortar, among numerous other successes. Now, Create Campaign has three Community Business Academies running simultaneously this Fall: one in English in Wichita, our first Spanish-language cohort in Wichita, and we’ve expanded to work with Omni Circle in Topeka, allowing them to launch the Emerge Community Business Academy as part of the Spark family. These results are in addition to success metrics captured from across the organization’s work.
When I look back over these last few years, the body of work and impact I’ve been able to catalyze is unbelievable, even to me, sometimes. On the CML Collective side, we’ve grown to be one of Wichita’s largest Black-owned communication firms in the south-central region of Kansas. For Create Campaign, we’re now the sole license-holder in Kansas for the Spark Community Business Academy, allowing us to work inside of any Kansas community that wants the curriculum to expand the Academy to additional geographies. We have approved more than $1 million in microloan funding, have served more than 1,000 diverse entrepreneurs in the state of Kansas, are expanding our programming to serve additional entrepreneurs, and have a staff of dynamic people helping to truly live out our mission of activating urban entrepreneurs in the Midwest to launch, innovate and grow.
It wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The road has been challenging on either side of the work I perform. With CML Collective, we’ve been fortunate to secure a great number of contracts as a certified Minority-Woman and Disadvantaged Business Entity (MBE, WBE, DBE), which has allowed our company to achieve significant profitability but finding the workforce to accompany the growth has been challenging. For Create Campaign, the nonprofit, we are a small operation but perform big and, as such, also have experienced growing pains with capacity restrictions. Also, in the nonprofit space, donor dollars in our geographic region are highly competitive and, as a result, our organization has had mixed results securing the funding needed to continue to meet the demand of our entrepreneurs, who need services and our organization being able to meet the demand for our services fully.
Let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
CML Collective is an inclusive graphic design and communication services company that provides professional communication and DEI services for entities that recognize inclusion as a business imperative. We are known for providing comprehensive services with maximum efficiency for projects of any size. I’m most proud that my company has such a wide-range portfolio with projects for startups and nonprofits to major corporations working on a local, regional, national, and global scale. What sets CML Collective apart is our ability to deliver services, including in Spanish, with great results for our clients.
Create Campaign is a 501c3 nonprofit that activates urban entrepreneurs in the Midwest to launch, innovate, and grow. We provide access and capital to entrepreneurs in ways that create pathways to build generational wealth. Our access focuses on access to entrepreneurial education and opportunity. Our business capital services provide numerous flexible, low-interest financing to diverse businesses. What sets Create Campaign apart is that we are the only nonprofit organization to offer the set of services we provide in-house: entrepreneurship training, workshops, financing — from application packaging to decision making to repayments; technical assistance through free and confidential business consultations and purchasing through our supplier diversity work. We’re a minority-and woman-led organization whose leadership, in our staff and on our board of directors, reflects those who we serve. Readers should know that Create Campaign provides the blueprint for achieving success in building and growing an entrepreneurial ecosystem that supports diverse entrepreneurs from all industries.
Risk-taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Risk-taking is necessary to achieve results but must be informed by sound data and decision-making. For CML Collective, we took a major risk when we noticed, we had 52 clients who, at some point in the year, would request one-off jobs from us. The workflow was steady and overwhelming. Several years ago, I decided to introduce a membership model, zeroing out my clientele and making 10 memberships available on a retainer basis. I referred the other clients to a protege company I knew could handle the work. It was challenging but necessary, as I worked 16-18 hour days to meet the demand. I could stabilize my workflow with the membership model while still hitting revenue goals. The transition worked, and the company grew more intentionally through a strategic pathway for growth that added contract work from major corporations and government entities to my membership model.
On the Create Campaign side, I took a risk by opting into the national curriculum opportunity, requiring the organization to commit to a $1.2 million raise to cover operational sustainability for three years. It was quite a leap, but with the right support, we raised $1 million+, which allowed us to hire additional staff members and train them on the curriculum delivery model. Because we took that risk, Create Campaign has additional operational infrastructure to perform the work we perform through training, lending, and technical services. Before we took the risk, the organization achieved notable accomplishments with only one staff member and myself. Our capacity was limited because of the number of staffers inside the organization. The risk was worth taking.
Contact Info:
- Website: CML Collective: www.cmlcollective.com; Create Campaign: www.createcampaignks.com
- Instagram: @cmlcollective; @createcampaignks
- Facebook: @cmlcollective; @createcampaign
- Linkedin: Christina Long: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christina-long-05221555/; Create Campaign: @createcampaign
- Youtube: @createcampaign
Image Credits
Scott Huynh Design; Unicorn Creative Studios, GBC Visuals
