ORLANDO, Fla. – This week on “Black Men Sundays,” host Corie Murray interviews Ella Duke, an Apopka-based entrepreneur behind several community endeavors and burgeoning businesses.
Duke is the CEO and co-founder of Propagate Social House, co-owner of Hall’s on Fifth and a founding organizer of Apopka’s Market on Fifth.
“I think that there’s definitely a difference between an entrepreneur and what some like to call a ‘wantrepreneur;’ you want to do this, but are you really doing the work? For us, it’s an all-in game. It’s not just me. I’ve got great business partners,” she said. “(...) It is a lot of hard work and especially for us, when you’re juggling multiple small businesses and trying to serve within your community and be a good friend, be a good partner, be a good wife and daughter, there’s not a lot of rest, and that’s not me trying to glorify hustle culture, it’s just what’s needed right now. So, right now, we have to hustle. Right now, we are in a growth phase of our business."
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Duke made the transition to entrepreneurship from banking, she said, telling Corie about her beginnings as a child of immigrant parents who pushed hard for her and her brother’s education.
“They’re like, ‘You could be a doctor, you could be a lawyer,’ or, ‘You could be a banker,’ so I took the easy way out and I became a banker and I did that for a really long time, honestly probably for the entirety of my 20s. I worked in banking all the way from, you know, teller to manager to doing financial and investment services, and I was good at it because I was good at sales, but boy did I hate the redundant-ness of it. Every day just going to the same place, the same office. It just wasn’t for me, and not to say that it’s a bad thing; we obviously need bankers, we need lawyers, people that can do that. I’m just not it,” she said. “I found myself constantly trying to figure out ways to take the day off or call out and, in your 20s, that’s something that you do, but then you start to grow up and you really start to think about, ‘What it is that you’re doing?’ and, ‘You know why you’re so unhappy,’ and at that age with not too many responsibilities I was able to make some moves and dip a toe into entrepreneurship and once that toe was in, I kind of just went in head-first, and I have been running my own business now for almost 12 years.”
Hear the interview and more in Season 7, Episode 6 of “Black Men Sundays.”
Black Men Sundays talks about building generational wealth. Check out every episode in the media player below.