Howroyd, Janice Bryant

Impact on the world

Starting ACT-1 Personnel Services out of the front office of a former Beverly Hills rug shop, Howroyd built what became The ActOne Group into a global workforce-solutions holding company spanning staffing, government contracting, background-check, and technology subsidiaries (including AppleOne and AgileOne); by 2011 the company had surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue, making Howroyd the first Black woman in U.S. history to build and own a company at that scale, with the business eventually reaching more than 17,000 clients and operations in 19 countries. President Obama appointed her to the President's Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities in 2016, and she has published two business books, The Art of Work (2009) and Acting Up (2019).

Life & background

Born September 1, 1952, in Tarboro, North Carolina, the fourth of eleven children, Howroyd was among the first Black students to desegregate her town's high school as a teenager and became the first in her family to earn a college degree, graduating from North Carolina A&T State University. She moved to Los Angeles in 1976 with limited savings to visit her sister, taking a temporary secretarial job for her brother-in-law at Billboard magazine, an experience that exposed her to business operations and workplace culture; with a $900 loan from her mother added to her own savings, she launched her firm in 1978. She has served on the boards of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Harvard's Women's Leadership Board, and USC's Marshall School of Business, and was inducted as an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority in 2025.

Sources

1. Black Enterprise; Entrepreneur; Fox Business