And we had a teacher who stood up on the desk that day, the first day I went into his history class, and explained so eloquently, if you can even see the paradox of that, how blacks are so suited to slavery.

I remember chewing so hard saying, “God please don't let me cry. If you just let me get out of here without crying, I'll never come back.” That's how intimidated, how fearful, and how foreign I felt in a U.S. History Class.

I told my dad I didn't want to go back and dad gave me three options. He said, you can come back here and compete against other black kids who are going to need scholarships to go to school, he could go up and he could floor the teacher and seek retaliation, or I could go back and I could understand.

And this is something that if you say to many black people, they will finish this sentence for you - It's not what they call you, it's what you answer to.

I simply had decided to shirk off in a physical science class. I went home and met with my report card, back then they were written grades in ink on yellow paper and I showed it to my dad, and it wasn’t a failing grade, but it wasn’t an A and I was a straight A student, and it disappointed my dad so gravely and he chastised me, and flippantly I just said, “Well dad, you know, I don’t even have all the pages in the book,” and he said, “You know that’s never a reason to fail, you’re smart enough to read the pages you do have and figure out what’s missing.”

And then after that, my mom, who more than my dad devasted me with the tears in her eyes, she said, “Janice, here’s what I want you to do, when you figure out what’s missing, you write it down and tape it in so the student that who comes after you won’t have to figure out what’s missing.” I kinda think that’s how I’ve chosen to live my life since then.

When you grow up in that type of household as I did, I came into the broader world with an understanding that I could learn and that I could create ways for myself to gain information that was not handily offered me.

I think that’s the spirit that she put into us as well. Not just the discipline and not just the focus, but the spirit of wanting to learn.

I remember one morning, my mom and dad, when we were kids, early morning was always their time. Dad left for work really early in the mornings and their date time was early morning and they dated in the kitchen and the little bay window where she has the table there to this day.

And I got up to walk through the hall and I saw them kissing and hugging just like teenagers. And I thought, you know, I'm an adult by then, that was the last time my mom saw my dad alive.

I, many times since then, have thought if you have to say goodbye, what a wonderful way for her to know that the last time he saw her alive, he held her and loved her so richly and she him.

I remember my mom took to her bed for a couple of weeks and I had booked a ticket to come to California to visit my sister, Sandy. I remember I told my mom, “I'll stay here with you mom and help you.”

My mom had been married since she was a teenager. She never had any other boyfriend and I knew there would be some heavy adjustment for her and she said, “No, I'm gonna have to learn to live on my own. I better do it now,” and then she said the last thing dad would want is for me to stop you living your dream because we certainly have lived ours.

I was hot and popping. Although let me tell you when I got to LA I didn't think so. On the east coast, I thought I was all of that.

When I got to LA and I saw all these women who worked without pantyhose on, they carry purses with somebody else's name on it, Louis Vuitton, and I was calling it Louis Vuitton, and they were all the black people.

All the black women I saw were like fabulous, gorgeous women and I felt like this little nappy-headed colored girl coming out of North Carolina amongst all these fabulous people. No, I didn't feel all hot and popping then.

It was palm trees, gorgeous, gorgeous palm trees and you know you go up and drive all the way up and look out over the city and it was just so beautiful. So beautiful. LA was wide open. It truly was a fairytale kind of existence for me and I wanted in on it.

I'll tell you something, when I did get my own office, I remember the first day I got a fax machine. Do you know who Judy Jetson is? I thought I was Judy Jetson. Technology hit hard for me.

And it also taught me the power of technology. I think that's why over the years my company has evolved more around how we build human friendly technology than anything else.

Well, finding people to place was not an issue during that time. Finding the jobs was. And the core of our business remains today as it was when I was one desk, it’s this, understanding the power of the interview.

The power of that interview enabled me to make sure that I understood the individual who was looking for work. I knew where they'd already worked. I knew if they were already employed that once they left there was gonna be an opening there and because of the rich network that I was able to achieve in the social side of how I lived with my brother and sister, I knew people who were looking for assistance, people who were looking for people to hire, and built it on that.

Actually thinking back on it, hitting profitability in a year seems pretty good. But living through it it didn't. But remember I was in a very low overhead business and I was in a business that had high transaction. I was as good as my effort allowed me to be.

I wasn’t making incredible money, but I was interested in having fun and sustaining my lifestyle so I was doing well on the whole.

You know what people look for today when they talk about work-life balance? That’s what I had then. That’s what I was enjoying. Trust me, I wasn’t buying real estate on my income, but I was paying rent and I was having a great time doing it.

My husband and I love each other very much. We have rich and open conversations. I think it would be the same as if we had been physicians or scientists, we are going to share a love of the industry and talk about it and we're still competent, capable people building a business.

My husband is a white European-born man and I have had instances where there have been inferences in social settings not ever in business, where people imply, “My, you're so lucky you were married to him. You must have learned so much from him.” But at the end of the day, I think Bernie in his best honest conversation will tell you that he has rather learned a lot from me.

Becoming certified, opened up many new client opportunities for me because now companies could look at me and look at my business as an opportunity to meet numbers and quotas that they had around diversity and inclusion.

And if it became a choice between me and another company who was not certified, I was going to get that opportunity. I'd never known that existed before I got certified. And so that's when I started to expand into contract business. Before then I was doing business on handshakes or on service agreements. But once I started to go after different types of business, I needed to do it in contracts and had to learn a lot about the process.

One of the failures I've seen occur in my own business as in others is that we create great relationships with people and companies, and definitely we should do that, but people are moving all of the time and the agreement you have with a person, it may not align with the agreement you have in that contract and when that person has gone, that contract is still standing, and so you've got to understand the difference between that.

That was one of the biggest lessons I had to learn once I started to expand my business from focusing on one on one transactions into contract work.

I've heard many people talk about the strain and the difficulty of the first two or three years. All of that happened for me when I transitioned from full time to temporary work.

The dynamics of how I did business changed and that's when I started to feel that pressure, that staying up at night, and am I gonna assume this client? Can I afford to assume this client? That's when it started to happen for me.

The big thing for me was not so much the exponential growth as it was the adoption of doing the temp work and bringing temp into the fold.

You're paying people long before the client pays you. And so there is another element of risk in there. You're also the employer of that worker and so you assume the employer risks.

So you've got dynamic new and very strong differences in place here and you're competing against larger entities who are going in and able because of their scale to offer a much better pricing and for me, and many companies like me, woman-owned, you are the minority company or you were the diverse company. So you were getting 1/10 of that business against one larger vendor and I still had to meet the same pricing as a larger company to do that efficiently to do that sustainably.

I needed to integrate technology in a different way and I didn't find any over the shelf technology. So that's when I started to hire people and we built our own technology solutions

For instance, a high-tech manufacturing company recently asked Act 1 to find 58 scientists and engineers fluent in Mandarin, Malay and English for new jobs at a plant it was opening in Malaysia.

Act 1 executives laughingly call that the “shepherds at midnight” request. But within six weeks, they had filled the request.

I’m very impressed with Jan personally and professionally. She brings a dynamism. There’s an energy you can pick up on. Sometimes you have a hard time getting the right people from a temp agency, but we’ve always been very satisfied.

They were the only non-national firm we talked with, but we picked them because they were very responsive and aggressive price-wise and gave us a customized deal. They spent time learning about graphics business and setting up training courses for our folks.

Until I forgave myself for being female and African-American and smart at the same time I did OK. My business started to really grow the day that I forgave myself for being smart and female.

For years I would take my innovations, my thoughts, my solutions, and get them into the hands of employees or males who were in other companies to put forward if I believed in the outcome and I did that as I think a result of the experience I had growing up as a female and as an African-American person.

It wasn't always good to be the smart one in the room if you were a woman. I just knew inherently and by experience that being a woman and putting forth the best idea that got solved on or delivered to was not the smart thing.

I have a daughter who is an adult. She deserved to see that a woman could have the best idea in the room, lead the team forward, and we could all win from that. And it was from my desire to change my behavior, based on a conversation she and I had, that you don't serve yourself nor the company well to not put forward who you are.

As a black woman, Howroyd has encountered both sexism and racism. Once, after a presentation to a utility company, a director congratulated her on her pitch. Then he said, “If more of your people were like you, we wouldn’t have so many problems.”

Another time, a company executive offered to make her his primary personnel contractor if she would sleep with him. Howroyd says she deflected the proposition by making a joke, but “inside I was seething, I was burning up.”

When Bernie and I were leaving a conference in San Diego, we decided to take the scenic route back to L. A. and we were having a discussion about our children and I remember my brother had said to me, “You know, Janice, you and Bernie have something that nobody else in this industry has.”

I asked him what he meant, he said, “Well, you guys work from completely different sets of strengths oftentime, and if you were to combine that, that could be dynamic in the industry.”

And I thought that was nice and I mentioned it to Bernie and Bernie said that makes sense. I said, “But it's not enough to merge our companies.”

We talked more and then I said, “You know Bernie, I think the thing that would make it interesting for me is that our son not have to decide which one of us he wants to work for because by then our son was looking at our industry as a future for himself and he had worked in my company, he had worked in his dad's company as a kid, and I said, “Bernie, I don't think he should have to make a choice.”

And it is a lot better succession planning for us to go ahead and do this now, let's not have him have to do it later. And that was the decision that was thought around how we would blend the companies.

My sister Sandy was my first employee and since then I went on to hire seven other siblings into my business and they have just been incredible for all of those emotional and those value support systems that you need in place as you're growing a business up. Everyone needs that, I needed that, and I had that in siblings.

Now one of the things that I insisted from my family members before they could come into my company is that they either had to work for three years in a larger company somewhere else or have three promotions before they could come to work for me.

I wanted to make sure that they brought into my business some learning not just the abilities to sustain for three years but the ability to have learned and have grown within someone else's organization and then bring that value into mine

I don't think luck had anything to do with it. I do believe that I've been blessed and I have received those blessings by honoring them with hard work.

All of the challenges, all of the people, all of the clients and applicants. My life has been a kaleidoscopic of opportunity.

I absolutely can't imagine what dad would say or what dad would think. My dad is the one who told us it was our attitude not our aptitude. My dad was the one who told us education is freedom. My dad was the one who taught us that we wake up on purpose.

I think about him so often and you can't not think about him when you're with mom, I was voted princess in high school. And I remember asking for a new gown to wear on a float and dad said oh we can't afford it. We worked so hard for you guys.

And I remember my mom putting her hand on my dad's hand and said, “No, daddy,” they called each other mommy and daddy, she said, “No, daddy, don't tell Janice we work hard for our kids, we work hard because of the decisions we made.”

And I've kept that in my mind as I built my business and I've made a point never to tell my children I don't work hard to give them what they want. I work hard because of the decision I've made. And for me it's a joy, it's a joy to do what I do.

You’ve got to make sure you are committed to the truth of why you want it.

There are various reasons people start businesses. Some want a cottage business. Some want to groom a business for sale. And others really have that bigger vision, that I’m going to grow this thing and it will live beyond me. You’ve got to really identify why you want that business. That’s really important.

In order to be outstanding, sometimes, you’re just going to have to stand out and not hide. My personal business protocol, my life mantra: Never compromise who you are personally to become what you wish to be professionally.