Serial entrepreneur Antwon Davis talks about importance of alignment, spending differently with the Black dollar

WJBF – Antwon Davis is a force to be reckoned with several businesses including 4^th Park and Spendefy, which went viral garnering him a feature in Ebony Magazine.

Deeming himself the “serial entrepreneur,” Davis sits down with WJBF to discuss how he has expanded his brand from conception during his college days at Georgia State University and how he’s using his influence to inspire and help others.

(NOTE: This interview was taped the week of the passing of Dexter Scott King.)

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Thank you for joining us on Celebrating Black Excellence. Now, you call yourself the serial entrepreneur. Can you please elaborate on that? What is a serial entrepreneur?

A serial entrepreneur is someone who has delved into more than one type of business of ventures. So, it doesn’t have to necessarily have to be in the same industry; it can be across different industries. It’s someone who is known for starting up different businesses, maybe even selling businesses, acquiring businesses, but you own more than one type of business. So, I actually started while I was at Georgia State doing graphic design, and upon graduating my senior year, I launched a digital branding marketing agency called 4^th Park. We’ve been in business for 12 years. January 24th is when I got the actual paperwork from the Secretary of State. The LLC was approved and filed. So, we’ve been in operation legally since January 24th, 2012. So, celebrating 12 years. That was my first business, and I’ve been given been growing that. We have a team of about 12 of us now.

I went on to launch a couple of other business ventures. One is a real estate company that I on called Enclave CO-LIVING. So, I run that. Now, we have a couple of properties that I purchased, and we also offer like property management for people who are looking for a more alternative way or style of positioning their properties for rentals. So, we don’t do traditional rentals or short term; we do co-living. Then, I have a tech company that I started with a business partner of mine called Spendefy some years ago. We went viral, got on CNN, got a lot of press, and coverage. We were like the first dope Black business directories to go viral in a long time. So, that was back in 2016.

Then, I have a couple of other smaller businesses that support the businesses that I have now, like a web hosting and domain name providing company called Cloudberry that kind of works underneath my 4^th Park Agency. So, I have a couple of businesses that I run. Then, the last thing is I recently started a music agency with my brother and a good friend of ours, so we all got together. I started this music agency. We focused on providing services to independent artists, and we just had an award show that we hosted in January a couple of weeks ago. So, that’s a business I have equity in, but I have several companies that are now run, so that’s what I do.

Congratulations on 12 years with 4^th Park. What made you decide to name your company 4^th Park? What’s the significance behind the name?

Well, when I started out my journey at Georgia State, I was trying to find my major. At first, I came in with this whole desire to go to for sound engineering or music production, but I did not like Georgia State’s music program. So, I switched over to business and maneuvered through that until I landed on marketing. I actually fell in love with marketing, so I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in marketing. While I was at school, you know, I have those four years, and I wanted to go through this kind of like four step process of developing and finding, not only my passion, but also like, what am I going to do in the marketplace? Because I didn’t just want to get a degree, and then just wait on a job. I want to come out the door with experience with like a portfolio. So, I got into graphic design. I wasn’t even trying to do that. I got in graphic design by helping out the church that I was at the time, New Birth. I was the graphic designer of the college ministry, and I just started meeting a need. The next thing you know, other needs came up, and before you know it, I had so much clientele that I was juggling clients, school projects and and assignments, and a girlfriend all at the same time. I ended up like missing out on a lot of work because I couldn’t manage at all, which is why I started this agency. In the fourth phase of me kind of deciding that this is what I wanted to do, it was like, me wanting to plant a flag like in this fourth phase of my college matriculation, I want to park and plant a flag here. I’m going to build this. I’m going to put my interest, time, energy, and 10,000 hours on building this idea. So, that’s where the name 4th Park kind of comes from.

The word park also is symbolic of a place that people come and gather from all walks of life. People go to the parks to relax and to connect. It’s a place where people feel free of a lot of the stresses of life. I want people – our clients – when they come to 4^th Park, that it feels that way. So, that’s why our brand color is green representing like the park. At some point, I want to get some grass turf somewhere. So, when we have meetings with clients, we can bring them onto the grass, sort of sit down on the grass turf, and take our shoes off. I’m very much so into not just the work we do, but how we do it and the sense of alignment. I think a lot of people in corporate America just are so stressed with the day to day or trying to like keep your job and perform that when they get to us, you can feel the stress. I’m like, when you get in these meetings with us, we try to bring that stress level down like we’re going to get the work done, but “how you doing today first? How’s everything? How are the kids?” So, that’s part of the ministry side of 4^th Park. Last thing, the number four in the Bible is the number of creativity. So, it all kind of has symbolism for me.

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Now, how did you get involved with real estate?

Well, I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad many years ago, and I mean, you can’t really get around the general way of how people accumulate wealth without crossing the path of real estate. It is one of the best tried and true assets because there’s only so much land we have, and population continues to grow so the value of property goes up. So, I knew I wanted to get into real estate. I just didn’t know how, but here’s the thing. It was around 2018. I’m from Albany, Georgia, and Auburn State University is in Albany. I was hearing a lot of reports on the news that they were dealing with the housing shortage. There were students coming to school, and they didn’t have dorms available. So, some of those students were having to go to other schools or not participate because there was really not a strong virtual program. it wasn’t until COVID that all universities had to figure out virtual education like at scale. At the time, they didn’t really have a lot of that set up, so there was a housing shortage. I’m going to buy some property in my hometown. So, I’m in Atlanta learning about this, and I decided to like, “Let me try to go and get like my first property.” I had already been kind of saving money on the side. I knew I wanted to do real estate at some point but wasn’t sure, but that was the why. It was like, “Here’s a need I can meet.”

So, I purchased that first property. In Albany, the market is just way cheaper. I bought a four-bedroom house, already renovated, everything done for under $50,000. The house was like $45,000, and the mortgage is like under like $500 a month. We were able to rent the rooms out at $600 a month with everything including utilities, Internet, etc. So, the margins are just amazing. So, I bought that house, and a year later, I bought the second house. Each house is like a mini bank. It’s me putting money in, and every time that mortgage is getting paid down, I’m owning more equity of the home, which in turn just becomes a bank in a sense. You know, if I need to take money out to get another property, I can. Long term, I just know that in order to build wealth, it’s important that you diversify. It’s not just doing business, but I also have money inside of stocks, and I jumped into crypto early back in 2013 and bought like some Bitcoin. I’m not going to say much more about that because right now it was extremely expensive, but it’s been a beautiful day because I was in it when it was under $500 a coin.

For me, knowing as a young black man years ago that we weren’t set up to achieve wealth, and my family didn’t come from that kind of background. I just want to do something different. I’ma read the books they won’t read. I’ma watch CNBC and watch the stock market. So, because nobody else is watching it, that really was my catalyst. Let me learn the things that I didn’t grow up learning so that I can bring information to my family and friends. I’ve helped a lot of people like start investing. I got several friends of mine who are in the crypto. Every girlfriend I got with from 2013 up to now, they all invested in crypto. I’m showing people how to invest and how to build wealth because I believe that’s important. You know, it was not what you make is what you keep that determines your wealth. Like, we make a lot, but we don’t keep a lot. We spend a lot. So that’s how it all started.

I want to buy more properties, partner with more real estate people and investors, and build a nice portfolio so that my family will be taken care of. We can also provide housing for people in various parts of the country.

Now you talk about spending. You have Spendefy, and your theme is “spending differently.” Can you please talk about that particular business?

Yes. So, I’ve done a lot of work with the King Center. I know Elder Bernice King personally. Her brother, Dexter King, just passed away on Monday, and so that’s like a big thing right now with the family to lose a sibling like that. I’ve spent a lot of time at the King Center. I went through Dr. King’s Nonviolent Philosophy; I did training with them. My agency built the brand with the King Center for what was at the time called Camp Now, which was their summer experience to engage millennials and young adults with Dr. King’s philosophy so that the message doesn’t get lost in this current generation. So, in all of that process you learn that one of the last things Dr. King talked about was economics. He was trying to move us toward this whole economic shift that we really need to get control of our economic footing and get control of our dollar. He talked about spinning Black and shopping Black back then, and that chapter of the civil rights movement didn’t get to unfold because he was immediately killed. Like, I think not too long after he gave one of those speeches, he talked about that in his last speech heavily, and he was killed not too long after that.

So, my former business partner and I were putting our heads together. This was in the midst of Black Lives Matter, Trayvon Martin, and all this stuff that was happening. I was like, we need to figure out a way that we can be on an economic footing because America doesn’t really care about even your skin color like that. It cares about your dollar. You know, the color issue is the green color. A lot of times we don’t have a say so, not because we don’t march well enough, but we haven’t taken our dollar collectively and positioned it as a power play. I want it to be a part of doing something about that. So, we got together and came up with this concept called Spendefy: defying the way you spend, which is this whole shifting the psychology of your spending. What if you knew that your dollar was your protest? What if you knew that your dollar was your economic weapon? That is not just something you do to just buy things, but where you spend it and how you spend it can shift governments. If we could get around that collective understanding economically, not only will we be able to build ourselves up, we can overnight extract dollars out of brands and at companies that we don’t believe support us. We immediately move our dollar somewhere else. That ability to flatten the company or bring it to its knees to me is a powerful thing.

If use it the right way, we can shift society overnight. You ain’t got to march; you don’t have the vote. You just buy your politicians. You use a dollar and buy who you want in office because that’s technically what these lobbyists do anyway. So, with me understanding all of this, I was like, “Let’s put this together, and let’s build this thing. We decided to set it up as a technology play rather than a nonprofit. So, we built this platform to spendefy.com. The site is still up, and we’re like doing some things behind the scenes to revamp, like even the concept behind it. Right now, it operates as a business directory. So, we built this beautiful site. We got thousands of businesses that signed on, and we launched in different markets and in different cities. So, you got Spendefy Atlanta, Spendefy New York, Spendefy L.A., etc, and it’s businesses in all the cities. You can go online, you can find those businesses, and you can shop with them. That was like phase one of it. We went viral as a site and got all this public attention, but it was tough because we couldn’t get funding.

They say only 2% of venture capital goes to Black and Brown owned businesses or minority owned, which also include women-owned businesses; it was only 2% of venture capital at that time. So, we were going trying to raise capital so we can fund this thing to scale it, and we couldn’t get anybody to “bust a grape.” Most people wanted it to even get too much equity, or they felt like we were too early. I’m like, “What do you mean too early? There are guys out here who are launching ideas that are like, stupid, and they’ll raise $1,000,000 on some game or something. What we’re doing is a huge solution, and there’s a need and an interest, but we just couldn’t raise the capital. So, we bootstrapped it as much as we could, and we’re in a chapter right now where we’re having to kind of revamp like we’re going to build long term. I have some ideas that I won’t share yet because it’s kind of like confidential, but it’s just in terms of what we really want to do in connecting our dollar here with Africans all over the world, you know, where you could actually be able to spend in different globally with Black owned brands and organizations. So, that’s where we are with it. I think the mission is still like the mission at the end of the day, which is to spend different.

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You were featured in Ebony magazine in 2016. How was that for you?

Yeah, they did like a whole, I think a page or two-page spread on us. It was crazy. You realize that when you get caught up in the way of publicity and press, these entities want to ride the with you because they’re all going for attention. So, they [Ebony] reached out to us, and so did Black Enterprise. We had various media news outlets that reached out. It was an exciting time to just get that kind of respect, especially from them, because, they do so much to share light and bring awareness to black businesses and brands. So, it was a thing that I think I’ll never forget that chapter of attention, but what I learned was that attention comes and goes. You are hot in the moment, you’re hot, but if you don’t leverage that moment, it will be out of here. You’re the thing for the week, and then, they’re move to the next thing. So, we built a lot of relationships that we still stay connected with, but it was a learning process because you realize like you can be a nobody, and then, literally overnight with the right amount of press… like our site went viral. We had several hundred thousand people visit the site in a matter of like an hour. This was before the CNN thing happened because people were sharing our site online because this is right up to when Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were killed. That’s when the whole like, “We need to shop Black. We need to control our dollar,” our site got picked up in like social media. People started sharing it, and it went viral. Then, CNN reached out to us, and then, we got on there. Then, Black Enterprise and all of these entities started coming around wanting to feature our story. So, I mean, it was exciting time to say the least.

What is the one thing that you’ve learned that you can share and give someone some words of encouragement?

Well, I would say, there’s a lot of noise, and there’s a lot of people doing a lot of things. It’s so easy to get caught up trying to mimic and copy what you see is successful. I think the first thing that I would say is: you being here matters so much. There is room for you at the table. I think if we could kind of step back from just this anxiety of trying to copy what have we seen anybody else doing and really get more in tune. I talk a lot about the importance of alignment and practicing alignment – these spiritual principles because there’s ideas and revelation around what’s needed in the world all day long. There are all kinds of things that we need solutions to, and it don’t even have to just be business. You know, people do a different type of things. My encouragement to whoever, whether you’re stuck at a job that you hate or doing something you don’t want to do, is to find a way to practice some level of stillness and alignment in your day to day in order to really get clarity around where you’re going with your life. You’re here for a reason, but why are you here? You know you’re a necessity. There’s a seat at a table or several tables that needs you there, but if you’re in chaos or stumbling around trying to do whatever, i.e.  chase a bag or whatever, you might even miss the revelation of your existence. So, that would be my challenge. Sit down, shut up, quiet down, get out of the social media, and really look at yourself, your skill, your passion, and your interest. Where is the alignment in that, pursue a path that way, and look for where there’s a need in the marketplace. Where is there a need for what you could can bring and build around that because I think that brings the ultimate fulfillment because at the end of the day, we’re all going to transition out of here. Your life should have meant something for being here. There should be a reason for why you came on this planet; not just to consume. So, that’s my encouragement. You matter, and there’s room for you at the table.

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If people want to learn more about you, or they want to learn more about your plethora of businesses, how can they follow you or how can they get more information?

So, you can follow my personal social: @AntwonDavis. You can pull me up. I’m Antwon Davis on everything. You’ll find my businesses through that. If you get to my personal, then you’ll see all the things that I have going on.

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