TALIB GRAVES-MANNS
NOVEMBER 12, 2025
This fund is helping small business owners re-write their adventure stories, building generational wealth and transforming communities.
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A Tale of Two Businesses
Education and Financial Literacy
Growing up, I was captivated by “Choose Your Own Adventure” books – those narratives where you, reader, made decisions to determine the story’s outcome. Each single choice led to dramatically different endings.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about how those books mirror the reality of lower wealth owned businesses in America. For Black and brown business owners, available choices are often constrained by systemic barriers to capital. What if we could rewrite those stories?
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Let me tell you about my parents’ business through this lens, the story of Richard B. Manns The Clothier, and the two very different possible adventures.
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You are Richard and Jacqui Manns, Black entrepreneurs in late 1970s Philadelphia. You’ve found the perfect location for your high-end women’s clothing boutique – the first floor of a historic mansion in prestigious Rittenhouse Square. You’re standing outside with lease papers in hand. But you face a choice:
Path A:
The Traditional Route
You sign the lease. For fifteen years, you pour your heart into Richard B. Manns The Clothier, building a loyal clientele and working seven days a week, reinvesting every dollar back into inventory.
But by the late 1980s, the walls are closing in. Interest rates climb. Your rent keeps increasing – money flowing out of your family’s pocket into your landlord’s. You dream of expansion, of opening locations in New York and DC, of building something your children can inherit.
You can sell a woman $1,000 in fine clothing in an hour – a skill that can’t be taught in business school.
But banks don’t value your proven ability to move inventory or build customer loyalty. They want spreadsheets and proformas (most likely presented by a Penn Wharton graduate), not track records of retail success. Patient capital doesn’t exist in your universe.
The stress fractures your marriage. Late nights arguing about cash flow replace conversations about dreams. Eventually, you make the hardest decision: you close the store. You pivot to trunk shows, your business reduced to what fits in the back of a car.
Your children learn that even with talent, vision, and fifteen years of hard work, there are limits to what’s possible for families like yours.
The End.
Path B:
The Access to Equity Capital Route
You sign the lease, but you’re not alone. A fund focused on wealth-building provides patient capital for you to purchase the entire building.
Everything changes. Instead of paying rent, you’re building equity. You convert the basement into additional retail space and rent out the upper floors. Your monthly costs plummet while your property appreciates. You’re not just running a business – you’re building wealth.
With this stability, you expand. Richard B. Manns The Clothier opens in Georgetown, then the Upper East Side. Your staff grows from two to twenty. You become known as business leaders and wealth-builders.
By the late 1980s, instead of fighting interest rate pressures, you’re leveraging your real estate equity for strategic investments. You develop a small chain of boutiques. You invest in other BIPOC-owned businesses. You become the patient capital provider you once needed.
Your children grow up seeing entrepreneurship as opportunity, not struggle. They attend college debt-free, their tuition paid from property appreciation. When they start businesses, you provide the seed capital no bank would offer you decades earlier.
Your grandchildren inherit not just money, but a mindset: that wealth-building is their birthright.
The End.
The Choice That Changes Everything
The difference between these stories isn’t talent, vision, or work ethic. It’s access to equitable capital that recognizes ALL entrepreneurs as wealth-builders, not just service providers. When business owners transition from tenants to owners, they don’t just build individual wealth, they transform communities.
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Today, organizations like Partners in Equity are rewriting these adventure stories. We provide the patient capital that enables lower-wealth entrepreneurs to purchase their commercial real estate, to build equity instead of paying rent, to create generational wealth instead of just surviving month to month.
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The “Choose Your Own Adventure” books of my childhood always reminded readers that they could start over and make different choices. In real life, my parents didn’t get that luxury. But for today’s lower wealth entrepreneurs, equitable community development creates new possibilities, new paths, new endings to old stories.
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The question isn’t whether these entrepreneurs have what it takes to build wealth. The question is whether we’ll provide the patient capital that makes wealth-building possible.
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Which adventure will you choose?
This article was first published in The People’s Practice Issue 09: The Equitable Wealth Equation. For more stories, research, and resources on anti-racist community development, visit The People’s Practice.
Talib Graves-Manns is a transformative leader and Aspen Institute Fellow reshaping entrepreneurship across America. Through Knox St. Studios, Partners in Equity, and Black Wall Street Homecoming, he has created an ecosystem connecting underserved entrepreneurs with capital, real estate ownership, education, and mentorship. At PIE, he co-founded a private equity fund providing down-payment assistance to help small business owners transition from tenants to property owners, building generational wealth and strengthening communities.