They usually asked for seconds when Ronda Stubbs-Tatum cooked.

Guests at her Maple Heights home often said little as they chowed down on her specialties, which include collard greens, shrimp and grits, and red beans and rice. In the brief break before refilling their plates, they would say something like this:  

“‘This is so good, you need to get a restaurant,’” she said.

In 2015, Stubbs-Tatum opened Flava Catering Cleveland. She soon discovered that it took more than knowing how to cook to run a successful business.

“It was like being like a hamster on a wheel,” said the entrepreneur also known as Chef Ronda. “I was just chasing my tail. I did not know what I was doing.”

Everything that the people at the Urban League told me to do, I have done. It has helped me to get to where I am today. They continue to be a resource for me.

Ronda Stubbs-Tatum, owner of Flava Catering Cleveland.

Things began changing for her about five years ago when she started going to the Urban League of Greater Cleveland’s Entrepreneurship Center. Stubbs-Tatum’s once-floundering business is now successful and growing. 

The center focuses on addressing key obstacles that have commonly undermined the success of Black businesses, such as Stubbs-Tatum’s, for generations. They include a low percentage of Black-owned businesses, which has led to a lack of role models, mentors and exposure to how successful businesses operate. A long and continuing history of lending discrimination means Black business owners often lack access to adequate capital.

Business coaching from the center helped Chef Ronda develop and implement a business plan. She grew close to advisers, who never hesitated to take her calls. She got one-on-one help in learning accounting software designed for small businesses. She said it has been vital in balancing the books. She received a $10,000 grant as a graduate of the Black Restaurant Accelerator Program. The program provided  much-needed capital and enhanced her business skills.

Stubbs-Tatum said all of the above have been key in helping her evolve from a home-based event planner to Flava Catering, which at first could only rent hourly kitchen space, into a business now leasing a building.

“Everything that the people at the Urban League told me to do, I have done,” she said. ”It has helped me to get to where I am today. They continue to be a resource for me.”  

In early December, Flava Catering moved into its new headquarters at 12540 Rockside Road in Garfield Heights. She intends to operate at least three businesses from the building.

Her catering business includes preparing and serving meals for the Brilliance School (a charter school in Garfield Heights) and for five area daycare centers. Within the next few months, Chef Ronda intends to open Flava Catering Live, with a  jazz supper club “for grown folks” as the focal point.

She will also operate her upcoming seasoning line, the Seasoning Saga, from the building. Her barbeque seasoning and blackening seasoning should be available locally next year, including at Meijer Fairfax Market. She is part of a center program that gets participants’ products placed in chain stores.

Entrepreneurship Center guides small businesses in finding space

A few years ago, Chef Ronda was convinced she had found an affordable place to rent for a headquarters. As she always did when she thought she had found the right spot, she asked Felicia Townsend Ivey to look at it and give her feedback. 

Ivey is director of the Small Business Development Center at the Urban League, which is part of the Entrepreneurship Center. The development center is also part of the Small Business Development Centers of Ohio, which is partially funded by the Ohio Department of Development and the U.S. Small Business Administration. 

As soon as Ivey drove up, she knew this wasn’t the right place for Stubbs-Tatum.

There wasn’t enough parking to accommodate a jazz supper club. The building was next to high-voltage power lines. The neighboring auto dealership had “a bunch of junk cars.”

“If you wanted to expand, and put a patio outside, you couldn’t do it,” she said. “The junk cars were really atrocious. I told her, ‘You can’t make the auto dealership clean up.’”

Stubbs-Tatum had been looking for a few years and was eager to get a place. She listened to Ivey because she valued her expertise. It took Chef Ronda about five years to find a location. The pandemic played into the lengthy search, as did  finances. As she continued to look for a building, she steadily made progress in strengthening her financial condition. 

When the right building came around, she was ready. Stubbs-Tatum remembers her first time at what would become her headquarters. 

“I started looking at the building, then I called Miss Felicia,” she said.  “She came right over here.”

Ivey was as excited as she was. The building offered room to expand. It is at the Garfield Commons shopping center, giving Flava Catering the potential to capture customers in an area with high retail traffic.

Ivey gave her some pointers on negotiating the lease. Stubbs-Tatum then got a lease with the first rights to purchase the building if it comes up for sale. By early this fall, she was juggling her time between getting the building ready and running her catering business out of the Cleveland Culinary Launch & Kitchen, near East 30th Street, where she rented space on an hourly basis.

Flava Catering is expanding upon a family legacy

Cooking is Chef Ronda’s passion. It’s also a family legacy that began with her grandfather, Calvin Saulsberry. The legacy continues, but this time as a business. Her son, Allen Crutchfield, is the sous-chef, which means he is second in command. Her daughter, Alleyah Crutchfield, is the pastry chef. Her niece, Shontay Stubbs, also works at Flava Catering.

(Though her husband Timothy Tatum isn’t part of the culinary team, Chef Ronda said he has unwaveringly supported her throughout her entrepreneurial journey. Ivey remembers Tatum, a Maple Heights council member, filling in for his wife at a pitch competition she couldn’t make because she was in the hospital.)

Stubbs-Tatum has oodles of family recipes. Making dishes from scratch is her signature style, even for the meals she prepares for the charter school and daycare centers. On this morning, six weeks ago, Chef Ronda and her team were still working out of the launch kitchen. They were busy preparing lunches to serve at the Brilliance School. The menu included loaded mashed potato bowls with vegetables and chicken topped with homemade gravy. She said the dish is one of the students’ favorites. Today, as always, fresh fruit is also on the menu.

“I just love to see a person’s face when they enjoy eating the food,” Chef Ronda said.

She recalls the delight on the face of a boy, who was eating one of her scratch-made entrees that included noodles, ground beef and mixed vegetables. 

 “He said, ‘I think my mom has all these ingredients at home,’” Stubbs-Tatum said. “‘You think you could give me the recipe?’ “I took him aside and said, ‘Here’s what you do.’”

What a contrast to most school cafeterias, where students’ complaining about the food is always on the menu. 

Stubbs-Tatum got the school and daycare center catering jobs on the advice of a friend, who owned a daycare center. It turned out to be good advice. Having steady contracts is an advantage since the catering business can be sensitive to economic whims. She also likes interacting with the children.

“I love feeding them, I do,” she said.

Not all exchanges bring a chuckle, such as the one of the boy asking for the recipe. She has seen first-hand how too many students come from homes struggling with food insecurity. Some have confided in her that at certain times of the month, there is little food at home. This is frequently between paychecks for their parents, who often hold low-wage jobs.

Other students aren’t as direct, but she knows the signs of hungry children. 

“Some kids you can tell are greedy and will eat everything,” she said. “Then there are some kids that you can tell are just hungry. They’re sneaking over to ask you, “Can I have another plate?”

She doesn’t mind packing up food for these kids to take home.

Shortly before 10 a.m. on this wintry fall day, Chef Ronda’s team loaded pans filled with the contents of the mashed potato bowls into a 2005 white Ford van. She acquired the van and many of the pans from a caterer who closed his business in the early days of the pandemic.

“I was like, ‘What about that van out there?” Stubbs-Tatum asked the caterer as she was leaving with her haul of kitchen utensils. “He was like, ‘You could just have it.”

Receiving the free van turned out to be a good omen of things to come. While many entrepreneurs were hard-hit by the pandemic, it was then that success began taking shape for Stubbs-Tatum. She got more clients because other caterers hesitated to serve schools and daycare centers for fear of catching COVID. All the hard work she had put in at the Entrepreneurship Center began paying off – from increasing her credit score to receiving the $10,000 grant.

“Now that we’re in our own space, the sky’s the limit,” she said.

$10,000 grant addresses many Black entrepreneurs’ need for capital

It was a few weeks before Flava Catering officially moved into the building. Chef Ronda’s enthusiasm about this milestone in her career was infectious. With euphoria and pride, she offered an invitation to view a video on the kitchen’s progress. As the camera panned the space. one saw a series of commercial grade appliances in what will become the heart of Stubbs-Tatum’s operation. It appears outfitted to handle just about any meals clients would ever request.   

She invested the $10,000 Black Restaurant Accelerator Program grant into the kitchen. Greater Cleveland is one of 12 Entrepreneurship Centers nationally chosen for this National Urban League initiative, which is run in partnership with the PepsiCo Foundation. The program aims to address “long faced systemic barriers to growth, including access to loans and capital.” 

Lending discrimination persists for Black businesses as it does for other Black borrowers. A recent Journal of Marketing Research study found that Black business owners had a harder time getting loans even when they had stronger financial profiles and credit scores than their white counterparts.

In an attempt to address some of the lending disparity issues, the Urban League has formed relationships with local financial institutions, said Ivey of the Small Business Development Center. The center’s Becoming Bankable program also focuses on improving the credit scores of participants below about 720. They receive credit education on such topics as improving their debt-to-credit ratio. 

Stubbs-Tatum took part in the program.

“When I first started, my credit score was something like 530,” she said, adding that it is now in the 700s.

Entrepreneurship Center focuses on one-on-one support

Flava Catering wasn’t Stubbs-Tatum’s first entrepreneurial venture. She had once owned a hair salon. Even though she hadn’t run a catering business, she was trained in the field. Chef Ronda has an associate’s degree in culinary arts from Cuyahoga Community College.

With this background, one would expect that running the catering business would have been fairly easy for her.

But Stubbs-Tatum’s early struggles with the business aren’t surprising, Ivey said. Many Black entrepreneurs face similar problems because of the low rates of Black business ownership. Only 3% of U.S. establishments were majority Black-owned in 2020, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data released earlier this year. Contrast this with 86% of businesses being majority white owned. 

The Urban League focuses on providing one-on-one support because, given low Black-ownership rates, it is unlikely participants have been exposed to how successful businesses work. Stubbs-Tatum said she has found the one-on-one support invaluable. The catering business required a set of skills she never needed running the salon. She said her primary focus as a salon owner was making sure that the hair stylists paid booth rent.

Running Flava Catering and the related businesses means that she must manage a small staff, which includes maintaining a payroll. She has to do things such as costing out meals as part of determining what to charge clients. She has to oversee meal preparation every weekday and make sure she and her team get the meals to the school and daycare centers on time and then serve them. 

The haphazard way in which Stubbs-Tatum kept books – some using a paper ledger, others using computer files – wasn’t giving a true sense of Flava Catering’s bottom line. At the Urban League, she learned how to use QuickBooks, an accounting software package suited for small and medium-sized businesses. 

“I’ve watched her grow,” Ivey said. “When she first came in, she was kind of shooting from the hip when it came to keeping books and records. Now she’s a savvy businesswoman.”

Ivey said Becoming Bankable participants get more than just a few lectures on how to use QuickBooks. An accountant or other financial professional works one-on-one with them. Participants also get a free software subscription for at least six months.

“They hold their hand to the point where they can actually create the books and records necessary for them to make smart decisions,” she said.

Ivey said she didn’t hesitate to walk through prospective rental spaces with Chef Ronda because doing so is in line with the center’s mission.

“We build relationships here,” Ivey said. “A lot of our clients don’t even feel like clients. She is more like my little sister, or kind of like my friend.”

This is how business coaching should work

Ask Stubbs-Tatum about her small business journey and she frequently speaks of two people: “Miss Felicia” and Ethan. Ethan Holmes is the founder and chief executive officer of Holmes Made Foods LLC, which makes Holmes Mouthwatering Applesauce.

 He serves as a small business adviser to the Urban League. Though just 30, Holmes is a seasoned entrepreneur. He began making and selling applesauce as a student at Shaker Heights High School.

“They not only keep me doing what I am doing, but inspire me to do more,” Stubbs-Tatum said.

Holmes remembers working with Chef Ronda early on when she needed a commercial kitchen to work out of but wasn’t at the point where she could afford to rent a building. He told her about the launch kitchen.

“Entrepreneurship is about problem solving,” Holmes said. “When she said, ‘Where do I find a kitchen?’ My job was to make it simple for her.“

He said his work with entrepreneurs includes directing them to resources, offering tips about running a business, and helping them with more formal things such as developing a business plan. At other times, he boosts their morale.

“My advice and business coaching is about making people feel good about themselves,” Holmes said. “I want them to be able to keep going. Sometimes they just need to hear, ‘You’re doing a good job. You’re on the right path. This is all part of your cycle.’”

When Stubbs-Tatum first went to the Urban League, she vaguely knew what a business plan was. Ivey and Holmes help her develop her plan.

Chef Ronda recalled analyzing customer attraction and retention as part of it. It caused her to consider the friends who enjoyed her cooking and urged her to go into business.

“When they had to pay, it was a whole different story,” she said.

Stubbs-Tatum said she frequently seeks their advice, even though sometimes she feels a little guilty.

“I know I get on these people’s nerves, and they keep answering the phone,” she laughingly said. “I call all the time.”

Ivey and Holmes said they don’t mind taking her calls. She takes advice well, and they have seen the results in her business growth.

“Ronda is amazing,” Holmes said. “She’s really embodying homestyle [cooking], home goodness with the quality the way grandma or mom used to make it. And she’s doing it in an organized way as a businesswoman.”