Black Women Are Building Detroit’s New Generation of Business Schools

While elite universities and accelerator programs continue to overlook grassroots founders, three local entrepreneurs have stepped up to create what mainstream institutions never prioritized: culturally grounded, community-owned business schools designed specifically for Detroiters. Racheal Allen, Ebony Cochran, and Jessie Hayes are not in the business of waiting on permission to educate, train, and empower. They’re building infrastructure—on their terms—for the entrepreneurs this city has long ignored.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Black women are the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the country. In Detroit, they lead one of the highest concentrations of Black women–owned businesses in the U.S., yet most operate without formal business training or access to sustainable capital. The majority of Black-owned small businesses in Michigan are sole proprietorships, which are often under-resourced and overburdened. Less than 1% of venture capital nationally reaches Black women entrepreneurs.

That systemic neglect has never been about talent. It’s been about access. And Detroit women are no longer asking for it—they’re building it.

This June, Ebony Cochran launched the Detroit Wealth Club inside a newly opened 7,300-square-foot headquarters at 11145 Morang Drive on the city’s east side. The nonprofit community business school is built to close the racial wealth gap by giving Black Detroiters real tools for wealth generation—through entrepreneurship, financial planning, credit literacy, and real estate ownership.

The investment behind the space is both personal and powerful: $155,000 of Cochran’s own funds, a $50,000 Motor City Match grant, and $10,000 from Build Institute. The funding reflects not just community belief in her vision—but the urgency behind it.

“We’ve waited long enough to be invited to spaces that weren’t built with us in mind,” Cochran said. “This is about rewriting the narrative of what wealth looks like in Detroit—on our terms.”

The Detroit Wealth Club is designed as a full-service hub: educational programming, curated mentorship, peer accountability, and access to a network of financial and legal experts. Whether members are learning to budget or building investment portfolios, Cochran’s approach is rooted in both tactical skill and mindset development.

“I found early in my entrepreneurial career that my mindset made me believe I didn’t deserve certain things,” Cochran said. “Once my mindset changed, I worked harder to get the things I knew I did deserve.”

Cochran calls the Club a movement. “We’re teaching entrepreneurship that leads to ownership, and ownership that leads to freedom. It’s a platform for people to shift from survival mode to wealth-building—and to do it in community.”

Two decades ago, Cochran started her first business just blocks away from Detroit Wealth Club and three years ago she became the first Black woman to own a Little Caesars Pizza franchise in the state of Michigan. Today, her work is about creating what she never had access to: a place where wealth isn’t gatekept, and where Black business success is normalized, not exceptionalized.

On the other side of metro Detroit, Racheal Allen is reshaping the landscape from her nonprofit, Operations School (OSchool), located inside Centric Place in Farmington Hills. Since 2019, OSchool has served nearly 2,000 entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders through its flagship “Get Your Business Legit” program, which walks founders through legal registration, operations, marketing, and long-term planning—free of charge.

Allen, like Cochran, began with no external funding. She invested over $200,000 of her own money before securing a $2.8 million Small Business Support Hubs Grant from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation—becoming the only Black woman recipient among 27 grantees statewide.

“I started this with no funding, which isn’t something a lot of people can say,” Allen said. “It’s given me a greater sense of responsibility to keep this program going and to keep building what is possible.”

OSchool’s work is deeply structural. It meets entrepreneurs where they are—hustling without systems, operating without access, navigating burnout and bureaucracy. The school provides practical tools, community coaching, and capacity-building—all housed inside a hub for Black arts, culture, and innovation.

Earlier this year, Allen announced that she would be stepping away from daily leadership to expand the school’s national vision. Her successor, Dr. Stacie Hunter, brings experience in banking, nonprofit leadership, and racial equity advocacy. “It’s truly an honor and privilege to carry forward the mission of OSchool,” Hunter said.

Dr. Hunter has led operational strategy at OSchool since 2024 and previously served as VP, Community Manager for Chase Bank in Detroit. She holds an MBA and a doctorate in nonprofit leadership and sits on the boards of the Rhonda Walker Foundation and Fostering Leadership Academy.

The leadership transition signals growth, not retreat. OSchool is expanding through new partnerships with the Apple Developer Academy, the Lansing Economic Development Corporation, and the Michigan Black Business Alliance. The demand is there—and so is the community power.

Detroit’s legacy of Black women building institutions continues through Jessie Hayes, founder of The Hayes Institute of Esthetics & Entrepreneurship—Michigan’s first business school focused on multicultural skincare and ownership in the beauty industry. After opening Detroit’s first facial bar and turning it into a franchise, Hayes saw the glaring gap in both access and cultural representation within esthetics education. That gap became the blueprint for her next move: a business school designed not just to certify estheticians, but to shape beauty CEOs. Located in Corktown, the Institute merges state-approved esthetics licensing with hands-on entrepreneurial training that equips graduates to lead and scale in a global industry that has often excluded their perspective.

What sets the Hayes Institute apart is its dual commitment to craft and commerce. The school offers a 750-hour esthetics curriculum with a specialized focus on multicultural skincare, acne treatment, and product development—an essential shift in a market where most training centers Eurocentric beauty standards. But Hayes didn’t stop at technique. Through the School of Entrepreneurship and the School of Business for Executives, the Institute delivers a full suite of business education—from startup playbooks to grant acquisition, executive presence, and crisis management. This isn’t about creating service providers. It’s about building business owners, decision-makers, and visionary leaders within an industry that generates billions from Black culture but rarely invests back into it.

“Opening The Hayes Institute is more than launching a school,” Hayes said. “It’s about creating a space where legacy meets purpose and filling a gap within the beauty industry. As someone raised in a family of entrepreneurs, CEOs and leaders, this institution is my way of giving back, building up, and ensuring that our community of beauty entrepreneurs are profitable, empowered, and have economic opportunity.” For Hayes, the work is generational. “This is personal for me,” she said. “The Hayes Institute stands on the shoulders of my family’s entrepreneurial and leadership spirit—a legacy of builders, dreamers, and most importantly doers. My goal is to leave a mark that outlives me, one that opens doors for the next generation of beauty and business leaders who look like us and dream like us.”

Between Cochran’s east side headquarters and Allen’s west side institutional framework and Hayes’s push for entrepreneurial excellence in the beauty industry, Detroit is witnessing something far deeper than business training. These are ecosystems—designed for Detroiters, led by Black women, and rooted in cultural clarity. They reject the idea that success must be defined by elite institutions, coastal investors, or academic jargon.

“We’re not teaching business for performance,” Cochran said. “We’re creating a space where people can understand their power, own it, and grow it.”

Detroit’s business future doesn’t have to look like someone else’s model. It can look like a neighborhood storefront turned financial education hub. It can look like a nonprofit building out from lived experience instead of legacy endowments. It can look like Black women saying, we’re not waiting on anyone to save us—we’re building systems that serve us.

What Allen, Hayes, and Cochran prove is that business education, when done right, isn’t just about profit margins. It’s about economic justice. It’s about passing down knowledge, not just assets. It’s about building infrastructure that lasts beyond grant cycles and headlines.

Their work is not only relevant. It’s necessary. And it’s Detroit-born.