AfricAn AmericAn-owned businesses in the supply chAin Making a difference Entrepreneurship comforting for Quinton I By M.V. GREENE f there is one thing to know about Terri Quinton, it might be that she is an entre-preneur who is comfortable — and confi-dent — in her own skin. A dictionary defines being comfortable in your own skin as the “beginning of strength.” That seems to personify Quinton, who heads Q2 Marketing Group, a Dallas, Texas-based in-tegrated marketing agency that specializes in combining dynamic storytelling content and cross-channel solutions to grow businesses. For Quinton, the businesses for clients she targets are those that usually and truly can use her help — small and medium diverse firms. While the girth and scale of corporate Amer-ica has its pluses, she is energized in her work by taking on clients “where I can actually make a difference.” “The biggest thing is that it allows me to use my God-given talents in a way that assists others in being better at what they do,” Quinton said. She said her corporate management experi-ence with Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. be-fore starting up Q2 Marketing Group helped her acquire requisite perspective and skillsets for her pursuit of entrepreneurship. Quinton said she founded Q2 Marketing Group in 2014 after meeting some “amazing” diverse CEOs from across the country with vision, expe-rience, charisma, hustle and fortitude who under-stood their business, but had plateaued and out-grown their ability to grow. By targeting small and medium diverse firms as clients, Quinton is able to see tangible results “and be creative” with those types of clients. “It’s hard to do being a small business myself working within corporate America’s boundaries,” she said. For instance, it was “fun but kind of out of my wheelhouse” when Q2 Marketing Group took on a Taiwan-based client seeking to introduce products to the U.S. market. Quinton said she was gratified to succeed in helping the client get products before audiences on the Home Shop-ping Network and into Walmart Inc. stores. That kind of entrepreneurial spirit and lead-ership also were a basis for Quinton joining with an Asian business owner and two Hispanic business owners to establish in the 2000s the Alliance of Diversity Printers LLC (ADP-LLC), “Any entrepreneur will tell you that the big challenge is always the money — finding it and keeping it. Once you can do that, everything else kind of rolls along.” — Terry Quinton, owner, Q2 Marketing Group 38 Vol. 1, 2023 mbntexas.biz
MBN Texas Volume 1, 2023: Page 38
