Management

How Business Diversity Helps Local Economies and Companies’ Bottom Lines

Inclusive programs allow companies to add value to their communities by developing relationships with small businesses.

Joe Kuehne is an Associate Editorial Director at BizTech magazine.

For several years now, a growing number of businesses have committed to initiatives supporting diversity, equity and inclusion, both within their own organizations and by building relationships with suppliers and partners that drive such efforts.

Studies have shown that diversity does indeed have a positive impact on a company’s bottom line. As reported by Forbes earlier this year, “Creating a more inclusive workplace yields greater satisfaction, which is directly tied to the bottom line through increased productivity and retention. Hence increasing the level of inclusion yields significant financial benefits by removing invisible costs.”

But business diversity comes into play when organizations look beyond their own walls to develop relationships with other diverse organizations. Such efforts, as detailed by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Business Diversity Principles Initiative, can “foster a more equitable economic landscape by encouraging businesses to learn from each other’s successes and adopt best practices and strategies that help promote economic growth in underserved communities.”

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CDW Partners with Diverse Suppliers

As a technology leader, CDW has seen firsthand how efforts to prioritize diverse supplier and business relationships have paid off.

In local communities in Texas, CDW has worked with the state’s Historically Underutilized Business Program, which “is committed to sharing advantageous educational and networking opportunities with HUB-certified and prospective HUB vendors all around the state of Texas.”

Daniel Segarra, an advanced technology account executive at CDW in Dallas, has been a part of exploring opportunities for the company to partner with HUB-certified businesses in local communities. “Imagine you’re a small business, and it's really hard for you to break into the IT space,” he says.

But through mutually beneficial partnerships CDW has built with these small businesses, “it really is a win-win type of opportunity,” Segarra continues. Through its Business and Supplier Diversity program, CDW is able to help small businesses to grow.

Segarra says that CDW takes a more active approach to supplier diversity that “really helps drive home the economic development, not only with these partners that are in our ecosystem but for our customers and constituents. If we’re looking at the state and local vertical, our customers’ customers are us: They’re mothers, fathers, teachers, grandparents, students. And that is a reflection of our supply chain.”

Segarra says that CDW approaches business diversity differently than most companies. “There aren’t a lot of corporations that really drive supplier diversity in this manner,” he says. “It’s more of a checkbox exercise for them, where they’re making sure that they’re using small and diverse businesses. But they’re not really driving customer opportunities.”

DIVE DEEPER: CDW’s business diversity program can support your small business.

A Minority-Owned Tech Supplier Finds a Foothold in Texas

TanChes Global Management is a perfect example of the kind of company CDW has partnered with through its business diversity program. The company and its CEO and president, Tanaz Choudhury, have been recognized with multiple awards since beginning operations in Houston in 1998.

According to its website, “TanChes provides IT solutions for small to medium-size businesses, enterprises, and city and government agencies. The company specializes in the digital transformation of our clients by implementing zero-trust cybersecurity, business continuity, and disaster recovery utilizing hybrid cloud strategies.” In addition to designing and implementing cybersecurity and infrastructure solutions, the range of services TanChes offers includes centralized purchasing, help desk support and maintenance of IT environments.

When telling the story of TanChes and its success, Choudhury points to its state and local certifications as a minority-owned small business, particularly through the Texas HUB program. And through HUB, TanChes has also been able to leverage federal-level certification due to its location in a federally designated HUB zone. “This is actually a geographical location that is designed and decided by the federal government as a historically underutilized area or zip code. Trying to create economic development in an underutilized area is the point of that program,” Choudhury explains.

I think the more technology we hit in the future, the more we're going to become aware of our humanness.”

Tanaz Choudhury CEO and President, TanChes Global Management

Leveraging Local Resources to Enable Economic Opportunity

Thanks to Choudhury’s immersion in the state of Texas and to her company’s regional customers, TanChes and CDW have been able to develop a mutually beneficial partnership that not only drives business success for each company but also gives a higher level of service to their respective and shared customers.

And for Choudhury, it’s equally important that TanChes can contribute to the local, regional and Texas economies through 100% community-based hiring and participation in regional growth programs. “I sit on multiple boards and panels, and I’m invited for multiple keynotes. We just had an event at the Houston Chamber of Commerce where Dell and Amazon Web Services came together to create a workforce-ready workforce through community colleges nationwide. And TanChes is the local partner for the state of Texas.”

In a recent blog, AWS announced that through its Skills to Jobs Tech Alliance program, “the tech industry in the state of Texas is booming, with a growing demand for skilled workers in cloud, information technology (IT), software development, and data analytics roles.” The same blog noted, “Several of the state’s most innovative companies will collaborate with AWS to identify talent needs, provide real-world learning experiences for students, and hire qualified candidates into tech roles.” TanChes is one of the companies selected to participate in the program.

According to Choudhury, “That’s going to be the next generation, creating that perfect ecosystem within communities where the buying and the spending is happening there because the earning is happening there. It’s really important to create that sustainable financial ecosystem model for communities because now you’re hiring from the community. So, they’re working there, they’re spending there, they’re earning there, they’re playing there.”

With AI and other new forms of technology emerging, Choudhury says it will be important to preserve and elevate the human element. “I think the more technology we hit in the future, the more we're going to become aware of our humanness,” she says. “So, getting on board now is going to put you ahead of the game.”

Choudhury says that projects will come and go, but people stay. That’s why she thinks the best way to stay ahead of the curve is “by employing people who are women, who are diverse and who are going to be boots on the ground and bring that human element and the sentiment of understanding people.”

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