Janice Bryant Howroyd

Janice Bryant Howroyd was born around 1953 in Tarboro, North Carolina, as one of eleven children in her family. Howroyd's parents enrolled her in Tarboro's all-white school, where one teacher opined that people of African descent were suited exclusively to slave labor and that affirmative action had a negative impact. Upset, Howroyd implored her father to allow her to switch schools, but he left the decision to her and she eventually opted to return. She completed the program and won a full scholarship to North Carolina A&T State University, where she subsequently earned a bachelor's degree in English. Later, Howroyd earned a doctorate in humanities from the same university.

After completing her education, Howroyd visited her sister in Los Angeles and decided to move there. In Los Angeles, Howroyd worked as her brother-in-law's assistant at Billboard magazine, where she discovered her interest in organization and employee placement. In an interview with Black Enterprise magazine, she stated,

I realized that I enjoyed helping people get temporary and permanent jobs. When someone told me to hang out my own shingle, I took the chance."

In 1978, Janice Bryant Howroyd borrowed $900 from her mother to start a resource management firm, based in front of a rug shop. She combined these funds with her savings to make a budget of about $1,500 and invested in essential equipment, notably a fax machine and a phone. Howroyd rented a small office in Beverly Hills and operated her newly-formed ActOne Personnel Services business from there. Billboard was one of her first clients. Looking back on that time, Howroyd commented, “My business literally started with my fax machine, my phone and my contacts.” By 2016, Howroyd was announced to be one of the richest self-made women in the world, with a net-worth of $420 million, according to Forbes.

She learned many practices that she employed in her later life from her parents and was overall positively influenced by them. One such practice was the ability to make the most of the available resources. In Howroyd's own words,

She [Howroyd's mother] taught us many of the principles of making lots from nothing, and I think those things that she did and the way she worked with us really taught me so much about not only how to build my business, but how to sustain and innovate across the platforms that I work in today.”

When it launched, ActOne Group was a full-time workplace staffing firm based in California, and after forty years of development it turned into a company offering temporary and full-time placement options to more than 17,000 clients in nineteen countries, including the United States, Canada, Denmark, Brazil, and the United Kingdom, with over 2,800 employees.

Besides providing work placement for its clients, the company provides a number of services across its technology and management solutions company, AgileOne; its staffing company, AppleOne; and its background checking and screening company, A-Check; these all together make up the ActOne Group. With the launch of appleone.com, ActOne was one of the first staffing agencies to be present on the Internet. This change had a significant effect on the growth in yearly revenue.

Howroyd employed two principles when building her business: the "WOMB" method and the notion of "keeping the humanity in Human Resources." The letters in "WOMB" stand for "Word of Mouth, Brother!" She assured her clients that she would find qualified employees to fit their needs or return any payment received for the service. ActOne's reputation gradually spread by word-of-mouth, and within a few years the company had earned $10 million.

Howroyd's philosophy was to place workers at companies with which she could maintain long-term relationships, and made it a rule to only select people who she was certain were qualified and would remain committed to the positions that needed to be filled. She voiced this approach in an interview with the San Diego Business Journal: "Never compromise who you are personally to become who you wish to be professionally. That means you only do business with a company you'd send a relative to, and you look to work with companies you can get repeat business from. That's how I measure success."

Howroyd and her executive team (eventually made up of several family members) invested in new technology to grow the company. ActOne developed an electronic time card Under Umbrella Managed Programs that Silicon Graphics, a computing manufacturer, could use to track the activity of its temporary employees. Madelina Williams, a manager at Silicon Graphics, told Black Enterprise in 1998, "At the end of the week, our managers can push a button and see the status of any temp employee. ActOne did in six weeks what their predecessors couldn't. They are truly a business partner."

ActOne later branched into other sectors, including engineering, technical and general office work, and entertainment. Howroyd also launched two schools of continuing education to help her workers gain new skills: California National University for Advanced Studies and the Academy of Computer Technology. Her other companies include the following:

• Agile-1, a management-solutions company
• A-Check America, a background and drug-screening company
• Enterprise Communications, a business-communication solutions company
• Document Scanning Systems, a document-management solutions provider
• CTA Travel, a corporate travel agency

Howroyd owns 51 percent of ActOne, and her children, Katharyn and Brett, own the other 49 percent.

Howroyd also served on the U.S. Department of Labor's Workforce Initiative Board, Loyola Marymount University's board of regents, and the Women's Leadership Board of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

• Janice Bryant Howroyd is founder and CEO of ActOne (revenue in 2017 estimated at $950 million), a provider of resource management solutions.
• She started ActOne in Los Angeles in 1978 with $1,500.
• ActOne has more than 17,000 clients and 2,600 employees in nineteen countries.
• With her family, she owns several dozen properties, including commercial rental properties and residences.
• In 2019, she released her second book, Acting Up, focused on business advice.
• She was married to Bernard Howroyd, the head of AppleOne Employment Services. He passed away in 2020 due to Alzheimers.