Lillian Lincoln Lambert is the very definition of a barrier-breaking entrepreneur, from being the first African-American woman to receive a Harvard MBA to founding her own company in her garage and then building it into a $20-million corporation before selling it.

Raised in rural Virginia, where she wore homemade burlap dresses to school, Lambert traveled north to New York City and Washington, DC, when she was 18 in search of new opportunities. She worked as a maid and a typist before she realized that, as she put it, “Owning the mop is much better than pushing the mop.”

Knowing higher education would be her ticket to a new world, Lambert enrolled at Howard University and earned a bachelor of arts before moving on to Harvard Business School, where in 1969, she became the first African-American woman to receive an MBA from the institution.

After earning her MBA, Lambert worked in a variety of jobs until, in 1976, she decided to strike out on her own. With a few thousand dollars from savings, a $12,000 loan, and a 90-day line of credit from a supplier, she started Centennial One, Inc. in her Maryland garage.

Over the next two decades, she nurtured the building maintenance company she’d founded, expanding it into the Boston and Rhode Island markets and winning accounts with such blue-chip clients as Dulles National Airport, ABC News, and Hewlett-Packard. By the time she sold Centennial One in 2001, the company employed 1,200 people and had grown to $20 million in annual revenues.

Since selling Centennial One, Lambert has spent her time writing, including authoring her autobiography, The Road to Someplace Better: From the Segregated South to Harvard Business School and Beyond, and public speaking, where her style has been described as a blend of Cicely Tyson and Maya Angelou. She serves on the Board of Visitors at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Board of Directors for the Harvard Business School African-American Alumni Association.

Lambert has received numerous honors and awards during her career, including: the Harvard Business School Alumni Achievement Award; the Harvard Business School African-American Alumni Association Bert King Award; the State of Maryland Small Business Person of the Year Award; and the Black MBA Association Entrepreneur of the Year Award. She also has been named one of the Top 50 Women-Owned Businesses by the Washington Business Journal and was honored by Ernst & Young as a finalist for its Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

“Lillian Lambert is an outstanding role model, mentor, and leader who built a substantial business against all odds.  She has built a legacy of business and personal success over her lifetime, and she has earned her place in the Enterprising Women Hall of Fame,” Monica Smiley said.

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Virginia Littlejohn is co-founder, president and CEO of Quantum Leaps, Inc., a Washington DC-based non-profit that helps fuel the global growth of women’s enterprise development through strategic initiatives and identification and sharing of best practices.

She has advocated on behalf of women business owners and small and medium-sized enterprises for more than three decades. Over the years, she has served as CEO of the Global Enterprise Group, helping create an initiative to train leaders of women entrepreneurial associations from 60 developing countries, as senior advisor for women’s entrepreneurship to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and as founder and chairman of TradeBuilders, Inc., a for-profit company based in Washington, DC, with a focus on helping companies and organizations gain cost-effective access to international markets.

Littlejohn led lobbying efforts in the 1980s to fund the Small Business Administration Office of Women’s Business Ownership and was a principal architect of the Women’s Business Ownership Act of 1988. One of the founders of what is now known as the Center for Women’s Business Research, Littlejohn also helped author the legislation that created the Women’s Business Centers, the census of women-owned businesses, and the National Women’s Business Council (which advises the President, the Small Business Administration, and the U.S. Congress), on which she served two terms. She is one of a handful of individuals who was elected as a delegate to the 1980, 1986 and 1995 White House Conferences on Small Business and, while serving as president of the National Association of Women Business Owners, was able to get many of the organization’s members elected and appointed to the 1986 White House Conference.

Littlejohn has organized numerous trade missions and trade events and, in 1985, helped organize the first women-owned-business trade mission in the world, between the United States and London, Frankfurt, and Madrid. In the early 1990s, she was the first chairman of the International Trade Committees for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Council on Small Business, the Small Business Legislative Council, and the American Express Small Business Partnership.

Her current initiatives include coordinating the development of The Roadmap to 2020 – Fueling the Growth of Women’s Enterprise Development, a strategic action plan designed to energize the growth of women’s business development starting in the United States, and then expanding internationally, and helping women become part of the global supply chain by working to create a global certification standard for women’s business enterprises.

The Roadmap to 2020 identifies the gaps in women’s entrepreneurship and the specific obstacles to be overcome, and then proposes detailed strategies and recommendations to be addressed by stakeholders in the public sector, corporate America, academia, and foundations, as well as by the major national women’s business groups. It draw upon months of expert roundtables and online forums on topics such as research, education and training, access to markets, technology utilization, financial and other strategies for fueling high-growth women-owned businesses, and return on investment in women’s enterprise development.

The co-founder of WeConnect International, Littlejohn is working with Global 500 corporations and women’s business enterprises (WBEs) to create a global certification standard for WBEs that are 51 percent woman-owned, managed and controlled. Certification for WBEs currently exists in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, and Littlejohn is helping lead efforts to develop similar WBE certification initiatives in Europe, India and China. In addition, she is working with the United Nations Global Compact to get supplier diversity onto the global corporate agenda and WBEs into the global supply chain.

“Virginia Littlejohn is truly one of the veterans of the women’s entrepreneurship movement in the United States and has shared best practices with women entrepreneurs all over the globe. She is a pioneer and a trailblazer who continues to chart the path for women business owners moving forward in the decades to come with her groundbreaking work on the Roadmap to 2020 and the WEConnect program that is helping women in Canada, the UK, China, India, and beyond connect with one another and build stronger businesses,” Monica Smiley said.

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