Entrepreneur Now Has
Global Connections
Thomas
Brooks had contacts. Lots of them. And so did his friend
C. J. Bland.
"Both of
us were officers with the Atlanta chapter of the National Black MBA
Association and were working in senior marketing and sales
positions," Brooks explains. "We both had large sets of
contacts around the country. And, both of us were heavily
involved in community service."
| Brooks
says it was not unusual for an acquaintance working in human
resources to e-mail them job descriptions to circulate. "The
HR person would get a lot of good resumes and end up hiring
someone," say Brooks, who received his MBA in marketing from the
Smith School in 1992. Today,
Brooks is co-founder (along with Bland) and executive vice president
of Minority Professional Network, Inc. (MPN). |
 |
MinorityProfessionalNetwork.com was launched in 2001 and provides
online connections and information for minority professionals around
the world. Content areas include a career center for job
seekers, an employer center for hiring companies, and student
resources.
In
addition to nearly 3 Million site visitors since its debut, the site
now has approximately 300,000 subscribers to its free e-Newsletters.
"This is double where we hoped to be at this point. Plus, the
demographics of our subscriber make our advertisers ecstatic,"
Brooks says.
A former
marketing director at Lucent Technologies, Brooks, who is also the
owner of a specialty marketing, public relations and publishing
firm, says that he discovered marketing while at the Smith School.
Before then, the University of Pittsburgh electrical engineering
graduate had planned on a career in engineering.
"I was
getting an MBA so I could be an engineering manager," Brooks
recalls. Marketing courses would change that. "I found
out that I loved marketing, product development and
entrepreneurship," he says, admitting, "It was a big change, but a
good change."
The MPN
user community would certainly agree.
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