Entrepreneurship, Family, and Community: A Conversation With KIEDC’s Metashar Dillon
Metashar Dillon is a busy person. She’s the chairman and CEO of KIEDC, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping women and young people succeed and overcome the struggles of poverty. She owns Executive Touch Salon & Spa in Farmington, CT, and co-owns California Hair Designs. She was the founder and executive director of Miss Black Connecticut Scholarship Pageant, and has written two books: Good Success: Visions and Legacies That Last, and The Power of Vision: The Reflection of Your Future. She’ll soon be releasing a third book, Women All Over the World: It’s Your Time.
Back in August, we had a conversation with Metashar about her story and her keys to success. Here is what she told us about how family and community have played integral roles in her career, which has taken her to both coasts and overseas.
Family
Metashar began learning about business when she was a little girl. She’s a 4th-generation entrepreneur, and learned a great deal directly from her mother.
Her mother started a wildly successful salon business, opening franchises on both coasts and launching her own product line. She accomplished all of this in spite of losing her husband, Metashar’s father, and raising four young children on her own. Metashar believes that living through this hardship would ultimately make her a more empathetic person. “Because of what happened to us, I was always very sensitive about other people.”
In her last year of high school, Metashar’s mother surprised her by telling her that she would be handing over control of the salon’s West coast locations to her once she graduated. Not even eighteen and thrown into a sink-or-swim situation, Metashar thrived where many others would likely have floundered. “I had to learn about everything- about how people would try to take advantage of you. I think it made me sharp and quick in my thinking.”
Though her salon business was going well, Metashar found that she wanted to do more to give back and teach others the way that her mother had taught her. “I started seeing my career going more from operating a salon into teaching.”
Community
While the idea of social responsibility is little more than a marketing gimmick at some companies, Metashar Dillon is fully committed to helping the community in any way that she can. Just like her entrepreneurial spirit, this is familial trait.
Metashar’s grandparents owned and farmed on land in the South. They ran their business well, and they generously shared their success with their community. “Nobody went hungry,” Metashar tells us. Her grandparents made sure to deliver food to anyone in the area who needed it.
Metashar has built on her family’s tradition of generosity with her own career. One of her key initiatives for helping her community is the Kingdom International Economic Development Corporation (KIEDC), a non-profit whose motto is “Meeting Needs and Solving Problems for the benefit of all humanity.” They are dedicated to helping women, children, and families to fight poverty, hunger, and disaster.
Metashar began KIEDC as part of the Miss Black Connecticut Scholarship Pageant, a pageant focused less on physical beauty and more on values, attitude, and accomplishments. “I took these young women, and I taught them about life. I taught them about volunteering. I taught them how to find scholarships. I prepared them for their future.”
She offered seminars to give contestants the opportunity to learn about scholarship options and other financing information for college, always stressing to her students that they should never give up on their passions. “The words ‘I can’t’ are not in your vocabulary,” she told them, encouraging them to pursue the careers they want while still finding an affordable path to education.
Over time, Metashar developed a broader vision for KIEDC, and it eventually grew into its own entity separate from the pageant. She describes it now as a sort of “boot camp” for young people. “I took everything that I would have wanted at that age, but was never done for me, and put it into a 6-month boot camp that would help prepare young women for their life.”
So far, she’s very proud of KIEDC’s results. “I mentored a lot of young women who are now lawyers, doctors, educators, business women, and leaders in their community.”
Going Global
Metashar’s business and community work have gone beyond CT and the US. A few years ago, she launched an incubator and Women’s Entrepreneurship Competition in Dubai. Without having the collateral to build such a project on her own, she began visiting Dubai and put her impressive networking skills to work to make it happen.
Building on the relationships Metashar built abroad, KIEDC is also currently working with the University of Bridgeport, as well as the city’s government, to bring business opportunities from Saudi Arabia and China to Connecticut in the International Trade Forum (ITF). This forum, which will be held from October 24 to November 1, aims to bring projects from the GCC, Africa and Asia to CT. Additionally, ITF will launch a global digital trade forum called the ITF Network, using software to connect project owners with investors and other funding sources. Video chat, project searches, and translation software will help business people all over the planet to connect with each other.
Metashar has also launched TIGRE Youth, a global digital incubator for young people. Having began her own career at a young age, she sees no reason that other youngsters shouldn’t follow suit. “Who says that you have to wait until you got older to go into business?”
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This post, co-written with Don Tirea , is part of Checkmate’s “On the Board” series, where we share the insights and stories of the entrepreneurs in our network. If you would like to have a chat with us and be featured in “On the Board”, please contact us at hello@checkmatecreations.com.
