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A free event focused on empowering “the culture” is coming to the Queen City on April 27.
Earn Your Masters, an event designed to inspire and connect local creatives and entrepreneurs, will kick off its three-city tour on Saturday in Charlotte. A collaboration between Ally Financial, Earn Your Leisure, and United Masters, attendees can expect a panel of entrepreneurship experts, performances, music, food, special guests, a pitch competition and more.
Earn Your Leisure is a platform that focuses on helping people achieve financial freedom through investment and entrepreneurship, while United Masters is a company that assists independent artists in sharing their music.
Alongside Ally, the two Black-owned companies are set to bring a unique blend of expertise, inspiration and opportunities to connect for the city’s creatives.
Erica Hughes, the senior director of multicultural marketing at Ally, told QCity Metro that the event was designed intentionally around “the culture.” She noted that Black creatives and entrepreneurs would be able to “see themselves” in various facets of the event and feel at home.
Choosing a growing market
“We’ve been doing these events with United Masters and Earn Your Leisure for the last three years, but this is our first time in Charlotte, so we’re really excited about it,” she said.
Troy Millings, who co-founded the media platform Earn Your Leisure, told QCity Metro that the event is an effort to highlight the hidden talent in the city.
“You go from New York, then it’s like Philly, D.C., and then it’s just Atlanta,” Millings said. He noted Charlotte was once an “overlooked” city but is becoming more visible as a place of opportunity, and he and his team are excited to showcase it.
“We wanted to make sure Charlotte was properly represented because there’s so much positive stuff going on down there,” he said.
Millings, who is a former educator, said he wants aspiring entrepreneurs to know that success is possible and hopes the Earn Your Masters event will remind them of that.
“Coming from education, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to just work my way to wealth,” he told QCity Metro. “Having opportunities to figure out how I could generate more income was vitally important to that. When we started [Earn Your Leisure], we didn’t know that would be the route [to more income], but we were able to create a business from it.”
Millings co-founded Earn Your Leisure alongside his friend and business partner Rashad Bilal in 2019 as a podcast. The two initially planned to share tips about investment, budgeting and financial freedom in hopes of helping to close the racial wealth gap.
But in its five years of existence, the podcast has grown into much more.
Today, Earn Your Leisure is a multimedia platform with a community of more than a million subscribers. Millings and Bilal have interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs, including famous ones like self-made billionaire Tyler Perry, who spoke at the duo’s Invest Fest, a festival centered around building wealth and highlighting successful entrepreneurs of color.
In 2023, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Earn Your Leisure’s three-day Invest Fest attracted 50,000 attendees that year.
On Saturday, Millings and Bilal will share some of their experiences with eventgoers in Charlotte in hopes of inspiring the next wave of successful local ventures.
Pitching connection
Millings said he’s most excited about the pitch competition, a new component of the event series this year.
The competition, Hughes said, provides small business owners a unique opportunity to get real-time feedback from industry experts, including Ally executives, Steve Stout, the founder and CEO of United Masters, and Earn Your Leisure founders.
More than 300 people applied to be part of the pitch competition in Charlotte. Pitches ranged in industry, from businesses focused on artificial intelligence to music and technology, Millings said.
He said the applicant pool was narrowed to less than ten who will pitch and compete for the $5,000 prize.
Then, the winner from each city part of the tour will then advance to a final round during Art Basel in Miami, Fla, where they will compete for $50,000.
“For entrepreneurs coming, the first thing I would tell them is be prepared,” he said. “Be open-minded to new ideas and come with a concerted plan.” Millings went on to explain that pitching is an important aspect of the event, but the connection is even more so.
Millings advised entrepreneurs to want to connect with one another as much as they would want to connect with Ally executives and the panelists, noting that creatives might find their next business partner or collaboration there.
“To have all these entrepreneurs in the building, to have all these ideas in the building… it represents so many possibilities,” Millings said. “Representation matters. When we see each other, it becomes more than inspiration; it becomes aspirational, and we’re really going to celebrate that [at the event].”
Earn Your Masters is set to take place Saturday, April 27, from 4 – 8 p.m. at Union at Station West, located at 919 Berryhill Road.
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