“Every time I feel like I’m not living fully within my purpose, I’m willing to let it go for something better. I tell my community I’m on, like, version 43.0 of myself.”
Bria Hash is the founder of 4ourty, a strategic consulting organization focused on supporting business owners of color. Her work is intensely values-driven—in fact, community empowerment is integrated into every aspect of Hash’s company.
“4ourty is a company I created as a form of economic empowerment,” she says. “I started it in 2016, and it started as a Black-owned business list in my hometown [Roanoke, Vir.].” At the time, Hash was in insurance sales; the list was a passion project.
Part of the reason she came up with the idea has to do with Roanoke’s history. In the 1950s and 1960s, Roanoke’s Black community of Gainsboro was systematically destroyed through what the government called “urban renewal.” Residents’ homes and businesses were seized through eminent domain, and the vibrant community was essentially wiped out.
Hash started thinking about that destruction, and how much the Black-owned businesses in her city had had to overcome.
“I started to think, what about the businesses that we had? We could go to Borough Community Hospital and be served, and go to the dentist office, the gas station, and everything was within our community. That really challenged me—especially with all the things that were happening socially in 2016, 2017—to say, ‘I’m going to create a list and pull us all together.’”
She set a goal of getting 100 Black-owned businesses on her list—and she met it. “Once I started the list, they [the business owners] started asking me, ‘Bria, can you help me with X?’ or ‘How are you sending out these emails?’ That’s really how I got my start as a virtual assistant.”
It was in the virtual assistant world that she found she had a knack for helping her clients reach their own goals. She helped one client build out and deliver an academy for real estate investing. The first day, that client brought in $16,000. He’s the one who first told Bria she had more to offer.
“I wouldn’t say I’m a coach, although I do have coaches on my team,” Hash says. “We really focus on one area of business, and that is in establishing mature, integrity-driven, and intentional sales strategies."
What this translates to is helping business owners generate the necessary revenue to sustain their passions and turn them into thriving enterprises, all with a strong commitment to community economics and facilitating the growth of generational wealth.
Bridging the gap between ideas and revenue
4ourty caters to a diverse clientele, from those in the idea phase to established businesses looking to stabilize their revenue. Regardless of where they are in the growth stage, her firm is geared towards those ready to transition into revenue generation.
This is because she wants to help entrepreneurs create stable, thriving businesses—not be the entrepreneur who’s working 80 hours a week and is never present with their loved ones. And she’s been able to do that for her clients, too.
"We don't want to be going up and down and then tearing our nerves up, and then, you know, unable to be there with our families, or around for our friends or ourselves, " she emphasizes.
A central tenet of Hash’s work with businesses is her focus on empowering women of color, particularly Black women, through her initiative Black Women Sales Academy. Launched in 2021, the initiative was a timely response to the disproportionate impact the community and Black-owned businesses faced in the pandemic.
“You can come into our community and say ‘Ok, I want the information. I want the education about how to improve my sales.’ But then you’re going to have to show up (know your revenue), and that gives you the permission to come to the next training. We do the work together.”
So, so how does Bria use Bench to run her small business?
Bria uses Bench to keep herself accountable and make decisions based on metrics and numbers, not emotion.
“Working with Bench has saved me so many times," she says. "I could have made decisions for my business that would not have turned out well, should they have not been made based on the numbers.”
In addition, Bria leverages Bench’s reports and real-time financial dashboard to see where her business stands every time she logs in.
In fact, Bench has been so integral, that she’s incorporated it into her Black Women Sales Academy.
"I don’t allow the numbers to be out of sight, out of mind with my community,” she says. “We bring in Bench to help streamline their financial reporting because often they’re going to multiple sources to get their numbers. And we want them to be able to just go to their dashboard and say, ‘Ok, this is what it says. Everything is flowing through here, and these are my numbers.’ Numbers are power.”
