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Wake up the Mogul Inside You: Get to Know These 50 African-American Women

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In honor of Black History Month we (The Jane Dough) decided to highlight 50 African-American women who are accomplishing extraordinary things in the public, private and non-profit sectors. Check out the gallery and prepare to feel a little bit inadequate when you get a load of some of these resumés.

Fatimah Moody

Fatimah Moody comes from a family of entrepreneurs — her parents owned a restaurant in Queens when she was growing up, and created her management consulting firm LinkVisum in 2007. Despite the bad economic timing she led the company through a period of tremendous growth, going from under $1 million in revenue in 2008 to $10 million in 2010. She’s pretty amazing, but she says her hero is her husband: “We are in the business together, and he is the backbone of the entire operation.” Cute!

D. Michelle Flowers Welch

D. Michelle Flowers Welch is the founder of Flowers Communications Group, a PR firm that has been in business for 21 years and boasted clients from MillerCoors to McDonald’s. Welch totally has the start-up bug and handed control of the company to its president in 2011 so that she could launch Welch Consulting, a sports marketing firm. She recently won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Publicity Club of Chicago.

Susanne Shank

Suzanne Shank is so, so smart — her original career dream was to be an engineer, but she ended up founding and heading up a municipal bonds specialist company that, among many other transactions, has overseen over $3 billion in deals for the Detroit Water Board. That’s not all — “in 2006 Black Enterprise Magazine named Shank one of the “50 Most Powerful Black Women in Business” and one of the “75 Most Influential Blacks on Wall Street.” Based in Detroit, she has established an internship program there — the Detroit Summer Finance Institute — opening careers in high finance to underprivileged city students.

See the full list of magnificent women at TheJaneDough.com

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