Vol. 11, No. 2, 2010

Enterprising Women of the Year Awards

Lillian Lambert is the very definition of a barrier-breaking entrepreneur, from being the first African-American woman ever to receive a Harvard MBA in 1969, to founding her own building maintenance company in her garage on a few thousand dollars and building it into a $20 million enterprise with more than 1,200 employees.

Raised in rural Virginia, where she wore homemade burlap bag dresses to school, Lillian came to New York City when she was 18 and worked as a maid before she realized that, as she put it, “Owning the mop is much better than pushing the mop.” She earned her bachelor of arts at Howard University, where a professor serving as her mentor convinced Lillian that she was Harvard Business School material. But after graduating there, she received no job offers from recruiters.

Undaunted, Lillian started her own company, Centennial One, based in Landover, Maryland, and it expanded into the Boston and Rhode Island markets and won accounts with such blue-chip clients as Dulles National Airport, ABC News and Hewlett-Packard before Lillian sold it.

Since then, Lillian has spent her time writing, including penning her autobiography titled “The Road to Someplace Better: From the Segregated South to Harvard Business School and Beyond,” and public speaking, where her style has been described as a blend of Cicely Tyson and Maya Angelou. She also sits on the Board of Visitors at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Along the way, she has been the recipient of many awards, including Harvard Business School’s African American Alumni Association’s Bert King Award; MBA of the Year, Harvard Business School African American Alumni Association; Small Business Person of the Year, State of Maryland; Entrepreneur of the Year, Black MBA Association; Top 50 Women-Owned Businesses, Washington Business Journal; and Finalist, Entrepreneur of the Year, Ernst & Young.