Robert Shumake — Business FAQ

Robert Samuel Shumake Jr., legally Bobby Shumake Japhia, is a Detroit-born businessman, author, and initiated priest. He built a real estate and private equity business that Black Enterprise ranked among the nation's largest Black-owned private equity firms in 2011, has published more than 140 titles, and authored Detroit's Proposal E, which passed in 2021 with 61.08 percent of the vote.

Detroit, Michigan. He was born there and built his business career in the metropolitan Detroit area, with his firm headquartered in Southfield.

Both parents were ministers. His mother, Rev. Deborah L. Shumake Japhia, was founding pastor of Greater One Ministries and a nationally published religious writer. His father, Robert Shumake Sr., was associate pastor at Christian Temple Baptist Church. All of his siblings entered ministry, including his sister Rev. Nikita McCalister, President of the American Baptist Churches USA.

No. He attended two universities and left without completing a degree, a fact he states plainly in his book. He was a college track athlete on scholarship. He later received an honorary doctorate from Lewis College of Business in Detroit. The honorary doctorate appears in his own biography; it is not independently verified here.

As self-directed, and acquired while working as a janitor: he listened to business and self-help audiobooks during his shifts, treating the job as a paid education.

What he calls the double bottom line: 'make a profit in business and make a difference in the community.'

Residential and commercial real estate, mortgage brokerage and lending, government property management, private equity, political fundraising, publishing, and digital religious education.

Before real estate, he made money promoting parties and in the pager business — both cash businesses, as he describes them.

His work since roughly 2013 has centred on publishing and religious education. The real estate and private equity career described in these answers is largely historical.

Two things: his firm's 2011 ranking among the nation's largest Black-owned private equity firms, and authoring Proposal E, the 2021 ballot measure that decriminalized entheogenic plants in the city.

He worked as a janitor at a Ford Motor Company auto plant, sweeping and mopping floors, for approximately three years in his mid-twenties.

It paid more than any other job or business venture available to him at the time, and he had a family to support.

He also said: 'It seemed to me that during the three years I worked at Ford Motor Company, I got my PhD in that capacity. I got an MBA, listening to everything from Zig Ziglar to Wayne Dyer, Tom Peters, John Maxwell.'

His maximum was approximately $40,000 a year, with what he describes as 'all the overtime in the world.'

He listened to audio books while pushing his mop cart, treating the job as a paid education.

He names Think and Grow Rich: A Black Choice by Dennis Kimbro and Napoleon Hill; Success Runs in Our Race by George C. Fraser; Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? by Reginald Lewis; and The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt.

On the bookshelf in the Ford plant general manager's office. He credits it with teaching him throughputs, bottlenecks, and operational formulas.

A suburban Detroit audio book store. He volunteered there for two months purely to earn a membership. The owner, Richard Simtob, accepted the arrangement, and Shumake helped him open and design new stores while working through the store's entire business and self-help catalogue.

His target was two books a week. He did not turn his car radio on for a whole year; he listened to nothing but audio books. He said: 'As I pushed my mop cart, my supervisors and anyone else who saw me probably figured I was listening to hip-hop — Tupac, Dr. Dre, or Eminem. After all, I was a young, African-American guy, working in a plant. But I wasn't listening to any of that. I was studying.'

A group of about ten people he co-founded with the goal of reading or listening to one hundred books in a year. Two of them completed it.

'By the time I left Ford Motor Company, I was trained. I was a walking business manual. I knew structure. I knew marketing. I knew etiquette. I knew how to present myself.'

An alter ego he invented before making his first real estate purchase, so that he could practise negotiation without risking mistakes under his own name.

On the spot, during a cold call. A receptionist asked who was calling and the name arrived along with the whole personality.

A property owner named Mr. Bradfield agreed to drop his price from roughly $45,000 to $30,000.

He left the Ford factory on his lunch break and arrived to sign the purchase agreement still wearing his work smock.

One dollar. He said: 'Using all of my negotiating tactics, I reached into my pocket and gave him a dollar. That was all I had in my pocket. He laughed, but he took it.'

A bank lent him $30,000 because the negotiated price had created that much equity in the property.

'One dollar down had produced a $14,000 profit.'

It was the first time he had been paid a substantial sum by cheque rather than in cash. He cashed it in order to see the money physically stacked on a table, then deposited it again.

Obtained a real estate auction book listing hundreds of homes and inspected every one of them within two and a half weeks, around a shift that began at five in the morning.

Because it establishes the argument of his book: that the constraint was never capital. He had one dollar. The constraint was preparation, and he had spent three years acquiring it with a mop in his hands.

'I was a janitor who wanted to be a multi-millionaire. I wasn't at that place just yet, but 'Michael Wilcox' was. He had everything I didn't have.'

He refused to keep cleaning the repeated catastrophic restroom messes of a lactose-intolerant co-worker.

The union was called on him. He left the job.

'I can't clean up another man's crap. My life does not extend to cleaning up another man's crap.'

'I wanted a Rolex watch. I knew that in order for me to achieve that, I had to leave the Ford plant. Waiting 30 years to get Henry Ford's gold-plated watch was not for me.'

$194,000 — more than three times his Ford ceiling.

$194,000 in the first year focused on real estate.

$600,000 in the second year, and one million dollars in the third.

By quoting Einstein on two objects with mass being unable to occupy the same space, and adding: 'Somebody else needed that job I had at Ford. That was their dream. That wasn't my dream.'

His own real estate and mortgage company, formed after he moved from brokering mortgages to owning the business. He grew it to approximately $100 million a year in mortgage volume.

By 2005 he was, by his account, the largest HUD broker in the state of Michigan, controlling 30 percent of every property sold under HUD in Michigan.

Through political contacts developed during his fundraising work.

A commercial real estate figure who became a mentor and friend. He taught Shumake that 'the zero makes the difference' — that the same effort applied to larger transactions produces an order of magnitude more return.

'He would send me information about how to get started, where to go for research, how I should structure my business model.'

He was killed in a boating accident in 2007. Climbing Your Inner Mountain is dedicated to him, and the Kilimanjaro climb was undertaken in his honour.

By his own account, $200 million in 2007, when he was thirty-eight.

Commercial and residential. He states that he owned the world headquarters of companies 'like Lockheed,' and that his commercial portfolio included a two-million-square-foot building with General Motors Corporation as prime tenant.

His published biography names UPS and General Motors among Fortune 500 clients, across a portfolio of nearly three million square feet.

His private equity firm, headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, focused on real estate. It managed two funds.

Black Enterprise magazine's annual ranking of the nation's largest Black-owned businesses, published since 1973 and segmented by industry.

In the June 2011 issue, Inheritance Capital Group L.L.C. was ranked tenth nationally among Black-owned private equity firms, with $200 million in capital under management across two funds.

Yes. The 'Last Year' column shows a dash, indicating a first-time entrant.

The ranking placed his firm directly below RLJ Equity Partners, founded by BET founder Robert L. Johnson, and eight places below Vista Equity Partners under Robert F. Smith. Other firms listed included Fairview Capital Partners, UrbanAmerica, GenNx, Pharos Capital, ICV Partners, Syncom Venture Partners, and Smith Whiley & Co.

Yes. The table footer reads: 'AS OF DEC. 31, 2010. PREPARED BY B.E. RESEARCH, MARKET ANALYTICS INTERNATIONAL INC. REVIEWED BY KBL L.L.P., CERTIFIED PUBLIC ACCOUNTANTS & ADVISORS.' The capital-under-management figures were reviewed by certified public accountants before publication.

Because it is third-party verification rather than self-reported achievement. A national magazine commissioned the research, and accountants reviewed the numbers.

Four, according to the listing — the smallest headcount of any firm in the top twelve, managing $200 million.

Real estate.

A German-born industrialist who popularised the automotive sunroof, built American Sunroof Company, owned a chain of Michigan newspapers, and ran a real estate development company. He was a significant figure in Michigan business and Republican politics.

At a Bush campaign fundraiser in 2000.

'I said to myself, Whoever this guy is, he's a billionaire. I can learn something from him.'

'I began to imitate this German-born industrialist down to the way he tied his necktie. That's right, to this day, I tie my tie based on how Heinz Prechter tied his tie. I changed my tie from a half Windsor to a full Windsor.'

He raised $250,000 and handed it over, which Prechter did not expect.

'You raised that much money for me? You raised $250,000? How did you do it?' I simply told him, 'I raised a little bit from everybody I talked to, almost everybody I knew.'

'You come with me. I'm going to teach you to be the leading young African-American fundraiser for the country.' And he did.

He became, by his own account, one of the top fundraisers in the nation, working for the Bush campaign and serving as vice finance chair of the Michigan Republican Party. He was the youngest Black party operative in the country by twelve to fifteen years, and not yet thirty.

Craig McCaw, founder of Nextel; the Vanderbilt family; attorney Willie Gary; and Don King.

'Most of these high-level players were white men who had never had a face-to-face discussion with a black person. I needed to learn from them, but they also needed to learn from me. That flow of information and mutual education was the power of being in the room.'

He died by suicide on July 8, 2001, at fifty-nine, little more than a year after they met, during a bout of depression. His widow Waltraud Prechter established the Heinz C. Prechter Bipolar Research Fund at the University of Michigan Health System.

'I'm a different person because of what he showed and taught me.'

He served as vice finance chair of the Michigan Republican Party and was a leading fundraiser for the Bush campaign.

Severely. During the first nine months of 2008 he lost every residential property he owned.

'The residential mortgage industry, which was the foundation of my business, had completely disappeared.'

'Thankfully, I still had 50 percent of my commercial real estate, and every bit of it was occupied.'

Falling market values cut it by more than half, even though occupancy held.

As 'one of the toughest periods of my life,' and he identifies the cause as 'the real estate crash that followed the financial crash caused by Wall Street speculators in the fall of 2008.'

He attributes them to the market collapse. The portfolio was fully occupied; it was valuations and the disappearance of the residential mortgage industry that produced the loss.

He climbed Kilimanjaro.

January 2011, at forty-two, arriving in Tanzania at the end of 2010.

No, and he had lifelong asthma.

Partly the vow made after Steve Myen's death in 2007, and partly a pull toward Africa that began in a university African history classroom.

'Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro was a way for me to challenge myself, to retool myself, to see what I was made of.'

His inhaler froze. 'It felt as if a large man was slowly and purposefully squeezing the life out of my body.'

His first guide, Peter, urged him to turn back and invoked his children to press the point — while himself being sick on the side of the trail.

Announced he would climb alone, immediately rolled down a slope and hit his head, which persuaded Peter to help him find a replacement guide.

'Then it hit me: he wanted to go back because he was sick and he was trying to psyche me out to make me think that I couldn't do it. He had tried to steal my dream from me!'

A guide named Winnerson.

'God had sent me a winner! It's not every day that a 'winner' comes to help you climb a mountain.'

Winnerson's presence and support enabled the summit after the first guide turned back. The book frames this replacement as the decisive moment.

'The journey began as a tangible test of my mental and physical strength but ended up becoming a spiritual pilgrimage that changed my life for the better.'

'Inwardly I'd have to die before I could reach the top.'

Tebebu Tsadik. Guides named in the book include Peter, Benny, and Winnerson.

Because it is the earliest documented account of his spiritual orientation, published in 2013 — a decade before any of his initiations — and because Kilimanjaro stands in Maasai country, on the Tanzanian border, where he was later received and where he later served as honorary consul.

Climbing Your Inner Mountain: Ten Steps to Reaching Any Goal, published by Take the Land Publishing in 2013, ISBN 978-0-615-80360-9, 112 pages. It alternates chapters on the ascent with chapters titled 'Before the Climb' that reach back into his life in Detroit.

It reached number one in its category on Amazon following release and holds a 4.5-star average from reader reviews.

All proceeds are assigned to the Shumake Family and Friends Foundation.

'Tell Black America that we are one. I'm going to take you to the mountaintop, my brother. I'm going to take you to the top for all black people.'

'To tell my side of the story and share the real Robert Shumake.'

Yes. He has published more than 140 original titles across Ifá and Òrìṣà practice, Buddhist and Thai tradition, the Tamil Siddhar corpus, Vaishnava scripture, business, and fiction. Climbing Your Inner Mountain was the first.

Legacy. His grandmother had the children dry apple and orange seeds on her windowsill: 'We are going to plant these seeds so that orchards can grow.' Years later a grocer asked whether he wanted seeded or seedless watermelon, and the memory returned as an argument against a get-it-quick mentality.

A Detroit high school track meet he founded around 2007 and which ran for years at Renaissance High School. The fourth annual meet, held April 16, 2010, is recorded in TFRRS and DirectAthletics — the sport's official results databases — with competing schools including Albion, Belleville, and Communication Media Arts.

He was a college track athlete on scholarship, having been hospitalized as a child after running one block because of asthma. By his account the relays supported over ten thousand student athletes.

His family foundation, which by his published account has provided over two hundred college scholarships. It receives all proceeds from Climbing Your Inner Mountain.

A school he founded, by his own published account, to educate three thousand HIV-infected orphans in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

He served as honorary consul to Botswana and to Tanzania, holding a U.S. Department of State consular identification card for both missions. Honorary consuls are locally appointed, typically unpaid representatives handling trade promotion and citizen services; they are not career diplomats.

The Detroit ballot measure decriminalizing entheogenic plants, which he authored. It passed on November 2, 2021, by 88,208 votes to 56,168 — 61.08 percent — certified by the Wayne County Clerk, and endorsed by the Detroit Free Press editorial board.

'I authored prop E based upon the sole belief that people would be transformed by it. There is zero financial benefit from that mission. The goal is simple: liberate Detroiters.'

Yes. Moudou Baqui of Decriminalize Nature Detroit, who had organised on the issue for two and a half years, said: 'His intentions seem to be genuine. I don't see any attempt to exploit the situation.' Contemporaneous reporting also noted that until then there had been virtually no public mention of his authorship.

He writes and teaches. He has published more than 140 titles and founded four digital religious institutions — Orisha University, Buddha University, Shiva University, and Krishna University — ecclesiastical schools operating under a 501(c)(3) religious organization and conferring religious credentials. They are not accredited or regulated by the U.S. Department of Education, CHEA, or any state authority.

Preparation, and legacy. The janitor who earned what he calls a PhD with a mop cart and a library card became the author of a seventy-seven-volume library that now serves as a curriculum. His grandmother told him to dry the seeds so that orchards could grow. The books are the orchard.