The eligibility standard

A business belongs in BOBBY when it is at least 51% owned, operated and controlled by African Americans. This follows the standard used by the National Minority Supplier Development Council for certifying a minority business enterprise.

All three words carry weight. Ownership is the share of the business held. Operation is who runs it day to day. Control is who makes the decisions that matter. A business where the shares are held one way and the decisions are made another does not meet the standard, however the paperwork reads.

No part of this system infers a person’s race or ethnicity — not from a name, a photograph, an address, or the name of a business. No model, no heuristic, no clever shortcut. This is a rule in the codebase, not an aspiration, and it is the reason the directory is slower to grow than it could be.

Eligibility comes from two things, and only these two:

• What the owner says about their own business. People describe their own ownership; nobody describes it for them.
• Documents a person reads. Ownership records, citizenship or residency documents, and whatever else the checklist for that case calls for — reviewed by a human being and recorded in a vetting case.

A guess about someone’s background, however well-meant and however accurate it happened to be, is not evidence. Building on guesses would make every label in this directory worth less, including the ones that were right.

A listing carries a trust tier, and that tier says exactly how much checking has happened — no more.

Discovered

BOBBY found a public signal that this business is Black-owned — its own website, a platform listing, a certification, or a person who told us. Nobody has reviewed documents, and BOBBY is not vouching for it.

Verified

An investigator reviewed this business’s ownership documents and filed a report, and BOBBY decided it meets the standard: at least 51% owned, operated and controlled by African Americans.

BOBBY Certified

BOBBY’s founder awarded this business the highest tier, after the same document review and investigator report required for Verified.

A listing that has not been through vetting carries no badge at all, and BOBBY is not vouching for it. How vetting works sets out what the higher tiers take.

Meeting the eligibility standard says who owns a business. It says nothing about whether the business is good at what it does, whether it will answer the phone, or whether you will be happy with the work. BOBBY does not rate quality and does not invent ratings: a business with no reviews shows no score, rather than a flattering blank.

Businesses close, change hands, and are sometimes added on a signal that turns out to be mistaken. Corrections and removals explains how to tell BOBBY, and what happens next.