Tuesday, December 10, 2024
“To keep my mind going, I have to be doing stuff,’ says Tawanna Fields, of Dallas, “because I don’t like to be bored,” She learned how to cook while taking home economics courses at Amarillo High School. “I didn’t go to college. I moved to Dallas at 18 years old right out of high school, moved in with a cousin, and started my first company.”
She had $200 she had saved while working at Braum’s in Amarillo. In Dallas, she went to Sam’s and bought $150 worth of food essentials and started preparing plate lunches of chicken tetrazzini, green beans, corn, a piece of chocolate cake and a roll that she tried to sell at car dealerships for $7. “They said no every time I went in. On about the 5th try, the manager of a car dealership bought a plate of food and so did a policewoman customer. They both raved about the food. Then the policewoman asked Tawanna if she could cook for 250 people. Tawanna said yes. That was the start of TAWANNA ‘S KREATIONS ‘N MORE CATERING. Then she started selling barbeque.
“I was everywhere,” she says. “Beauty shops, barber shops, parking lots nightclubs at night, I was making 4 or 5 thousand dollars a day. Then I started really diversifying.”
She started a house cleaning business, had a bunch of vending machines, a couple of restaurants, and had 11 dump trucks to help out at disasters all over the south. Then a man told her he would give her $5000 to haul something to Oklahoma City. “I found out it was a very long light pole. So, I ended up buying a seven dually trucks and seven forty feet long gooseneck trailers, and we started hauling freight to 48 states.”
Tawanna had a fleet of Amazon trucks delivering goods all over East Texas. She owns BLACK DIAMOND TRANSPORTATION that takes celebrities all over Dallas and beyond.
“I have 24 black Suburbans, two Cadillac Escalades, three Mercedes Sprinter vans and one party bus.”
She wrote a book and gives entrepreneurial brunches. “I tell people how to start a business or take their business to the next level. Then I give them my resources that have made me successful. I have these at the first of the year every year.”
One thing that got her on the road to success was while she was working at Braum’s. She worked there all four years she was in high school, had keys to the store, and was the store leader, opening and closing the business every day. She worked even on her days off. She got a raise, but it was an increase of only pennies per hour. That’s when she decided she didn’t want to work for anyone else. She wanted to be her own boss, work when she wanted, and make as much money as she could. She cried and prayed all the way during the long drive from Amarillo to Dallas.
