You’ve heard the story. Or maybe you’ve seen a movie recounting the overnight success of an entrepreneur or inventor who cashes in on a great idea.
That is not the story of Erie’s Marva Keys Morris, who recently won a contract to sell her Zenedge Energy Drinks in Walmart stores.
Morris, daughter of the late Rev. Perry Keys Sr., founder of what is now Abundant Life Church of Erie, doesn’t downplay the importance of a letter she received from Walmart a few weeks ago.
“It’s huge,” she said. “It’s over 100 stores, I am so excited. It will catapult me to well over a million revenue that we have been trying to get to. It will help me finally get my distribution network in place.”
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But success at this level did not come all at once. Fact is, she’s been laying the groundwork for as long as she can remember,
“The first part of my career, I was the first Black secretary at Hammermill,” said Morris, who is in her 60s. “Then I worked at Marx Toys. I was an internal materials coordinator.”
There were a couple of other jobs along the way before she found herself making her case to Joseph Prischak, a plastics industry pioneer and the founder of the Plastek Group in Erie.
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She asked Prischak, who died earlier this year, to hire her as a manufacturer’s representative.
“He said, ‘No, I want you to be a distributor,'” Morris recalled. “He was my mentor for many many years. He gave me $1 million worth of inventory and told me to go sell.”
Prischak was important in molding her into the businesswoman she would become, Morris said.
“I loved him like a father,” she said. “He was a wonderful man.”
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Looking back, the work for Plastek was Morris‘ first foray into being self-employed.
And it wasn’t the last.
As the president of Premier Manufacturing Group, she owned and operated a plastic blow molding factory in Detroit.
When Morris learned of an opportunity to install seats at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, she jumped at the chance. Ultimately, when the park opened on March 31, 2001, her company had installed about 10,000 of the nearly 40,000 seats.
Morris confessed to having some doubts along the way.
“On the first day I went out, all you could see was a sea of concrete. It was a hot August day and I thought, ‘Well, Marva, you bit off more than you can chew.”
But that wasn’t the case.
Morris not only finished the project on time but received the Shining Star Award from the state of Pennslyvania.
Along the way, she also worked as a quality control contractor for GE Transportation.
For the past 13 years, Morris has been working to grow Zenedge Energy Drinks, a line of energy drinks billed as having healthier ingredients and less caffeine than the competition. The drinks are bottled in New Jersey and distributed from Erie.
She and her former partner, Tim McQuaide, a logistics professional who died in December 2020, had some success along the way. Zenedge is available in Country Fair, ShopRite and online at Amazon and Walmart.com.
But Morris doesn’t always feel like a success when she needs to borrow money for expansion.
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There have been loans along the way from the Small Business Administration, the Erie County Redevelopment Authority and ErieBank.
But struggles with financing have slowed the growth of the company.
“I think there are a lot of reasons,” Morris said. “I am the only Black female in this role in the United States manufacturing an energy drink. Erie is not used to anybody like that. I’m a unicorn in my community. Erie does not quite understand this type of space and how to fund this type of business.”
Morris, whose company was recently named a finalist to win $25,000 in the Ben Franklin Technology Partners Big Idea Contest, said the challenge isn’t unique to her company.
“Black women receive a very small amount of funding for business, and we are the fastest growing segment of the small business population,” she said.
Cathryn Easterling, director of Bridgeway Capital’s Erie Office, a nonprofit dedicated to combatting injustices by investing capital in underserved areas, knows something about the challenges Marva Morris has faced.
Morris is her mother. Easterling, who remembers attending board meetings and going to her mother’s office as a young child, learned by watching her mother at work.
“I was eight years old, playing on the phone and learning to use my best business voice,” Easterling said.
Mostly, she remembers that her mom was always a dreamer, who was constrained at times by her role as a family caregiver. She was the person who stepped in when a family member was in failing health, Easterling said.
“She was always a big-dream person,” Easterling said. “She always had these grand ideas of what she wanted to do. Being in Erie and a Black woman, she’s not able to accomplish some of those dreams. It was hard.
“A lot of it has been bootstrapping,” Easterling said. “She would work two jobs to be able to finance things. The access to capital wasn’t there. This is a huge issue for a minority woman.”
Easterling said she’s pleased by her mother’s latest success.
“Now that she knows it’s going to be in Walmart, it’s a really cool thing,” she said.
Morris doesn’t sell her own efforts short but offers another explanation for her success.
“The single most important thing that helped me to make it is my faith in God and the belief in me by my family and friends,” she said.
Jim Martin can be reached at jm*****@ti*******.com.
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