Janice Bryant Howroyd practices what she preaches. With a lot of hard work and even more perseverance, Janice turned her passion for helping others into an admirable and highly successful enterprise—all the while mentoring others and championing work/life balance along the way. Janice is a strong advocate for Women Owned Businesses, Diversity and Inclusion. Faith and family are core to her life, and her work/life balance expertise is sought by many organizations, both as a lecturer and in member-leadership roles. A North Carolina native, Janice is the fourth of eleven children. Watching her parents raise her and her ten siblings instilled in her a strong sense of family and fairness. As driven as a student as she is as a professional, Janice landed a scholarship to North Carolina State Agricultural and Technical College where she earned her English degree. Soon after graduating from college, she worked for the American Red Cross and then the National Academy of Sciences. In 1976, Janice left her hometown armed with $700 and a hunger for success. She has returned many, many times since, often as a benefactor and always as a role model. Janice and her husband, Bernard, are the proud parents of two adult children, both graduates of the University of Southern California. They maintain homes in Rolling Hills, CA, Tarboro, NC, and Yorkshire, England. Janice often proudly credits her roles as a mother, wife and advocate for strengthening her resolve to succeed. Ever enthusiastic about sharing her work/life balance experiences and know-how, Janice authored a book entitled ‘The Art of Work—How to Make Your Work, Work for You’. Filled with Janice’s own life experiences and featuring work sheets to help leaders apply these lessons to their personal lives, this book is slated to hit the bookshelves this year.In 1978, Janice founded Act•1, which has since evolved into the ACT•1 Group, a global organization that is leading the human resources industry with innovative services and tools to partner with firms in optimizing human resource talent management. The ACT•1 Group has three major components: the staffing brands, the business services brands and the group’s flagship, Agile•1 Workforce Solutions.AppleOne Staffing Solutions provides temporary, direct hire and contract employees as well as staffing solutions through AppleOne and industry-specific brands AT-TECH, Accounting Advantage, All’s Well, Pro Travel and BilingualOne. Also within the Act•1 Group are the business services brands which include A-Check America, CNU, DSSI, CTA and AppleOne Payroll. A vital part of Janice’s conglomerate is Agile•1 Workforce Solutions, which provides technology and management systems for human capital and vendor management to create streamlined and efficient contingent staffing and project based processes. In 2008, the Act•1 Group created temporary assignments for over 100,000 Americans, and over 20,000 Direct Hire placements. Additionally, 250,000 individuals were added to the Agile•1 Workforce System. Act•1 and her active industry involvement gives Janice a unique understanding of the challenges faced by American workers and business owners alike.

Boards

Executive Committee, Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation
Women's Leadership Board, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Board of Governors, TownHall Los Angeles
Board of Councilors, USC
Board of Directors, SIFE
Member, The Committee of 200
Minority Business Roundtable
Recycling Black Dollars (RBD)
International Women's Forum (The Trusteeship of Southern California)
Los Angeles Urban League
Advisory Board, U.S. Department of Labor
National Association of Women Business Owners

Media

At the helm of the one of the most innovative and fastest growing conglomerate of companies is Janice Bryant Howroyd. For more than two decades she has managed to develop business services and techniques that keep the ACT.1 Group front and center when it comes to profitability. As Founder & CEO, this savvy business leader has become a sought after expert as the print and electronic media outlets vie for a cover story on how she has managed to build one the nation's largest privately held companies. From the Oprah show, to gracing a cover of Black Enterprises magazine, recently Bryant Howroyd was featured in PINK, a international magazine which feature only the most influential women in business