“My first love, from selling lemonade and cutting people’s grass as a kid, has always been business,” Emanuel Jones ’86 says. “I was an entrepreneur long before I knew what the word meant.”
Jones is the owner of several successful car dealerships near his birthplace of Atlanta, and while he’s still on the lookout for new ventures with “upside potential,” he also has a second love: community service. Jones has served on the boards of hospitals, YMCA chapters, education programs and the local United Way, and he was the first African-American chairman of the Henry County Chamber of Commerce, in 2000. His biggest venture outside the business world thus far was running for a Georgia State Senate seat in 2004. It paid off: he’s in his third term representing DeKalb and Henry counties in the legislature and serves on seven legislative committees.
Jones views his entire career as a springboard to public service. “For those of us who have some degree of success,” he says, “we must make ourselves available, regardless of the sacrifice, so that we can set a better course for our city, our state and even our nation.”
His first foray into public service came as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, where he served in the ROTC Army Corps of Engineers. After Penn, he worked at IBM for a few years before pursuing his MBA. It was living in New York City that inspired Jones, along with a friend and fellow student, to start his first business: owning two medallion taxis.
“I drove one of them—that’s why they didn’t do well,” he says, laughing. “An MBA just doesn’t prepare you to drive a taxi around New York City. But it taught me the biggest lesson of my career: it’s not enough to invest your money if you’re not willing to invest your heart, soul, mind and your time.”
After earning his MBA, Jones returned to his home state (“I am Southern born and bred,” he says), and while working at Arthur Andersen, he entered the auto-dealership business as a dealer candidate for Ford’s minority dealership operations. Slowly, his business expanded to include Chevrolet, Saab, Cadillac and Toyota dealerships around the Atlanta area. As Jones’s business expanded, so did his volunteer work.
“It’s my way of giving back to the community that’s given me so much,” he says. “It’s a calling we all must accept.”