Janice was born in 1953 in Tarboro, North Carolina in the USA. She is the fourth of eleven children born to her father of Irish and Cherokee origin and her mother an African American. While her father was a factory foreman, her mother stayed at home to take care of the family’s eleven children. As a teen Janice was the first black student to attend her town’s previously segregated high school. She recalls that, ‘On the first day of class, i listened to my teacher explain why Africans were so well suited to slavery and how we’d be much poorer as a society if we went further with affirmative action.’ When Janice got home that day she related the experience to her father and begged him not to let her return to the school but her father convinced her to go back. After high school Janice won a scholarship to study English at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro. On completion of her degree she went to work for The American Red Cross and National Academy of Sciences from 1975 to 1976. In1976 she visited her sister who lived in California and decided to stay there. Her brother-in-law who worked at Billboard Magazine employed her as a temporary secretary. It was here that her talent as an office worker began to show, Janice in an interview with Ebony magazine said that, ‘They were fascinated that I knew what needed to happen in an office.’  Someone at the office even suggested that Janice could turn her office skills into a career. Fortunately Janice took that advice seriously, she decided to start her own business. While working at Billboard Magazine she had noticed a market she could exploit. She observed that most of the support staff at the firm were people who hoped to get into the entertainment industry. They only took the job to get to know people who might be able to help them with their ambitions. Janice decided to open an employment agency that helped to recruit permanent workers who were not aspiring actors or screen writers. Combining $987 of her own and $533 borrowed from family she rented a small office space in a Beverly hills location and started her company, Act*1 Personnel Services. The business was made up of just her  and a telephone. Naturally her first client was Billboard Magazine and she sought out other clients by calling businesses and offering to help them find the right employees. She also agreed to refund clients money if she couldn’t get them the right people. The business started to grow  steadily based on a strategy she called ‘WOMB’ which stood for, Word Of Mouth Brother. And by 1981 she opened her first branch office. When she started out her clients were mainly from the entertainment industry but she also wanted to to work in other industries. That was on her mind in 1984 when the entertainment industry was affected by large scale job losses prompting her to move into the temporary employment sector providing workers under contract. She also expanded the business into three other divisions focusing on engineering, technical and clerical markets. In 1990 she moved the company’s headquarters to Torrance and by 2000 Act*1 had offices in 75 US cities with much more clients including Ford, Toyota, Cingular Wireless and Sempra Energy. The company also moved into other business areas, for instance it created a time keeping system that utilised swipe cards for Silicon Graphics. Janice also started a company that provides background checks, drug checks. She also started a travel agency and an electronic maintenance company. In the 1990′s the company grew speedily at an annual rate of 10 per cent and by 1997 it had revenues of about $75 million. By 2002 the company was turning over no less than $483 million. The company’s headquarters currently employs over 300 staff and has no less than 65,000 workers under contract. Janice married Bernard Howroyd in 1983 and together they have two children, Kathryn and Brett. Their children now own 49 per cent of Act*1 while Janice owns the remaining 51 per cent. Janice also holds a Masters degree from University of Maryland and a PHD from North Caroline State University. Some of Her Achievements In an interview with Black Enterprise, Janice said, “It’s just hard for people to believe that an African-American woman and her family can develop systems and do what we do on our own.” That is understandable given all that she has achieved. Her humble beginnings of sitting alone in a tiny office with a phone to building a multi-million business reads like a fairy tale, but in this case it’s true. But Janice is not just about doing business, she is a success in many other ways too.

• Firstly we must respect and at the same time appreciate Janice for taking the bold step of starting out on her own to build Act*1 after just two years in employment. The company she founded in 1978 now provides recruitment related services to scores of companies and helps provide employment for thousands of people.
• Janice’s company is still privately owned by her family. That in itself is an achievement. A lot of companies that size probably have the owner just controlling between 10 to 30 per cent but she has managed to grow the company and at the same time keep it’s control within the family.
• Janice has won a number of awards which include Minority Enterprise Development Week Achievement Award, US Department of Commerce 1992, AT&T Entrepreneur of the Year 1994 and 2002, Beta Gamma Sigma Medallion for Entrepreneurship 2006, 2007, and Star Group Top 50 Leading Women Entrepreneurs in the World. She was the first African American to receive this honour.
• Janice has served or still serving on numerous boards, some of which are Los Angeles Economic Development Commission, C0-Chair North Carolina A&T University Capital Campaign, Executive Committee Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, and International Women’s Forum (the Trusteeship of Southern California).
• Janice is not just about making money she is also giving back too. This is why she serves on so many boards and she is also involved in various social charities in Southern California. She has also set an endowment fund for college scholarships in her hometown of North California.
• She has authored a book titled, The Art of Work – How To Make Your Work, Work for You. The book uses some of Janice’s experiences to teach lessons about work-life balance.
• Act*1 the company she started has blossomed into various other businesses including, Agile-1, a management solutions company, A-Check America, a background and drug screening company, Enterprise Communications, a business communication solutions company, Document Scanning Systems, a document management solutions provider and CTA, a corporate travel agency. 
• Janice started two schools of continuing education – California National University for Advanced Studies and Academy of Computer Technology to help her workers gain more skills.

Challenges One must not overlook the discriminatory experience that Janice went through in high school when her teacher said black people are more suited to slavery. Though a difficult experience for a teenager with the help of her parents she overcame it. There is also no doubt that as an ethnic minority woman in the 1970′s to go out on her own and a start a recruitment business she must have faced a lot of barriers. The fact that she sailed through is a testimony to her strength and persistent attitude. Learning From Janice

• Make sure you know your strengths and use them. It is possible that when Janice was commended about her office skills it prompted her to think about starting her own business. Nevertheless all her business exploits have been centered around her office management skills. The lesson here is: don’t overlook what you are good at doing because that may be what you are able to sell. Often people choose to start a business in what they believe is profitable instead of what they can do really well and are passionate about. That can be a recipe for failure.
• When you start something and it starts succeeding you don’t need to stop there. Janice started Act*1 and when it became successful she decided to rest on her laurels? No, she saw more opportunities and capitalised on them to expand her business in to other office related areas apart from just recruitment. A lost opportunity begs one question – What would have happened if i tried taking advantage of that opportunity? You don’t want to ask yourself that question so like Janice don’t rest on current success, when other opportunities come around take them. 
• Education is not wasted. When  Janice started her business she had a degree and running a very successful enterprise did not stop her from studying further. It is probably the value she placed on education that made her set up two adult education colleges. So don’t see the opportunity to further develop and educate yourself as a waste of time because even people like Janice who are successful financially are still learning.