Her lack of business skills was another obstacle she had to overcome.<\/p>\n
“When I started applying for municipal contracts with the City of Chicago, they wanted me to pay for projects upfront and get reimbursed later. But I didn’t have the capital,” Traci explains.<\/p>\n
So instead she applied for loans, but she was “too embarrassed” to say that she didn’t understand the financial jargon. “Finally I broke down and said I needed help.”<\/p>\n
Traci was directed to various non-profit groups who assisted her with everything from organising her accounts to showing her how to bid for jobs. Pink Hats earned $125,000 (\u00a395,000) in its first year, rising steadily to more than $1m in 2025.<\/p>\n
Traci now employs all four of her daughters as her main team, aided by six part-time female staff. They specialise in transforming residential and commercial spaces with an emphasis on helping marginalised people.<\/p>\n
Last year, Pink Hats renovated a 30-room home for women recovering from substance abuse in Chicago’s Austin neighbourhood. And it won a Builder of the Year award from the Southland Development Authority, a non-profit business organisation designed to help grow the economies of Chicago’s southern suburbs.<\/p>\n
Pink Hats is currently starting its first new development, building 10 affordable, single-family homes for a Christian organisation in the west of the city.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Her lack of business skills was another obstacle she had to overcome. “When I started applying for municipal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":521012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-521011","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}