The Workshop in Business Opportunities began in 1966 in response to the absence of economic power in the African-American community. The founders, a Midtown marketing consultant and a Harlem attorney, felt that economic, political and social equality could be achieved most quickly and effectively by training and assisting minorities to build growing prosperous businesses. The founders recruited a volunteer faculty of twenty-four business owners from their friends and clients, each one a specialist in one or more aspects of running a successful business, to conduct the classes.

How to Build a Growing Profitable Business has been conducted at 28 locations in 8 states, including workshops for Native Americans in South Dakota, Wyoming, New Mexico and Arizona. Over 9,000 individuals have graduated from WIBO workshops and an estimated half of them are operating successful businesses today. In the late 1970s, an exciting trend began to emerge. WIBO graduates who had become successful in business began coming back to see how they could help.

WIBO's first sixteen-week workshop, How to Build a Growing Profitable Business, opened in Harlem on March 5, 1966. Fifteen students enrolled, fourteen graduated and eleven either started businesses or expanded existing businesses. Word of WIBOâs success quickly spread and within five years, WIBO workshops were being conducted in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, New Jersey and Westchester.

WIBO has also conducted advanced workshops for business owners, courses for young people on understanding the free enterprise system and for non-profit corporations in entrepreneurial methods and strategies.