How to Grow, Be Opportunistic, and Ignore Your Critics Like Robert Johnson (B.E.T. Founder) by Evan Carmichael

"Anything that has to do with money, I want to be in that business." - Robert Johnson

Robert L. Johnson (born April 8, 1946) is an American businessman, best known for being the founder of television network Black Entertainment Television (BET). In 2001 Johnson became the first African American billionaire, and the first black person to be listed on any of Forbes world's rich list.

Johnson was born in Mississippi and was the 9th of 10 children. According to Johnson: "We weren't a welfare family, but we knew that if I wanted a bicycle it meant that somebody else wasn't going to get something else...If you wanted to go to college, you knew your parents couldn't pay your way.” He had an entrepreneurial drive and used his $15,000 in savings  to launch BET in 1980. It started with only two hours of old movies each Friday. In fact, for the first five years, BET would lose money. Soon, however, it began to expand its programming, and cable operators jumped on board. They believed that many of their subscribers would be interested in watching black-oriented shows.

Eleven years after its initial launch, BET became the first black-owned company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Today, BET has spinoff channels and is the largest black-owned cable company in history. Johnson bought back all the BET stock seven years after it went public for $1 billion. He then sold it to media giant Viacom two years later for $3 billion.

Action Item #1: Always Be Growing

As entrepreneurs we need to always be finding new customers and growing our businesses. Whether it's launching new products, offering more services, or aggressively marketing your existing solutions, you need to always be growing.

Johnson has been called a serial entrepreneur thanks to his love of starting new businesses on the fly. Throughout his career, however, if there is one thing he has learned it is this: there are always new customers to go after.

According to Johnson: “If there’s something I can do and I feel it should be done, I just want to do it. I just don’t want to leave it undone because I’ll sit back and say, why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I start that business?”

Action Item #2: Be Opportunistic

Entrepreneurs are the special individuals who can spot opportunities and then turn them into profitable businesses. In order to start a new company or grow your existing one you should always have an eye open for new opportunities.

Where Johnson sees the chance to make money, he jumps at it. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. And, while his critics use that fact as one more chance to knock him down, Johnson attributes his success largely to his opportunism. Johnson is an entrepreneur, plain and simple. He wanted to make money – and lots of it.

According to Johnson: "Whenever I see an opportunity and a chance to change something, I go at it... BET was never a legacy event for me. BET was something I started as an investment and I knew someday I would sell it."

Action Item #3: Ignore Your Critics

If you're doing something different then you're going to have your critics. People are going to attack you for ideas and try to knock you down. It's going to come from our competitors and in many cases even comes from our friends and family.

Johnson had a lot of critics as he built his business. One of his greatest successes in his own mind is being an African American who succeeded at the highest level - since he felt that "nobody expects minorities to be there." As much as others tried to paint his career in terms of black and white, Johnson has refused to let others identify him as anything other than an entrepreneur – and a good one at that.

According to Johnson: "Today, if I were to put on jeans and walk into a jewellery store, and I could probably buy the jewellery store ten times over. But the jeweller's going to look at me as a black guy in jeans who probably can't afford it, and maybe who just might steal something."

True Story

After being the first in his family to go to college, Johnson planned to start a career as a government worker. That all changed when the National Cable and Telecommunications Association hired Johnson as a lobbyist for the nascent cable industry. That experience proved to be a wakeup call for Johnson. He began to think about his own opportunity to create a cable channel just for African-Americans and would soon go on to launch BET.