Lesson #2: There Is Nothing Wrong With Being Cheap

He knows it and he’s proud of it: Robert Johnson is cheap. He did not get to where he is today by being careless with his money or by taking expensive chances. He got to the top by spending less than his competitors, by being frugal with his money, and by focusing on the bottom line.

It is an ironic fact of BET history that despite its impressive growth during the 1980s and 1990s, few people – even its viewers – were ever impressed with its content. Johnson used to say, “We’re not reinventing the wheel, we’re just painting it black.” He was not striving to create original content or award-winning programming. Johnson just wanted to make a profit.

What that meant was content with little creativity. Keeping a low budget was prioritized over everything else. In fact, throughout BET’s history, Johnson consistently spent one-third less on programming than his cable competitors ever did. He was the first to admit that BET was often a mesh of dismal shows. Raunchy rap music videos took up two-thirds of the air time. That was because music videos were provided free of charge from the record labels. The rest of the time was devoted to reruns of average sitcoms such as Amen and Benson. In off hours, BET aired nothing but infomercials. In its early days, BET did not produce a single original television sitcom or drama of its own. They were just too expensive, Johnson would say.

As a result, Johnson became the target of much criticism from leaders in the black community. Where was his pride? Where was his contribution to culture? What was he doing to support the race?

Nothing, said Johnson. Despite focusing on the untapped market, his goal never was to support his race or uplift his people. Johnson wanted to make a profit, and he did not think those two goals could coincide. He pointed to the likes of Emerge, a black-oriented magazine that received much praise from black leaders, but that was losing money as a result.

Johnson founded BET on Jazz, a new television station devoted to black jazz musicians, not because he wanted to promote the music, but because he saw the opportunity to make money. So too did BET become the only channel to accept ads for hard liquor. Today, ad sales make up more than half of BET’s annual revenue. And, despite making sure his employees were largely black, Johnson also tried to block unionism and paid some of BET’s performers below average wages.

Johnson makes no apologies for being cheap. Indeed, that is how he says he was able to not only make a profit but turn BET into an empire. Today, Johnson is allowing more money to be spent on producing better and original content, but only because he now sees the promise of greater return on his investments.

“Anything that has to do with money, I want to be in that business,” he says.



Lesson #2: There Is Nothing Wrong With Being Cheap

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