A walk through fire

Sheila Johnson’s career has spanned three parts.

An accomplished violinist and philanthropist, she started out as a music teacher, a job she held while she supported the growth of Black Entertainment Television, the network she co-founded and launched with her former husband, Robert “Bob” Johnson, in 1980 that turned her into a media mogul. Johnson became the first Black woman billionaire after BET was sold to Viacom in 2000 for $3 billion.

After being fired from BET by her husband, whom she has publicly alleged was unfaithful and emotionally abusive, her marriage of three decades ended. Johnson retreated to Middleburg, a town about an hour outside Washington, D.C., in Loudoun County’s horse and wine country. That’s where she founded her flagship Salamander Middleburg Resort & Spa, the first in what she’s built into a portfolio of seven luxury properties stretching from Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Charleston, South Carolina, to Anguilla, Jamaica and Aspen, Colorado.

In recognition of her remarkable career and excellence in business leadership, Virginia Business has named Johnson to its Virginia Black Business Leaders Hall of Fame. (See past Hall of Fame winners and profiles of this year’s other Virginia Black Business Leaders Awards winners.)

Johnson describes her journeys as a “walk through fire,” which is also the title of her memoir, “Walk Through Fire: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Triumph,” published in September 2023 by Simon & Schuster.

Her father, a neurosurgeon, abandoned her family when she was a teen, and she took a job sweeping floors at a department store outside of Chicago to help support her mother, who had a breakdown over the split. Johnson also spent much of her marriage feeling abandoned by her husband, the public face of BET. In 1991, when BET was listed on the New York Stock Exchange and executives were to travel for the event, Bob Johnson told his wife not to come.

Those trials helped prepare Johnson for what might have been her biggest fight; establishing her resort in a conservative, largely white town where one business, a gun shop, still flew a Confederate flag. Johnson bought the shop, turning it into high end café and market. It took years for Johnson to convince the town to approve plans for her resort. Since its opening in 2013, the 168-room Salamander Middleburg Resort & Spa has raised the bar for the town. That year, Johnson also helped launch the Middleburg Film Festival, drawing stars like Brendan Fraser and Kenneth Branagh. The resort is also home to the annual Family Reunion, a multiday food and wine festival that highlights the work of Black professionals in hospitality.

Johnson also is the first Black woman to hold stakes in three professional sports franchises: the NBA’s Washington Wizards, the NHL’s Washington Capitals and the WNBA’s Washington Mystics. And she co-founded the venture capital consortium WE Capital to support women-led enterprises that advance transformational social change.

Salamander takes its name from Johnson’s farm outside town, which had once been owned by the late Bruce Sundlun, a former Rhode Island governor who was given the nickname “Salamander” by the French after his plane was shot down over Nazi territory during World War II and he made his way to France. According to legend, Johnson writes, the salamander is the only animal that can walk through fire and survive.

For Johnson, the moniker suits her just as well.

Virginia Business: You don’t hold back in your memoir. How did you approach writing it, and what has the response been?

Sheila Johnson: First of all, the response has been overwhelming. … I’ve been getting so much mail thanking me for being very transparent, very raw. … This has been something that I’ve been thinking about for about five years. So many people said, “It’s time for you to tell your story.” I’ve been through a lot with all three chapters in my life, from childhood to building a media company and then just trying to get the resort open here in Virginia. …  Now that I’ve written it, and it’s out there, I feel like there’s just been a huge load taken off my shoulders. I’ve been able to really share my story to so many men and women to inspire and to give them courage, to really open up and reexamine themselves in their lives and see where they can find happiness.

VB: The Washington Post and other media outlets have written about you for years, but you’ve said this is a way for you to tell your version of your story. What’s the challenge in getting that out there?

SJ: It was just a case where I’ve been reading all of this and what I’ve been through where I literally had been erased, especially out of the second chapter of my life where I helped build a company. It was probably the most painful period of my life. … It was just a case where people needed to know what I was going through. They knew what was happening, but I wanted to share with so many people what I personally was going through and how I had to deal with so much of it. Because it was already published, it was out there in the open. I suffered a lot. … I was afraid to open the newspaper because there was going to be another story about infidelities and betrayal and just all sorts of things. It was really humiliating, and it was just a case where there were so many people and even former employees [who] said, “You’ve got to tell your side of the story.” They said, “We’ll be there with you when you do it.” … I realized, as I’m writing the book, I was going through a lot of post-traumatic stress in doing this. I think more than anything, I wanted people to understand that during the process and what I suffered through that second period of my life, I had to go through a lot of therapy. I’m not afraid to talk about it.

VB: You sold your beloved Landolfi violin, which your parents paid $15,000 for when you were a child, to help keep BET running in the early days. Did your mother forgive you for that? Have you replaced that violin?

SJ: I did replace it. It’s not the same violin because I couldn’t find the same one because they’re rare violins. I had to sell it because I really believed in the vision and the mission of starting this media company. What people don’t realize when you’re starting companies, there are a lot of sacrifices that have to be made. That’s what I had to tell and convince my mother. She wasn’t really sold on the ex-husband anyway, so this just made it worse, but it was a case where I had to pay the bills.

VB: You built a very successful music teaching career before and after BET was started. What lessons did you take from that to BET?

SJ: People reminded me that, from the very beginning, I had a sense of an entrepreneur. During the BET days, when I had to continue to work and teach, you just have to do what you have to do. There were a lot of lessons learned as I was doing that. … I had to keep a roof over our heads and pay the bills, but I also was able to understand how to build a business.

That even started way before BET because as a schoolteacher, I was not making enough money for us to exist. After two-and-a-half, three years at Sidwell Friends [private school in Washington, D.C.], I had built up enough students where I could start teaching privately. I started out going house to house teaching violin and cello. Once I was able to accumulate enough money, then I was able to buy our first house over in Southwest [D.C.], but I also had to take an acting job in order to get this money. … I was building a company then, building a business in order to keep a roof over our heads.

VB: How did your past prepare you to take on the fight in Middleburg to get your resort approved by the town? And what did you learn from that?

SJ: First of all, I was very naive in doing this. If I realized how hard it was going to be, I probably would have never done it, but I’m glad I persevered and moved forward. … One thing that I learned from all of this — even with starting BET, we didn’t know anything about the cable business, nothing. It was a case where we hired people that were already in television that knew what they were doing. The problem with BET was the lack of leadership.

There were several things that were done wrong that I learned from. When I went to this third act of building this resort, first of all, I did a feasibility study to make sure that I was putting this resort in the right place and at the right time. I needed to also do a study to make sure who was going to be my guest, because remember back then, Loudoun County wasn’t even built up. What you’re seeing now is a total transformation.

I didn’t know anything about the hotel business. I do now. I had to make sure that I found the best in the business. … [Salamander President] Prem Devadas had been through a similar situation that I was getting ready to go through, and I needed his help. He helped me build an incredible executive team, who are … still with us to this day. The executive team has grown to about 38 people now. We have over 3,000 employees. It was just a case of bringing in the right person. Hey, this is where you become vulnerable and humble. I didn’t know anything about it, but I wanted to hire people that were smarter than me and that really understood my vision and didn’t come in with their own agenda.

VB: You write about Salamander as a place of comfort and warmth and inclusivity. How do you describe your leadership style?

SJ: I’m a leader that knows how to communicate, and I communicate with my executives my vision. … I try to lead by example. I make sure that I give them enough bandwidth to do their job. … We all want to excel to build the best company possible, and we’re all on the same wavelength. I make sure that I’m always there for them. I have an open-door policy. They come in and talk with me. We speak every day. I have so much respect for my executive team.

VB: Did you anticipate having a portfolio of resorts when you started this?

SJ: I can be very honest with you, when I brought Prem Devadas on, and we started building a team, I only could focus on what I was doing here in Middleburg. That was my only place that I could think and build that up. … I had also bought Innisbrook [golf resort in Palm Harbor, Florida]. … We had accolades from that. That put two [properties] in our portfolio. Then from there, people were starting to watch. I’ve always wanted to build the company and make it larger.

You can’t attract good people if they can’t see growth. That’s … really important with my employees. They weren’t going to be happy with one or two resorts. At that point, because we were able to prove ourselves that we are a fabulous hotel company, that we could continue to grow, and we did. … With all of these hotels now in our portfolio, we want to continue to grow. We would like to get up to 10. … I want to make sure I don’t lose the quality and the thumbprint of what we’re trying to build. I want every guest, every hotel that Salamander has its name on, either ownership or management, that they know it’s us.

VB: What is your experience like when you are traveling?

SJ: I try to learn from all the other brands. I take away what’s the best and what I don’t like. … You try to stay in the best hotels that are going to be your competitor. You learn from [it]. … I can find a spot on the rug where other people, they don’t pay attention to it. I walk my hotels, and I then report back to them what’s lacking, what the general managers have not paid attention to. Some-times it drives me nuts, it may drive them nuts, but that’s the way it’s got to be. We have got to keep striving for excellence.

VB: Salamander recently rebranded. Why?

SJ: It’s now Salamander Collection … because we have so many hotels … you want to keep it fresh. You don’t want to have the same old, same old.

VB: You’re a part owner in three sports teams, and you’re quite involved with the Washington Mystics. Why is that important to you?

SJ: I try to go as many games as I possibly can. No one really pays much attention to women’s sports. I’m in an ownership [partnership] with a lot of men. There’s only one other woman in there, and that’s Michelle Freeman [CEO and owner of real estate firm Carl M. Freeman Cos.]. She comes to the games, too, to support the women. … I just think that women have to support women. There’s no question about it. If I didn’t support the WNBA team, my team, no one would pay attention to it. I’m constantly having to fight for sponsorship, fight for whatever they need, and I’ve got to keep an eye on it. That’s just what I do. Even my license plate says WNBA.

VB: How do you view your role as a Black woman and business leader?

SJ: I think the barriers aren’t breaking down. … It’s just important that I continue to push the buttons there to get people to start thinking about it because if I’m not doing it, and no one else is doing it, we’re going to fade in the background. That was the whole idea of even starting BET because that was the birth of all cable. If we hadn’t stepped forward, there would not have been a Black cable channel.