Billionaire Sheila Johnson says a bad contractor cost her $12 million building Salamander

Sheila Johnson, the BET co-founder turned luxury hotelier, told an audience at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen that a single bad hire cost her $12 million while she was building her Salamander Resort, a mistake she says taught her to be ruthless about the people she lets into her business.

Johnson, who co-founded Black Entertainment Television before becoming one of America's most prominent luxury hoteliers, shared the story at a breakout session in the event's trade program, framing it as the most expensive lesson of her career.

The misstep came early, when she knew almost nothing about hospitality. New to the industry, she relied on word of mouth to hire a contractor development company that had been pitched to her as the best in the business. Eager to get the project moving, she brought the firm on without much scrutiny.

It went badly. The work was poor enough that she fired the company, which then threatened to sue. Johnson said she dared them to try, unbothered by the threat, but the fallout still cost her $12 million. She has never repeated the mistake.

The lesson she drew was about people rather than buildings. She said she learned to be careful about who she brings around her, and to avoid anyone arriving with their own agenda rather than a genuine commitment to her vision. An idea can come from someone who knows nothing about the field, she argued, as long as they do the homework and hire the best people they can find.

To rebuild, Johnson found a contractor who had just been through the same ordeal. She flew to meet him with her plans in hand, walked him through what she wanted, and came away convinced he had bought into the vision. She handed him the job of assembling the team that would deliver it. Of that group, she said, only one person has since left, and when they tried to return she declined to rehire them, saying that once someone walks away she no longer trusts them.

The Salamander project tested her long before the contractor did. The land had belonged to the political hostess Pamela Harriman, who died in 1997 after collapsing in the pool at the Ritz in Paris. A broker approached Johnson to ask whether she might buy the acreage from Harriman's estate. Years of touring as a classical violinist had given Johnson a taste for European-style luxury, and she saw a chance to bring some of that feeling to the Virginia countryside.

Middleburg did not roll out the welcome mat. Johnson, who is Black, said the reception in the small Virginia town was hostile, describing a backlash so fierce it felt as though the community had risen up against her. Neighbors fought her over permits and zoning at town council meetings and aired their complaints to visiting reporters. She said she eventually prevailed by a single vote, after a decade of wrangling.

What she wanted to build was more than a hotel. Johnson envisioned a place that could host professional sports teams, performances by American Ballet Theatre and a film festival, the last of those encouraged by her fellow Sundance board member Robert Redford. She is a part owner of three Washington franchises, the Capitals, the Wizards and the Mystics, through her stake in Monumental Sports & Entertainment.

The resort opened in 2013 and has since become an economic engine for a town that had been struggling. Johnson said Salamander pumps about $1.8 million a year into the local economy, employs hundreds of people at the property and around 4,000 across her wider business, and gave rise to the Middleburg Film Festival, now a fixture for cinephiles.

The property has collected the industry's top honors, including a Michelin Key, a five-star rating in the Forbes Travel Guide and a place on the Travel + Leisure 500. It anchors a collection that Johnson, now 77, has expanded to include properties in Aspen, Charleston, Palm Harbor and Reunion in Florida, and resorts in Jamaica and Anguilla, with more planned.

Johnson's path to hospitality ran through media. She and her then-husband, Robert Johnson, built BET into the first cable network aimed at Black American audiences, selling it to Viacom in a deal worth about $3 billion. After their divorce, she sold her stake and poured her fortune into hotels, sports and real estate, a reinvention she has described as the third act of her life.

She is widely regarded as one of the first Black women in America to reach billionaire status, and remains the only Black woman to wholly own a Forbes Five-Star resort. She has used that platform to push for more diversity in an industry where ownership and senior roles remain overwhelmingly white.

The $12 million she lost early on, Johnson suggested, bought her something more durable than any single building. It taught her to trust her instincts, do the work and surround herself with people who share her stake in the outcome, a discipline that has carried the Salamander name from a contested patch of Virginia horse country to hotels across the United States and the Caribbean.