A recent conversation Byron Allen had with The Breakfast Club’s crew — Charlamagne Tha God, Angela Yee, and DJ Envy — shed some light on how Allen went from entertainer to the CEO of Entertainment Studios and owner of several media outlets including The Weather Channel and theGrio. And along the way, he talked about his rise from bankruptcy to billionaire status.
He started out talking about what life was like being raised by his single mom, after her divorce and having to move from Detroit to Los Angeles. It was actually his mother, Carolyn Folks who had him at the age of 17, he inspired his career in entertainment.
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“I’ll be the first to say if the mothers succeed, so will the children,” Allen said. “And, if mothers fail, most likely, so will the children.”
He continued: “…my mother was at UCLA and getting her master’s degree in cinema TV production, she went to NBC and said, ‘Can I get a job?’ and they said, ‘No.’,” Allen reflected. “And her persistence really paid off. She said she asked a very important question, and she asked a question that changed our lives. She asked, ‘Do you have an internship?’ And they said, ‘No.’ And then she went to the next question. ‘Will you start one with me?’ And they said ‘Yes’.”
This tenacity by his mother opened the world of entertainment to the young Allen, who would accompany his mom to the studio as she couldn’t afford a babysitter.
“I would just watch Johnny Carson do ‘The Tonight Show,’ and I watched Red Foxx do ‘Sanford and Son,’” he recalled. Eventually, Allen got his break into the world of comedy and started to make his name on the circuit. But he wanted more.
Allen didn’t just want to be on TV shows, he wanted to own his own TV show and own stations. And thus he started his own company.
“I started my company from my dining room table in 1993, and I did a television special with a bunch of funny friends. I remember that.” Allen told the Breakfast Club. “I called all 1,300 television stations and asked them to carry the show for free. And, on average, they all told me no about 50 times.”
But this didn’t stop him. “Literally, I sat [at] my dining room table from sunup to sundown and I got about 50,000 nos. After a year of doing that, I was able to squeeze out about 150 yeses. I got a station, a TV station in every market from New York to Waterloo Island. Right. And so that was my lineup.”
Here are 5 business tips to take away from Allen’s Breakfast Club conversation and beyond.
According to Allen, there are lots of opportunities for Blacks to find the right investments that will result in more Blacks becoming billionaires.
“I want to make sure everybody understands how much money there is out there and it is there for you. That money is there for you and you can make all that and more, especially today,” said Allen on the radio show.
“I mean, you look in America, this is the greatest financial system out there. We have over 20 trillion dollars in liquidity in our financial system and that money is just swirling, looking for a place to invest and looking for a place to get a safe return. That money’s available to you. That money is looking for you and there aren’t that many people who can actually invest it, protect it, return it with a return. So there’s plenty of capital, there’s no shortage of capital in America.”
Allen shook up the media industry when his company Entertainment Studios acquired The Weather Channel for $300 million. “$300 million is really not that much money,” Allen said when the hosts asked him how he raised so much.
In 2015 Allen sued Comcast, the country’s largest cable company, for $20 billion. He claimed racial bias in the company’s dealmaking. The case finally went to the Supreme Court in November, though a decision has yet to be rendered.
“There’s nothing polite about this situation,” Allen, 58, said in an interview. “I’m going to be loud, proud and I’m going to make a change.”
Allen has approached Comcast about carrying six of his company’s channels and he said they had turned it down in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
“When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, some black leaders were irked at the prospect that Allen’s lawsuit could undo longstanding civil rights protections,” The New York Times reported.
Now the NYC comptroller is pressuring Comcast to settle racial discrimination case with Allen before the Supreme Court delivers its decision.
“We request that Comcast resolve this dispute promptly…so that the Supreme Court need not…put at risk the civil rights jurisprudence of our nation,” said the comptroller’s office in a statement.
According to Allen, it’s not as difficult to raise capital as entrepreneurs might think, but Black people, he said, have not been positioned to strive for success.
“We are positioned to fail by the nature of the way we were brought into this country. We were brought here to create wealth for others, not to share the wealth…the moment we became free we became a liability to them…They get us in the schoolroom by making sure you don’t get a proper education. They get you in the boardroom by making sure you don’t have access to capital that’s not predatory, and they get you in the courtroom by making sure there are laws that incarcerate you and lock you up,” he said on the Breakfast Club. ”You have to understand how you are positioned to fail if you don’t understand this and get into that matrix, you can’t go to the next level. When you see an Eric Garner getting choked to death in the streets, he wasn’t positioned properly in the schoolroom so that he would have access to capital so that he would own the block, own the store he was killed in front of. It all starts in the schoolroom.”
Allen said you have to fight against this positioning once you understand it. “I had to fight to get my company up and running. I had to produce the show myself and I didnt have two nickels to rub together. My home went out of foreclosure about 14 times. There were days I didn’t eat, days they turned my phone off. Finally, it turned the corner went I got movie studio advertising for the show. Then I went industry by industry and got advertising. I did it all myself.”
Money is a mindset,” claimed Allen. “If getting money is your goal as an entrepreneur, then don’t sweat it. Sweat for it,” he said. “Making money is easy. That’s a mindset…Don’t be afraid of money. Let money love you. Money will always be with you. There’s plenty of money.”
