Bernard Robinson Sr. (Illustration by Rachel Lee)
After years of working in technology and seeing everything a company shouldn’t do, Bernard Robinson Sr. decided to start his own business, selling computer network services. There was one problem: “I had no money, literally,” says Robinson, president and CEO of Chesterfield County-based Networking Technologies and Support.
He started the company in 1997, running up $4,200 on his credit cards. “I tell people I’m often glad that I didn’t have MBA experience at that time because if I knew what I didn’t know back then, I probably wouldn’t have started this business,” he says. “There was a lot of trust back then. We didn’t have this community of scammers.”
Starting the company was a risk, but he says he decided to “put one foot after the other and handle problems as they came up.”
His risk paid off. The company has grown from two employees to 204 workers in 14 states. Robinson now serves on the boards of organizations such as ChamberRVA, and he has earned numerous accolades, including the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2006. DiversityBusiness.com listed his company as one of the Top 500 Diversity Owned Businesses in the United States in 2016, and as one of the Top 100 Privately Held Businesses in Virginia from 2010-14.
He has learned much in his 20 years in business. His first lesson: Don’t have a closed business plan. If you only focus on your business plan, you might not take advantage of a glaring opportunity in front of you.
Robinson, a grandmaster in tae kwon do with a seventh-degree black belt, believes in being flexible and determined when you are building a business. He met his first challenge when he started the business as a value-added remarketer. He would order merchandise from a distributor, sell it to a customer and then pay the distributor. But there was a problem with the process: It took 60 days for the entire transaction, but Robinson had to pay the distributor in 30 days from the order.
“You want return on your time. Time is the best investment you have.” —Bernard Robinson Sr.
Forty-five days into his new business, he landed a large purchase order.“I was looking for a distributor,” Robinson says. “I talked to six different distributors, and the sixth one had a program where they would give you credit based on the end user’s credit. That meant I could do the deal.”
Thirty days later, he received a $250,000 purchase order and went back to the same distributor and was able to do the deal. Afterward, Robinson asked for and was granted a $1,500 direct line of credit. He contacted other distributors to match it. “Over time I was able to ramp up the amount by going to different distributors,” he says.
Lesson Two: Even though the odds are against you, keep moving forward.
He learned his next lesson from a receptionist/bookkeeper. About five months after the person was hired, Robinson went in search of a file he needed in the receptionist’s desk. He didn’t find the file, but he did find a legal notepad containing five pages filled with the handiwork of someone who was practicing writing his signature. “The first page didn’t look good, but the fifth page was pretty good,” he says.
Lesson Three: Trust should be something you gain over years and not weeks. “She was going to do harm to our business,” he says, adding that she was fired immediately.
Three months after opening the business, Robinson went to the Small Business Administration to check out opportunities for a loan, but he didn’t have a “business that they could look at for performance because it was my first year,” he says. “They looked at my personal credit profile and the equity in my house, as did the people that leased me property and the distributors that I spoke to. If I didn’t have a solid personal credit profile, I couldn’t have started this business.”
Lesson Four: Handle personal finances with care. “People look at how you handle your personal finance as the way you will handle business finances,” Robinson says.
He says that companies should be equally careful about the time they spend on Requests for Proposals. Many new companies will go after several RFP opportunities, which are generally awarded to companies providing the best performance for the best price.
Robinson once went after a large RFP that turned out to be a no-go. “We were very qualified. We had all the right partners, but we weren’t the 600-pound gorilla. Don’t go after the long shots. Go for the sure shots and then build up,” he says.
“Be very selective about the RFPs you go out for,” he adds. “They take too much time, and most of the time you are not going to be successful in winning [them] unless you knew about the opportunity before it came out. If an RFP is coming from a customer you have never done business with before, the likelihood is high you will not be successful. You want return on your time. Time is the best investment you have.”
His last lesson: Pay salary. Never give up equity in your company. “Don’t let people in because it’s a new company,” he says. “I am hiring employees. I am not looking for partners.”
