Young Entrepreneur Spreads Cheer, With Oprah’s Blessing
At age 9, Cameron Johnson started his first business, making greeting cards and party invitations on the Compaq computer he got for Christmas. Three years later, the Virginia native was making $50,000 a year selling Beanie Babies online from his parents’ garage.
At 15, after flying to Tokyo to advise a large corporation, Johnson was an instant media sensation there and had his biography published in Japanese. “My entire life has always been: What’s next? What’s next? What’s next?” said Johnson, now 23.
You might call Johnson a Donald Trump in the making — a self-made millionaire, entrepreneur, public speaker and philanthropist.
And tonight, he’s a contender to win $1 million.
Johnson is a finalist on “Oprah’s Big Give,” ABC’s latest reality television show: a cross-country charity challenge to find the person who can change the lives of complete strangers in the most creative ways. The youngest of 10 contestants, Johnson is among three remaining for tonight’s series finale.
The other finalists are Brandi Milloy, 23, a beauty pageant winner from Chicago, and Stephen Paletta, 43, a real estate developer and father of three from Bedford, N.Y.
Johnson said that if he wins, he will donate some of the prize money to Jobs for Virginia Graduates, a nonprofit group trying to lower dropout rates at high schools across Virginia.
“It’s a really screwed-up world, especially when you look at the statistics,” Johnson said in an interview Friday.
Consider Johnson’s alma mater, Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke. Fifty-seven percent of students at Patrick Henry graduate, meaning that two-fifths fall through the cracks, a problem Johnson likened to an “epidemic.”
“They think all the odds are against them,” he said. “That shouldn’t be the case. Somehow we’re failing all of these people.”
Before becoming an education advocate, before Oprah, before the Japanese book and the Beanie Babies and the greeting cards, Johnson was a little boy growing up in southwest Virginia. He would pull his red wagon through the neighborhood. He would hang out with his father at the family’s Ford dealership.
He also would eat like a champion — “A lot of broccoli and carrots and fish,” his mother, Ann Johnson, 55, said.
“He was always thinking about the next thing,” she added. “He was never one to sit around and do nothing. That’s for sure.”
After he saw the movie “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York,” Johnson, then 8, wanted to be the Kevin McCallister character. He wanted the Big Apple to be his playground. So he made a deal with his parents: If he got straight A’s on his next report card, they would take him to New York.
Of course, he followed through, and the family booked a room in the Plaza Hotel, which was featured in the movie. Just before the trip, Johnson hand-wrote a letter to his childhood idol, Trump — who happened to own the Plaza at the time.
For Johnson, what happened next was nothing short of a miracle. When Johnson and his family arrived to check in, they were escorted to the ultra-luxury suite where McCallister had stayed. Johnson even got a private shopping spree at the toy store F.A.O. Schwartz. Trump, it turned out, had arranged it all.
“That was my first taste of wanting to be successful,” Johnson said.
A year later, he launched the first of what would be dozens of Internet companies, selling stationery, greeting cards and party invitations. The business flourished, but Johnson’s parents wondered about their son’s hobby.
“He was starting these businesses, and it would be 2 o’clock in the morning with him working on the computer,” father Bill Johnson, 56, said.
But Cameron Johnson kept going. At 15, he was invited to advise a corporation in Japan. When his flight landed in Tokyo, he was greeted by a mob of cameras. “We thought Mariah Carey or somebody was on the plane,” he said. “But then they started shouting my name.”
Capitalizing on the fame, Johnson published his autobiography in Japanese a few months later. It was an instant bestseller in Japan. “I would get recognized on the streets,” he said. “It was literally insane.”
Johnson said he thought things would calm down after he graduated from high school and enrolled in Virginia Tech. In a business management class his first semester, he opened the textbook, only to find his picture and a story about him. That’s when he decided to drop out of college.
“It set in,” he said. “If I’m really going to be in the classroom for four years, look at the lost opportunities I’d have in the real world,” he said.
In the real world, Johnson is a hot commodity. He published his first U.S. book, “You Call the Shots,” which has an endorsement from Trump on the back cover and is required reading in Virginia Tech business classes. He is a regular on the cable news show circuit. And he speaks at conferences around the world. (He is scheduled to be in Washington on May 31 as the guest speaker at the “Extreme Success Summit.”)
His best friend, Matthew Bagby, said, “Cameron loves to win, and he loves to succeed.”
“It’s his will that drives him,” said Bagby, 23.
But it’s unclear whether Johnson has what it takes to go all the way on “Oprah’s Big Give.”
“Because he achieved financial success at a very early age, Cameron thought he had this in the bag,” the show’s host, Nate Berkus, told TV Guide in a recent interview. “He’s one of the most tenacious people I’ve ever met, but has he thought ‘big’ enough every week?”
Regardless of the outcome of tonight’s finale, Johnson is planning his next steps.
“My grand ambition is to use whatever platform I can create, whether it’s through TV or media, to promote my issues — education, financial literacy — and to inspire people to just do something,” he said.