A Life in Seven Stories

Before he learned how to build a company, Bogoljub learned within his family how to build trust.

The family coat of arms bears the words “Peć, 1763”. The Karić family’s roots in Peć date back to that year. For Bogoljub, the emblem is not an ornament, but a reminder that every generation inherits a duty to preserve faith, unity, hard work, and one’s word.

Danica and Janićije raised five children on a single modest salary. Clothes and schoolbooks passed from the older children to the younger ones, and the children began working early to earn money for clothes, books, and pocket money. There were not many possessions, but there was a powerful sense that no one would ever be left alone.

Sreten, Dragomir, Zoran, Bogoljub, and Olivera shared household duties, music, and their first earnings. Later, they combined their different strengths—technical skill, organisation, contacts, and an instinct for the market—in a shared business. The success of one was inseparable from the strength of the family.

Bogoljub and Milanka started a family and had four children. As the children grew, she completed her studies, became involved in the family company’s legal affairs, and joined the other women of the family in establishing the Social Council to assist workers. The Karić Brothers Foundation later grew out of that tradition of family care.

The story of the Karić family is therefore not the story of one man who did everything alone. It is the story of people who knew how to combine different talents, share risk, and create together over many years.

For Bogoljub, family is not a decorative word. It is the first school of work, tolerance, forgiveness, and responsibility—and the place a person returns to when everything else changes shape.

Bogoljub was not drawn to new ideas simply because they were new. He was drawn to what people lacked but did not yet know they would soon need.

At one trade fair, he noticed that no small plough was being offered. Within sixty days, they had built their own model; orders then arrived from across the country. While others looked at what already existed, he searched for a gap that could be turned into a product.

The same pattern recurred on a much larger scale. Karić Banka was the first private bank in what was then Yugoslavia; “Evropa Osiguranje” was the first private insurance company in socialist Yugoslavia; and Karić Brothers University was Serbia’s first private university. Mobtel launched Serbia’s first mobile network.

BK Television soon became a widely watched private television channel and brought together many prominent journalists and television professionals. EUnet was among Yugoslavia’s first commercial internet service providers.

Bogoljub once summed up his position in these words: “I was a capitalist under communism, a capitalist under socialism, and I am a capitalist today.” Behind that statement was more than a desire to be first: it reflected a willingness to invest in something before the need for it became obvious to everyone else.

His most important innovation, then, is not any single company or device, but the habit of looking several steps beyond the present—towards what everyone will regard as normal tomorrow.