Craig Andrews 00:06

All right. Today I want to welcome Laura Johns. She is the founder and CEO of the Business Growers. Laura hit $1 million in annual recurring revenue in 13 months. If you don't know, that is amazing. So we have some things to learn from her. Her business is the business. Growers. It's a marketing firm serving the B to B Telecom, SaaS, It and cloud services industries. I think she said it's the only agency focused just on tech in the whole state of Mississippi.

Laura Johns      00:41

That's right.

Craig Andrews 00:43

And for 18 years, Laura managed marketing efforts for companies ranging from tech startups to global multibillion dollar businesses. She spent nearly half her career serving as corporate marketing executive in the telecommunications industry before starting the Business Growers. Not only that, but she's also the co founder and host of the Home and Hustle podcast for Working Moms and also the no Grow and Scale videocast and podcast for entrepreneurs. We're going to have trouble fitting all this into a few minutes.

Laura Johns      01:20

We might do part one and part two.

Craig Andrews 01:23

Laura, welcome. It's a delight to have you here.

Laura Johns      01:26

Thank you, Craig. So excited to be here, excited to talk about leadership and what it means to me and learn from you as well. So thanks for having me.

Craig Andrews 01:35

Well, I mean, you've hit some amazing milestones. And one of the questions that always comes to mind for me is what was the crucible that brought you to this? And I understand you had to live kind of straight and narrow. Your dad was a judge.

Laura Johns      01:58

Yeah. Yes, he was. And thankfully, I had two older brothers ahead of me that were making plenty of mistakes. I just made them a little more so. My dad was a judge up until these last few years. Actually, he's gone back to practicing law. But something about a judge in write, john Grisham writes books about it. It's one of those things you certainly want to keep things on the straight and narrow when your dad is watching everything you do or has the radio on at all times in case anyone messes up.

Craig Andrews 02:38

I think that's hard to appreciate that that would be challenging because you feel like the spotlight is always on you.

Laura Johns      02:47

Yeah. I will say of my two older brothers and myself, the three of us, I definitely was one that I'm not sure if I think everything about us today has so much to do with our upbringing. And so I'd really work hard to try to figure out or pinpoint things and tie them back to my upbringing, but I was not the daredevil of the family. I was always the one that I would be the one that would rise to the occasion, that would make sure that if my parents expected something out of me, curfew, et cetera, never got speeding tickets growing up, et cetera. Now, since I've been an adult and a mom and a business owner, the speeding ticket part has changed, but I'm no longer accountable to my dad now, so don't have to worry about that. But really, having two older brothers ahead of me, I got to see the mistakes that they were making, and I was a little too scared of my dad to make some of those myself. So I got out of high school in skates, but it was pretty tough because we are also in a very small town in Mississippi, so if he didn't hear via police radio, he would hear from the neighbors. So I tried to keep things pretty tight.

Craig Andrews 04:08

That's another interesting aspect. My wife grew up in the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex, and last month, we were back in my hometown of Cambridge, Maryland, which is this little 13,000 person town, and she occasionally fantasizes about living in a small town. And I said, you know, if you do that, there are no secrets.

Laura Johns      04:30

There are no secrets, and it can be a good thing or a bad thing. My husband actually grew up about ten minutes from me, and in fact, now today, this shows you how Mississippi works. Our families have moved to live, like, less than a mile from one another, so his parents and my parents live really close, which is actually wonderful because we have a three year old and a seven year old. So when we go out of town, we have a ten year anniversary coming up next month. We'll take the seven year old to one house and the three year old to the other and drop them off. But when you marry someone from your hometown, which I, in fact did, the benefit of that is, you know, all the dirt. So before I even started dating him, I got all of the information about him, and he still seemed to be a pretty good guy. And we're ten years in, now 13 together.

Craig Andrews 05:21

Congratulations. That's awesome.

Laura Johns      05:23

Thank you.

Craig Andrews 05:24

Well, and tell me a little bit about your husband. You said that in the green room, you said that he's an important figure in this story.

Laura Johns      05:32

Absolutely. He is a worship pastor. When we got married, he was dabbling in maybe some insurance and some other things, working with his brother in law at the time. But really through the course of the first couple of years of our marriage and him doing what was called a worship school at the time at Bethel Church, a very prominent worship style, and church in North, California, he decided when we were not newlyweds, but fairly newlyweds, that he was going to lead worship at a church. Of course, before we had children was working, but working had always been in the I know you know, some of it's a bit cultural, but definitely in the south and Southeast, particularly in know, a lot of my friends were graduating college. Some went on to get their masters, but I would say at least 75% of the friends that I graduated college with are now stay at home moms. So in the South, I would say things are changing, but there's still a good bit of the traditional household that's honored here. I grew up with a mom that stayed at home and very much saw her working just as hard as my dad. She was just doing it in the so anyway, our family today, I held various jobs and in fact I worked for a tech startup that then sold to a company called Itron. And that job at Itron had me traveling internationally at the drop of a hat. And this is when we were just married. So we didn't yet have children, but I found out with maybe like a 24 hours heads up that I was going to need to go to Singapore, which is quite a long travel, but.

Craig Andrews 07:24

It was a really good let's put teeth on that. When you say long travel, what's that mean? How many hours?

Laura Johns      07:30

I think it was like 16 hours. Twelve to 16 hours. For me, that's better than I thought. That was the flight time. So I think the total travel time was a full day. It was a guaranteed full 24 hours of travel. And think of the stop. We had a couple of stops in the US. A stop in Tokyo and then another stop. But I'd been married for two years and of course we were thinking I'm married, which also Southern. This is very late in Mississippi's eyes probably that I got married when I was 31. So we wanted to start a family and drop of a hat. International travel was probably not going to serve us very well for much longer. So with that, I actually was on a business trip in California, met a church member that saw that I was on Facebook, that I was in San Francisco. We had dinner. He had a tech company that had no marketing at the time, so I started working for him shortly thereafter and then started my own business serving companies similar to his in the tech space. But before I started my own business, my husband and I had a very real conversation about what that would look like. Because obviously when you own your own business, it's like a child almost in terms of what you're spending devoting to building it, growing it the amount of not just time, but like brain cells that you were putting into leading. And now I have 17 women that work for me that I'm leading in addition to two little boys at home. So it was very much a commitment both for me and my husband. And I said, are you sure that you are in? And he was 100%. But that means that right now in this season, he's doing carpool. In the afternoons, he's picking up, he's getting folks to and from ball because his schedule is a bit more flexible in terms, know, getting kids to and from. So it had to be a team decision. We're very much a team, and he has been extremely supportive and really the only way that I could do this the way that I have. So I'm very grateful. His name is Jay.

Craig Andrews 09:37

Jay. Well, and that's so encouraging to have a spouse that you know is in your corner and that you're working together, you're working through things together.

Laura Johns      09:50

And we've had seasons when we first had our first son, I was working for someone, and his job was a bit more demanding. And so during that season, I was at home a great deal more. And I think that there are probably going to be another ebb and flow in the marriage. We committed for the long haul, so whatever's to come, we're going to make decisions as a team. And honestly, I feel like that's part of leadership. No matter if it's in your marriage or in your home, in your family, in your work life, being able to make compromises and make those big decisions and remember when it gets tough that we made it together, that's huge.

Craig Andrews 10:34

Yeah. And you just touched on something really important there. It doesn't matter whether it's in your family or in your team. If it's a decision made together, there's a lot more commitment to see it all the way through.

Laura Johns      10:49

Right? Yeah. I actually sent out a survey I'm planning for 2024 right now, so planning for next year. And I just sent out a survey to my team wanting everyone's participation if they've been here longer than four to six months. But I'm asking them questions like, what did we do well? What did we not do well? What should change in 2024? And although it's probably going to be painful for me to read, because, again, this is like another baby of mine, so you don't want somebody calling your baby ugly. Right. But I do honestly want everyone's feedback because now that we've grown like we have, I'm not able to have these conversations with the whole team every day. So I want that feedback so that we can make the right decisions going forward. And I want everyone to feel like they are part of the growing of this business and the decisions that we're making.

Craig Andrews 11:45

Yeah. And how have they responded to that?

Laura Johns      11:48

Well, I don't know. I just sent it out this morning, so I'll let you know. But we do every three weeks, three to four weeks, at least once a month, we do what we call start, stop, and do better. So we all are required to bring something that we need to stop doing, something we need to start doing, and something that we could do better. We at least vote during the start, stop, and do better. When everyone gets theirs out, we vote on one because it's really hard to take all of them and make change. It's not very realistic, but we do at least all vote on one in each category that we will take and implement before the next start, stop and do better. So it's kind of similar to that. And I'm very much not someone who thinks that my way is the best way. And so I'm leaning on all of these really smart women that work with me to give me their insight so that we can do better as an organization.

Craig Andrews 12:42

And there's an interesting question that comes out of there, and it reminds me of my first job out of university. I worked for a telecom. It was Erickson.

Laura Johns      12:50

Oh, yeah.

Craig Andrews 12:52

And my first annual review, my boss, we get to the end of the review, and he said, do you have any feedback from me? And I was like, oh, that's in a serious question. So I gave some BS answer, and he kept pressing, and I thought, well, maybe he really wants a serious answer. And I said, well, you know, I often make plans on Friday nights. And when our group meetings go until 06:00 on a Friday night, it makes it really hard to make. Oh, okay. And like nine months later, one of my colleagues, guy named John Fried, comes up to me and he says, I hear you don't like the Friday night meetings. I'm like, yeah, where'd you hear that? And he had just finished his review, and he brought up the same thing with my boss. And my boss said, so you and Craig Andrews don't like it? He's like, oh, a lot more don't like it. Craig and I are just the ones bold enough.

Laura Johns      13:49

It'll say something. Yeah, speak up.

Craig Andrews 13:53

So that's kind of the set up. You're putting this survey out. How do you get genuine, authentic answers?

Laura Johns      14:02

Right? Well, one is I'm not administering it. My assistant is. Which that's step one. I think she's filtering through everything, and she's just showing the data. So that's key number one is making sure everyone knows that I'm not looking at each answer. But also, we don't ask for them to put their names on it. Don't ask for them to put their information on it. I have no way of knowing who says what. But also, I have found that one of the things that I'm very serious about is immediate feedback. And I've built a culture. Our number one core value is trust. And I do work really hard, not just in our own team, but also with our clients. If we feel like trust is being compromised, we'll let the client go. I have a very specific example of that. If we feel like the trust is being compromised internally, we address it really head on. And I do that because I've worked for organizations that didn't. And I saw because I was usually in the inside, in some sort of role where people would always come sit in my office and I would hear just that, things where I felt like trust was being compromised. The culture certainly suffers so I've made it a point to make sure that if I see not only just an opportunity for feedback or growth, we don't call it criticism. It's feedback. It's feedback. It's feedback. It's just addressing something quickly. I always had managers that as wonderful people as they were, I never really felt like I knew how I was doing. And so we give our team ample opportunities to have conversations with each other, with me, with Vicky, our VP of Ops, so that they know on a weekly basis how they're doing and have the opportunity to have that feedback exchange, which is really important. But to me, if trust is compromised and if you don't feel like you can communicate openly, then that's a whole lot of time you're spending in an organization that, to me, is not life giving. So I want to make sure that our team feels like their voice is heard. That's important to me.

Craig Andrews 16:06

What does it mean to you to be life giving?

Laura Johns      16:09

If you pull up and I don't know how many people are remote workers are actually physically going into an office, but if you pull up or if you sign on early in the morning for work and you feel like, I don't want to be here, I don't want to talk to these people, everybody has their day. But if you are finding that you are every day getting online and don't want to be there, that organization is not giving you life. If you don't feel encouraged, if you don't feel some sense of joy in what you're doing, 40 plus hours a week is a long time to spend. Not feeling like you have skin in the game, not feeling like you have purpose. I'm very committed to driving home the purpose of our organization, very different from our mission and vision, which is to serve tech companies, but our purpose is to empower women both in the workplace and in the home. I'm committed to doing that. And that might mean, again, kind of going back to that trust core value. That might mean that we all trust that if someone is out on maternity leave, that I'm going to handle what schedule works best for them, where they can still get their work done and also be a great mom, be there for their kids. We all trust that that's going to happen, that we're going to work together. We also have a couple of other core values that kind of lean into that. But life giving work is work that you can get to and you don't dread it. You feel there is a community of trust and a culture that makes you want to be there and you can leave. Joyful yeah.

Craig Andrews 17:43

Well, do you feel like a lot of businesses make it hard for women to work there from that perspective?

Laura Johns      17:52

Yeah, I think it just depends on the business. I think that there are traditionally handbook type things that don't consider overall the person the rest of their. For example, when I had a newborn, my husband and I had moved to a place where he was a worship pastor at a church in Laurel, Mississippi, where the HGTV Hometown show is on. For those that are HGTV, watchers. But we had moved there, and actually I was working about an hour and a half away. So that was a three hour commute, a couple of days a week with a newborn. That meant if he's running a fever at 07:00 A.m., I had already left the house at 535 45.

Laura Johns      18:40

I feel like we need to take the person and their surroundings, for example, if they don't have family nearby to help, that might look like we come into the office two days a week. That might look like for a season, this person doesn't come into the office two days a week. I just think that there's a whole lot of factors that in black and white, I understand why we need to make it black and white because that's how the world works. But also I think we need to consider a little bit more than just what's on paper in terms of just the leave and hours and look more at the person as a whole. And that doesn't just apply to family. I think that it applies to any kind of if we have a scenario that we're going through that might give us an opportunity to go overseas for six months, is that person any less productive in their job because they are in a different seat, a different location? I don't know. So I think that we just need to think about that as leaders in our organizations, especially given this new generation of employees and of workers post COVID. I think there's a lot more to think about than and I hate to even say COVID on a call, I know we're over it, but it's still a thing. And I think that the way that people work has changed and the way that organizations have to bring value to the employee has changed.

Craig Andrews 20:04

Yeah, well, I can think of two examples where that flexibility that you're talking about one in my own life where it was amazing. So a couple of years ago, I was in the hospital. They were pronouncing me near dead, and my wife worked for NCR, and I'm going to call them out because they did an amazing job. They immediately gave her two weeks off, didn't charge her leave, go home, deal with your husband.

Laura Johns      20:33

Wow.

Craig Andrews 20:34

And then that was August 22. And then from then, when she came back, from then until the end of the year, they had her work half time while paying her full time.

Laura Johns      20:48

Oh, wow.

Craig Andrews 20:49

Yeah.

Laura Johns      20:50

That's amazing.

Craig Andrews 20:51

Yeah.

Laura Johns      20:52

And that matters? I mean, how much does that make her want to be loyal? And I just feel like those things my boss at my previous employer before I started my own business.

Laura Johns      21:05

About six months after having my first son, I was just exhausted and trying to drive, and I just said, I can't do it anymore. And it took me a long time to say that, but he said, Put down on paper what you need, and we'll figure it out.

Craig Andrews 21:18

Yeah. Wow.

Laura Johns      21:20

That is incredible. What might seem like a small decision for a leader can be life changing for an employee.

Craig Andrews 21:26

Yeah, well, we're eternally grateful to NCR, and I'm not a big fan of big corporations, but they still have a warm spot in my heart.

Laura Johns      21:36

Absolutely. Yeah. It matters.

Craig Andrews 21:41

Anyway, you're about helping women, empowering women to figure out the balance between Work.

Laura Johns      21:50

And The Home and the Hustle. That's the name of my podcast, so I call it The Home and the Hustle everywhere but trying to find joy and balance in both The Home and the Hustle, which is work.

Craig Andrews 22:01

That's awesome.

Craig Andrews 22:06

Anyway, one few ways of people reaching you, one is to listen to Home and The Hustle, and you say that's only a little bit of hiatus, but.

Laura Johns      22:13

That'S yeah, we're getting back into it, but because we're working moms, we have to take a break between seasons. But we do have two full seasons that are full of working moms, that are nurses, that are news anchors. So they have a very unconventional schedule. We got moms of all backgrounds there, so The Home and The Hustle on anywhere you listen to podcasts, and then the no Grow Scale podcast. Also, anywhere you listen to podcast, that's my entrepreneurship podcast. And then you can find my organization@thebusinessgrowers.com, and we'll have all of our social media handles on our website as well.