Anthony C. Johnson is a managing partner attorney at Johnson & Vines, PLLC and the CEO and co-founder of the American Injury Attorney Group. He received his BA at the University of Arkansas in Computer Engineering and his Juris Doctor from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His law practice started as a general practice but has since shifted towards mass torts, medical device litigation and other serious personal injury cases. Johnson’s interests expand beyond the practice of law, especially in the fields of business and technology. He was recently featured on the 2014 Empact Showcase of Top 100 entrepreneurs under 35 across the country. He is on The National Trial Lawyers 40 Under 40 list. He was listed by Arkansas Business as one of the “20 in their 20’s” to look out for in 2012. He was also featured in the April 2012 cover story of the American Bar Association’s Journal as one of “America’s Techiest Lawyers.” Follow him @anthonycjohnson.
Who is your hero?
“Stay hungry, stay foolish” was the first quote that stuck with me growing up. Despite the cliché, Steve Jobs is my business-world hero. He was tenacious, demanded more and had the confidence to create and innovate technologies that the world was desperate for, even before the world knew that they were desperate for them.
What’s the single best piece of business advice that helped shape who you are as an entrepreneur today, and why?
A very successful mentor of mine told me about the last conversation he had with his wife prior to getting married. He suggested that I have the same conversation with my own partner if I wanted to be an entrepreneur. He told his fiancee that he was going to miss birthdays and Christmas sometimes. He was going to blow their life savings at least twice, maybe more. But, he was never going to quit until he succeeded, and that day would absolutely come. He asked if she understood the man that he intended to be and she answered in the affirmative. They’ve now been married for over 40 years and have become enormously wealthy through his business endeavors.
So armed with my mentor’s advice, I sat my wife down and laid out my plans, many of which were very similar to those of my mentor’s. Despite its immediate backlash, that conversation set a framework for understanding, and has endured through my years of being an entrepreneur. After eight years of marriage and three kids, my wife is a testament to support and encouragement through all of the hardships, the devastating failures and, inevitably, the overdue successes.
Thus my advice: if you are thinking about marriage, sit down and have the talk first. You can send me a thank-you gift when you finally make it.
What’s the biggest mistake you ever made in your business, and what did you learn from it that others can learn from too?
My biggest mistake has been not firing employees faster. Every employee who has been fired from my company should have been fired months earlier. If you think about someone specifically when you read that last sentence, fire them today. Get over the training costs, the time it takes to re-hire and all of the other headaches that come with firing someone. You know almost immediately if a person is going to push the company forward or drag the others down. Bringing in someone new who actually believes in the vision of the company will more than make up for any time lost during the transition. Company culture is one of our most prized commodities and one bad egg can put a real stink on everything it’s around. Fire fast if you find a bad egg.
What do you do during the first hour of your business day and why?
I check email, but probably not like most people. First, I scan my email for new leads. American Injury Attorney Group is in part a sales company, and I need to make sure that new leads are not being neglected. Second, I delegate whatever tasks I can and respond to questions that my team might have pending. This ensures that I’m not bottlenecking any of my team members. Third, I respond to anything that can be replied to in less than two minutes, mainly because it would take longer than that to flag and re-read later. Finally, I flag and transfer the remaining emails to my task management system. Sometimes this requires me to reorganize my tasks for the day. Either way, I finish this process with a full understanding of what’s happening with my sales team, an assurance that no one is waiting on me to move forward with projects and a fully mapped-out task list for the day ahead.
What’s your best financial or cash-flow related tip for entrepreneurs just getting started?
Learn cash flow-based accounting. So many people do not understand the importance of cash flow in a startup. A business can get by with having bills, debt, overhead and most other things; however, a business can not survive without cash flow.
Quick: What’s ONE thing you recommend ALL aspiring or current entrepreneurs do right now to take their biz to the next level?
Be awesome. I type it into my browser window every day so that it’s engrained in every fiber of my being. If you do something “awesome,” you will succeed. Make that your new standard and you will succeed. Sufficient, ordinary, good enough, okay — these are all words that lead to failure and have no place in your world. For any task or product you create, ask yourself if it’s awesome. If it’s not, try again.
What’s your definition of success? How will you know when you’ve finally “succeeded” in your business?
I define success as change. In that, I don’t mean any small change or change within your company; instead, I mean change within an industry. I mean systemic change. Do something so revolutionary that your biggest competitors change their businesses to conform to yours. Shake things up. You’ll know that you’ve succeeded when you’ve changed not only yourself, but everyone else as well.
