LOVE MONDAY: Featuring Jeff Johnston

At Painted Turtle Partners, we believe that every individual should be able to fully utilize their interests, skills and experience in a work setting that they will enjoy. In our weekly post, “Love Monday”, we will be highlighting individuals that have made a major career change and love what they do. This week you will gain insight from Jeff Johnston, Founder and CEO of A-List+. Learn what career change he made and how he got there.

What was your past career(s) and what are you doing now?

 After two years at Marietta College working towards a Sports Medicine degree, I transferred to Ohio State and I graduated a few years later with a bachelor’s degree in Nursing. I was interested in pursuing a career in the healthcare field, and I was interested in business as well so I got a minor in business. I never expected to be an RN my whole life and thought I’d end up in some sort of healthcare administration position.

I worked for a few years as critical care nurse at The Ohio State University and then in 1991, took a position working for a local Home Infusion Therapy company. Home Infusion Therapy is a niche market within the larger Home Health Care industry. These companies provide patients who are stable enough to receive care at home with intravenously infused medications. At that time, nearly all providers performed this work without the benefit of any business management software. All our patient records were literally written with pen on paper. It was time consuming and inefficient and I continually made the case that the manual documentation process led to more mistakes and less time actually providing patient care. I knew ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about computers or software but figured there had to be something on the market that could alleviate the tedious documentation my fellow clinicians (RN’s and Pharmacists) and I had to do in order to manage our patient’s care. I eventually wore my boss down, convincing him that we’d be much more productive and profitable if we would implement a software solution. Finally, he said if I could find something that everyone liked, he’d buy it.

So I started looking. I searched for about 6 months without success. Keep in mind, this was BEFORE Google, the Internet, email, etc. I actually called people – on land lines! I went to trade shows and talked to sales reps – in person. I sat through some demo’s but eventually concluded that nothing out there specifically designed to address the unique needs of a home infusion therapy company. Toward the end of my search, I was in my backyard in Clintonville one day and met my neighbor, Stuart Crane, literally over the backyard fence. Turns out Stuart was a computer programmer . . .

We hit it off really well.  I told him about my unsuccessful software search and he showed me the kinds of database applications he had built for other types of businesses.  We quickly came to believe that if we worked together, we could build something that could make it easier for my co-workers and I to do our jobs, and of course, we could make a few extra bucks on the side.  My boss loved the idea of being “cutting edge” and he agreed to pay us a small monthly fee for our after-hours effort. So, every night after work, I headed over to Stuart’s basement and we’d work on building the software. I did most of the design, sketching out screens and workflow on a legal pad and Stuart would write the code.  It was so much fun – literally watching my ideas & vision come to life on the screen.  Stuart was a great programmer and didn’t know the meaning of the word “can’t” . If I asked for it, he made it happen.  We worked almost every day for about 9 months building the software and every couple of weeks or so, I’d bring in a “floppy disk” (anybody remember those?), update the system and gather everyone around to show them the new features.

Was there a point when you just knew that you wanted and needed to go for this new opportunity?  Can you describe that moment? What pushed you to move forward?

At first, most of the staff were very reluctant to try our software.  They were afraid of it, didn’t trust it, they thought they’d break it, and basically wanted to keep doing it the pen & paper way they were comfortable with.  Change is hard.  But, slowly, I began to notice occasional lines forming at the one PC we all shared.  Soon, my boss put a computer on everyone’s desk (something we never had or ever needed), all networked together with shared printers.  One day, as I walked around the office, I realized that every one of my co-workers were heads-down, using the software that Stuart and I built to do their jobs.  And they LOVED it.  You couldn’t have pried it out of their hands.  Of course they kept asking for more, more, more – “Can you make it do this?  Can you add this report?  Can you capture this piece of data?” – but, it was quite a rush.

I went to Stuart’s house that night and said “Dude, we have got something here . . . we need to start our own business and sell this system to other Home Infusion Therapy companies!”  I was confident that there was an unmet need out there that we could satisfy.

So, we kept our day jobs but every night and most weekends, we were busy working on “version 2.0”, adding additional features, streamlining the look and feel, creating a “mass-market” product, rather than a custom built program.  That took another 9 months and by the spring of 1993, we felt like our product, which we called CPR+ – Complete Patient Records – was ready to go to market.  So, with $400 of start-up capital, we bought letterhead, business cards, a vendor’s license and a 2-line phone from OfficeMax and we launched our software company.

What helped to prepare you for this career change?

I can’t think of any one thing that prepared me for this career change . . . neither one of us had ever run a business before but we both felt like if we worked hard, we’d figure it out.  I had no marketing experience but I knew I loved to design and create and solve problems, I knew I wanted to be my own boss, and I felt like my experience as a home infusion nurse gave me the insight we needed to have a reasonable chance of success.  Stuart was an awesome business partner and friend and our strengths complimented one another really well.

After we launched our business, we worked 10, 12, sometimes 14 hours a day, marketing, demo’ing, selling, training and supporting customers and continually adding new features to the software.  We began hiring staff and quickly outgrew Stuart’s basement.  We got an office and the business grew rapidly.  We worked very hard at taking great care of our customers. If there was a problem, we fixed it.  If they expressed a need, we did our best to meet it.  We were NOT perfect but our customers liked the software and they liked us. Consequently, they gave us great references and testimonials.

We made a small sale our first month and turned a profit and we continued to be profitable every single month thereafter for 20 years, becoming the leading software vendor in home infusion therapy industry.  We sold the business in 2013 with over 2500 customers and nearly 80 full time employees.

What have been the biggest struggles and/or hurdles that you have encountered with this change?  What are you doing to overcome them?

Delegating was never one of my strengths but we learned how to build a great team of managers, keep our fingers on the pulse of the business, and hire and manage good people.  It was all new us but as I said, we figured it out along the way. Mostly, it was fun.  Yes, it was challenging and the hours were long I LOVED Monday’s (and Tuesdays, Wednesday’s, Thursday’s and Friday’s).  When you own your own business, you’re never really not working . . . I thought about it constantly, always trying to improve the product, our service or internal processes.  The time flew – weeks turned into months and years in the blink of an eye.  Having worked in the industry, I always tried to evaluate our business from our customer’s perspective.  That would probably be my biggest piece of advice.

If you were to offer one piece of advice to individuals that are contemplating making a major career change, what would it be?

Go for it!  There are no guarantees and success is not a given.  As the years went by and we continued to grow, we did not take that growth for granted.  We kept our foot on the gas, pushed hard and continually tried to improve our customer’s experience, always asking ourselves how we would want to be treated by our software vendor if we were paying for this product / service.  We constantly told our staff that “we” (Stuart and I) weren’t paying their salaries, our customers were and that if we didn’t take care of them, someone else surely would.  That philosophy served us pretty well for 20 years.

Where can individuals learn more about you and your business? 

Since selling our business in 2013, I’ve been working on my next software venture – this time it’s a mobile app called A-List+.  Again, success if not a given and I know it will be very difficult to duplicate the success that Stuart and I had with CPR+.  However, as I said, I love to create, solve problems and delight customers so I’m hoping I can catch lighting in a bottle one more time . . .

If you’re interested, you can check out A-List+ – a personal productivity & life management app for iPhone / iPad users at www.alistplus.com.  If you have any questions or if you think I could help you in anyway, drop me note at jeff@alistplus.com.