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Joe Johnson, PhD | Founder & Shareholder | Welfont
Joe Johnson: Record Setting Real Estate Startup Welfront, a real estate brokerage and services business specializing in the non-profit sector, has become the fastest growing real-estate brokerage and services company in recent history. Last year, Inc. Magazine ranked Welfont #1 in the real estate brokerage category in America, and #16 overall with an impressive 11,350% 3-year growth rate. This makes Welfont the fastest growing real estate brokerage company in the history of the Inc. 5000. Further, a few months later, Entrepreneur Magazine ranked Welfont as the #1 most entrepreneurial real estate brokerage business, and the #20 most entrepreneurial business overall in their annual The Entrepreneur 360 List, which ranks the best entrepreneurial businesses in the country. Only one other business in the country made the Top 50 in both of these prestigious entrepreneurial rankings. Welfont has gone from approximately $100,000 in revenue to over $20 million in revenue in 4 short years, in an industry that is traditionally difficult to grow at a fast pace. The entrepreneurial founder and business architect of this fast-growing business—Joe Johnson, PhD—is CIO Look Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year. His Story Dr. Joe Johnson is a serious serial entrepreneur. He takes his entrepreneurial career so serious that he spent 7 years earning a PhD in Entrepreneurial Leadership. Prior to his PhD, he earned an MBA in Executive Leadership, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Ashland University, and also studied business at the Ohio State University. As a serial entrepreneur, he has launched or funded over a dozen startups. As an investor, he has acquired over 10 million square feet of real estate in dozens of states. And, as a philanthropist, he has given back by helping fund over 15,000 microloans to underprivileged entrepreneurs in over 80 countries. Dr. Johnson has achieved major success in his entrepreneurial life, but he has also experienced a few failures along the way. Although he started his first business when he was 14 years old and has been an entrepreneur for now over 30 years, his entrepreneurial life has been filled with ups and downs. Embrace and Learn from Failure A lot of his success has come from lessons learned in failure. According to Johnson “as an entrepreneur you have to be able to embrace and learn from failure. The lessons from failure become part of our fabric vs. the lessons from the classrooms are easier to forget.” And in the failure, he examines his mistakes and how he would do it differently if he could do it again. And doing it again, is what he often does. Although he has experienced business failures, he has never failed twice in the same business concept or industry. “If you do not succeed the first time, and don’t give up, but try again and make major adjustments, the business tends to work a lot better the second time,” says Joe. He is a big believer in the quote: “if at first you don’t succeed, try again.” Take for example, SUCCESS Magazine. In the early 2000s, Johnson had a struggling magazine publishing business that he never planned to get into. It just sort of happened because someone owed him money and getting into publishing was the only way he could see how he could recoup what he was owed. He learned a lot in his struggles to succeed in the magazine publishing business. Eventually, SUCCESS Magazine, a magazine that had been published since the 1800s and owned by a different outfit went bankrupt. From what he learned about his own struggles in the publishing business, he was able to see an opportunity using a better publishing model. He partnered with a colleague to bring SUCCESS out of bankruptcy. He relaunched it using a unique business model, won “Best Design Launch of the Year” award, and sold it a year later for millions of dollars. Humility and Wisdom