From Answering Phones to Tech CEO: Stephanie Johnson’s Leadership Journey | Staffing Series

Intro: Welcome to another edition of inspired stories where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes, how they’ve overcome adversity and explore current challenges they’re facing.

Anthony Codispoti: Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Kodespode and today’s guest is Stephanie Johnson, CEO of Acklin Avenue, who is your strategic partner in digital transformation delivering agile custom software solutions that revolutionize how you operate, engage customers and drive new opportunities.

They emphasize a unique approach to agile software development, ensuring future ready solutions that are tailored to meet your technology needs and business goals. Stephanie was recently promoted to CEO in August 2024, taking over from the previous CEO and founder. She has been instrumental in the company’s growth and management alongside other leaders like Jennifer Fields and Evan Hensley. With her leadership, Acklin Avenue has strengthened its company culture and values, fostering innovation and transparency that has truly aligned the team internally and externally. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs.

Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible to find out if your company qualifies. Contact us today at addbackbenefitsagency.com. Now back to our guest today, the CEO of Acklin Avenue, Stephanie Johnson. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Stephanie Johnson: I appreciate you having me here. Thank you.

Anthony Codispoti: So Stephanie, what first attracted you to the IT industry?

Stephanie Johnson: Oh, I remember I did my internship at Howard University Hospital. My degree was in healthcare administration and planning. And when I did my internship there, I just wanted to be in their IT division to see it’s like a big hospital. How are they all doing what they were doing at the time? I think my job was like setting up emails and figuring like exchange at the time. But I loved the technology with healthcare. My first love was healthcare. And then I wanted to see how technology was going to impact healthcare. And so that’s kind of what I surrounded myself with. I would go to like all of the HCA tech innovators conferences back in the day and where they were like, you know, changing how the patients were interacting with tech while they were patients in their hospital. And, you know, now we have where you can come in and you can go to your room and later on they’ll get your information. Those were all like innovations at the time that I thought were so interesting. So I wanted to see where it was going to go.

Anthony Codispoti: So how did your path eventually bring you to the opportunity at Eklund Avenue? Oh, man.

Stephanie Johnson: I feel like without trying to, I have been working at organizations where they are startup. So they’re a startup or a startup mentality. And over time when I first became a COO, which is my background as a COO, is where I would just kind of slot into those companies, take away their operational debt, and eventually they would sell.

So for every big company that I’ve been at, they eventually sold. And so that’s kind of where how I think I ended up at Eklund was I have this real need to be effective. I want to not just work somewhere. I want to be effective. I want to help. So if I see like the bigger the problem you have in your organization, then I’m the person that is going to probably knocking on your door.

But they found me. They had a lot of operational debt and they seemed like they were just at the cusp of getting that, you know, getting that fixed, and then being able to continue to grow the company. Like it was kind of not growing.

It was kind of year over year doing its thing. But a lot of it was because of the operational debt and that just attracted me so much along with my founder now, the CEO at the time, really liked. I really interviewed CEOs for my next job and I really liked him. I liked how he thought about his employees. And I knew that like talking to him, he was ready for a change. That’s important is like to know that a CEO is ready for a change.

Anthony Codispoti: What does operational debt mean? And how did you help with that?

Stephanie Johnson: It means that there’s that the departments may not be operating as effectively and efficiently like we are my my think my secret sauce and talent is to walk into a place and understand where the gaps are. And so when I say operational debt, I mean that we are not they’re not operating as efficiently as they could to be able to, you know, keep money from walking out the door to be to be provide optimal service to have optimal contracts to deliver optimally. Like those are those are very important things, but they stretch across the organization and they require all the departments to be aligned. And so it was a lack of alignment in addition to the things that I just meant to mentioned.

Anthony Codispoti: So would it be accurate to say that part of what drew you to Aklan was the ability to not only help Aklan itself, but the ability to help its collection of clients, be able to bring sort of your operational expertise to an even wider swath of companies.

Stephanie Johnson: Yes, that is the thing that excites me about being an operations person. But in my experience to your CEO has to be ready for that kind of change that kind of integration, because I am a change agent when I come into organizations that will be changed, most definitely. But yeah, that’s it was important that he was ready for that and he knew it and he was very self aware about the thing that he needed, which was somebody like me.

Anthony Codispoti: And you also said that you really like the way that he treated employees. Can you talk more about that?

Stephanie Johnson: The culture at Aklan is probably one of the biggest, the biggest pulls for people for me for my senior leadership team and everybody else who works with us and for us. Whenever I talked to people there, they loved working there. They loved working there through struggle, through whatever. He just had this way about attracting talent to the company and they stayed. And so like he had a lot of longevity on with the people that I talked to, the people that were on his team at the time that I joined.

Like I just felt it when I talked to different different folks, I felt it and you know, we’re near shore. So the majority of our employees are in Latin America and in other places, but that Latin they loved. They love Aklan and they and they loved his leadership around it. He thinks about people. The reason that he started that job to his job, his company at the time was he just wanted to provide someone or some some people a place where they like to go.

And like to work because he didn’t have that. And I just kind of like that. It’s a simple, it’s a simple reason to start something that turned out to be a great, great in the culture.

Anthony Codispoti: Okay, so let’s delve into what Aklan Avenue does.

Stephanie Johnson: So Aklan Avenue, it provides our clients with high performing agile teams. And we also provide staff and we do that with near shore resources. And so if you have development needs or you have a backlog, you know that it takes you a lot of money and time to build those teams, you know, get your VA, get your scrum masters, get your dev, your dev ops, your UX, UI design.

You can come to us. We will scope out your project, tell you how long it would take, give you a really, really close estimate. And it’s already a built team. They’re used to working together and we just kind of set that down onto your project. We work with your product donor, and we do whatever project work that you need, whatever development work that is needed, including like backlog, it could be old tech, it could be putting in new tech. So we can do that across all industries, but we really concentrate on fintech healthcare manufacturing, if we were to narrow it down.

Anthony Codispoti: And are most of your clients then here in the States?

Stephanie Johnson: Yes. Yes, the majority are here in the States.

Anthony Codispoti: And what else could you say about them that kind of, what makes somebody an ideal fit for you outside of kind of the three industries that you mentioned? Is their revenue size or employee count or?

Stephanie Johnson: No, here’s the thing. I think it’s, this is the most interesting thing about what we do is we talk to people when they’re like, when they’re trying to get money for their idea. So we can help you by clarifying the idea that you have and giving you a really good sound estimate of time and money.

So where then you take that and then you go ask for that money and you get that money and then you come back and then we develop the idea even further and give you an MVP, or like get you into a MVP into a Stage 1 or Stage 2 of your product. So we have clients that are like that. And then we have clients that are running, you know, like a running old tech, but they have their backlog is so big and they’re not going to be changing that anytime soon. So we put that team in to help them with all of the technology needs that they have with that particular thing. And then we have somebody who is like, Hey, I’ve got the money.

I’m ready to, I’m ready to go and anything in between. So we can help anybody who are in like a pre stage where they’re like trying to get that money for their product to people are already they have their stuff established, but they need help updating it anything in the backlog. Yes.

Anthony Codispoti: And as I’m hearing you talk, I don’t hear anything that says, Oh, we only focus on these platforms or this programming language. It sounds like there’s a lot of flexibility to go and find the talent that’s needed, regardless of what the platforms or the you know, the existing tech platform stack looks like.

Stephanie Johnson: But that is Acklin’s like key is they can put those teams together. We have a really big like resource pool. And so we’re not trying to preach to you about what tech you need.

We will advise you if there’s something that we think is going to change out and you’re going to have to come back later. But we it’s not that we do use agile methodology on top of everything that we’re doing.

Anthony Codispoti: Describe agile methodology for those folks who are familiar with it.

Stephanie Johnson: I would describe agile. And I’m not an agile like, what an agile list. Jennifer feels is our chief delivery officer and she’s the one who’s like taught me and is the most knowledgeable. But it’s basically the way I would describe it is it’s a way for us to be iterative and efficient and scalable. So that we’re not just stuck to like, like we’re not taking a set time to say we’re going to finish it in this amount of time. We’re not doing it that way. We are flexible in the way that we do things something comes up we pivot. So it makes it iterative for us. So that’s the best way I can describe it, although she probably has a way better explanation than I do.

Anthony Codispoti: So we mentioned in the intro that you were promoted to CEO earlier this year. So first of all, congratulations for that. So now as you step into this new role, obviously you’ve been there for a while and you’ve affected great change. But as you step into this new role of CEO, what are some of your first priorities?

Stephanie Johnson: My very first priority when I stepped into this role is to make sure that the culture didn’t suffer. Not that you wanted to change it. You wanted to keep it.

I wanted to keep it. And so it was months probably before we were going to make this announcement. And I talked to Colin Callaghan who’s our founder. And I know that was really important to him.

And not that, you know, it’s not that these things were not happening. But one thing that I did do is I learned started to learn more Spanish. And so now when I have my company-wide meetings, when we had the announcement, I did them in Spanish first.

89% of our, you know, our team are in a Latam country. And so it was a way for me to say that I see you. You’re very important to me. And do my intros or whatever I was talking about. I do those in Spanish first, and then I do them in English second.

And I think the feedback that we’ve gotten from that is that it’s very, they talk about it, although I have to hear it from other people because they won’t, they don’t tell me, but they really love the fact that I’m making those efforts. And it was really important for me, although in the beginning, very nerve wracking, because I know I was probably saying some things that were not, that were not Spanish.

Anthony Codispoti: Your Spanish was not fluent quite yet.

Stephanie Johnson: No, and I keep working on it. The team is just, you know, I have so many people that I can practice with too, but that I think that it came from my heart. It’s something I wanted to do. And it’s gone, I think it’s gone a long way just so that they know that, you know, I’m invested in the company and they’re important to the company and to me.

Anthony Codispoti: So I’m trying to think, I’m trying to wrap my head around what makes Aklan unique, special, different. And I mean, I think I’m putting together one, there’s a really great culture.

People just love coming to work there. Two, you guys, you’re, you’re sort of platform agnostic, you know, you can advise the client on, you know, where you think that they should be, but you can, you can support anything. And then three, you use near shore talent. So it probably opens up a whole nother pool of talent that a lot of other agencies aren’t able to bring to the table and, you know, able to do it in a more cost effective way. Absolutely.

Stephanie Johnson: Yeah, those are, those are really great reasons why what makes this unique is just it’s our people, it’s our ability to pull talent together. And it’s also our ability to like be a place where people want to be and want to work.

You were talking about differentiators that makes us, us unique. And I mean, I think that what for me, the thing that stood out and I’ve worked with, I’ve worked with Indian teams before I’ve worked with other Latin American countries in Colombia and Bogotá and Mexico City. But the thing, thing here is, Aklan puts a lot of time and energy into the community in which it sources its talent.

And so the majority of our talent comes from a particular area, but we’re very vested there. Like it’s, it’s what they used to call the heart of Aklan. And so the story that intrigued me about Aklan when I didn’t know that I was going to be coming here was that story about how one of the founders went there on a mission trip, met his wife, and he kept coming back, right, kept coming back.

And that’s kind of how Aklan started to recruit from that area. And so, like, even though we can’t be there with our team, we spend so much time in wanting them to be together. And so we invest in a lot of get togethers for them, but we invest a lot of our time and our energy in making sure that they feel like they’re part of the organization.

Where, you know, I feel like I didn’t do that with other other assignments that I had. But, you know, I know that we can’t compete with the Ruby in terms of cost, but in terms of talent, and the ability to be able to connect with US companies and not we’re not yes people. Our communication is outstanding.

We will tell you, you know, our teams will tell you if they don’t think a thing will work, but they’re highly polite, but they’ll still tell you. You know, I think that’s what sets us apart. It’s just that community involvement and how we really do double down on the folks in those areas where we’re recruiting from.

Anthony Codispoti: So you’re kind of touching on what my follow up question is, which is how do you establish and then maintain such a strong company culture when you are geographically spread out?

I get that a lot of your folks in Latin America are in the same geographical region, but it sounds like maybe they’re not all reporting to the same office every day.

Stephanie Johnson: Oh, yeah. No, you know, Aklena has been remote since it started 15 years ago, which I think in itself is kind of like forward thinking and amazing and having the formula in which it works, right? It works out really well. I think we have a tremendous human resources group headed up by Chelsea Gonzalez. And we have get togethers. We just recently ended up the year we have these quarterly meetings. We have monthly just gathers where we’re just playing games like crazy like online games. And somehow they just make it work where it works not only for everybody in Latin America and other places where you have people.

It works for us here in the US to be able to connect and see folks more often. And we have such great turnout. And we’re just goofy together online. Like it’s a very family type, even though some people hate the term if I say family, but it’s a very close knit group. And we welcome like how we welcome people into our organization too is like to make them a part of this, you know, we announce a lot of things. We announce our wins when we win. We announce losses when we lose. Like it’s trying to just keep them informed so that they feel a connection. But we’ve done that just remotely by meeting weekly and quarterly and in for holidays and things like that and also acknowledging their holidays along with our own.

Anthony Codispoti: What is a message to Garcia and why is this important to you, Stephanie?

Stephanie Johnson: A friend of mine that I that’s like my one of my mentors but also helps us in business. His name is his name is Ryan Billing Wave. He’s with Cruise and Co. He’s just become a friend to me. And so like he’s he’s like he’s there partly because, you know, it can be a little lonely where you don’t have someone to talk to. So I talked to him about a lot of things and I think this one day I was sharing with him how I was feeling a level of frustration and a level of deep gratitude for the types of people that we have been able to get on our senior leadership team.

And so it’s like this. I’m trying to explain to him like if I were to hire this person, I’ve got to have them, you know, not have me tell them what to do a B and C. And what I try to do in my leadership style is to encourage people to make mistakes because in the mistake in the failure is our lessons that you need to learn and you need to dig deeper. And so if you’re not bringing up problems, I always am like, no, no, no, we always have problems. You have to bring some problems in here.

But I’m also an advocate of like look at root causes, but I’m trying to explain this to him and he says I’ve got the perfect thing. You’ve got to read this letter, this letter to Garcia. And it’s about a man. He gets his, his, his higher up says, Hey, I need you to go find somebody and get this message to Garcia. It was Garcia that was looking for. He sends the guy out the guy asks no questions. He just takes the letter disappears for a couple of months finds Garcia hands him a letter comes back.

He says he’s successful. And I’m like, that kind of rolls it up for me is like, he’s probably made a mistake along the way of his journey, but just go for it. I trust you to go make the decisions. They may not be 100 completely 100% completely right, but I trust you to go if I feel like I got to like say, if you come to me and say, well, how do I get started? It’s like immediately I’m just like, no, you just got to go out there and like, make the mistake.

Make it do what you think is best and nine times out of 10, it’s going to be fine. And then if you have a concern or you learn something, come back, come back with that, but be bold.

Anthony Codispoti: Like, so when you’re looking to build out and support, you’re seeing your leadership team. These are the kinds of folks that you want along your side, people that, you know, aren’t saying, Hey, Stephanie, I need a, you know, a step by step 10 point list of how to execute this next project. No, you want to be able to sort of discuss the big picture vision with them and then, you know, they’re going to go run with it.

Stephanie Johnson: Yes, that’s the senior leadership team and I have. Okay. And so while we’re, you know, how this came up was like, you know, I haven’t replaced myself as the Chief Operations Officer. And I felt like, man, that’s going to be so hard because I have this whole thing this whole way. But I also know that somebody is better than me. And they’re going to like, so when someone’s asking what, what type of person I was just kind of running through, it’s hard to somebody to ask me that and come up with these, oh, I need them to be all of these things, but I do realize too, having sat in the seat, I have these biases that I don’t need to have. But like the core of that they were asking, what’s the core is that I know that the team will communicate with me when they need to communicate with me. But they, once we decide on something, and we’re off to the races, they are going to execute on that without asking like, how do I get started? What do I need to do all of these things, right? Comes up in the discussions that we have anyway.

Anthony Codispoti: Are there a small handful of folks from this team that you would like to mention here?

Stephanie Johnson: Oh, absolutely. You know, I love that you asked me that question. Because coming up as a CEO myself, I feel like a COO, and now I’m a CEO, one of the things that I was like, man, it’d be nice if my CEO mentioned the senior leadership team.

So I’m going to do that. So I would like to shout out Jennifer Fields, who is our chief delivery officer. Dan McCarthy, who is our chief finance officer. Chelsea Gonzalez, who is our CPO, our chief people officer. Lionel Johnson, no relation is our chief or CRO.

Fernando Mesquita is our business operations strategist. So you’re going to make it to where I’m going to forget someone. And I’m like, deathly afraid I’m forgetting some of my senior leadership team and I’m feeling like I am.

Intro: There’s, there’s, there’s so many.

Anthony Codispoti: Can we get your website and would they be used to that?

Stephanie Johnson: Yeah, I feel like in Colin Callahan, right? And so like, I don’t, it’s an interesting thing, but the reason that anyone could ever look at me to say I’m successful, they have to look back at that team. They’re the reason why. I was like, tell me I didn’t forget anybody.

Anthony Codispoti: I’m looking on your site.

Stephanie Johnson: See if I can find. No, I did forget someone Brooke Janes, who’s my personal executive assistant. So she makes life very easy for me.

Anthony Codispoti: We got Fernanda, right?

Stephanie Johnson: Check. Brooke.

Anthony Codispoti: Check. Lionel. Check. Yep. We’ve already talked about Colin, the founder. Yes. And Dan. So yeah, I think we got them all.

Stephanie Johnson: Yeah. Nice work. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity because I really like they’re fantastic.

Anthony Codispoti: Absolutely. Yeah, we, yeah, I mean, I started a number of businesses myself and, you know, none of them would have been nearly as successful as they were without the team behind me. So yeah, you got to give credit where credit’s due. Nobody is running this race by themselves.

No. You know, it seems like there’s, you know, there’s a big emphasis on innovation at Acklin. What are maybe some unique approaches or innovations that your teams introduced that have had a substantial impact for your clients?

Stephanie Johnson: One big one that stands out to me is being able to provide flex teams so that like, you know, I know that in our past, if you wanted a team, we were saying, hey, you have to have all these people on your team. And then we started to explore how like we were listening to our clients and stuff that they needed and we were like, we can build flex teams because every single client’s needs are not the same. So we can’t like just put it, put it down, put that team that we have prebuilt into a client where really they need certain things. And so we were able to come up with this flex team model that if you perhaps had your UX UI design team, but you needed to have the devs and the devs op dev ops and like some other, you know, BA QA, we could add those things to you or you needed just like a team of QA or you needed a team of designers.

So we ended up doing that with which proved out to be really good. It brought in like, I feel like our mix of like someone who has our clients, they have a full stack team versus like flex team is like maybe a quarter of our total clients have they have they have needed or need a flex team and that they’re utilizing currently.

Anthony Codispoti: How do you find most of your clients or how do they find you

Stephanie Johnson: and that is that is like the golden like answer if I had all those answers we you know we’ve started putting a lot more into our marketing top of funnel research but I could tell you like prior to me coming here.

The company had one salesperson and she did a fantastic job, but all of that was like her secret sauce to things and so there wasn’t process behind it. And so this year we have really torn down everything and rebuilt up with the new CRO and account executives and how we how we get out into the market. So I don’t know if I have the best answer for that other than one of the things that we have been focusing on is audience audience based research, like how are we going to get in front of those folks that like maybe people don’t open emails. How do we get in front of them what are they like do they like a webinar. So we’re trying to figure out how to get in front of them and then use a I to craft our message to those personas that we have so I feel like I don’t have the best answer for that.

But if you find somebody who does. I would love to talk to them. But it’s it’s ever changing things changing you have to figure out how you change with your client and their needs

Anthony Codispoti: would be safe to say that I mean a fair bit of the clients have just come by word of mouth.

Stephanie Johnson: I think in the past they absolutely have and we built a really strong partnership agreement with some key people where you know if they’re talking to somebody they refer them to us. Like I feel like it’s almost like when if you get the conversation going and we get in front of that client they will see value in it immediately because that’s what we want them to see is get them to their value to their revenues as fast as possible but just starting that from our first interaction.

Anthony Codispoti: As a company that’s you know on the front edge of all things tech. I’m curious what you’re most excited about when it comes to AI. You know or or I should open the door to say most concerned about.

Stephanie Johnson: Yeah, maybe it’s a little bit of like both. And I think you know I attended a conference that they were just focusing on AI. And when I walked into that conference it was back in September. Now what that conference I felt like as a company we were behind. that I was like, man, we’re behind. I’m not really sure what direction we’re supposed to take. I’m just here to kind of hear people out and see where they were. Walking away from that conference, I realized that we’re not behind, that many people are trying to figure out how this is going to help their company or help their company bring in revenue.

And even the early adopters are still figuring that out. So I felt like I was in a good place. I left that though, understanding that AI is not meant to replace people. It is meant to improve the services that we’re already doing. And so I kind of took that approach with my senior leadership team. We built up a committee that we will launch.

We kind of pre-launched it at the end of this year, but really going in full force in January. But our sales uses it already to find prospects. Our financial, our CFO is looking at how to, like what kind of tool we can use in AI that will help us with structured data and unstructured data and what’s best to use. And on our development and our delivery, trying to figure out how AI can help us do those things that are timely, like penetration testing or something like that. So we’re just literally trying to go department to department to see how it will help us be better at what we already do. Like we’re on the very beginnings of figuring that out. But I don’t feel late.

Anthony Codispoti: What kinds of requests, if any, are you getting from the client side as it pertains to AI?

Stephanie Johnson: I think general questions in terms of like, how are we using it? Like what are we using in terms of our development? I’m not getting a ton of questions from them, from our clients in terms of like, how are we using it to develop?

Like the things that concern me around that, like what are the legalities of those things? Like is a percentage of, if we use AI as a percentage of developing code, is it belong to us? Or those types of things are other things that worried me as well as incentivizing me that we weren’t behind, but like how are we managing it? How do we manage it in legality with our clients?

How much do we have to divulge if we decide to use it in more of our development work? So I’m just figuring it out. But we haven’t had, I feel like we have not had a ton of people that are like, how are you using AI? Like they’re not, we haven’t had a ton of questions around it.

Anthony Codispoti: That’s interesting. It surprises me a little bit. I was talking with a friend of mine recently who’s an experienced developer. And he was saying one of the things that he really liked about using AI in the coding work is that previously he might spend a lot of time searching on like GitHub or other platforms, looking for a chunk of code that could execute some small portion of what he did. And sometimes he’s got to pay a licensing fee for that. Lots of times he’s got to give credit or share the modifications that he makes to the code. But when he goes and he uses an AI tool and asks for help sort of creating the same thing, it just sort of frees up all that extra administrative work.

But you hit on an interesting question here. And I’m wondering if you’ve ever gotten to the bottom of it is who owns that code? Like are you free to use that yourself? Is there, do you have to give attribution to chat GPT? Is there any clarity with this?

Stephanie Johnson: Not yet. Not yet. Like literally September and then we put our committee together, but that’s the thing that worries me the most before I unleash it. Everybody’s using it. Your folks or your teams, they’re using it in many different ways. I used it the other day to like try to create a JD I wanted to see, right? And it worked out beautifully. But before we say, we have to provide guidance to the company and all of its users on how we’re seeing that we’re going to use it before I unleash it to an entire company without understanding the realities of that. But I’ve just connected with other folks who have more information about it, more direction and thoughts about how we handle it that I just haven’t connected with and we won’t till the beginning of the year. No. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti: What’s the future look like for Acklin Avenue? Their growth plans, you want to get into new industries, paint a picture here.

Stephanie Johnson: Definitely growth. I think you touched a little bit on innovation before. And I think when I think about innovation, it’s a very used term. But when I think about it for us, it is literally testing out theories that we have to be able to support our customers even more than we have.

And when I say that, I mean, like, are there things that we’re already doing? But they have a need. For instance, if they’re using multiple, multiple dev teams or multiple agile teams, does somebody else have that? And they’re just also using Indian teams and they need like a person that’s a liaison between the US and their company and the Indian team. Or it’s like, with the flex thing that came up as a need, where the customer’s like, I don’t need all these people. But I think we’ve developed this thing where any opportunity that we see that’s coming from a client, we want to test it and see if it makes sense for us. Like, are there other things that we need to be thinking about?

Should we be, one of our clients needed us to, they were using someone who was like, just wanting just in time support, they would pay like a number of hours. We didn’t do that. We built a small model.

They loved it, right? And then now we have another service that we can now go explore out with other clients. So that’s kind of, you know, we’re definitely on a growth trajectory.

Anthony Codispoti: Have you ever, or have you ever done or ever thought about building your own SaaS products? Like, do you see needs when working with your clients? It’s like, oh, like that’s a tool that, you know, everybody would be able to use.

Stephanie Johnson: Yeah, I feel like our team is like really gung-ho on us exploring that. Cause they talk about it all the time. But the reality of it for us right now is like, you know, coming into Acklin, doubling up the revenue, all of that, so many changes that have happened that I feel like that could probably be a conversation that we need to have going into 2025. Cause I feel like we’re more set to have it.

Anthony Codispoti: I mean, you’re talking about a whole different business model. I mean, you’ve got the skills and you have the, the front row seat, you know, into a lot of client needs, into a lot of industry needs to where you can probably say, wow, you know, this is a tool that not only would FinTech use, but manufacturing could tie into as well. But it is a different business model. Once you build it, you know, then you’ve got to ramp it and you got to sell it.

Stephanie Johnson: And I know Colin, like, you know, there’s a big concern whatever we do to try to keep it, what we call the Acklin way, but exploring different ways, exploring different ways to be the Acklin way, I think is what we’re trying to do while maintaining who we’ve always been.

Anthony Codispoti: How would you sum up what the Acklin way is?

Stephanie Johnson: Help first. It’s help first. And it’s whether we help first a client, a potential client, a person at work, it is help first, that’s the mentality. I don’t know a better way to say it than that.

Anthony Codispoti: You know, my very first business, back in mid to late 90s, we were doing web development. So we were in the tech space. And my business partner, one of the smartest guys I’ve ever known, very smart on the tech side. He’s like, I hate sales, I don’t want to do sales. And then he would get into a sales meeting and be phenomenal because he did exactly what you talked about, Stephanie. It was all about helping.

He came from an educational background. And so he would ask a lot of questions to sort of get to what the client needs were. And then, hey, here’s some different solutions that could work for you.

And you know what, it’s not the $50,000 price tag that you were thinking, there’s an off the shelf tool that you could put into place that it’s gonna cost a few hundred bucks. And that cemented relationships so strongly that people would just come back again and again as they had future needs. And I’m going to assume that what I’m describing here is exactly what is going on in Acklin at a much bigger scale.

Stephanie Johnson: All the time. Like, you know, when we had low sales, we hit that sales crunch. And I feel like a lot of companies did. You know, we all considered ourselves. One of the things we talked about was like consider all of us are salespeople, right? We’re all gonna sell. However, for me, it’s like more about conversations and relationship building.

And it’s not, it doesn’t stop with me. I think everybody, if you called Jennifer, she’s gonna, she wants, you want to know more about Agile and how you can apply it. She would be willing to talk to you.

There’s no price tag to that. If somebody calls me and it’s another COO or a CEO that needs help understanding like an operations thing, it is help first. And those are the ones that actually come through.

And they don’t need to come through at the time that you’re trying to like, it is literally like, hey, what’s going on with you? And if you can help them, and it may not be that they use your service, but if you can help them, they will remember that and they will come back. And that’s what you want. It’s like, it’s not about me selling you something. I don’t want to sell anybody anything that they don’t need. It’s really about like, where are you in your business? How can I assist you, whether it’s with us or not? And cause I’m giving you the best advice. It doesn’t mean that it’s the best advice that’s gonna lead you here. It’s just advice. Like this is what we think, you know, we’ve seen, but we don’t offer that, but we can put you in touch with someone who does. Or like, I know of somebody who better be suited to help you with your just UX UI design. That’s worked for us. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti: When you help first, you’re putting the relationship first. You’re putting the person and their company and their needs first. And I can’t think of a better way to lay a foundation for your own reputation and, you know, continue to have avenues to converse with that person in an open way.

Stephanie Johnson: Sometimes we’re just doing things that are voluntary. We’ve taken on voluntary for nonprofits that just don’t have the kind of banks to like find an entire like app development project. We’ll do it for free. Because the team likes to do those things for free. Cause they like the exposure and the difference. And it’s like telling a different story for a little while and then, you know, going back to something else, right? So I think it doesn’t just work for that person that we’re giving those services to. It works for the people that we employ that are part of our team to feel like they’re making a difference somewhere that’s just not related to your revenue.

Anthony Codispoti: Stephanie, what’s a serious challenge, maybe personal, maybe professional that you’ve gone through? How did you work through that? And what are some lessons that you learned coming out the other side?

Stephanie Johnson: Well, Anthony, I was pregnant at 15. And so by the time I was 18, I had three children. And I remember like it was really tough. I remember working three jobs, trying to take a class, I think I even took one or two of my kids to class with me so that I could be there trying to work towards my degree. And I know that like, I feel like either I’m too early or too late for things, so too early to be a mom, right? But by the time I graduated, like, I graduated when I was 30, 30 years old. 30 years old is when I walked across to get my bachelor’s.

Two years later, I got my master’s. But what I recall as being a young mother, trying to take care of your family and work without assistance is just like people wouldn’t give you, they kind of would judge you on your circumstance. And so I wouldn’t get a lot of opportunities.

But what I learned from that is like, I’ve started at the very, very bottom of the rung and worked myself up. And I just think that like, somebody might say, well, would you change anything? I’m not sure that I would. Because I think the person that I’ve become has led me to the leadership style that I have because I understand what it’s like. I understand what it’s like to be hungry, I understand what it’s like to be broke, I understand what it’s like to have your lights off, not have the perfect place to live, having doors shut in your face just because, you know, of a judgment or you don’t have that degree. And I mean, honestly, the reason I went and got my degree is so that no one could tell me, you know, no, because I didn’t have it. And then I wanted to get my master’s for the same reason is like, I also think that like, when I’m looking at people, I don’t judge.

There’s so many smart people that may not look good on paper. I was one of those people and you gotta give them a chance. And so if that’s my own little way in life is to be that person, I can tell people like, even if you have a kid early or you wanna change your, what you wanna do that you can totally do it. And hopefully like you just pass that kindness on to others. There have been people who have been kind to me in the most unexpected ways that I can’t like, I can’t even explain from the woman who gave me, you know, just a little bit of respect even though I couldn’t pay my $6 a week childcare bill. But the way she treated me with respect and understanding has stuck with me my entire life.

Anthony Codispoti: So. I have to imagine that was a very difficult time. You’re a mother at 15, three kids at 18, working three jobs, trying to support yourself, your kids, you know, find stable housing. Lots of people judging you, lots of people shutting doors in your face. Some people that showed kindness along the way and it still sticks with you to this day and in what seemed to be very subtle ways at the time. I’m curious, Stephanie, at what point did you feel kind of the dark clouds start to lift and think, okay, all of this struggle, all of this hard work is finally paying off and we’re gonna be all right.

Stephanie Johnson: I feel like they come in different phases of your life where things aren’t like, if you were to say, hey, this is textbook perfect, it’s not textbook perfect, but like, let me give you an example. So I come to Nashville in 93, 94. I come to work for a, I started answering phones here when 10 care was just launching. Like that was all the buzz, 10 care was about to launch. So this company that I worked for had 24 seven phone coverage and somebody had to be there all the time.

And I worked for them for a time. But when there’s something that I do also know is like, I know when it’s time to move on for another opportunity and I do that without fear. But like getting that next thing, you’ve learned this thing. So you can, you started at the bottom, you’re answering phones, you learn customer service, you know, you learn how to deal with difficult personalities. You hone your communication skills with people when you’re dealing with the kind of a healthcare adjacent insurance type situation.

You get to take, I got to take all of that, that helps me land my next job. And I continue to do that as I go. So to me, when you talking about, when do you know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel? Well, when I got that next job, there was light. When I got an increase, there was light.

You know, when I worked for somebody that I really respected and loved to work for, light. When I learned something new, then no, cause you learned something things, people can’t take knowledge away from you. I learned that pretty early on. I also learned to be a little bit fearless. Like I will take a risk.

I will walk out and do the thing because I believe in myself because that’s who I had to believe on and rely on growing up and also taking care of my kids. And so like, there’s not one light. There’s many lights.

Anthony Codispoti: There’s not one destination. It’s lots of little waypoints.

Stephanie Johnson: No, you got to appreciate those. Like have you ever broken up with somebody? And then you think back and go, like it was heartbreaking maybe, or they broke up with you. And then you go, man, I sure am so glad that I dodged that bullet. I’m not gonna, like I won’t talk about it.

Anthony Codispoti: Any details you want to share there, Stephanie? Or we’ll just kind of leave it at that.

Stephanie Johnson: Just leave it at that. Like it’s that kind of thing is like… Everybody’s been there. Yeah, everybody’s been there, but it’s like it’s not, it’s lights. It’s like high points and low points.

Anthony Codispoti: How do you think your experience, what I’m gonna call a challenging experience when you’re a teenage mother, how do you think that has come into play with your role as CEO and COO there at Acklin and being able to relate to a lot of different types of employees?

Stephanie Johnson: I mean, that’s pretty, like I can relate to a lot of people. I can connect with a lot of people. But I think for me in my leadership style, what’s important and what has really affected that has been like, I know that I’m always gonna be kind. I’m always gonna try to be direct. I’m always gonna try to be ethical. And if I have to make very tough decisions, it will be with kindness, with directness. And so I think that I don’t go to sleep at night worried about any kind of cross-containment.

What did I say over here and what did I say over there? I feel like being authentic all the time works. And it works for me. And so like I can have this conversation with people and just be like, hey, I might not be happy with something, but we have a direct conversation. And I feel like they know that I still support them, but I’m just pointing something out and I need you to listen. I’m gonna listen to you. I wanna learn and grow as well.

But yeah, I think that going through all of those things has been the influence of not judging and being open and being aware if someone is going through something and allowing space for that.

Anthony Codispoti: What’s the significance of the picture in the background there?

Stephanie Johnson: Which one? The Buddha? Oh man, I… When I was coming up as a kid, we were seven-day of Venice. And I’m no longer seven-day of Venice. But when I became a young adult, I wanted to explore other religions because I was like, this can’t be the only religion. There’s so many religions. And so when I was able to do my internship in DC, I lived on 16th Street. And 16th Street in DC is where all the churches are like, they’re all the different churches. So you have mosque, you have temple, you have the Buddhist temple. And I spent my summer visiting every single one that would allow me in.

There’s sometimes you have to have your hair covered and I had to learn some things, but I went to everyone that would allow me to visit. And I just, something about the Buddha and the Buddhist principles, they resonate with me. Just be kind to ants. Like the smallest things have significance in the world. And I used to feel very small, but I feel like I have significance in the world. And so like, these are kind of around my house a little. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti: Are there any other mentors, books, experiences that we haven’t called out already that have been helpful to you along your way?

Stephanie Johnson: So many. I don’t know if they’re gonna be all around business. That’s okay. Just, I have found like, you’re talking about mentorship, Mentorship or books, you say mentorship or books?

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah, mentorship, books. And I also think about kind of your, the challenges of being a teenage mom, if there was anybody that was kind of just offering a helping hand that was rather significant to you, this would be a chance to give them a shout out. So kind of wherever you wanna go with that question, Stephanie.

Stephanie Johnson: Yeah, I feel like they have been like, again, throughout my life where the lady who was kind to me at the daycare that I had my kids, years later, when I first became a COO, she’s getting honored at the Athena Awards. I get there really late and I’m at the back of the room, but then they allow for people to speak. And I’m the last person to speak. And like, now I’m kind of in the center of the room. And I told her that about that story, about when I couldn’t pay the $6 of kid where she was so polite to me, she called me, my maiden name is Woodard. So she’d say, Ms. Woodard coming to my office and she’d say, hey, you have to pay this or whatever.

I know it’s difficult. She didn’t treat me like I was like not important or disrespecting me because I was, I got to get up and tell that story to her in front of 500 people and tell her how much I appreciated her and where I was in my life and how she still stuck out for me. And that was like 20 years ago that that, 20 something years ago that that happened.

And I wish I could remember her name right now, but it’s evading me, but it’s not that. It’s just things like that where I find these people who take a moment to pour into me or give me an opportunity like Daryl Freeman at Zychron, give me an opportunity to step into his door without any experience at all, allowing me to fail, right? These are the things that I want to make sure that I’m allowing other people to do. It just happens throughout my life, like finding a mentor that is way younger than me when I was going through a really tough time. Like finding those people, like they don’t know it. They probably don’t know that they had such a significant impact to me, but like Ryan Villanueva that I talked to with Cruz who lets me just say whatever the heck I want to say without judgment, right? And just always being able to relate it back to something, right? It’s just, I have them throughout my whole entire career in my life.

Anthony Codispoti: That’s fantastic. And it is fun and it’s really rewarding to ourselves and our own hearts when we can remember back to those and give call outs to those people that have been so helpful to us in ways that, maybe they didn’t realize at the time. Yeah. Is there something fun or interesting about you, Stephanie, that we haven’t touched on today that might be fun to kind of share with the audience?

Stephanie Johnson: I feel like people who are really close to me probably know this already. So I’m gonna just, I, during the time that I was like also in my career, traveling around or whatever, I was modeling. So I was modeling out of New York. I was modeling out of California. I went to Paris. So I’ve been in magazines. I was on the cover of the New York Post. And so like it was almost like a hobby to me. And I know that probably pisses off people who are like, my whole career is modeling.

What do you mean? But I got these incredible opportunities to, I went to Paris and I was in a two spread magazine that this woman just kind of reached out to me to ask me if I would be willing to come. And she’d see me do some other things, like some other ads for folks. But yeah, I’ve been able to do so many incredible things from humble beginnings that like, I love the fact that I was able to experience that. I was like my first experience in having a private plane take me to my meetings.

Like I’ve had so many like cool things that have happened. I coach my youngest, my youngest daughter is 16. And so I coach her softball team in the summer. So I need my time off is coaching the travel ball team, which I love cause that was my sport.

It’s big time commitment. Yeah, it was, it is, but I love it so much because I get to talk to these young women. I remember how I was.

I think part of the reason why, you know, at 15, I was kind of going through some weird childhood stuff that was really tough. And I feel like it’s so important to tell these 15 and 16 and 17 and 18 year olds that, you know, that they’re fantastic, just how they are. Like it’s a way for me to mentor to them in a sport that gives them confidence. That gave me confidence playing ball.

I was really good. And so like, I love that, that I get to be with her, one to share that experience with my daughter, but also be able to talk to other girls and make them understand how important they are, just as they are, how to have a voice, right? And be confident because some of those girls are now like, they got their college scholarship. So anyway that I can help them get there. Like that’s my one way of me giving back in that way. So that’s like, I love coaching. My dad was a wonderful coach to me. I played baseball. So I’m giving you like tidbits of a lot of different things, but I played baseball for three years. My dad was my coach before he said the girls or the boys were getting too big and he wanted me to switch over to softball, but I was way better than my brother. So if they see this, just know that dad said I was better than you.

Anthony Codispoti: All right, we’re gonna stir up a little sibling rivalry here. Yeah. That’s fun. Just got one more question for you, Stephanie, but before I ask it, I want to do two things. For those listening today, I know that you love today’s content. Please hit the like, share, or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. Stephanie, I also want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you. What would that be?

Stephanie Johnson: Awesome. Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn, but I’m on LinkedIn. I am at, you can also email me. I’m very open to that as well. Stephanie at acklinav Avenue.com. Like if people want to talk about anything that I’ve talked about, I’m there for it.

Anthony Codispoti: That’s really cool. So last question for you. I’m kind of curious what you see the biggest changes coming to your industry in the next couple of years. How do you see things unfolding?

Stephanie Johnson: I feel like there’s a more, I feel like I’ve seen it, right? But there’s more dependence on near shore capabilities for companies and offshore capabilities for companies. So I feel like I hear more and more that that’s the way to go because it’s cheaper than US resources. I also know that like, I feel like they’re understanding, like even though you can’t compete with Rupi in our industry, but they do see some value to having a near shore team.

Like I feel like that’s uncovering more and more. We’re trying to also like expand from Latin America to other places that are the same time zone that could potentially be another resource pool for us. But I know like, I think my answer is, I’m starting to see more reliance on the near shore model. I know that in our business, they require more flexibility. I think AI is gonna play a part in how we deliver to our clients. I don’t know exactly what that will be, but I know it’s coming. Like I think everybody kind of knows it’s gonna shift.

I’m not 100% sure in how. Hopefully just making us better at what we do. But like, there’s so many models that are very similar to what we do, but you gotta find that company, companies care about working with companies that care about what they care about. Like what’s the relationship? Like a lot of times I’m just checking in on people, on clients or potential clients and just saying, hi, what’s going on?

Or sending them stuff that I know that we talked about. So that relationship model doing business is alive and well. And I think that we’ll have to depend on it more and more. Does the years go on?

Anthony Codispoti: A follow up question for you, Stephanie, because you’ve mentioned this a few times in the interview that with the near shore model, using Latin America resources, you can’t compete cost wise with Indian developers, the rupee as you put it. But what are the big advantages to the near shore model that you guys are able to offer? Is it being in the same time zone? Is it maybe a different caliber of assistance?

Stephanie Johnson: Yeah, both. So it’s very much like we’re in central time zone. Their time zone never changes. So there’ll be a time where they’re in the same time and there’ll be a time when they’re an hour ahead or behind. So maybe an hour ahead. But like it’s the near surest that time that you can connect with someone in the same time zone and get your answers right away, check on where your projects are. Like they’re working at the same pace that you are.

And then it’s the communication too. Like I said before, is the caliber of people that we get are equitable to anyone. Like if someone’s gonna equate the US resource, our resources are outstanding. They also have a voice. They also are experts in their industry. So they’re gonna be able to tell you whether something’s not gonna work or it is gonna work. They’re not order takers. We are not order takers. So it’s just part of that relationship that you build with customers, that you can be able to tell them.

You build that trust by not telling them everything that they wanna hear, but what they need to hear and our opinions about where they should go. Discussions as opposed to we can do this and we can do it in this amount of time. We’re not even promising whatever. If you come to us for the time, we’re gonna say, well, that’s not really how we do that. And you’re not gonna have the best outcome. So the way we do what we’re doing is aimed at the best outcomes possible, not to reach a timeline, but to also best time possible to get you to your revenues faster for your application development or something you have to like, you have a release date for or something you have to get done in a certain amount of time because it’s dependent on the next step or some release. But yeah, I feel like that’s the difference.

Anthony Codispoti: Stephanie, I wanna be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it. No, thank you for having me. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories Podcast. Thanks for learning with us today. And I’ll see you next time. Bye.