Founder’s vision sets business technology company on a path for success

Cheryl Hentz

Contributor

September 2, 2024

WAUSAU – The business  Emery O. Johnson started on May 1, 1957, and the vision he had for well into the future, EO Johnson Business Technologies Owner Mary Jo Johnson said, played an integral role in the success of his company.

Mary Jo said her father had an innate ability to see what businesses might need, but more importantly, he had the curiosity and interest in learning how he could best meet those needs.

Those attributes, she said, are just part of the reason his company has survived the last almost 67 years.  

And it all started with one fortuitous sales call.

“My dad had been selling Victor adding machines in Milwaukee and decided he didn’t want to become a branch manager with Victor and be moved,” Mary Jo said. “Instead he wanted to set out on his own.”

When he was making a sales call one day, Mary Jo said her father saw a Thermo-Fax copier from 3M Corporation, which he saw as a potential opportunity for him.

Back then, she said, business technology consisted mainly of typewriters, phones, Rolodexes and adding machines.

“But, he went to 3M, and then took on two dealerships – one in Wausau and one in the Eau Claire area – and the rest is history,” she said. 

EO was a one-man show, literally.

As the only employee, Mary Jo said her father wasn’t just making the sales calls – he was doing everything else, too, including servicing equipment and answering phones.

“His first hire was my grandfather, his father-in-law, who was a tinkerer – he went out and fixed the copiers, taking them apart and putting them back together because he loved that part of the technology,” she said. “(My father) was very good at selling this copying concept. Back then, the only way you could make a copy was with a mimeograph machine. And in order to utilize that you had to have this huge piece of equipment that would print out 25 or more at a time in order to make it worthwhile to even print anything. But he made these copies for them and it was almost like a magic show. They didn’t understand how what he did was even possible.”  

Mary Jo said her father’s desire was to help entrepreneurs in their businesses – because as an entrepreneur himself, he knew he needed products and services from others. 

“He totally agreed that we all have to join hands and help each other…,” she said. “He was always looking for new tools to help businesses run more efficiently so they could go out and do what they do best.” 

In helping others do that, Mary Jo said her father also did it for himself.

Today, the company that bears his name, she said, is a leader in office copier equipment, production print, digital transformation and IT solutions.

Memorable milestones

The EO Johnson Business Technologies’ timeline, Mary Jo said, contains dozens of memorable moments – with a couple standing out as hallmarks of its existence. 

One of them, Mary Jo said, was taking over a ComputerLand franchise in the very early 1990s. 

“That was very forward-thinking on my dad’s behalf,” she said. “This was still when copiers were analog – there was nothing digital in a copier at all. We were getting into color copying around that time, so it was becoming a digital format.”

Mary Jo said it was important to her father that people understood how those different hardwares talked to each other and how they could be beneficial.

“That was an interesting acquisition and really gave us that knowledge before many copier dealerships even understood what digital was,” she said. “That was huge for us.”

Along the way, Mary Jo said the company continued to grow and her father was proud to know each of his employees and families by name – considering them an extension of his own family. 

Though she herself had worked at the company during her high school and college years, Mary Jo said after graduating college she moved to Dallas.

However, she eventually returned to Wisconsin and rejoined the business in 1985 – taking it over in 1999, when her father, then in his 80s, decided to retire. 

Mary Jo said her father passed away in 2011, just one year before the company realized another defining moment – adding IT services, which would eventually become one of the most important parts of the business. 

Mary Jo said the company had been looking at starting its own IT business that would correlate with what it did in print – which eventually led to the purchase of a La Crosse company named Locknet.

At the time, she said Locknet worked mostly with banks – providing them with IT security.

EO Johnson’s 2012 acquisition of Locknet, Mary Jo said, helped the company differentiate itself.

“That really stepped up the game for us into the managed IT world,” Dave Greene, EO Johnson president and CEO, said. “So today, Locknet® Managed IT is managing and helping our clients manage their IT, but most importantly, manage their security. That’s how we got into cyber security and it was a very forward-thinking decision at the time. Today, it’s 30% of our business.” 

Mary Jo said the various acquisitions EO Johnson made over the years integrated the company even deeper into the sectors it was already supporting and doing well – “giving us a little more opportunity to come up with new ways to assist our clients.”

“It was definitely a game changer for us,” she said.

Today, Mary Jo said EO Johnson continues to manage IT for many banks, hospitals and healthcare-related companies and construction firms, among others. 

Always looking one step ahead

In today’s security-conscious world, how companies secure client data is as important as securing it – something Greene said EO Johnson doesn’t take lightly.

“We manage firewalls for banks across Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota,” he said. “Because we manage banks’ firewalls, we are viewed as a bank by the federal government. If we get hacked, our clients get hacked. So we have very strict examination procedures and policies to protect us, but most importantly, to protect our clients and our clients’ customers and clients.”

Greene said EO Johnson is ranked 18th in the world in managed service security providers.

“In any given month, we have about 331 million attacks on our network from outside agencies trying to hack us,” he said. “Most of those are done through AI. We have to have the ability to stay one step ahead of that. And we do it better than anybody else.”  

Of course, staying ahead of technology, Greene said, can be challenging when you’re in the technology business.

“You have to be ahead of technology, and to be ahead of technology you have to have great people with a willingness to learn and grow,” he said. “Finding those people and developing those people at a speed that keeps up with the speed of technology is the biggest challenge we face. We do very well at it, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have to work very hard at it.”

Greene said EO Johnson offers its employees great training and continued education programs.

“We have some very strong internship programs with universities, particularly in Iowa, where we bring in a large number of intern engineers every year,” he said. “And a lot of those internships are year-round. They get college credit and even though many of them move on, a surprising number of them stay, too. It’s a great opportunity for us to develop young talent and bring young talent into the business.”

Looking to the future, remembering the past

Mary Jo said when she was looking at taking over the reins of the company, she asked her father at what point in the early days of the company he thought he would consider himself successful. 

“To him, success meant having 10 employees and being able to pay them on time,” she said. 

Today, EO Johnson has 320 permanent employees, in 10 locations in three states – Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa – and the company continues to grow. 

“We have acquired a number of different offices over the years in order to expand what we can do and be more agile to help other businesses with their business information and the security of that information,” she said.

Greene said that vision continues today with leadership finding companies looking for assistance in handling their business information, “keeping it safe and secure and utilizing it more effectively.”

In addition to EO Johnson’s visionary focus, Mary Jo said the company’s success falls back on a personal philosophy that her father had – “treating others as you want them to treat you.”

She said he also believed that “if we do what’s right, the right things will happen.”

Mary Jo said that remains the blueprint of the company today.

“The people are No. 1,” she said. “And our culture is strong. It was there before it was a thing that everyone talks about these days. If you don’t have a culture you’re missing a big opportunity, and you will lose people much more easily and you won’t attract people very easily. It’s the people, the environment and the ability to remain agile and resilient and to work together.” 

Greene said EO Johnnson’s core values and behaviors are reviewed on a daily and weekly basis.

“Within our vision, we have what we call the Three Cs – our clients, our community and our culture,” he said. “But our overall vision statement says: ‘To be an indispensable technology partner to our clients, while supporting our communities and providing an extraordinary workplace culture.’” 

Mary Jo said she also credits diversification for EO Johnson’s continued success.

“Being diversified is important so that if one or more aspects of your business ebbs and flows, other aspects can fill in for it,” she said. “It’s a blessing to be able to assist clients in so many different ways because you just never quite know what the world will bring you.”

The many facets of EO Johnson, Mary Jo, are still unknown to many.

“A lot of people aren’t aware of the many different things we do,” she said. “Some people still see us as a copier company. That’s true, we are a copier company, but we are so much more. We are an information technology company, and we provide secured information management for companies. We work with organizations to help make them productive and able to grow their business and able to give back to the communities which then make the communities grow. So, it’s a big circle and we’re just a little cog in that wheel.”