Marla Johnson

The direction of Marla Johnson's life resembles a random Internet search. Clicking a link here leads to a second link over there, which leads to yet another link elsewhere. There's no obvious arc, just a series of fortuitous discoveries plotting her destiny like a firefly marks the night.

A co-founder and the chief executive officer of Aristotle, the Little Rock website design and Internet marketing agency, she works in an industry where waves of change come flashing down fiber optic cables at the speed of light. In that relentlessly variable environment, Johnson's at home.

"I always expect amazing things," she says.

She's not simply waiting around for The Next Big Thing to fall into her lap, colleagues say. Tourism marketing, for example. "She's not just out there understanding the market," says David Davies, former executive director of Garvan Woodland Gardens and the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute. "She's out there making the market as far as online marketing is concerned."

Jake Steinman, founder of the San Francisco-based eTourism Summit, says he asked Johnson to join his advisory board because of her unstoppable drive. "There are about 10 thought leaders in the industry that I follow, and she is one of them," Steinman says.

Johnson has held leadership positions with Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, Just Communities of Arkansas, and Little Rock's Public Education Foundation, among others. She is a member of the board of Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield and the new president of Fifty for the Future. She also has been active with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, Arkansas Arts Center and Arkansas Repertory Theatre.

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Johnson attributes her insatiable curiosity to her parents. Her father, Marshall Johnson, left the family farm to sell business machines and then mainframe computers. Her mother, Louella Sanchez, was a public school teacher for 38 years who volunteered to teach theater along with her other duties. Louella was a lifelong learner, Johnson says.

"When I was born, my mother found a soul mate," Johnson says. "She took me to museums and concerts, and I loved them from the time I was little. I sang and played the piano. Everyone in our family was a musician."

The youngest of four children, Johnson spent her first 11 years in Pueblo, Colo., and St. Louis. In 1970, the family moved to Memphis, and Louella got a teaching job in Germantown.

Johnson was a good student, active in her school and church. Her senior year ended in a typical flurry. She fell in love, got sick and had to take an exam while playing Ado Annie in a production of Oklahoma!

"I played the girl who can't say no, which was ironic because I was very religious," Johnson recalls. "I carried my Bible to school the whole time I was in high school."

The first major click in her life happened minutes after she finished that last exam. She hadn't made plans for college, and no one had suggested she ought to, probably because the adults in her life assumed she was already on top of it.

"I'm very much all about this moment," Johnson says. "I took this test and I went out to my car and for the first time I looked past the parking lot. My eyes focused and I thought, 'OK, I'm going out there.'"

She enrolled in Memphis State University, now the University of Memphis, at the last minute, and "it turned into a blessing."

Johnson held a variety of jobs in college that laid the groundwork for her career. She used a personal computer for the first time compiling surveys for the transportation department, did research for an economics professor using punch-card computers and worked at the local PBS affiliate, where she learned film and video production. She also worked in a library and learned how card catalogs, that analog precursor to the Internet, organized the world's accumulated information.

Johnson eventually graduated with three majors: international relations with a focus on economic development, urban studies, and political science.

Rex Enoch's class persuaded her to add that major in international relations. She credits Enoch with teaching her how to "connect with people who lived completely different lives than mine."

Enoch, a retired manager of adult education programs at Heifer International, recalls that the international relations program was just getting started at Memphis State.

"Marla helped make this unique class we were finding our way through into a positive co-learning experience," he says. "It really was a collaborative relationship."

After graduating in 1981, Johnson moved to Little Rock with her then-boyfriend. She worked for the state Health Department for three years, worked for a time at KHTV, Channel 11, started a film production company, taught private school for 10 years, and got her master's degree in education from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

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In 1994, Danielle Bunten Berry of Little Rock was a nationally known video game designer and programmer. Jim Simmons, then a producer for Electronic Arts, asked Berry to develop a new game called "Immercenary." Berry turned down the job and recommended J.D. Robinson, a programmer who was Johnson's friend.

"That's where Marla came into the picture," says Simmons, a Fayetteville native now living in New Zealand. "She was part of J.D.'s loose creative collective and would lead the team doing the live action video part of the game, including casting, costuming and innovative video techniques. Marla knew everybody in Little Rock video production, so she was able to put together a great team."

The fact that Johnson had never done a video game wasn't a concern, Simmons says, because the industry was in the "infancy of figuring out how to incorporate movielike media," and no one had any experience in that part of the project.

Johnson finished her work early, and Carl Shivers, a member of the Immercenary team and friend from her days at the Health Department, said the magic words: "You guys should start an Internet company."

"And I said, 'What's that? What's the Internet?'" Johnson says, laughing. "I looked at his account, and I said, 'Oh, my God,' and then I went and got an Internet account, and I knew I had to do it."

Maybe you remember the Internet of 1994: a pokey, mostly colorless, text-heavy maze that was already bottomless but difficult for the uninitiated to navigate.

To Johnson, it was a thing of beauty.

"It was like falling in love. It was like explosions, you know, it was so great," she says. "I felt like everything I loved was embodied in the Internet. It was creative, it was connections, it was communication, it was learning. I just immediately got it. I knew. I just knew I would be a part of it."

Not that Johnson didn't have misgivings. She thought of herself as an artist rather than a money-driven entrepreneur. But she remembered the pride a childhood friend's father took in working for FedEx Corp., a well-run company that valued its employees. And, she realized, good jobs make it possible for people not only to care for themselves and their families but also to contribute to their communities.

"I had this dream the night after I saw the Internet that I was a vessel kind of like a magic lantern, and light was pouring through me and coming out as money," Johnson says, laughing again.

She and her co-founders -- Dixon Bowles, Robinson, Shivers, Elton and Dina Pruitt, Christopher Stashuk and Benjamin McCorkle -- started building Aristotle. Since Johnson's work on Immercenary was complete, she took the lead and learned everything she could about the Internet as quickly as possible.

Out of the chute, Aristotle offered website design and dial-up Internet access, but the Internet was hardly a household word in those days, so potential customers had to be educated.

"We went to Park Plaza and set up computers in a kiosk and showed people how to install [Aristotle's service] and how to use it and explained to them what the Internet was," Johnson says. "I was a go-getter. I called everybody. I said, 'Hey, can I tell you why you need a website and what a website is and what the Internet is?'"

Aristotle signed its first dial-up customer on Aug. 14, 1995, three years before Google was founded.

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Twenty years ago, Aristotle sold Internet access for a dollar an hour, beginning at 10 hours per month and topping out at 40 hours. Customers didn't know how much access they needed in those early days, so by-the-hour billing seemed appropriate. (The company soon dropped it to 50 cents an hour, and in fact, still sells dial-up in all 50 states for that rate, Johnson says.)

Patrick O'Sullivan, executive director of the Blue & You Foundation, remembers that his teenage daughter wanted an Internet account in the late 1990s. He liked Aristotle's 50-cent rate.

"As a parent, that seemed reasonable to me because I couldn't imagine anyone spending much time on this thing called the Internet," he says.

(Aristotle also featured an early social networking component: Users could see whether their fellow Aristotle customers were online, play checkers against one another and take part in streaming chats.)

O'Sullivan says Blue Cross and the Blue & You Foundation eventually bought websites from Aristotle after long internal debates about whether the Internet was a passing fad.

"They created this awareness of the Internet in Arkansas," he says.

As a private company, Aristotle doesn't disclose financial results, but Johnson says most of its revenue the first couple of years came from Internet access. Within three years, though, web development and Internet marketing generated more than half its revenue, she says. Today, she says, interactive marketing, advertising and web development bring in five times as much revenue as Internet access.

Over the past 20 years, Aristotle has employed 250 people, conducted $1.5 million in pro bono work for nonprofits and managed 1,350 domains, Johnson adds. Destination marketing is one of Aristotle's specialties, and the company has designed a number of tourism websites.

David Davies, now assistant vice provost for student affairs at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, teaches a course on hospitality marketing. Every semester, he invites Johnson to speak to his students about how technological changes will affect the tourism industry.

"At the Governor's Conference on Tourism, I always ask her what's next," he says. "Her most memorable answer was: mobile, mobile, mobile. That was six or seven years ago, and she was already talking about it."

Johnson is heavily engaged in the latest trends, including making custom music videos for businesses and managing online ads that can quickly be redirected based on geographic and demographic information gleaned from active customers. She also plans to open an Aristotle office in Northwest Arkansas in the first half of this year and will teach a course in online marketing at the university in the fall. Next month Aristotle, in partnership with the Northwest Arkansas Technology Council, will present the Northwest Arkansas Google Digital Breakfast at Arend Arts Center in Bentonville. The free event will offer business leaders insider tips and online advertising strategies from Google experts.

"I wish sometimes that we made widgets," Johnson says. "I would get more sleep."

Scott Morris is a freelance writer based in Little Rock. Email him at [email protected].

NAN Profiles on 04/12/2015