‘The funny thing about sadness is that it’s temporary.”
James Webb’s storied career started as a radiologic technologist in his home state of Mississippi. After moving to Dallas in 1983, he began working as the Director of Radiology at a local hospital and, for the next 13 years, worked on the executive team for various medical imaging companies. In 1996, Webb started his first of several companies and became a key leader in the industry. After more than 40 years in the medical field, including five exit events, he turned his focus to the fitness sector, becoming one of the largest OrangeTheory franchises in the country. James owned and oversaw the management of 33 OrangeTheory Fitness franchises throughout NorthTexas. His most recent endeavor includes an agreement to develop, and open, at least 18 BeBalanced Centers throughout Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston.
James released a book last year, “Redneck Resilience: A Country Boy’s Journey to Prosperity“, where he shares the highs and lows that accompany anyone who becomes successful in life. You’ll learn about amazing wins and devastating losses, about sin and redemption, about recovery and forward momentum. Most importantly, readers truly understand the benefit and advantage of RESILIENCE – the one singular characteristic James attributes to all his success. Resilience, as James illustrates throughout his book, is the key differentiator between gained and missed opportunities.
James attributes a majority of his success to the relationships – both personal and professional – that have inspired and motivated him to achieve greater things. James is an alum of Jones County Junior College where he received his radiologic certification and William Carey University where he earned a degree in Radiology and Business. He continued his education at the University of North Texas receiving a Master of Science with an emphasis in Business and Health Administration.
James lives in Frisco, Texas with his wife, Cathy, and together, they have five children, Elizabeth, Max, Joey, Kristen and Carly and four grandchildren (and another one on the way).
Let’s learn a little about you and really get to experience what makes us tick – starting at our beginnings. Where did your story begin?
James Webb: I often tell people I was a poor dumb southern Baptist redneck from South Mississippi that got very lucky and was very blessed. And to tell you the truth, most of that is true. I grew up in a small town in Mississippi and was the product of a budding high school romance. My parents were 17 years old at the time and by the time they were 25, they had three kids, a mortgage they could barely pay on a home they bought for $9500, an old Ford Fairlane Station Wagon, and a mountain of bills that caused nightly “discussions” at the dinner table. And as far back as I can remember, I always wanted so much more than that for my family…always…..
So, in 1965, at 5 years of age, I discovered Pot Holders and begin making them for the church bazaars that we so often attended. As best I can remember, I sold them for a nickel holder. My guess is, over the next three years, I made and sold about 800 and accumulated enough money to buy my first lawnmower and rake. And so at 8 years of age, I set up my first company, James Webb Lawn Services, recruited a couple of buddies, and went to work on weekends and after school mowing yards and raking leaves.
By the time I was 12 years old, I managed to save several hundred dollars so I bought a Schwinn 10 speed bike and signed on with the Laurel Leader Call as a newspaper delivery boy. Every day a bundle of newspapers was dropped off at my grandparent’s house and the aunts and cousins dove in and helped me roll and rubber band the newspapers. Fun job riding my bicycle and throwing papers but again, I WANTED MORE
Paper route only lasted about 1 year but the money was good. At 14, I got my first “real” job at a MCB Business Services, a printing company. $1.25 per hour to wrap paper products, make paper pads, and generally anything else they needed me to do. Eventually, I learned to create paper products (business cards, forms, stationary) and to operate the printing presses. Stayed with this job through high school and my first two years of junior college but obviously, and always, I WANTED MORE.
After high school, enrolled at the local junior college and while walking through the science building saw a sign that simply said “Interested in x-ray technology call Liz Bush”. So signed up, got accepted, and did 24 months of “slave labor” in Radiologic Technology, passed the exam, and got my license. Worked the overnight shifts in the ER and went back to college during the daytime. Graduated. I worked a shift of 10 nights out of 14 and on my days off, worked at smaller county hospitals doing 48-hour shifts. The day after I graduated from William Carey College, with my Bachelor’s degree, I was offered the Director of Education position for the hospital. Yep, me at 21 years of age now over the program I graduated from just 18 months earlier. It’s a great learning curve when 6 of your 15 students were the same age as me and a couple of them were fellow high school classmates. Had some fun, learned a lot, and I WANTED MORE.
After 18 months of teaching the radiology program, and in the summer of 1982, with a beer in my hand and on the flip of a coin, I quit my job and moved to Dallas, TX. My wife and I slept in my truck the first few nights trying to figure out what the heck we’d just done. Eventually ended up at Lewisville Memorial Hospital as the Chief Technologist for the x-ray department. And then boom…..3 months into the job, the Director resigns and they name me the new Director of Radiology. Yep, 24 years old and probably the youngest in the U.S. at the time. Enrolled in night school at the University of North Texas and, after 4 years, graduated with an M.S. in Health Administration in 1986.
I thought my next career move would be as a hospital administrator but this thing called MRI was born so I joined a start-up and worked my way up to a Vice President of Operations. Long hours & long days but help build the second-largest mobile MRI company at the time. Eventually, the company was sold and I received a phone call….”Mr. Webb, the chair your sitting in needs to be vacant, you have no equity therefore you are fired”…. I had no equity or ownership. Just a well-paid gun for hire. Once the shock wore off, and rather than let it keep me down, I went and played golf that afternoon…and, since I was known in the industry, had a job in Atlanta the next day.
Atlanta was a tough time. Hated my job. Hated the owner. Didn’t like me very much. So…after 18 months, I changed it all. Left the job for a new one in South Florida and became Chief Operating Officer of a medical imaging company based in Boca Raton, FL. Helped revamp the company from privately owned physician joint ventures to a publically traded company. After about 5 years into my job as Chief Operating Officer of the company in Boca, I was approached by Dr. George Laquis. He was moving back to the island of Trinidad to be Minister of Health and wanted to bring MRI to the island. Walked into my boss, the CEO’s office, and asked him to fire me so I could exercise my contract for severance and I asked him to be my first investor. He did and as I recall, I had about $90,000 bucks in the bank to invest with him.
Trinidad led to Nicaragua which led to Honduras, Guatemala, Barbados, Bahamas, South Florida, and even Guyana, South America. Tons and tons of stories of resiliency are involved in this venture. Held at gunpoint twice. 53 separate trips to Managua trying to save a deal. Earthquakes, volcanoes, caught up in a large civil riot, engulfed in a street protest that irrupted into gunfire, numerous government official involvements, and a decent amount of “hand out” corruption. Finally, I decided enough of this craziness so I sold the company. Made a little money but not enough to quit so begin looking for my next opportunity.
Started doing some consulting and had a couple of options….stay in Boca and go back to work for my previous boss (with equity) or continue on by myself……… No one believes in me more than me…..so off I go on my next venture……..Texas. I had made the decision, around 2000, to invest in a medical imaging center deal in Texas….one of those “I’ll provide the money, you guys do all the work…and send me a check back”……Didn’t work……So in 2001, 11 years after leaving Texas, moved a 3-week old son, a 3-year-old son, and a supportive but disappointed wife from Boca Raton, FL to Plano, TX. Knowing the long hours ahead of me, I kissed my wife on the cheek and said “I’ll see you in 3 – 4 years….I gotta go back to work”….And I did. Worked 60 hours a week, coached kids sports on the weekends to be with my boys, tried to do one date night a week, gained 55 pounds from eating breakfast donuts every morning, and faced so many business obstacles that by 2003, we were dead broke. Could not even make my house note.
Obstacle 1 – Hospital our imaging center is attached to goes out of business in 1 day due to Medicare fraud. City revokes our occupancy license, turns off power, and gave us 10 days to vacate. On day 9, and out of desperation, spoke at the Dallas City council meeting. While it was evident that they could care less, we found an angel in the role of assistant city manager. Back in business the next day…be it next to an empty hospital.
Obstacle 2 – DVI – Publically traded company loaned money to people like me….lots of knowledge but no deep pockets. Essentially owned us. In one day, they are shut down due to FBI investigation into double selling paper. Factoring line is turned off. Credit line is turned off. Judge intervenes and partial financial line restored. Sued by successor bank… three-year federal court battle that results in favorable settlement for us.
Obstacle 3 – Successor bank sells lawsuit settlement to outside group who tries to have the settlement overturned. Fought them off for another 2 years and eventually settled even though I didn’t want to.
Obstacle 4 – Managed Care insurance company decides to reduce contract rates for MRIs to a point that we cannot survive. I invoke a strategy that NO ONE thinks will work…it does….The ship is finally righted and we move forward……ultimately building 27 outpatient medical imaging clinics.
As I mentioned, there came a point where I could not make my house note. So, around 2003, I sat down with my finances and found where I could make a $9000 cash distribution out of one of the business bank accounts. Paid my house note, took my sons and their mom for a nice dinner and…. went back to work…… and for some strange reason, ….it never stopped after that. Next month was $10,000, next month $15,000, next month $46,000…..up to $1M per month take home…… All of this lasted until we sold the company in 2017.
Not one to sit still, I also got involved in the franchise world with Orangetheory Fitness, from 2014 to 2019, our team built and/or bought 33 OTF gyms and sold all of the in December, 2019 for a really nice pay day and 45 days before Covid changed our world.
Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
James Webb: Backtrack to 1990. Barry O’Bryan was my mentor. Long before I began my entrepreneurial journey, he took me under his wing and got me out of hospitals and into business. I adored Barry and I think he saw in me the kind of person he wanted to help. Working with him was an adventure, learning from him was a gift, calling him a friend was a treasure.
Until I screwed up.
Our relationship, which had been something I could count on ended almost overnight. Barry and I had a fight. I was wrong. I had hurt him, abused his trust. I will not go into details, but I went from being his star student to a pariah. We both tried to mend the relationship but time and distance were not on our side. Six months later, the company was sold and I was terminated. From there—Atlanta, Florida, and on to my life as an entrepreneur.
I was happy to leave in the rearview mirror so many of the relationships and memories from that time in my life, but Barry stung. His was a scar that would take a long time to heal, and I was too cocky, stupid, or just plain stubborn to do anything but let it fester.
I had been in Boca Raton for a couple of years when I got the phone call from a mutual acquaintance and former coworker at the old company. Barry was going to be in Florida and he wanted to know if I’d meet him for dinner. I can’t remember the name of the place we went to, but I remember that the fancy dinner started off awkwardly, but by the time we got to dessert, we had kissed and made up. I felt a lightness that I hadn’t felt in a long time. We laughed and told stories about the old days. We caught up on family stuff and work and even made plans to get together for golf.
I couldn’t undo the past, but it felt like the chance to rewrite the future and include Barry in it had been dropped into my lap. The relationship could never be the same, but it could still be good, and that created a sense of release and happiness in me that I could never have expected. That dinner didn’t erase the rift, but it went a long way to bridging the divide and it was gratifying to know that the scar had a chance to begin to heal.
It was two or three days later when I got the call. Barry had been skiing with his son not far from their Connecticut home and had dropped dead from a heart attack. I was floored, devastated. Our relationship had been built over years working together, come to close to a permanent ending in a matter of moments, and, after three years of stagnation, had just begun to show promise … then this. Just as quickly as he had come back into my life, he was gone and the sadness was overwhelming.
The funny thing about sadness is that it’s temporary. And once the fog started to clear, I realized that the sadness had morphed into an overwhelming sense of gratitude. I was grateful to have had Barry in my life, grateful for the opportunity to make up and to be able to look back on the good memories, not the bad. I felt extreme gratitude for my relationship with Barry—not the money we made together, the sales, the impact on my career. No, I was grateful for him. I don’t measure success in dollars and cents, possessions, or the kinds of achievements a lot of people seem to think matter the most. When I look back on my life, the biggest successes I can claim take the shape of people such as Barry,
People are always more valuable than money; memories mean more than money ever could and the greatest accomplishments of my life and career are defined by the relationships with the people who have been a part of it every step of the way.
What are the most common mistakes you see entrepreneurs make and what would you suggest they do?
James Webb: The entrepreneurial path can be so diverse, so problematic and so full of obstacles that mistakes are basically inevitable. We all know the statement “we learn from our failures, not from our successes”. I like to add that if you haven’t failed at least 3 times, you are probably not trying hard enough. There are many mistakes that we all have made but I’ll focus on three of them.
One of the single biggest mistakes is failing to focus on relationships. Relationships are critical. Listen to people, Invest in People. Hold yourself accountable to people. If you don’t take anything else away from this, it’s that financial future will be formed, shaped, built and defined by the relationships you create in this journey.
I’ve met many entrepreneurs who fall for the starry-eyed and overly romantic belief that they have to invest everything they have in order to get a business off the ground. A lot of them end up broke. It can be hard, particularly when you are just starting out, to get other people to invest in your ideas. Whether it’s a bank (big fan of borrowing money) or an investor, you are asking them to make a calculated bet on you and your future. Without a track record of success, that bet looks pretty bad. I get it. Try it anyway. Before you take out a second mortgage or drain your investment account, try to get other people to pay for your business. It can be uncomfortable and difficult to do, but it is worth it. Using other people’s money may also require you to delay making anything yourself, but it is worth it in the long run. When you use your money to run your business, your decisions are clouded with emotion. You don’t make the best decisions for the business; you make them based on a compromise between the company’s needs and your own. And if you’re overly leveraged into the business, you leave yourself exposed to real problems if things go south. Protect your assets and keep a clear line between the decisions you make for your business and the decisions you make for your life.
And finally, in business, it’s easy to let “what could be” trick you into ignoring the very real possibility of failure. Every entrepreneur does it. They sit down with a piece of paper or a spreadsheet and start to add things up. They see prosperity, accumulation of wealth, a future much brighter than today. That’s good. Hope and optimism are the driving force in entrepreneurialism. But caution is what leads to long-term success. Every business requires a plan, and every great business has more than one plan. There’s the plan that lays out what happens when everything goes right, and there’s the plan for survival when everything goes wrong. Use the first one to guide your investment and marketing. Use the second to protect your business.
As I write this, the world has been in lockdown for nearly two years. The Covid-19 virus has created unprecedented challenges for businesses in nearly every sector and in nearly every country in the world. Apart from some very forward-looking virologists and science fiction writers, no one saw this coming, and a lot of businesses have been put out of business for their lack of forethought. No one will come out unscathed, but the businesses that planned for the upside but did not plan for the downside will be exposed.
Business founders and owners are optimists. Business leaders are pragmatists. Entrepreneurs and operators are both.
Resilience is critical in critical times like the ones we are going through now. How would you define resilience?
James Webb: Many people think resilience is the art of getting knocked down and getting back up…over and over again. Resilience isn’t just about getting back up. Any fool can get back up when they’ve been knocked down. What other choice do you have, staying down in the gutter? A resilient person never considers staying down. Getting back up is an instinct, like breathing or blinking. Resilient people never take their eye off where they’re going, even when they get knocked down. They don’t take it easy; they don’t retire. They refocus. They get back and find a new path.
What is most important to your organization—mission, vision or values?
James Webb: While all of these traits are important, at this point in my career, I focus on vision. Or as I like to call it, A, B, C, D, E for an exit. In short, as an entrepreneur starting a company, enter with the exit in mind. Having an infrastructure that allows you to grow in a meaningful way puts you in a position for an exit. Yes, A, B, C, & D are important but if you believe in your process then develop a 5 – 7 year exit strategy and start from day 1 with that in mind. It will help you make critical and important decisions that will lead to the “big payday” we all dream of as entrepreneurs.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success?
James Webb: I’ve spoken about this in previous questions but, without a doubt, the ability to form, grow and maintain relationships has been instrumental in my success. Whether it be employee, customers, or vendors, relationships are critical. With employees, be clear in your expectations. Intereact often and show you care. Customers want to know you as a person so be a little receptive to opening up during conversation. Most of my conversations begin with “how are you and how is your family”. I want to know my clients and I want them to know me. I often see vendors so mistreated by their clients. Why! Venders can provide so much value. Whether it be experience, knowing you competition, or responsible for your financing, get to know your vendors. Become a geniune friend and not a pretend friend and see the fruits of that relationship multiply and help you in so many ways.
The art of resilience, as described before, has been paramount in my entreprenual success. When you get knocked down, get back up, access the situation and find a new path. That simple.
And finaly, Work ethic is critical. Work harder than anyone else. Period. When it time to go home, send out two more emails. When your employees are leaving, stay and be the last one out the door and the first one in the next day. Being lucky is important but I have always found that this saying is so true……”the harder I work, the luckier I get”.
Being a CEO of the company, do you think that your personal brand reflects your company’s values?
James Webb: I don’t have an answer for this question……never had a “personal brand”
What’s your favorite leadership style and why?
James Webb: Contingency management. Manage the situation, don’t rule it. Care for your people, don’t set them up for failure. Set expectations but hold them accountable. If you’ve set expectations and they are not following or achieving counsel them or make the necessary change. And above all things, you don’t have to be a Theory X manager in order to be effective.
Do you think entrepreneurship is something that you’re born with or something that you can learn along the way?
James Webb: I do think there is an innate genetic trait in my family that led me toward entrepreneurship. But, it was my life/business experience, that truly drove me to want to be “my own boss”. Nothing like being terminated after a company is sold and you realize that you had no “skin in the game”…just a hired gun. Those type of experiences certainly sent me down the path but I also always felt deep inside that this track was meant for me.
What’s your favorite “life lesson” quote and how has it affected your life?
James Webb: I have a quote from President Calvin Coolidge on the wall of my office:
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
Coolidge will probably never make the list of the country’s greatest leaders. No one is fighting to add his face to Mount Rushmore, but there is a lot of wisdom in those six little words—wisdom born from experience. Coolidge made a name for himself in Boston in 1919 when he became known for his decisive action in the face of a bloody and violent police strike. America was newer back then. The country had risen from revolt and survived the Civil War. The industrial revolution had created wealth unlike any time in our history and with that had come graft, scandal, and an erosion of public trust in the government. World War I had just ended and, while the US had not been hit nearly as hard as our friends in Europe, we found ourselves wrestling with a new identity as an economic and military power. We were prosperous and naive, growing, and powerful. During his administration, Coolidge oversaw an economic boom, while maintaining an almost monastic devotion to his ideals.
He never had the finesse of a Kennedy or the steadfastness of Lincoln, but he never lost sight of himself. He believed in the free market and in a person’s responsibility to do right, not only in the face of temptation but in the presence of opportunity. He oversaw the Roaring Twenties while maintaining a reputation of quiet contemplation.
I have never been accused of being the quiet, sober type, but I have always had a soft spot for Coolidge. Historians rank him in the bottom half of the forty-five men who have occupied the White House, but I have always seen him as someone who wanted to do the right thing, someone who believed in the balance between forward motion and introspection.
This interview was originally published on ValiantCEO.
