People You Need to Know: Jarad Johnson

Noting Mostly Serious LLC is no stranger to remote work, founder and CEO Jarad Johnson says the website design and digital marketing firm is currently in between homes.

Johnson says the 12-person staff at Mostly Serious, which he founded in 2010, exited its office at 3810 E. Sunshine St., Ste. 201, around two months ago. Acknowledging productivity for the company has always been strong remotely – even amid the COVID-19 pandemic – fewer employees were working in the office earlier this year.

“It just turned into this thing where it wasn’t worth the investment,” he says. “We’ll end up back in an office eventually, but for right now, this is working really well for us.”

Making business shifts is nothing new for Johnson, who also co-founded professional training and coaching business Habitat Communication & Culture in 2020 with Spencer Harris. Additionally, Harris serves as president at Mostly Serious, where he is a majority owner with Johnson. The company last year announced Thomas Douglas, CEO of information technology services provider JMark, as a minority investor.

The investment from Douglas expanded an existing partnership between Mostly Serious and JMARK related to artificial intelligence and consulting in the area, officials say.

“Tom always says we’re better together than we are apart,” Johnson says. “That’s been the experience of just his expertise being brought to the table, us being able to help a number of his clients, and JMark being able to help some of our clients. It’s been fantastic.”

Johnson, who uses AI tools both personally and professionally, says Mostly Serious in 2021 began seeing the emergence of the technology.

“By 2022, with the release of ChatGPT in November, it was very clear to us that it was going to shock our industry, and that we needed to get ahead of this,” he says. “Since then, we’ve invested heavily in understanding what AI would do to our business. And through that, the thing we’ve always done at Mostly Serious and at Habitat is take what we learn by doing it on ourselves and then take that out to the market and help our clients kind of solve those same problems.”

A graduate of Greenfield High School, located in a small town around 40 miles northwest of Springfield, Johnson quickly determined college life wasn’t for him. He completed one semester at Ozarks Technical Community College before transferring to Missouri State University to study graphic design. Shortly thereafter, he was hired as an interactive designer with digital marketing firm Departika LLC and dropped out of school.

“I got the job I was going to school to get,” he says, adding that a return to college never made sense. “I learned an immense amount at that company on how to do this type of work, how to work with clients, how to understand problems and solve problems.”

After two years at Departika, Johnson worked for a couple of local marketing and web development firms – both since shuttered – before eventually achieving his goal to start his own company.

A self-described “nerd,” Johnson says he’s always been fascinated with technology and “new shiny things.”

“I try any new app, any new tech that exists. I built my first computer when I was 13 with hay hauling money,” he says, adding he worked on farms in Greenfield during his childhood. “We needed websites for our little groups that played video games, so that’s what got me into that in high school.”

Over his leadership tenure at Mostly Serious, Johnson says he’s been told he’s much more relaxed about feedback than he used to be. He says AI is likely a reason for that.

“One of my lines I go back to is, ‘AI creates options. Humans make decisions.’ And this has allowed us to move at such a fast pace where we can just throw out ideas and throw away work and not worry about it,” he says of an area where he’s seen collaboration change at his company.

Working in the tech industry was all Johnson says he imagined doing growing up. While his company isn’t operating in Silicon Valley and doesn’t have that area’s resources, he likes helping clients face and solve tough problems.

“If we can be any type of conduit from what’s happening there to here, so we can stay ahead and not fall behind as a region, that’s also very important to me,” he says. 

Jarad Johnson founded digital agency Mostly Serious. Now he’s championing practical AI adoption to help the region lead the way.