Who Is Will Johnson? The Story Behind The Will Johnson Team (2026)

The interview was supposed to take fifteen minutes. That was the offer Will Johnson made to the dean of the Middle Tennessee School of Anesthesia: give him fifteen minutes, and if the panel didn't like what it saw, the school would never hear from him again. He had been asking for four years — four straight years of applying and not meeting the criteria, finding out what the criteria were, going away, and meeting them. Now he was driving from Fort Gordon, Georgia, to Madison, Tennessee, with three textbooks.

Twelve people waited around the table, most of them anesthesiologists. Johnson — an Army officer, a nurse with five kinds of intensive care behind him — laid the books in front of them: Stoelting's Basics of Anesthesia, which he had spent a year reading cover to cover; Pharmacology and Physiology in Anesthetic Practice; a third anesthesia text. These were not admissions materials. They were the books the school's own students studied after getting in. Then he made the offer he had driven there to make: ask me any question from any of these three books, and I'll answer it.

And because he has never been good at leaving the risky half of the truth unsaid, he added the rest: "I don't have the best grades or the best background, but what I do have is incredible grit. I may not be the best student you've ever had, but you will be proud to have had me — and I will graduate this program." Twelve people around a table, deciding whether he meant it. The right place to start, though, is not the table in Madison. It's a time clock at a fast-food restaurant, and a boy punching in on his fifteenth birthday.

Who is Will Johnson?

Will Johnson is the founder of The Will Johnson Team, a veteran-owned real estate team serving Nashville and Middle Tennessee, brokered by eXp Realty. He has been a Middle Tennessee Realtor for twelve years, with eXp Realty since 2017. Before real estate he served in the U.S. Army — active duty from October 1997 to December 2006, the reserves from 2009 to 2013, leaving at the rank of Major — and practiced as a nurse anesthetist at St. Thomas Midtown in Nashville, a career he ended on his own terms after a multiple sclerosis diagnosis, resigning his license before anyone asked him to. He lives in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and leads the team with his wife and team partner, Mindy Abshier. The record around the team is kept by third parties: a 5.0 Google rating, RealTrends recognition in 2026 as a top Tennessee team by sales volume, expert quotes under his name in CBS MoneyWatch and Bottom Line Personal.

Every item in that paragraph is checkable, and it is also the least true-feeling version of the man, the way a map is the least true-feeling version of a country. The truer answer is a tally: four people told Will Johnson no — a high school counselor, a dean, a family member, and the school in Madison — and what he did with each no built everything that followed. The story runs in order, because the order is the point.

Where did Will Johnson grow up?

Wisconsin, first, in a one-income family. His mother babysat other people's children at home; for a stretch when he was young, the family was on welfare. There was one car. There were periods when there wasn't enough food in the house, and there was the thing underneath, harder to name — the low, steady static of bills, the stress adults assume children don't notice. Children notice. When he was in fourth grade, the family moved to Tennessee.

He took a job at a Krystal fast-food restaurant on the day he turned fifteen, the first day the law would let him work. The job was not for pocket money; it was to help bring in income at home.

The rest of his adolescence reads like two résumés stapled together. One belongs to a joiner: swim team, cross country, yearbook, ROTC, Key Club. The other belongs to a worker: twenty hours a week at Krystal, the legal maximum for a student then. What neither résumé shows is grades. His junior year, a high school counselor looked at his GPA and told him college wasn't meant for everyone. It was the first official verdict on Will Johnson, and his answer set the template for every verdict that followed: he made straight A's his senior year, just to scrape into a state school, Middle Tennessee State University.

College was three jobs at a time — tuition, a car, a phone, help with the family groceries — and living at home with his parents, for whom he remains grateful; there was no other financial option. He'll volunteer the unflattering part himself: early on, he partied and drank too much. He became the first person in his family to graduate from college, in a family where nobody had ever earned more than $70,000 in a year, and the explanation he gives for those years says more about him than any award since: he didn't have anybody to ask.

Why did Will Johnson become a nurse anesthetist?

Because of a rash. He'd had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic, and the doctor treating it asked him, in passing, what he planned to do with his life. He had no idea. The doctor said that if he had it all to do over, he'd have become a nurse anesthetist. Thirty seconds, a stranger, one good question — and the course of the next two decades was set. The echo took years to become visible: the man whose life pivoted on a near-stranger's question now spends his working life asking strangers life-changing questions at their own kitchen tables.

Did Will Johnson almost fail out of nursing school?

Twice, nearly. Nursing school barely admitted him, and in his second year the dean asked him to leave the program: he had missed the required average in one class by a single test question — roughly a 73.99 against a 74. He stayed. He was held back a semester while his friends advanced without him, a humiliation he doesn't bother to soften, and he graduated. Barely, he'll add, doing his critics' work for them. That made two official verdicts on Will Johnson, and he was still keeping score.

Is Will Johnson a veteran?

Yes — though not in the branch he'd wanted. The plan from high school was the Navy: SEAL, or the nuclear-engineering program. He was a serious swimmer who didn't know that hard training can put protein in your urine, and he failed the Navy physical on his kidneys. Turned away. In college an Army recruiter pursued him; to his surprise, he passed that physical, and, once again with nobody to ask, signed a four-year commitment in exchange for a scholarship of about $3,000. Four years of his life for three thousand dollars, signed with nobody at the table to tell him whether that was a good trade.

The Army inherited everyone else's low expectations. His dean told the ROTC department his odds of graduating were poor, and days beforehand he learned he'd been rerouted from the easygoing summer camp for medical cadets in Washington state to a full Army camp, unprepared. He went in with a chip on his shoulder and came out holding records that camp had never seen. His own explanation is the quietest sentence in this story: he'd never thought much of himself. The camp was the first hard evidence to the contrary.

His first assignment was Gold Bar recruiter at MTSU, sent to sign high-schoolers up for the Army. Johnson put enlisted pay on a projector screen and told them the truth — that many of them would live near the poverty line — and urged the capable ones toward officer programs instead. Enlistment-track recruits resigned. Recruiters called his colonel. He was chastised, and his defense didn't give an inch: "I'm just out there telling the truth… they need to make the decision with their eyes wide open." Will Johnson has been getting in trouble for telling people the truth for his entire adult life. The settings change — a recruiting hall, an interview room in Madison, a kitchen table in Nashville. The habit doesn't.

Where did Will Johnson serve?

Three posts tell the story — Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and Fort Gordon in Georgia — across active duty from October 1997 to December 2006 and the reserves from 2009 to 2013, leaving as a Major in the Iraq-war era, though his only deployment would be stateside, and would be a hurricane. Brooke came first: newly opened, a Level-1 trauma center. His step-down unit ran three patients per nurse, at times three patients on ventilators, and he was a brand-new nurse. He calls it the highest stress of his life. It was a unit under crushing strain.

He chose his next post the way a tired man chooses a chair: Fort Leonard Wood, the middle of nowhere, one or two low-acuity patients at a time, the break he needed. Then war broke out. As the only medical officer on post who hadn't deployed, he worked seven days a week, twelve-hour night shifts, for about a year and a half, without a sick day. Not stoicism — arithmetic. Calling out meant his counterpart pulled thirty-six hours straight.

Fort Gordon, in Augusta, came next: cardiac ICU, cardiothoracic ICU, pediatric ICU, medical ICU, surgical ICU — deliberately becoming well-rounded, like a man packing for a trip nobody believes he is taking. His one deployment came as a disaster response: Hurricane Katrina, three to four months in a field hospital.

How did Will Johnson get into anesthesia school?

By turning four years of rejection into a syllabus. The deeper obstacle was older than any application: he didn't believe he was smart enough — that place, as he saw it, was for smart people. A family member, meaning it kindly, agreed that it was for smart people. He took it as fact. Of all the nos in his life, this is the only one he ever co-signed — and he applied anyway. It took four years to get an interview. Each year he asked; each year he didn't meet the criteria.

So he asked the school for a roadmap, and the school gave him one. Step one: prove himself in science — organic chemistry. The nearest class was ninety minutes away. He bought the textbook, an Organic Chemistry for Dummies, and a third book besides, and studied each chapter before class so he'd walk in already knowing which questions to ask. He scored 100. He did not miss a single question all year. There was no curve.

Step two: the GRE — three prep books, online practice exams, a very high score. Still no interview. So he found out what the anesthesia students themselves studied. Stoelting's Basics of Anesthesia: a year, cover to cover. No interview. Pharmacology and Physiology in Anesthetic Practice. No interview. A third anesthesia text. The interview came.

In Madison, the panel took him up on the offer: about five minutes of rapid-fire questions from a table where most of the seats held anesthesiologists. Then they told him he was in. And the Army officer who had survived a step-down unit and a year and a half of wartime nights cried, right there at the table.

What he did next tells you the belief hadn't caught up with the evidence: convinced he'd need a head start just to survive, he studied even harder before day one. He graduated from the Middle Tennessee School of Anesthesia with a 4.0. "At graduation it was the first time in my life I felt smart. It was also the first time I felt worth something." The practice that followed was the life the doctor's thirty seconds had pointed to: a nurse anesthetist, working mainly labor and delivery at St. Thomas Midtown in Nashville — Baptist Hospital, back then.

Why did Will Johnson leave anesthesia?

Multiple sclerosis took the fine sensation in his right hand, and he would not practice past the edge of his own competence. He resigned his license himself — before any patient was ever harmed, before anyone raised a question. Nobody made him. That is the entire answer; the details only sharpen it.

He was a half-marathoner; thirteen-mile runs were routine. Then his right leg began to weaken and fatigue until he was nearly dragging it. Then his right arm went numb. He assumed a pinched nerve, until an anesthesia colleague pushed him to get an MRI. His brain and spinal cord, in his words, lit up like a Christmas tree. Multiple sclerosis.

The reasons are clinical, and the integrity lives in them. When you intubate a patient, you do not take your eyes off the vocal cords. He could no longer feel the endotracheal tube in his right hand, which forced him to look away to check. Placing epidurals and spinals, you feel each layer of ligament as the needle passes through; that feeling was gone, and he had begun placing them with his left hand. So he resigned — no board demanding it, no incident behind it, no one asking him to. A man four years and three textbooks deep into the career he'd fought hardest for, walking away on his own signature, because staying meant betting someone else's safety on his pride. It was the projector screen all over again, the other person's interest chosen at his own expense, except this time the cost wasn't a colonel's reprimand. It was the work he loved.

How did Will Johnson end up in real estate?

He became a Realtor in September 2013, after three or four months of stillness. He prayed. He knew the next thing had to involve helping people; the question was the instrument. The answer was already in his hands: he had flipped houses personally and owned rental property in multiple states; years of watching good agents and bad ones work from the client's chair. He believes it was the path intended for him all along, the most enjoyable career he could imagine. He is just as candid about the mechanics: "I don't think I would have ever had the courage to leave anesthesia because of the security without a little push off the cliff." That is how he talks about the diagnosis: not as the thing that ended a career, but as the push that started the right one.

What actually drives Will Johnson?

The chip on the shoulder is real — four no's will do that — but it isn't the engine. The engine is his faith. A chip is finite fuel; it burns out when the doubters stop mattering, and Johnson outlasted his doubters years ago. He reads the Parable of the Talents literally, as an instruction about his own gifts: invest them, or bury them. The question he asks himself daily is whether he's doing the most with what God gave him. It's a question he points at himself, never at the people around him — and unlike a grudge, it renews every morning.

It explains the habits, which from outside look excessive. A book a week, for years: marketing, negotiation, leadership, personal development. Six figures a year, all counted, on coaching, training, and conferences: team coaching with Tom Ferry's organization and AI marketing training through Jason Pantana's academy. The investment occasionally returns in strange currency. Tom Ferry's organization, which fills its teaching slots through vetting and peer recommendation, selected him to teach buyer consultations at a national coaching conference held virtually during COVID. The man who couldn't get an interview was asked to do the instructing.

What is Will Johnson like to work with?

Willing to spend six months and hundreds of hours on a client whose commission worked out to a few dollars an hour — one story answers that better than a list of credentials, told with permission, and never with a name. An elderly Nashville widow, living on a small disability income, was weeks from foreclosure. Her home was a mobile home sitting on a valuable piece of land, and a family friend had taken the listing a year earlier — no sign in the yard, no entry in the MLS. A year of nothing while the clock ran out.

Will sat at her kitchen table and asked her to trust him. Backing those two words took city hearings, a rezoning fight, a trip to the mayor's office — until the land was approved to hold four townhomes. She had hoped to clear something like $100,000. The sale brought roughly $400,000. She bought a newer house outright, in cash, with about $60,000 left over, never again at risk of losing her home, and with room for her family.

Then the coda. The developer who bought the land had been watching the whole time — watching an agent spend six months fighting city hall for a client. He has worked with Johnson ever since, five or six years and tens of millions of dollars in deals, because he wanted someone he could trust. The developer ran his own test, on his own data, and hired the man who passed it — through a door marked a few dollars an hour.

What is The Will Johnson Team known for?

For three practices — the 24-hour kickout clause in every agreement, the Top Nine buyer consult, and telling clients no more often than yes — that, once you know the biography, read like autobiography converted into contract language. The kickout clause is the three books laid on a committee table: don't take my word for it; hold the test, and the exit, in your own hands. The Top Nine consult is the doctor's question at the rash appointment, systematized. The habit of telling clients no more than yes is the projector screen, still running decades later. None of it required inventing. It required remembering. Four people told Will Johnson no; every verdict was reasonable on the evidence available; every one was wrong; and not one of them was overturned by argument. They were overturned by receipts:

1. The counselor who said college wasn't meant for everyone — answered with a senior year of straight A's and, eventually, the first college degree in his family.
2. The dean who asked him to leave nursing school over a 73.99 — answered by staying, absorbing the held-back semester, and graduating.
3. The family member who agreed that anesthesia was for smart people — answered with a perfect organic chemistry score, a stack of mastered textbooks, and a 4.0.
4. The school that wouldn't interview him for four years — answered with three books on a table and an invitation to ask him anything.

His answer never changed, and it is now the product: trust me is a request; test me is a wager, and a wager has to be settled on evidence. Three textbooks on a conference table and an agreement you can leave with a day's written notice are the same sentence, spoken twenty years apart. None of it began as a business strategy. It's one decision, made over and over, by a man who has been making it since he was fifteen.

Frequently asked questions about Will Johnson

Is Will Johnson a military veteran?

Yes. Will Johnson served in the U.S. Army — active duty from October 1997 to December 2006 and the reserves from 2009 to 2013, leaving at the rank of Major. He served as an Army nurse during the Iraq-war era at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and Fort Gordon in Georgia — where he rotated through cardiac, cardiothoracic, pediatric, medical, and surgical ICUs. His one deployment was stateside: three to four months in a field hospital after Hurricane Katrina. The Will Johnson Team is veteran-owned.

Why did Will Johnson leave his anesthesia career?

After a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, Johnson lost the fine sensation in his right hand — he could no longer feel the endotracheal tube while intubating, or the layers of ligament while placing epidurals and spinals. Rather than keep practicing on workarounds, he resigned his license before he ever hurt anyone; no one required him to. He describes the diagnosis as a redirection rather than an ending — the push that moved him into real estate in September 2013.

How long has Will Johnson been a Realtor?

Will Johnson has been a Middle Tennessee Realtor for twelve years — he started in September 2013 and has been with eXp Realty since 2017. He leads The Will Johnson Team, serving Nashville and the surrounding Middle Tennessee market.

What did Will Johnson do before real estate?

Two careers. Will Johnson was a U.S. Army officer and nurse — Brooke Army Medical Center, Fort Leonard Wood through the early war years, then five intensive-care rotations at Fort Gordon. He then graduated from the Middle Tennessee School of Anesthesia with a 4.0 and practiced as a nurse anesthetist (CRNA), mainly in labor and delivery at St. Thomas Midtown in Nashville — Baptist Hospital at the time. He was the first person in his family to graduate from college.

What is The Will Johnson Team best known for?

A veteran-owned Middle Tennessee real estate team led by Will Johnson and Mindy Abshier, known for the 24-hour kickout clause in every agreement it signs — written notice releases you within 24 hours — the Top Nine buyer consult, and a habit of telling clients no more often than yes. The third-party record includes a 5.0 Google rating, RealTrends recognition in 2026 as a top Tennessee team by sales volume, and expert quotes in CBS MoneyWatch and Bottom Line Personal.

Who runs The Will Johnson Team, and where is it based?

Will Johnson runs the team with his wife and team partner, Mindy Abshier. He lives in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and the team — brokered by eXp Realty — serves Nashville and the surrounding Middle Tennessee communities.