ABOUT JOHN VALENTY
John Valenty must have been born an entrepreneur since they just didn’t teach this stuff anywhere--and certainly not in the early 80’s. At age 8, when most kids would set up a lemonade stand in front of their house, young John Valenty had a small work force on the busiest Southern California street saluting to the Navy traffic a couple miles before the local base. This guerrilla marketing tactic peeled away enough traffic generate a good bit of cash for John and his crew on the weekends.
The limitations of weekend work wasn’t enough. John Valenty added house and pet sitting to his offerings around age 9-10 which prompted the need for his first checking account.
John has a younger brother Michael Valenty and parents Janet Valenty and Jack Valenty were always supportive of John’s business interests. Around age 11, the family had a wild idea to move aboard a sailboat and life was suddenly very different. While John’s home-based businesses were dead, but he was brewing new business ideas immediately that would work around the boating community. John Valenty started “Shipshape Yacht Maintenance” at age 11 and got his first business cards.
He learned to market himself up at the marina gates by offering to help people who needed to unload their cars into carts and truck the carts down to their boats. John started getting $5 tips which was a new thing, but it sent a clear message that he could raise his prices and these boat owners would keep paying. John developed a base of business selling boat washing and waxing as well as helping local boat owners with various projects around the marina. In his free time, John loved fishing out of the family’s rigid inflatable power boat and sailing in his Sabbot. He had pretty much free range of San Diego bay and would use every bit of that free range to explore on his own. Looking back on that, John can’t imagine extending similar freedoms to children these days.
At age 14, John was now entering the 8th grade, and the family decided the boat was too small, the boys were getting bigger and it was time to move the family back to a house. Again, John’s businesses, customers and cash flow were wiped out in an instant. But new ideas of home-oriented businesses were brewing in John Valenty’s head which manifested into starting “Quality Yard Maintenance” and getting his first set of magnetic truck signs he’d put on the truck he didn’t have yet. So, the signs stayed on the family refrigerator for about a year.
To make extra money, John took on a large paper route delivering newspapers in the local community. At age 15, John’s parents helped him buy a Honda Elite 150cc scooter which enabled him to deliver papers to hundreds of homes across several miles in just minutes.
At age 15, John was exposed to a local franchise operation which sold auto detailing and polishing equipment and training. John bit the hook and his parents helped him acquire the franchise on a credit card. Auto detailing regularly commanded $40 - $50 per hour which instantly made the Yard Maintenance business obsolete in John’s mind.
Entering high school it wasn’t long before John Valenty was earning more than his teachers. Age 16 gave him more freedom and he got his first truck--ironically--didn’t have much use for the magnetic signs selling yard maintenance as that business was over.
John was good at auto detailing---great at detailing actually. He had a fanatical sense of detail and the tenacity to get lost in a project until it was done right. This earned him a great reputation around the city and his business grew to require a few employees.
High School wasn’t a great fit for John. His grades were average, he loved weightlifting, shop classes, English and History the most. He made friends easily enough just not many close friends. John felt especially comfortable around adults. At age 17, John’s high school District Counselor recommended that he drop out of high school and run his business full time. When John asked about college, he recalls the counselor laughing a bit and saying you don’t need a high school diploma for anything you’ll ever do in your life. If you want to go to school, enroll in the local community college. He explained that there wasn’t much more for him to get out of high school and he could always attend community college if he wanted to. John had pretty much given up on the idea of more school until he said the girls were a lot nicer in college---John was intent to find out if there was any truth to that. So, John Valenty dropped out of high school mid way through the 11th grade and began to operate his business full time.
His company picked up a few commercial auto dealership accounts which was a nice addition to the retail business clients. At the auto dealerships, John Valenty noticed other mobile services vendors selling paint repair, bumper repair and dent repair to the dealerships. To his horror and excitement John found out that those services commanded as much as $100 per hour compared to the $40-50 per hour he could earn auto detailing. John had the new idea of offering a fully equipped mobile detail and auto repair service. The only problem is that John didn’t know how to repair paint scratches, dents, dings and damaged bumpers. It now became John’s single minded mission to learn how to perform these other valuable services for his same customers.
Since John loved building and flying radio controlled airplanes, he was very familiar with making repairs as expensive things that fly tend to crash and break apart too. There was always something that needed repairing. John just needed to learn how to spray automotive paint and color match and he figured the rest would be easy. As it turned out, it was several months, thousands of dollars in equipment and many expensive mistakes later that John could perform a decent paint repair. But John wasn’t going to “decent” he was going for perfection.
Next, he had to learn how to repair dents and dings in cars and trucks from the inside out (called Paintless Dent Repair) which was an exciting new field of expertise in the early 90’s and the people who offered it were extremely secretive not letting their techniques become known. The tools weren’t even available to buy--there were only expensive franchise operations that included proprietary tools with their $20,000 franchise licensing fees. John Valenty was stuck. He needed tools and training but couldn’t afford it. He had to come up with a new plan.
John did some research and found which company had the best dent tools. He called the owner and said he didn’t need training, only needed the tools. The owner of the business “Brad” was shocked that there was someone in California who knew how to perform Paintless Dent Repair as it was very new and only well-known in the Midwest. John told Brad all about his paint and bumper repair wizardry and Brad decided he needed to see it for himself. Brad shocked John Valenty by saying he would send the dent tools to him and buy a plane ticket to California to see John’s repair abilities in action in the next couple weeks.
John was excited and horrified as the truth is he had no clue how to do Paintless Dent Repair, but Brad was going be there in a couple weeks to see John’s work. John asked him to air ship the tools which would cost a few hundred dollars just in shipping.
When John got his tools, all he knew is that he had to learn to use leverage to push dents from the inside out, without damaging the paint or leaving visible marks. A good technician can actually make small dents disappear completely. John worked night and day trying to teach himself this new skill, but it was very challenging. Paintless dent repair required amazing patience, unusual hand eye coordination and about 1 year of training to become minimally competent. John had to squeeze one year into two weeks somehow or his story about “not needing training” would not hold much water. John Valenty had three very important advantages; he was intensely determined, he had lots of cars to practice on, and he knew how to fix paint damage. This gave him the ability to learn through trial and error at a very fast pace.
When Brad arrived in San Diego to see John, they became friends instantly. Brad could see John had a real talent for paint repair and his dent repair abilities weren’t horrible either. Brad gave John lots of new tips and showed him more about dent repair than John knew existed. In a matter of weeks, John was now able to earn $100+ per hour fixing small dents invisibly without ever breaking out his paint equipment.
Brad asked John to come to Springfield Missouri to see their operation and teach his team how to do paint and bumper repairs like he was able to do. John was very excited about doing this and quickly became their company’s top trainer in California.
By age 18, “Valenty Enterprises” was established and John was on his way to earning a six-figure income.
At age 19, John hired his first professional business consultant.
He was training people from all around the country how to perform mobile paint and dent repairs and also had a small fleet of mobile service rigs working the San Diego area. John’s revenue was about $10-$15K per month and he was quite dissatisfied with the business. He couldn’t seem to grow the business beyond that level and went looking for help. One particular business consultant made him an offer he’d show John how to double his sales at a minimum or he wouldn’t have to pay him. John took the bait.
At age 20, John Valenty was living proof that the right business coach can do wonders. His business was making $25K-35K per month the following year.
Still, John Valenty felt he was not anywhere near his potential. He learned the hard way that the only thing worse than a retail business can be a highly technical service business. He had built himself an elaborate "job" requiring his personal hands-on expertise (hours for dollars) to make a living. He soon realized he was too near the bottom of the entrepreneurial food chain again and had to make a change for the better.
John Valenty had big dreams and imagined what life would be like with a business that produced residual monthly recurring revenue. He couldn’t get the concept out of his mind.
By age 22 he was working every midnight infomercial get rich quick program he could get his hands on. John Valenty was one of those freakishly few people who were able to make those midnight infomercial programs work--but still not well enough. The problem he learned was that they did not pay very well in small scale and large scales took large investments which he didn’t have. After that phase, John developed a small mailing list business and learned the direct mail marketing game inside and out. He brought many of the concepts he had practiced into his next endeavor.
By age 23 John Valenty stumbled on the network marketing industry which at the time he felt was not a good fit for him. John was not at all comfortable with the style being used to develop sales organizations in most of these companies. While researching products he could market with his direct mail marketing skillset, he kept running into network marketing or MLM. Attending a few meetings and hearing these compelling front-of-the-room pitches, John knew he wasn't cut out for it. Still, John was enamored with the concept of selling consumables and the residual income had that can be earned from it. He was determined to see if he make it work with direct mail marketing.
At the time, John’s mother Janet Valenty was slave to a very intense corporate job and she was also committed to making a home based business for work her so she could make a break from the corporate world.
The first company he put his heart and soul into fizzled out after about 6 months and really wasn't a good fit for. The second company John and Janet joined a couple months later was New Vision International founded by the Boreyko family. They had a line of nutritional products which seemed like it could be a better fit, but they had no systems of any sort to develop a steady flow of customers. This prompted John to build his own direct mail marketing system for his New Vision distributorship.
John Valenty’s goals were to automate the marketing process and make the phone ring with people on the line who wanted the product. He knew if he could do that, it might work.
An upline team leader "Bob Schmidt" gave John Valenty a audiotape called "Dead Doctors Don't Lie" and told him he thought it did a good job selling people on why they needed to supplement their diet with liquid minerals. John listened to the tape and thought it was compelling as well. John tried mailing 100 of them out to random people he had on a mailing list with a catchy little note and his phone number. Within a week several people had called him and asked how to get the liquid minerals that were discussed on the tape. He knew he had a winner.
John Valenty got in contact with doctor Joel Wallach who made the recording and asked if he could use it to help sell New Vision's products. Wallach said, nope, but you can join my company and sell for me and you can use it. John figured he'd do whatever it took to get permission to use the tape even if it meant leaving New Vision and joining Dr. Joel Wallach in a new unfamiliar company. As luck would have it, Dr. Wallach's company was even located in his home town of San Diego. How bad could it be? Let's just say JV recalls it as more of a re-start of a re-start. It didn't look like a probable success story to him. So, he told Dr. Wallach thanks but it wasn't a fit and asked if he could license the use and duplication of his audio recording to help sell New Vision's liquid minerals. Dr. Wallach was not agreeable at first, but the owners of New Vision had a feeling that young John Valenty (23 at the time) was onto something big and they agreed to a sizable upfront royalty payment at 25 cents royalty per copy. John was now off to the races with a good marketing tool and a solid company with a good product.
To make a long story short, he assembled a small marketing team made up of a couple buddies and one guy he met through a classified ad. John’s mom signed up his younger brother Mike Valenty under him and somehow got him (an engineer-type) to work the business with them. John worked night and day for a period of time teaching our team how to work our direct mail marketing system. He also taught his team how to find investors to help fund the marketing campaigns. That was August 1995.
John’s sales team was also motivated to make the system work and together we launched one of the largest and most successful direct mail marketing campaigns the industry had ever seen. By December John Valenty’s income was over $20,000 for the month and it nearly doubled each month until eventually exceeding $100,000 per month in 1996 and over $300,000 per month in 1997 with over thirty million per month of gross sales. As a family they were responsible for five hundred million dollars in gross sales and earned well in excess of twenty million in commissions over about five years.
Not that anyone needs to make more than $300,000 per month personally, but John had huge dreams and believed that he had maxed the compensation plan in the business. So, John started looking into other ventures.
At age 25 John founded Work@Home Magazine, published 3 issues, made it to the Barnes and Noble magazine rack. He also formed the opinion that it would be 1-2 years before the business would become profitable. Even though he was already into it about $400,000, John was not prepared to invest millions into this idea. He cut his losses and pulled the plug on the magazine.
At age 26 John married his sweetheart and fellow entrepreneur Shelleen Valenty and her 4 year-old son Zachary. Shelleen was also one of the top income earners of the same company John was building. That’s one quick way to get a raise!
Just getting into internet technology at the time, John promptly lost a million dollars trying to develop software without the first clue how to instruct or manage software developers. A rapid technical education was what John needed and it prompted the formation of John’s newest venture “Earnware Corporation.” The company's purpose was to help his sales team and other businesses grow through the use of Internet and telecommunications technology. Little did John Valenty know that would be the start of his new passion and captivate his attention and focus for more than 15 years.
At age 26 John Valenty had his first child Sophia Valenty and met his partner Rob Greenstein around the same time.
By age 27 John had his second daughter Fiona Valenty.
At age 28 John and his partner Rob sold the web domain workathome(.com) for $2,100,000. That got John Valenty hooked on the growing web domain business.
By this time John Valenty had assembled a list of potentially valuable web domain names. Now age 35 around 2007, John planned out what he thought was 10 years worth of start-up businesses many in synergistic support of each other and intended to be powered by Earnware technology.
At age 35 (2007), John founded http://www.wellness.com making it his primary focus and made it his mission to help people live healthier and happier lives with technology.
As John is known for saying; he thought he was a genius and publishing would be easy. He might as well have gone into space travel as his tech and marketing background had not prepared him for the unique challenges of starting, running and growing successful publishing business.
Valenty recalls the time vividly, getting kicked in the teeth financially speaking, dumping millions into what seemed like fleet of sinking ships and running out of cash, going into debt and almost losing everything.
Around age 36 (2008-2009) the country was entering a recession and Earnware's clients were dropping like flies. It wasn't clear at all if Earnware would make it. We got down to a skeleton crew but the company's layoffs didn't happen fast enough. We were in a serious jam. Learning how to make a profit publishing became a single minded focus for John Valenty. It was do or die.
Miraculously, John and his team managed to get Wellness.com indexed and pulling in millions of organic unique visitors just before going down in flames. What a save.
At age 37 John and his team grew Wellness.com revenues by nearly 10x and had the site over 3,000,000 unique visitors per month.
The old company Earnware Corporation had served thousands of small businesses, health and wellness professionals, home-based businesses and network marketing organizations, but the old ship had to be decommissioned several years ago as publishing became the new focus.
Today John Valenty and his partner Chad Fisk are all about the publishing business from the tech platform on up. The brand Earnware also re-emerged out of the ashes as a platform for publishers based on the practical hand-on learning experiences of running and growing their own publishing business.
John Valenty has also been thinking a lot about his legacy and contributions. His plan is to launch a site called helpfund.org and turn it into the best (person-to-person) direct contribution system in the world. The mission of helpfund.org will be to “inspire giving.”
These days, the Valenty family is closer than ever. Shelleen Valenty manages the books and her passion and specialty is managing all sorts of events. John Valenty’s daughter’s Sophia Valenty works in the business with John and the team and Fiona Valenty runs a pottery business which she's done amazingly well with. John’s brother Mike, nephew Ben and some of the employees are all on the same ice hockey team “Ice Pack.” Good times.
All in all, it seems John Valenty is one lucky guy.
Follow John Valenty at: https://www.facebook.com/pages/John-Valenty/289981277831275
The limitations of weekend work wasn’t enough. John Valenty added house and pet sitting to his offerings around age 9-10 which prompted the need for his first checking account.
John has a younger brother Michael Valenty and parents Janet Valenty and Jack Valenty were always supportive of John’s business interests. Around age 11, the family had a wild idea to move aboard a sailboat and life was suddenly very different. While John’s home-based businesses were dead, but he was brewing new business ideas immediately that would work around the boating community. John Valenty started “Shipshape Yacht Maintenance” at age 11 and got his first business cards.
He learned to market himself up at the marina gates by offering to help people who needed to unload their cars into carts and truck the carts down to their boats. John started getting $5 tips which was a new thing, but it sent a clear message that he could raise his prices and these boat owners would keep paying. John developed a base of business selling boat washing and waxing as well as helping local boat owners with various projects around the marina. In his free time, John loved fishing out of the family’s rigid inflatable power boat and sailing in his Sabbot. He had pretty much free range of San Diego bay and would use every bit of that free range to explore on his own. Looking back on that, John can’t imagine extending similar freedoms to children these days.
At age 14, John was now entering the 8th grade, and the family decided the boat was too small, the boys were getting bigger and it was time to move the family back to a house. Again, John’s businesses, customers and cash flow were wiped out in an instant. But new ideas of home-oriented businesses were brewing in John Valenty’s head which manifested into starting “Quality Yard Maintenance” and getting his first set of magnetic truck signs he’d put on the truck he didn’t have yet. So, the signs stayed on the family refrigerator for about a year.
To make extra money, John took on a large paper route delivering newspapers in the local community. At age 15, John’s parents helped him buy a Honda Elite 150cc scooter which enabled him to deliver papers to hundreds of homes across several miles in just minutes.
At age 15, John was exposed to a local franchise operation which sold auto detailing and polishing equipment and training. John bit the hook and his parents helped him acquire the franchise on a credit card. Auto detailing regularly commanded $40 - $50 per hour which instantly made the Yard Maintenance business obsolete in John’s mind.
Entering high school it wasn’t long before John Valenty was earning more than his teachers. Age 16 gave him more freedom and he got his first truck--ironically--didn’t have much use for the magnetic signs selling yard maintenance as that business was over.
John was good at auto detailing---great at detailing actually. He had a fanatical sense of detail and the tenacity to get lost in a project until it was done right. This earned him a great reputation around the city and his business grew to require a few employees.
High School wasn’t a great fit for John. His grades were average, he loved weightlifting, shop classes, English and History the most. He made friends easily enough just not many close friends. John felt especially comfortable around adults. At age 17, John’s high school District Counselor recommended that he drop out of high school and run his business full time. When John asked about college, he recalls the counselor laughing a bit and saying you don’t need a high school diploma for anything you’ll ever do in your life. If you want to go to school, enroll in the local community college. He explained that there wasn’t much more for him to get out of high school and he could always attend community college if he wanted to. John had pretty much given up on the idea of more school until he said the girls were a lot nicer in college---John was intent to find out if there was any truth to that. So, John Valenty dropped out of high school mid way through the 11th grade and began to operate his business full time.
His company picked up a few commercial auto dealership accounts which was a nice addition to the retail business clients. At the auto dealerships, John Valenty noticed other mobile services vendors selling paint repair, bumper repair and dent repair to the dealerships. To his horror and excitement John found out that those services commanded as much as $100 per hour compared to the $40-50 per hour he could earn auto detailing. John had the new idea of offering a fully equipped mobile detail and auto repair service. The only problem is that John didn’t know how to repair paint scratches, dents, dings and damaged bumpers. It now became John’s single minded mission to learn how to perform these other valuable services for his same customers.
Since John loved building and flying radio controlled airplanes, he was very familiar with making repairs as expensive things that fly tend to crash and break apart too. There was always something that needed repairing. John just needed to learn how to spray automotive paint and color match and he figured the rest would be easy. As it turned out, it was several months, thousands of dollars in equipment and many expensive mistakes later that John could perform a decent paint repair. But John wasn’t going to “decent” he was going for perfection.
Next, he had to learn how to repair dents and dings in cars and trucks from the inside out (called Paintless Dent Repair) which was an exciting new field of expertise in the early 90’s and the people who offered it were extremely secretive not letting their techniques become known. The tools weren’t even available to buy--there were only expensive franchise operations that included proprietary tools with their $20,000 franchise licensing fees. John Valenty was stuck. He needed tools and training but couldn’t afford it. He had to come up with a new plan.
John did some research and found which company had the best dent tools. He called the owner and said he didn’t need training, only needed the tools. The owner of the business “Brad” was shocked that there was someone in California who knew how to perform Paintless Dent Repair as it was very new and only well-known in the Midwest. John told Brad all about his paint and bumper repair wizardry and Brad decided he needed to see it for himself. Brad shocked John Valenty by saying he would send the dent tools to him and buy a plane ticket to California to see John’s repair abilities in action in the next couple weeks.
John was excited and horrified as the truth is he had no clue how to do Paintless Dent Repair, but Brad was going be there in a couple weeks to see John’s work. John asked him to air ship the tools which would cost a few hundred dollars just in shipping.
When John got his tools, all he knew is that he had to learn to use leverage to push dents from the inside out, without damaging the paint or leaving visible marks. A good technician can actually make small dents disappear completely. John worked night and day trying to teach himself this new skill, but it was very challenging. Paintless dent repair required amazing patience, unusual hand eye coordination and about 1 year of training to become minimally competent. John had to squeeze one year into two weeks somehow or his story about “not needing training” would not hold much water. John Valenty had three very important advantages; he was intensely determined, he had lots of cars to practice on, and he knew how to fix paint damage. This gave him the ability to learn through trial and error at a very fast pace.
When Brad arrived in San Diego to see John, they became friends instantly. Brad could see John had a real talent for paint repair and his dent repair abilities weren’t horrible either. Brad gave John lots of new tips and showed him more about dent repair than John knew existed. In a matter of weeks, John was now able to earn $100+ per hour fixing small dents invisibly without ever breaking out his paint equipment.
Brad asked John to come to Springfield Missouri to see their operation and teach his team how to do paint and bumper repairs like he was able to do. John was very excited about doing this and quickly became their company’s top trainer in California.
By age 18, “Valenty Enterprises” was established and John was on his way to earning a six-figure income.
At age 19, John hired his first professional business consultant.
He was training people from all around the country how to perform mobile paint and dent repairs and also had a small fleet of mobile service rigs working the San Diego area. John’s revenue was about $10-$15K per month and he was quite dissatisfied with the business. He couldn’t seem to grow the business beyond that level and went looking for help. One particular business consultant made him an offer he’d show John how to double his sales at a minimum or he wouldn’t have to pay him. John took the bait.
At age 20, John Valenty was living proof that the right business coach can do wonders. His business was making $25K-35K per month the following year.
Still, John Valenty felt he was not anywhere near his potential. He learned the hard way that the only thing worse than a retail business can be a highly technical service business. He had built himself an elaborate "job" requiring his personal hands-on expertise (hours for dollars) to make a living. He soon realized he was too near the bottom of the entrepreneurial food chain again and had to make a change for the better.
John Valenty had big dreams and imagined what life would be like with a business that produced residual monthly recurring revenue. He couldn’t get the concept out of his mind.
By age 22 he was working every midnight infomercial get rich quick program he could get his hands on. John Valenty was one of those freakishly few people who were able to make those midnight infomercial programs work--but still not well enough. The problem he learned was that they did not pay very well in small scale and large scales took large investments which he didn’t have. After that phase, John developed a small mailing list business and learned the direct mail marketing game inside and out. He brought many of the concepts he had practiced into his next endeavor.
By age 23 John Valenty stumbled on the network marketing industry which at the time he felt was not a good fit for him. John was not at all comfortable with the style being used to develop sales organizations in most of these companies. While researching products he could market with his direct mail marketing skillset, he kept running into network marketing or MLM. Attending a few meetings and hearing these compelling front-of-the-room pitches, John knew he wasn't cut out for it. Still, John was enamored with the concept of selling consumables and the residual income had that can be earned from it. He was determined to see if he make it work with direct mail marketing.
At the time, John’s mother Janet Valenty was slave to a very intense corporate job and she was also committed to making a home based business for work her so she could make a break from the corporate world.
The first company he put his heart and soul into fizzled out after about 6 months and really wasn't a good fit for. The second company John and Janet joined a couple months later was New Vision International founded by the Boreyko family. They had a line of nutritional products which seemed like it could be a better fit, but they had no systems of any sort to develop a steady flow of customers. This prompted John to build his own direct mail marketing system for his New Vision distributorship.
John Valenty’s goals were to automate the marketing process and make the phone ring with people on the line who wanted the product. He knew if he could do that, it might work.
An upline team leader "Bob Schmidt" gave John Valenty a audiotape called "Dead Doctors Don't Lie" and told him he thought it did a good job selling people on why they needed to supplement their diet with liquid minerals. John listened to the tape and thought it was compelling as well. John tried mailing 100 of them out to random people he had on a mailing list with a catchy little note and his phone number. Within a week several people had called him and asked how to get the liquid minerals that were discussed on the tape. He knew he had a winner.
John Valenty got in contact with doctor Joel Wallach who made the recording and asked if he could use it to help sell New Vision's products. Wallach said, nope, but you can join my company and sell for me and you can use it. John figured he'd do whatever it took to get permission to use the tape even if it meant leaving New Vision and joining Dr. Joel Wallach in a new unfamiliar company. As luck would have it, Dr. Wallach's company was even located in his home town of San Diego. How bad could it be? Let's just say JV recalls it as more of a re-start of a re-start. It didn't look like a probable success story to him. So, he told Dr. Wallach thanks but it wasn't a fit and asked if he could license the use and duplication of his audio recording to help sell New Vision's liquid minerals. Dr. Wallach was not agreeable at first, but the owners of New Vision had a feeling that young John Valenty (23 at the time) was onto something big and they agreed to a sizable upfront royalty payment at 25 cents royalty per copy. John was now off to the races with a good marketing tool and a solid company with a good product.
To make a long story short, he assembled a small marketing team made up of a couple buddies and one guy he met through a classified ad. John’s mom signed up his younger brother Mike Valenty under him and somehow got him (an engineer-type) to work the business with them. John worked night and day for a period of time teaching our team how to work our direct mail marketing system. He also taught his team how to find investors to help fund the marketing campaigns. That was August 1995.
John’s sales team was also motivated to make the system work and together we launched one of the largest and most successful direct mail marketing campaigns the industry had ever seen. By December John Valenty’s income was over $20,000 for the month and it nearly doubled each month until eventually exceeding $100,000 per month in 1996 and over $300,000 per month in 1997 with over thirty million per month of gross sales. As a family they were responsible for five hundred million dollars in gross sales and earned well in excess of twenty million in commissions over about five years.
Not that anyone needs to make more than $300,000 per month personally, but John had huge dreams and believed that he had maxed the compensation plan in the business. So, John started looking into other ventures.
At age 25 John founded Work@Home Magazine, published 3 issues, made it to the Barnes and Noble magazine rack. He also formed the opinion that it would be 1-2 years before the business would become profitable. Even though he was already into it about $400,000, John was not prepared to invest millions into this idea. He cut his losses and pulled the plug on the magazine.
At age 26 John married his sweetheart and fellow entrepreneur Shelleen Valenty and her 4 year-old son Zachary. Shelleen was also one of the top income earners of the same company John was building. That’s one quick way to get a raise!
Just getting into internet technology at the time, John promptly lost a million dollars trying to develop software without the first clue how to instruct or manage software developers. A rapid technical education was what John needed and it prompted the formation of John’s newest venture “Earnware Corporation.” The company's purpose was to help his sales team and other businesses grow through the use of Internet and telecommunications technology. Little did John Valenty know that would be the start of his new passion and captivate his attention and focus for more than 15 years.
At age 26 John Valenty had his first child Sophia Valenty and met his partner Rob Greenstein around the same time.
By age 27 John had his second daughter Fiona Valenty.
At age 28 John and his partner Rob sold the web domain workathome(.com) for $2,100,000. That got John Valenty hooked on the growing web domain business.
By this time John Valenty had assembled a list of potentially valuable web domain names. Now age 35 around 2007, John planned out what he thought was 10 years worth of start-up businesses many in synergistic support of each other and intended to be powered by Earnware technology.
At age 35 (2007), John founded http://www.wellness.com making it his primary focus and made it his mission to help people live healthier and happier lives with technology.
As John is known for saying; he thought he was a genius and publishing would be easy. He might as well have gone into space travel as his tech and marketing background had not prepared him for the unique challenges of starting, running and growing successful publishing business.
Valenty recalls the time vividly, getting kicked in the teeth financially speaking, dumping millions into what seemed like fleet of sinking ships and running out of cash, going into debt and almost losing everything.
Around age 36 (2008-2009) the country was entering a recession and Earnware's clients were dropping like flies. It wasn't clear at all if Earnware would make it. We got down to a skeleton crew but the company's layoffs didn't happen fast enough. We were in a serious jam. Learning how to make a profit publishing became a single minded focus for John Valenty. It was do or die.
Miraculously, John and his team managed to get Wellness.com indexed and pulling in millions of organic unique visitors just before going down in flames. What a save.
At age 37 John and his team grew Wellness.com revenues by nearly 10x and had the site over 3,000,000 unique visitors per month.
The old company Earnware Corporation had served thousands of small businesses, health and wellness professionals, home-based businesses and network marketing organizations, but the old ship had to be decommissioned several years ago as publishing became the new focus.
Today John Valenty and his partner Chad Fisk are all about the publishing business from the tech platform on up. The brand Earnware also re-emerged out of the ashes as a platform for publishers based on the practical hand-on learning experiences of running and growing their own publishing business.
John Valenty has also been thinking a lot about his legacy and contributions. His plan is to launch a site called helpfund.org and turn it into the best (person-to-person) direct contribution system in the world. The mission of helpfund.org will be to “inspire giving.”
These days, the Valenty family is closer than ever. Shelleen Valenty manages the books and her passion and specialty is managing all sorts of events. John Valenty’s daughter’s Sophia Valenty works in the business with John and the team and Fiona Valenty runs a pottery business which she's done amazingly well with. John’s brother Mike, nephew Ben and some of the employees are all on the same ice hockey team “Ice Pack.” Good times.
All in all, it seems John Valenty is one lucky guy.
Follow John Valenty at: https://www.facebook.com/pages/John-Valenty/289981277831275