John Preston got his first exposure to the dangers of uneducated entrepreneurship when he was a

teenager. His parents quit their jobs and started a travel agency. Like most small business owners, they

knew their industry very well but understood little about running a business. They worked long hours

and built a somewhat extensive customer base.

To the outside world, it appeared they had created a strong company. Behind the scenes, however, they

weren’t making any money. Despite eighty-hour work weeks, there was barely enough profit to keep

food on the table. Later in life, he would realize this was an all too common scenario for small business

owners.

At a travel conference in Vegas, they were fortunately enough to work up a conversation with another

agency owner who was bragging about all the big-ticket (highly profitable) trips he had recently sold.

John’s dad, Jack Preston, finally worked up the nerve to ask him how he did it. All the Preston agency

could sell were airline tickets and cheap 3-day cruises to the Bahamas. The guy responded with a

question of his own, “What do you advertise?”. Jack responded that he advertised the cheap vacations

because that’s all the folks ‘in our hometown” want. The agent responded, “Wrong, there are folks in

your town spending thousands each year on vacations, but they don’t come to you because they think

you only sell the cheap shit.” Front that day forward, John’s parents marketed nothing but bucket list

items (trips to the Holy Land, Luxury cruises, etc.).

Within a year, they were working 40-hour weeks, had a fraction as many customers, but were making

ten times as much money. On top of that, when the internet came on the scene and folks started buying

their airline tickets and cheap vacations online, their travel agency barely noticed. The clients buying the high-end vacations preferred to buy from knowledgeable people rather than online algorithms.

That memory remained locked away until years later when John started to recognize just how paralyzed most small business owners are by their lack of business acumen. It occurred to him just

how different his life would have been if his parents hadn’t gotten five minutes of “education” from

a random stranger in a bar in Vegas.

His pathway to this realization was quite serpentine. A love for the sciences led him to pursue a

degree in physics. However, the meticulous pace of a researcher’s life didn’t marry well with John’s frenetic energy. Television journalism offered him the right environment to use his unique analytical and storytelling skills. Over his award winning 22-year TV career, he helped launch a paradigm shifting
local newscast and headed the highest rated local news organization in the business. Along the way he

begins to fine tune his understanding of just what drives consumer decisions.

In 2015, his life changed when he became first a Publisher and then a Mentor/Coach for other

Publishers and sales personnel for Best Version Media. The company’s core products, local

neighborhood magazines, were designed to give small businesses a fighting chance against the big

corporations. For the first time, John began to see that marketing and advertising were sciences with

their own sets of laws. He realized that just like physics, chemistry, and mathematics the laws of

marketing were very poorly understood. In 2023, John was inducted into BVM's Hall of Fame for his

work helping others better help their advertisers.

John believes that local businesses are what define a community. He's watched as the explosion of new

marketing tools have made it harder for those to compete with the larger national and multinational

corporations. These tools can be amazing but only if used with purpose as part of a complete marketing

strategy designed to drive profit. Unfortunately, most small business owners lack the foundational

understanding needed to develop such a strategy. The fact that many of those selling advertising also

lack that knowledge exacerbates the problem.

Through the JP Revolution, John hopes to arm local entrepreneurs with the intellectual weapons to take

back their communities. It's only by maximizing the impact of their often-limited resources that they

can compete with the million-dollar marketing budgets of their competitors.