The Wolves and the Mandolin: Celebrating Life's Privileges In A Harsh World

by Brandon Vallorani

  I went to AiG’s website one afternoon to just browse. Their publications looked great, but the website was very basic and lacked a special polish. So, I e-mailed them: “To whom it may concern: I’m a graphic artist and I’m interested in working for you.” The general manager contacted me and asked when I could visit the company for an interview.

  I told him I’d be there on Monday. I was immediately offered a job. I put in my two-weeks notice at the extension service, put my house up for rent, and moved my young family—Jan was expecting our second child, Adam—to a place, oddly enough, not far from the second American home of my great-grandfather Luigi!

  My job at AiG offered so many more creative opportunities than I’d had working for the state, and I was having a great time. My design work was in full color on coated paper, instead of in black and white on matte paper. I was cranking out projects left and right: book covers, VHS cases, posters, CD/cassette-tape covers for music, and kids’ music.

  Less than a year went by before my employer said, “Brandon, we want you to take over the website. If you want to hire people and build up our site, that would be great.” That was music to my ears! I hired a programmer, a content manager, and even got an intern. The four of us together built AiG’s website from a little brochure page to a deep site, rich with content. Now, of course, it’s massive.

  Quickly realizing that we needed to constantly refresh the content on our site if we wanted return visitors, I came up with a model for publishing new posts on the website, daily. I would recycle already-published magazine content because the company generated a lot of original material that was always relevant.

  We were diligent about keeping the content fresh because we wanted our followers to be engaged. Every day, there was a reason to visit the site, and our audience started to respond. Web traffic started pouring in, especially when we initiated an e-mail newsletter guiding them to the website.

  If you don’t put out something new every single day, you’re going to lose your audience because there won’t be a reason for them to check in. Every day you lose a pair of eyes is a day you have made an impact, a difference, a sale. Money never sleeps. If you’re not getting in front of your audience regularly, you’ll find they will direct their attention to your competitors.

  I also ran the online store, and once we got visitors regularly coming back to the site day after day, we were able to put our products in front of them too. These experiences and what I learned became a model for my own company, Liberty Alliance.

  As we started seeing this exponential expansion of sales, thanks to a dynamic website, people inside and outside the organization began to take notice. I was invited to a business meeting with a publicly traded company located in San Francisco. It was a wonderful experience for a kid who had grown up in rural West Virginia. We got to see the Golden Gate Bridge and ate at amazing Italian restaurants. I was flying high with exuberance.

  I was eager to share that kind of experience with everyone at the company and to commend my staff for their great work. I set up a digital kiosk over the web department with a scrolling marquee screen where we’d highlight the traffic numbers for the website. The numbers would scroll across the screen: “This month’s traffic numbers: one million. This month’s sales: $50,000.”

  Remember that at this point in my life, I was still very young, and I was pretty idealistic. I was proud and happy to see how successfully we were getting the company message out to the big World Wide Web, and I was so relieved to be out of the government system where I’d felt stifled. Our little web team was celebrating successes out loud, something that I came to understand is very important in every business. All I wanted to do was to share that feeling with everyone and inspire us all to achieve even more.

  Sometimes, people judge your motives. Sometimes, their negative opinion is deserved, and sometimes, it isn’t. Sometimes, you’ll understand where you could have done something differently to avoid the negative outcome. But you can’t let that wolf of criticism discourage you.

  AiG’s president, Ken Ham, and our board of directors treated me as though I were a prodigy. They raised my salary, gave me a company car, and invited me to every board meeting—before I was even an executive. I was just a new, upstart, middle-management guy, but soon I was traveling to semi-annual board meetings and sitting with all the directors and executive team, who presented me as “our web guru, Brandon. Wait until you hear his report.”

  They were proud of what I had accomplished and of everything I was doing for the company. It was intoxicating and spurred me to work even harder and do more. To other department heads it was probably seen as unbridled ambition, brown-nosing, or a combination of the two.

  After a few years of hard work, I was promoted to the position of executive vice president. I was an eager twenty-nine-year old kid running a multimillion-dollar nonprofit company and overseeing some of the same people who had hired and trained me. In retrospect, it’s no wonder I could count my friends around the water cooler on one hand. This really ate at me, so I vowed I would focus on making others successful along with myself.

  Looking back, I realize I was compelled to succeed. Would I be where I am today if I hadn’t been so ambitious? Perhaps not, though it can get lonely when you’re galloping full-speed ahead.

  One time, I remember Ken pulling me into his office to tell me I was “a wild stallion. You remind me of me.” He was an exacting leader with extremely high standards. It’s no exaggeration to say that he expected perfection, and he didn’t tolerate laziness or mistakes. He wanted the best out of each team member. As I moved up in leadership, I was put in charge of firing people who couldn’t measure up. I had to let a lot of people go, and I began to hate being “that guy.” Though I was not yet aware of it, my calling would be found in building and inspiring, not solely in management and administrative necessities.

  I think I resented having to let people go over what seemed to be less-than-significant infractions. But now, after years of owning my own business, I better understand Ken’s thinking, and I’ve come to respect his standards. I’ve also come to learn that it’s not just the company that can suffer when someone needs to be fired. Other team members may be forced to pick up the slack or be put out by obvious incompetence or disrespect. Troublesome employees may need a wake-up call that forces them to seek a position that offers more chance of success. Holding on to an employee you know isn’t cutting it is toxic to everyone involved.

  Ken Ham is also a brilliant marketer and communicator. His Australian accent makes him fascinating to listen to, and millions of people all over the world have done so with rapt attention, for decades. We would run an event and pull in $100,000 in product sales over a weekend, and that was because he was an incredible salesman. From his lectern he could mention things that people would line up to buy, afterward. I learned a lot from watching him work. He would bundle products in the most ingenious way. He’d say to the crowd, “People ask me what one book I would recommend. I recommend these three.” And people would rush out the doors to the tables and buy all three.

  The most important thing I learned from working for Ken Ham was the power of a mailing list, knowledge that I used to great effect years later to build my Inc. 5000 company, Liberty Alliance.

  Put bluntly, a good mailing list is a money-making machine. AiG worked with millions of dollars by raising donations and selling products through a massive mailing list. As Ken traveled around the country, he passed around a clipboard at every event to collect the names and addresses of his audience members. Eventually, we added a line for an e-mail address when e-mail became more common. He would come back to the office and hand it to the office staff, who would manually key in every single address and e-mail address. By the time they hired me, AiG had been in existence for about four years and already had over one hundred thousand people on its mailing list.

  That may not sound like a lot of people in the grand scheme of things, but when those one hundred thousand
people had heard Ken speak and were supercharged over what he was talking about and had taken the time to put their name and address on a clipboard, they thereafter faithfully read every piece of literature that came in their mailbox from us.

  Engagement was through the roof because people knew that while they were signing up for the newsletter, they would also get a monthly fundraising letter. And when Ken sent a fundraising letter, chances were high that a large percentage of recipients were going to return the envelope to us with a check and a pledge for a future donation. When he sent a newsletter with a mini-catalog of products, a good percentage of the recipients bought the products.

  I remember marveling at the power an organization can have. Within a few days of sending out a letter, money would start pouring in. I began campaigns to increase the size of the e-mail list, and we began conducting e-mail fundraising as well. My web team set up a way to receive donations online so that we could get access to funds instantly. We didn’t have postage or printing expenses. We just sent out an e-mail with a link to the online store and rapidly watched the donations pour into the bank account within forty-eight hours. That was revolutionary.

  It was while I was still at AiG that I started a business venture with my dad, one close to our hearts. Dad and I both love history and we happened to discover that the first version of the Bible brought to America by the Pilgrims in 1620 had gone out of print not long after that period.

  A little over four hundred years later, my Dad and I had this version of the 1599 Geneva Bible restored page by page in order to republish it in a modern edition. It’s still, word for word, the same as the original, which is part of its charm, so it reads as if it were in Middle English, but all of the spellings, punctuation, and font have been updated for readability.

  We borrowed money to get started, and three years later, we went to print, rolling those Bibles off the presses for the first time in four hundred years. Since then, we’ve distributed over one hundred thousand copies of the 1599 Geneva Bible. If you’d like to know more, visit GenevaBible.com where its popularity is still strong.

  At this point I had a full-time job, a side project, and three young children. That probably was enough to keep me busy, but I’d always wanted to earn my master’s degree by the time I was thirty years old. I also wanted to gain more credibility at AiG. I had read somewhere that people who have an MBA make more money than those who don’t, so that was enough encouragement for me to pursue the degree.

  The executive track MBA at Thomas More College, which was taught at night school, was my choice, given my full-time day job. Because my salary at the nonprofit was not enough to pay for my studies, I took out a student loan. The cost, plus the hours it took to complete the work, made it quite a challenge. But I got a lot out of it.

  I would recommend to anyone considering studying for an MBA to not to get it right out of college. Go and work somewhere for a few years and gain some experience. I found it much easier to apply the book knowledge I was receiving after having already gained valuable hands-on experience in management.

  Working full time with three small children while earning an MBA did make for a long day, though. I was up very early, getting ready, checking e-mails. I arrived at the office by 7:30 a.m., and put in a full, hard day of work, not leaving the office until 6:00 or 7:00 p.m. most days. But my work didn’t stop even then. E-mails piled up and the phone rang well into the night.

  On two nights a week, I would leave the office and go straight to night school. Classes went from 6:00 until 10:00 p.m., and we had a study group for another four hours on a second night of the week. For the rest of the week, we had research, writing, and projects to prepare.

  As AiG’s EVP, I’d often get phone calls that couldn’t wait until I was out of class, so sometimes, I had to step out. Ken might be on the West Coast with a problem. Though only 6:00 p.m. out there, it was 9:00 p.m. on the East Coast, but it didn’t matter what time it was, the problem still had to be dealt with despite the hour.

  Honestly, I didn’t mind the challenges. I thrived on defeating the wolves. I was the only person in the class who was a second in command, and one of the few who had to provide for young kids and a wife at home.

  You won’t find me saying it wasn’t difficult to juggle it all, but I learned to stick with it even when it seemed impossible. It’s largely why I found myself actively seeking out the mandolin moments in life. They don’t just happen. You have to make the effort to find the time to sit and enjoy a glass of wine. You don’t gulp it down and dash out the door. You can’t smoke a good cigar quickly. You must savor it and enjoy the moments you’re celebrating.

  At the end of my MBA program, I had to choose a company to research for my thesis work. I chose AiG, which had several offices around the world at that time in Canada, Great Britain, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia.

  I spent a few weeks at the Australian office interviewing the leadership there. They had a very different management philosophy than our US office did. I wanted to implement some of their suggestions, which I believed could really benefit the US office. My findings and recommendations, however, ended up creating some friction among the management at the US office and, eventually, led to my resignation.

  It was at about this point that I became aware of American Vision (AV), a nonprofit organization in Georgia. I liked this company because its message was that we could change the world for the better in every area of life. AV promoted the utopian vision that we could make a difference—and should. It was our God-given duty to outsmart the wolves and enjoy the mandolin. You know me by now. That vision fired me up, and I wanted to be a part of it!

  A week before I was hired at AV, I got a little ahead of myself and submitted a letter to the board of directors at AiG listing my concerns and my hope that changes could be made that would benefit the company. As you might imagine, it did not have the positive impact I had hoped for, and instead, I learned a very valuable lesson: how you say it is as important as what you say.

  My employment at AiG came to a sudden and jarring end. I had just enough in my bank account to get us through the next few weeks while I waited for AV’s decision regarding my employment. I had a moment of fear that my candidacy for the AV position could be jeopardized by the manner in which my employment had just ended at AiG.

  But, thankfully, my new boss, Gary, and the board at AV saw past all that and presented me with the opportunity to take what I had learned up to that point and apply it to my burgeoning career. Our move from Kentucky to Georgia held the promise of new beginnings.

  What I Know to Be True

  I believe God is the great artistic creator. What good is that knowledge if I don’t do anything with it? I’ve always believed it’s our responsibility to do what we can to improve on the great world that’s been given to us. We can make it better, economically. We can create more freedom and prosperity and encourage more peace and moments of calm despite the wolves of stress, demanding bosses, and long, hard days.

  Especially when we are young, our tendency is to gallop ahead, plowing over others who might be on the same path we are. We must learn that the mandolin might only be heard if we make the effort to stop and listen. And by doing so ourselves, we may encourage others to join us in enjoying the privileges of life.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Vision for America

  Where there is no vision, the people perish.

  Proverbs 29:18

  When I first moved to Georgia in 2004, my dad and I climbed Cobb County’s Kennesaw Mountain, which boasts a lot of Civil War-era history. At this 1,808-foot elevation, you can see Atlanta’s skyline very clearly. On the opposite side, a ridge of mountains in Paulding County is visible. I would later find my current home there.

  Just a few miles away sprawls the town where the drama represented by Fess Parker and Jeffrey Hunter in the 1950s movie The Great Locomotive Chase unfolded during the Civil War. In 1862 The General locomotive was stolen by Union spies at Big Shanty st
ation—now historic, downtown Kennesaw—and ran a few miles north before being recaptured by the Confederates. The author Joel Chandler Harris characterized the event as “the boldest adventure of the war.”

  I had just made my boldest career adventure with my move down to Georgia. As my dad and I took in that sweeping view, we had a premonition of the future and made the comment that “one day, the Vallorani name will have made an impression on this landscape. We’ll have put down roots here. We’ll have spread our family legacy across the state of Georgia.”

  At that point, I had a small house and was still working for someone else, making a nonprofit salary. I had only touched on the research of my family history and had no idea of the impact the legends of my ancestors would have on my future brand, Vallorani Estates. Over the next twelve years, I would lay the foundations to realize that vision.

  Before I made the decision to work at AV, I had mentioned the idea to a fundraising consultant at AiG. His question was, “How big are they?” I said, “Well, their budget is half a million dollars a year.”

  He just looked at me, aghast. I was heading from a nonprofit with a budget of twelve to fifteen million dollars to one with an annual budget of half a million dollars. “That’s crazy. Don’t do it. It’s career suicide. Why would you even consider that? You should be looking to go to an even bigger nonprofit, not a smaller one.” And he wasn’t the only one who thought so.