From the Publisher, Eileen Majors
Looking back on this second anniversary of Mountain Valley Living, one thing rings true: Our readers have made this dream my reality. I mean by so many reading it yes, and because It was a few of our readers who jumped on board, literally becoming the creative staff who makes the magazine.
Melissa Wynn called me one day after she got the first edition. “I want to write for the magazine,” she told me. After two months of 17 hour days put in, I was thrilled. Every month she searches out great places to stay and comes up with some really fun stuff for our readers. I quickly called my old friend Mary Hasselwander, who agreed to help us make some sense of it all. My neighbor Rhonda Sanders hustled through local businesses to win the support we needed to continue.
Like magic, beautiful photography from good friend Jack Coverdell soon followed. Ben Graham, our wise webmaster worked days and nights to design a website that does absolutely everything! It took him several months to even get me to look at it, let alone use the amazing features including his unique tag system which has resulted in as many as 430,000 website hits in a single month. He also set up an online Nor Cal store where readers can buy things easily from our local merchants. I am shocked when I think of how far we’ve come because of the talent that showed up to take part in this plan, obviously bigger than mine. John and Jan Cox also jumped on board and are now a vital part of our team.
Greg Marankie of Marankie Concepts, now a regular design contributor called me last year to tell me he liked the magazine but he thought we needed his help. I listened to his ideas, as each was an answer to a problem I was completely aware we had. He has been helping us ever since. We can’t wait to grow into becoming a big consumer of his amazing talent.
Teresa Majors who had taken a professional break to enjoy being a full time, stay-at-home-mom voluntarily jumped on board to help me some time back. She now designs every page in the magazine, pretty beautifully too, I think. Her dedication and talent is fun to watch and it’s fun to have kids popping in our office from time to time. Speaking of kids, we love the opportunity Sedona brings to the communities with her Kidzview page. Kim Poggi, who joined the drive early on, continues to help and distribute magazines throughout the Nor Cal region.
It’s been a long struggle as taking time to sell ads could not always take first priority. Hearing from my old boss of 15-plus years, I thought was sheer luck. Her extensive experience is in sales management locally and in the Malibu area and she too wanted to help. There we have Eve DeVeir, the latest miracle to arrive on board.
We are equipped and ready to grow into the original dream project as we currently seek out qualified candidates to put together a strong sales team. We have tens of thousands of readers and hundreds of thousands of online visits each edition, but we are still well on our way to becoming successful. I cannot wait to be able to reward all of these ordinary people WELL for their extraordinary efforts.
We are still looking for sales people to complete the team here. I have no doubt as we celebrate our second anniversary that just the right people will arrive so the magazine can prosper the people who work here and help the communities we serve. Thanks for reading on.
