John Earl Shoaff

John Earl Shoaff ( March 21, 1916 - September 6, 1965 ) was an American entrepreneur and philosopher who was widely known as "The Millionaire Maker." At the height of his career, Shoaff was President and Board Chairman of the Nutri-Bio Corporation ( headquartered at 291-293 South La Cienega Boulevard, Beverly Hills, California ), a direct sales organization which sold vitamin, mineral, and protein dietary food supplements. He also founded Ovation Cosmetics in 1960 and they are still in business today.

Shoaff was deeply influential in the early life of Jim Rohn ( 1930–2009 ), an American motivational speaker and writer whose work helped launch or further the career of many others in the personal development industry, including Anthony Robbins, Mark Victor Hansen, Brian Tracy, and Jack Canfield. Mr. Shoaff also had direct influence on the early lives of Zig Ziglar and Mary Kay Ash. At the age of 25, Rohn heard a "laws of success" lecture given by Shoaff and went to work for him.

Today, much of the information about Earl Shoaff comes from Jim Rohn's teachings and a student of Rohn's named Ron Henley. Henley first heard Rohn mention Shoaff at a seminar in 1978. He became so intrigued with Shoaff that he spent the last three decades conducting research and interviewing many people who knew Shoaff personally. Henley launched EarlShoaff.com as a result of his research and he is currently writing a book about Shoaff, Rohn and their legacy.

Early life

Born in Point Grove, Pennsylvania to a family of humble means, he was born with such a weak and fragile heart that he was not expected to survive childhood. At age 14, the Great Depression hit and he left ninth grade to get a job and help support his family. He found work in a local dry cleaners and quickly learned every aspect of operating the business, working his way up to manager.

When World War II broke out, he wanted to join up but he was rejected by the military because of a very serious heart condition he had been born with. In order to serve, Shoaff worked as a medical volunteer with the American Field Service overseas. After the war, he was told that this combat duty had caused further heart complications. Faced with a pessimistic prognosis of his mortality, Shoaff was determined to live life to its fullest. He married his sweetheart, Flossie, and proceeded to open his own dry cleaning business which he named "Earl's Cleaners" in Michigan.

The Michigan Winters were getting rough on Shoaff's elderly parents, so, in 1950, Earl and Flossie decided to sell their dry cleaning business and move, with his parents, to Long Beach, California. Earl got a job at Desmond's department store pressing suits and settled into daily California life.

The Shoaff's next door neighbor, Marvin Wendt, introduced them to a nutritional supplement company called AbundaVita. When he saw what the company offered, he joined on the spot and became a shining star in the company. he did so well, he was promoted to VP of Sales and began touring the country giving seminars and recruiting others into AbundaVita. It was at one of these seminars where a young Jim Rohn came to hear him speak. Rohn was so impressed with Shoaff, he signed up as a distributor of AbundaVita's product line.

2 years later, in a dispute with the owner of AbundaVita, Shoaff resigned and, with friends Rich Schnackenberg and Harry Ebbert, started The Nutri-Bio Corporation in July, 1957. Many of AbundaVita's sales force had also become unsatisfied and signed up with Nutri-Bio. Shoaff was always proud of the fact that he, or no one from the management team, had ever asked a single person to leave AbundaVita and join Nutri-Bio and that people had done so of their own free will.

Under Shoaff's leadership, Nutri-Bio quickly became a "national mania" growing to 115,000 distributors in the USA and Canada and he became a multi-millionaire.

Of special note, Shoaff was the keynote speaker at a large gathering of success-minded people held in 1962 at the Essex House Hotel (renamed the Jumeirah Essex House Hotel in 2006 ) in Manhattan, New York City. His talk, originally made available on a 33 RPM vinyl record, has since become legendary in the self-help, prosperity consciousness, MLM, and network marketing communities. As copies of this record are now very rare, Shoaff's talk was released in eBook, CD and MP3 formats under the title "How To Become a Millionaire!" on http://www.EarlShoaff.com.

Earl Shoaff centered a lot of his lessons around farm life. Stories including sowing, reaping, weeds, and tending gardens were cornerstones of his teachings.

Some of his quotes include:
"Nothing comes to us, everything comes through us from us. Everything in this world that happens to us comes from in here, not out here."

"Let's not be moons, the reflector of the light. Let's be suns. Let's be the creator of the light - the creator of ideas. We all have the capacity."