Nov. 27, 2023

This paid piece is sponsored by Sioux Metro Growth Alliance.

There was a time when Joe Barton sold some of his possessions online to help cover his family’s expenses.

Today, his business, Barton Publishing, sells e-books and nutritional supplements to thousands of new customers every week.

In between is an entrepreneurial success story largely written from Barton’s home in Brandon, where he built a publishing business that has grown fast enough to rank on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies this year.

“I started in a 6-by-6 closet in our basement with no windows and just worked away,” said Barton, who grew up in the Twin Cities and met his future wife in college in Duluth, Minnesota. “As an accountant, I’d come home and work until 2 a.m. building the side business.”

His wife, Amanda, is from Luverne, Minnesota. They moved to Brandon in 1997 to be closer to her family, and both worked in financial services until the birth of their second of four sons.

“We really wanted Amanda to be able to stay at home, so we took a step of faith, and she quit,” Barton said. “Our income got cut in half, and I needed to make some extra money.”

While working as an accountant by day, he went online after hours and began to research online marketing. At first, he sold his own possessions on eBay – his Star Wars collection and golf clubs – and through e-commerce, he noticed how others were selling e-books.

“As I studied it, I saw people were selling $10 e-books over and over again,” he said. “It was usually around a solution for a problem.”

He started searching and gave some of his own titles a try. Ideas like “how to make big screen TVs with 50 cents in supplies” or “how to buy designer handbags for 80 percent off wholesale” helped him dabble in the online publishing and marketing world. A course called push-button publishing introduced him to strategies for copywriting, website development, Google advertising and email marketing.

Then, he looked for a problem to solve – and found it literally covering the house on their family farm in Luverne.

“The house was covered in ladybugs, which happens after soybeans are harvested,” he said. “I knew my mom’s house five hours away had it happen too.”

He did some research, built getridofladybugs.com and published an e-book.

“I started buying ads on Google and made some sales and was like, wow, this actually works,” he said, after making a few hundreds dollars.

Then, his chiropractor told him about “a weird home remedy he used to dissolve his kidney stones: Coke and asparagus.”

You guessed it: “I went from how to get rid of ladybugs to how to get rid of kidney stones,” Barton said. “I was just experimenting, and it worked. People were using it. I launched a few other websites with a similar theme – gallstones and some other things – and then it was continuing to hone my craft as a copywriter.”

The big breakthrough came thanks to a story he remembered from his father, who suffered from acid reflux for a decade.

“Nothing fixed it until one day he realized if he eats an apple before bed, his reflux went away,” Barton said.

“That was the kicker. There’s more to the story, but it led to www.refluxremedy.com, and that was the website that became the one that made enough sales I could quit my job. I was making three times more with this website. Telling my boss I was quitting right before tax season was a little nerve-wracking, but I knew I had to do it.”

 Ups and downs

A couple of years after going full time at Barton Publishing, Barton went to a marketing event in 2007 and ended up meeting a doctor who would become pivotal to helping grow the business.

California-based Dr. Scott Saunders is a functional medicine doctor, “and it was like a divine appointment because I was looking for someone like him and he was looking for marketing help in his practice, and we started talking and hit it off,” Barton said. “He started looking at our e-books and said they were really good and were things he’d taught his patients.”

The two began working together on new content and began publishing at homecuresthatwork.com in 2009.

“We have almost 15 years of content there,” Barton said. “He’s an excellent researcher and writer and has covered nearly every disease or chronic illness you can think of.”

Barton Publishing’s marketing approach speaks specifically to common conditions people are facing. Can’t keep your blood sugar under control? There’s a $20 e-book waiting at fixbloodsugar.com, for instance.

Consumer demand led the company to expand into supplements about six years ago, first producing one designed for diabetics.

“We can’t say this helps reverse diabetes — we need to be compliant — but that product really has been a game-changer for us,” Barton said.

He also has overcome some rough patches in the business. He helped a friend launch a healing frequency music project that “just took off like crazy,” he said. “But after three years, I felt I needed to step away from that and hand it off to my friend who created it and set him up to run that business, and I needed to focus on my own.”

Left with what he called “a shell of a business” because his attention had been diverted, Barton “did a lot of soul searching” and was nearly ready to throw in the towel, as he put it, when friend and POET founder Jeff Broin said something in a board meeting they were both at that resonated.

“He talked about what they focus on is not helping more people but helping people more,” Barton said. “It’s a subtle distinction but a huge difference. So I thought, how can I help customers more?”

He asked Saunders about launching a free weekly webinar for customers, “and he was excited about it, and as we did that, we just really got to know our customers better,” Barton said. “We could learn what they’re struggling with more. It helped me personally connect and feel the heartbeat of our customers. And we learned  they’re struggling with high blood pressure or neuropathy, and we knew we could help with that.”

Growth accelerates

The increased customer focus led Barton to produce more content and more supplements, positioning the company to be right where it needed to be in early 2020 as the pandemic took hold.

“So 2020 was our best year up to that point, and each year it’s continued to grow,” Barton said. “It’s been amazing. My business has become much more of a passion, a personal mission.”

Barton now has 17 full-time employees and about as many working in contracted positions like phone sales and customer support, including globally.

“I think we have six in Sioux Falls, and the rest are all over the place,” Barton said.

He and his family continue to be based in Brandon, where they’ve renovated the basement to be an office and workout room.

“All my meetings are on Zoom, and we’ve become really good at running the business using the EOS, or entrepreneurial operating system,” he said. “It’s just been a great system for us.”

The success of Barton Publishing validates how Sioux Falls metro communities can support entrepreneurs at all stages, said Tyler Tordsen, president and CEO of Sioux Metro Growth Alliance.

“It’s incredible how many people this company has reached beginning from a basement in Brandon,” he said. “Our metro communities really embrace entrepreneurs and small businesses, and with that foundation, it’s not uncommon to see a massive success story take shape.”

For the Barton family, Brandon also provides an important place to invest in personally. They originally moved across the border to take advantage of South Dakota’s tax environment – the savings allowed them to cover the mortgage on a new house – and now find it an ideal location.

“My life is online-based, and my wife’s is very community-focused,” Barton said. “She volunteers for three or four nonprofits and hopes to help get a community center built at some point, plus she has directed a kids camps for foster kids for years. We’re about to adopt a 16-year-old out of foster care, so that’s very exciting. We love the Brandon community.”

As for his business, it keeps growing. Barton estimates his work has been able to reach well over 1 million customers. He’s on track for another record year and credits a defined company culture for helping him attract the talent necessary to support the business.

“We’re clear on our core values, and I think that’s why we have really high retention, even on our phone team, which typically has high turnover,” Barton said. “We wear our faith on our sleeve, we give God credit and look for him to help us, and we pray for each other and our customers. It’s a really cool thing. I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing through my business. People ask if I would sell, but why would I sell something like this? I’d lose my purpose.”

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