John Varnedore, Founder of Impact 360 Media

Meet John

John Varnedore grew up in Hot Springs. He's lived here since 1974, apart from 20 years in the U.S. Air Force, and graduated from Lakeside High School in 1979. He earned both his degrees while on active duty: a BS in Technical Management from Oklahoma City University and an MBA from the University of South Dakota. After the Air Force he spent 14 years selling and building marketing for local businesses at AT&T Interactive, Alltel and DPS Media, where he founded the digital division serving 80 markets.

He started Impact 360 Media in 2006 building custom virtual tours on the side, and in 2013 he left corporate to run it full-time, shooting Google Street View tours and optimizing Google Business Profiles. In 2014 Google certified him as a Street View Trusted Photographer, one of only five in Arkansas, and his Google photos and tours have now passed 41 million views.

Since 2015 he has been a Google partner, first in the Let's Put Our Cities on the Map and Get Your Business Online programs and now Grow with Google, and he was a Google Trusted Verifier from 2016 to 2019. He led Google Business Profile workshops at the Hot Springs and Arkadelphia chambers, training more than 100 business owners, and he spoke often at Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center events. In 2017 he was a guest speaker at the Diamond Lakes Region Hospitality and Tourism Conference at DeGray Lake Resort State Park. He has set up more than 500 Google Business Profiles, and some of his clients have worked with him since 2000.

For most of those years, you wouldn't have seen any advertising from us, and you still won't. We've never paid for ads. Our work came from Google referrals, from larger agencies that hired us behind the scenes, and from customers who sent their friends, and everything we do for ourselves today is organic search, PR and referrals: the same work we do for clients. In 2021 we launched the i360 platform, one connected system for websites, calls, follow-up and reviews, and grew into full-service local marketing. That's what lets John work directly with more local businesses today without losing the personal service.

Today he builds lead systems for contractors, home service businesses and cosmetology schools: Google profiles and websites built for search and AI answers, plus AI receptionists, AI chat and automatic follow-up, all in one login on the i360 platform.

He's also a Level 8 Google Maps Local Guide, and one of his favorite jobs is helping a small business get untangled from an agency that left them stuck: getting their domain back, getting access to their own Google profile, and moving their website somewhere they own it.

How John works

• You talk to John, not an account manager.
• Month-to-month, no contracts. Your domain, Google profile, reviews and contacts are always yours.
• Google Meet, or in person if you're near Hot Springs.