Jay Van Andel and the Family Lessons Behind the Amway Founder’s Success
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2026
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, Jay Van Andel, co-founder of Amway, built one of the most successful businesses in American history. But at home, his greatest lessons weren’t about business, they were about family, discipline, and faith.
Each night at the dinner table, Jay and his wife Betty made time to teach their children through real-life experiences, sharing the challenges of building a company and the values that sustained them. From family meals to a life-changing trip into the Soviet Union, their children saw firsthand the difference between systems, and the importance of freedom, responsibility, and perseverance.
In this tribute, Dave Van Andel and Barb Gaby reflect on their parents’ marriage, their struggles with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and the lasting lessons that shaped their lives.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:14.3 | And we continue with our American stories and with a compelling tribute from two grown kids to their late parents. |
| 0:23.3 | Jay Van Andel is best known as the co-founder of Amway, the direct selling company which provides |
| 0:28.4 | over one million people with the opportunity to own their own business. |
| 0:33.4 | But he also was the founder of a namesake medical research institute and a dad. |
| 0:38.3 | Here's siblings Dave Van Andle and Barb Gaby on their parents, Jay and Betty. |
| 0:44.3 | I had a front row seat every night at the dinner table with one half of a duo that was experiencing |
| 0:59.0 | an incredible story in life called the Amway. You know, and I was born the year that |
| 1:06.0 | Amway was founded. So I knew nothing else but the Amway story. |
| 1:16.6 | But every night at the dinner table we would hear about what happened, you know, at work and, you know, |
| 1:23.6 | inevitably there was always a lesson in there somewhere. |
| 1:28.8 | As we got older, he'd begin to bring those things home and then he would also challenge |
| 1:33.7 | us, say, okay, you know, what would you do in a situation like this? |
| 1:39.4 | A couple of us would chirp in and we'd debate that. |
| 1:42.1 | And then he'd go, okay, here's what I did. So you'd learn, and here's what happened because of that. |
| 1:48.0 | He would do that more often than not. |
| 1:51.0 | And I got to see a front row seat of two entrepreneurs |
| 1:56.0 | going through and living this story real time. |
| 2:03.6 | They didn't have all the answers. |
| 2:05.6 | They didn't even know half the questions. |
| 2:07.6 | But they knew that they had the will, they had the drive, |
... |
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