Meet Nick Ordonez
Nick Ordonez is a family man and business owner with years of experience in different industries, including not for profit. Nick has worked for different companies as an administrator, accountant, controller, CFO, and partner.
His first business, started with his parents in 2008, Aquarius Homes is a home health care that is still thriving in Long Beach CA. Nick grew up with a brother with Down Syndrome, and had always been inspired and motivated by his brother to do big things. Aquarius Homes was started by his family when Nick went off to college because his brother had become lonely.
In 2017, Nick started his first solo business, JETCET, and dedicated it to his brother Jonathan. The LA/OC based travel brand, JETCET’s vision is to “inspire the appreciation of journey, time, and community for every traveler. Travel should not always be about the destination, but the journey.”
A portion of every JETCET sale gets donated to the nonprofit Campaign One At A Time with the goal to help as many kids battling cancer and other life-threatening illnesses as possible.
Since its inception, JETCET has donated thousands of dollars and many different products to a variety of organizations across the United States, including, Campaign One At A Time, Hollywood Food Coalition, Project Ropa, Mamba & Mambacita Sports Foundation, Three Sisters Gardens, Capo Bella Inc., and other organizations with varying missions.
In 2020, Nick published a book about his relationship with his brother, Jonathan called “Halo Effect.” A story of two brothers, the older Down syndrome and severely mentally disabled and the younger “normal," navigating the trials and tribulations of life growing up from boys to men. Born just 11 months apart, their early childhood is filled with happiness and love, until the Down syndrome brother has to have dangerous spinal surgery as a young child and has to live with a halo on his head for a year. The younger brother must spend most of his life, with his parents, taking care of his older brother. For the younger brother, especially during his teenage years, this creates resentment and embarrassment for having a family member who is “different.” The brothers would continue to face many different challenges as the years go by but through it all they inspire each other to come out stronger.
Nick says everything he gets involved with is for his brother, since his brother wasn’t able to enjoy travel as much as he did, and to “help make a difference in different communities and spread good wherever it traveled.”
Nick has been featured on numerous podcasts including the Westrive Podcast to talk about his business, JETCET and the Diversity & Down The Podcast to talk about his complex relationship with his brother. Nick and his brother have also been featured by the National Down Syndrome Society.
In 2021, Nick joined Campaign One At A Time as Director of Campaigns. Since joining Campaign One At A Time, he’s helped Brodi Nicholas, the organization’s Founder and CEO, grow its impact from making 1 child’s dream come true a month to 15 children a month, with a goal of making over 200 dreams come true and impacting over 2000 children in 2022. In the short time he has been part of the Campaign One At A Time team, he’s been interviewed by over a dozen newspaper and television news broadcasts to talk about the nonprofit’s mission and the specific children they have sponsored.
Nick invested in and joined the Spread Good Squad at its birth because he believes in telling positive stories to inspire. Ordonez says he “hopes to inspire other business owners and individuals to be more philanthropic and give to worthy causes.”
An avid traveler, Nick has been to multiple countries across Europe, Asia, and North America. He has a goal to visit as many countries in the world as possible. He loves to experience different cultures and meet different people, believing “we all have more in common than we have differences.” He hopes to continue his travels with the Spread Good Squad and share positive, uplifting stories of the beauty of humanity to as many people as possible.
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