The Beginning
I was finishing university, trying to figure out what to do with my life. My Dad had a small t-shirt printing business — under $100,000 in annual sales — and he needed help. A friend was offering me a well-paying career in IT. I chose my Dad.
Within four years I had grown that business to $500,000. It was hard, physical work with a lot of staff and not much left over at the end. My Dad knew I needed more. So he did what dads do when they want to give their kids a shot — he bought a bankrupt toy company, took out a large loan at high interest rates, and started making toys.
It didn't go well.
After a year, the toy company had less than $90,000 in sales and was bleeding money. He had to let go of the staff who knew how to run it. The loans were mounting. He was out of options.
He turned to me — still running the t-shirt business — and asked if I could save it.
I said yes.
The Internet Changes Everything
While I was figuring out how to dig two companies out of a hole, a friend in Australia mentioned something called the internet.
In June 1995, there were 23,500 websites in the entire world. I built one of them — for a toy company most people had never heard of, in a city most people couldn't find on a map. Nobody thought it would work.
It worked.
By 1999, my website was featured in a book sponsored by Visa titled Selling Online: How to Become a Successful E-Commerce Merchant. Colleges started calling, asking me to speak to their business classes about this new way of selling. I was figuring out e-commerce before most businesses knew it existed.
By 2005 the business was profitable and growing. Sales were climbing toward a million dollars a year. I was proud of what we'd built — and I knew we could do more.
The Education That Changed Everything
In 2005 a friend told me about something called the 30-Day Challenge — a competition run by marketers Ed Dale and Frank Kern. The goal: pick a topic, develop a product, get your first online order within 30 days. Thousands of people entered. I came third.
That prize was a ticket to a conference in California that introduced me to some of the sharpest marketing minds I'd ever encountered. Over the following years I sat in rooms — and eventually one-on-one meetings — with people like Dan Kennedy, Dean Jackson, Joe Polish, Dan Sullivan, and Gary Halbert. I was also a member of a high-level marketing group whose speakers included country singer John Rich, entrepreneur and supermodel Kathy Ireland, actor and bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno, and Gene Simmons of KISS — each of whom had built remarkable businesses and had something real to say about how they did it.
What I learned in those rooms changed how I run this business. Not just the marketing — the thinking. The discipline of understanding exactly who your client is, what they need, and what you can honestly promise them.
Sales passed a million dollars. Then two million. Then more.
