It’s always a heartbeat. “thum-thummmm-thum-thummmm”

Ok so where to begin…

It all started back in 2000 when I got my second car, a black v6 Mustang before I was to go to school in Tallahassee, FL. The land of the free. So like any fresh 18-year old back when custom wheels were hot I decided to get some wheels for my new car. Some American Eagle 068 “replica” Cobra R rims. So rather than pay the $900 price tag for some 17×9 polished wheels I decided to call the wholesaler and act as a retail outlet in need of a set for my customer.

I still remember exactly what I said…

“Hey this is Chris with Boca Tint and Tunes and I’ve got a customer looking for a set of 068 wheels.”

I end up paying $465 cash for a brand new set. Put them on my new car and forgot about them.

Fast forward two years later, I’m a sophomore in college, dead broke and in need of money to pay the $350 rent payment. I’m scrounging around my apartment looking for stuff to sell and then I remember… “Ah my rims!”

My roommate at the time says, “Hey, why don’t you check out eBay?” I respond, “eBay? What’s that?” He then tells me about it, we hop on our 28.8 modem and check out the site to find out that guys were selling the same rims I bought for $465 for $850. And they were selling them ALL DAY LONG.

Cha-Ching!!

I’m in business!

And my first year, cranked up to $250,000 in sales all on eBay. Three years later in 2005, I sell the business to a private investor and call that business a day… sold!

Note to self: NEVER get in a hard-goods, physical shipping business again. Merchant companies, scratched merchandise, and the dreaded “inventory” is never fun or really scalable.

But the truth is… I knew nothing about selling or marketing!

So my “marketing mission” was on. I picked up book after book, old course after old course, and learned everything I could about selling, direct mail, boring college text book Coca-Cola marketing, and down and dirty marketing strategies from Jay Conrad Levinson in his Guerrilla Marketing Series.

By the way, the best tape series on selling is Zig Ziglars “Secrets to Closing the Sale.” It’s old, a little out-dated, old school for sure, but a great sales series. If you can find it, grab it. “The redhead would be proud.”

So anyhow, I dig in DEEP to learn marketing and after my 150th book I say to myself… “Hmmm, if these guys are doing it offline with direct mail and paying for letters, there MUST BE people doing this online.” And then the internet journey begins…

I bought every Jay Abraham course I could get my hands on. (Stealth Marketing is AWESOME by the way)

I listened to every interview from Michael Senoff’s Hard to Find Seminars website.

I bought every old school marketing book from Dan Kennedy.

And being single at the time, spent every waking moment absorbing marketing, marketing, marketing, selling, selling, selling, and a little persuasion on the side. If I wasn’t listening to a course, I was reading a marketing book.

I figured if I can MASTER marketing I can be free.

Jay Abraham says it best, “Marketing is the Ultimate Leverage.”

So… let me master this.

My First Product

It was the beginning of 2005, I had sold my wheel company, living the dream and was deciding what to do next. I was working for a friend’s business ValueRich at the time selling advertising to small-cap public company CEO’s with little success and came across the “ah-hah” moment for the next venture.

Before I tell you, please don’t laugh.

It was called TrueRaffles.com and was slated to be the worlds largest raffle ticket website where non-profits could post their raffle tickets for sale and people could buy them from our website.

Whoa… what a dud.

One cool thing happened out of this… the Lance Armstrong Foundation advertised on the site at a time when he was practically god. So after plunking a couple grand into this site and paying $90 per web-page and down to my last $2,000 later that October, my girlfriend, now wife, Alessandra said, “Why don’t you do that business with the replicated websites?”

So we did…

Worked on this site for 7 months and launched it to quickly bring in 150 paying customers at $19.95 per month in less than 3 days not knowing anything about product launches or anything. this business, MyRevive, funded my further marketing education.

I then bought every internet marketing course imaginable: Product Launch Formula, tons of ebooks, software, StomperNet, and a ton others while my membership site business was cranking in money day after day. I learned a ton, spent most of my time reading, watching videos, and studying like crazy.

FAAASSST Forward to today.

I LOVE making really killer software, creating big scalable businesses, and am never short of game-changing ideas like some companies I founded this year, 2010: Call Loop, AutoTeleseminar, AutoWebinar, JVGenie, and many more.

I love to surf, get away, think, and smell the roses.

I hope you enjoyed my brief, yet roller-coaster entrepreneur story, of which is being written now…

Cheers,

Chris