Gerald's son Raymond does most of the development for his father's site. Raymond is pictured here with his mother Karen West.

Gerald West drove trucks for 30 years near Indiana. Five years ago he bought his first computer-hoping to open his own expediting company. Unfortunately, rising fuel costs meant the business never really got off the ground. The computer sat for three years, rarely being used except to read an occasional email. Then one day Gerald looked at it and thought, "I've never owned anything that didn't earn its own keep. Either that computer is going to start earning me money, or it is going out by the curb." He immediately began looking for some sort of computer-based business. He briefly got involved with some self-proclaimed Internet "Gurus"-but those efforts went nowhere. He then tried some web-based multi-level marketing companies, but that didn't work either.

Then his life changed.

Gerald's eyesight had been progressively failing, and on November 12, 2002, Gerald West officially became visually disabled-eventually enduring seven surgeries. He couldn't drive trucks anymore, and he had to sell his house to keep his business going. During the months his eyesight was failing, he saw an advertisement for StoresOnline. He went to the introductory meeting because it was on Saturday, and as a trucker, he couldn't get time off to go mid-week.

"[I] Didn't know what to expect out of it. I went for information. I had no intention of buying any sites. I had no knowledge of what I could or couldn't do," he says flatly. "If you want to talk about 'PC Illiterate' I could write a book about how stupid I really am. There isn't anybody any dumber than me when it comes to computers."

Gerald has learned a lot about computers over the last year.

After the Internet preview meeting, Gerald decided to go to the full-day workshop out of sheer curiosity. "The whole thing was about education," he says. He was in search of knowledge. While driving trucks for three years he had listened to news reports that talked about the rise in Internet.

At the end of the workshop training day, Gerald and his wife decided it was their time to try and better their futures by launching a new Internet enterprise. Trucking was literally killing him. He and his wife were both 60 years old and beginning to have some health problems. They bought the Internet sites because they knew they couldn't keep doing what they had been doing.

"We were trying to prolong our lives by doing something else," he explains matter-of-factly. Gerald knew the potential of the Internet from what he himself had heard on news reports. He worked with 164 people in his company-all who dreamed of striking out on their own some day. Proudly, Gerald proclaims, "Everyone I worked with kept talking about doing it, and talking about doing it, and talking about doing it. So I went out and did it. And they are still talking."

He and his wife bought six websites that day.

Gerald's wife wanted their first site to sell beeswax candles. They investigated that possibility, but had a difference with their potential supplier of products. So instead, they began looking at a wholesale dropshipping list. Eventually they found the supplier they wanted, and their first site, KozyKomfortbyKaren, now sells quilts, linens, and health items. Within ten days after they published the site, they had two orders. Gerald and Karen's son is their "web master." Together, they have designed a unique and impressive site. Since May 2003, they have been getting phone calls from total strangers who put this site on a "world class basis."

The first year, Gerald grossed $17,000 in sales from his first website. And although he is satisfied with what he did on sites last year, he is thinking bigger. He is currently updating his site to encourage international sales. One of the first sales he made was to a person in Sweden. He is also modifying his business plan to do the same thing his distributor is doing-building an affiliate program. Gerald predicts a day when a network of affiliated sites will sell the products he supplies to them from his KozyKomfortbyKaren site.

But he didn't stop with just his first site.

Gerald and Karen have another website published and are working on publishing another two. He has already stumbled across items that were hotly in demand on his second site. He is modifying that site to specialize in those items. "And," he adds mysteriously, "we are very excited about another idea that we will probably save for our last site."

Clearly, his Internet businesses are still in their infancy stages. He predicts that their main site will probably sell $6,000-7,000 of product per month for the rest of year. He loves using the training that StoresOnline provided in that first Workshop to drive traffic to his sites.

"We are very, very optimistic," Gerald says. " I know within two years, there is no reason our first website should not be selling $250,000 per year." He wants to turn all of his websites over to his kids within 2 years and have time to enjoy his retirement years with his wife.

So far, Gerald and Karen are not pulling any money out of the business. They are reinvesting everything and are planning big! "The business world has changed so much in the last 20 years," Gerald says wryly. "But I fell back on the knowledge and experience I had and made it work. And I incorporated some of the new technology, too!"

In the future, Gerald wants to help extended family with his Internet sites. "I've just tried to keep an open mind. And I do what I can with what I've got."

Visit the Wests' Website at www.kozykomfortbykaren.com

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