When Lee Harper married his wife, Sue, he expected a seamless transition into a new life.  “When I left San Diego and moved back to Texas,” he says, "I had a computer science degree.  I had 25 years of experience as a computer systems manager.  I had a niche market that probably not more than ten people out of a hundred sending a resume in could get the job, and I could…but yet, there was nothing there for me."

The computer industry had declined in the Fort Worth area, and many companies had made significant layoffs.  “The online job search engines like Monster,” Lee says, “instead of having 50 and 100 jobs, they were having 5 and 6 jobs available in any particular area for computers.”

To ease the crunch, Lee took a position as a delivery driver for auto parts.  “I just decided to do what I could, do what I had to do to support the family.”  While delivering these parts, and later when he delivered fresh meat, Lee observed the business practices of his clients, and he realized that running a business wasn’t as hard as he thought it would be.  “I said, ‘You know what? We can do this.  We can do a business. It’s not that hard.’”

So Lee opened up an eBay store, selling fine meats, such as filet mignon and gourmet steaks, but it wasn’t as successful as he had hoped.  “It was okay,” Lee says, “ but it wasn’t making enough of a living where we can bring Sue home and just have that be our sole income.”

While Lee was working on the eBay site, Sue continued her job at National City Mortgage, one of America’s major mortgage companies.  “I was an auditor over there for four years,” Sue says.  “I would just come home…after work and help Lee, you know, ship and do the paperwork and the shipping labels and everything.” 

Things were going well enough with their combined income. Then National City made an announcement.  “They told us that there was going to be a department-wide, company-wide get together over at the hotel,” Sue says.  “And they just got everybody together and said…we’ve had to break up the company and they’re sending all their work up to the main company…everybody who was there in the room got laid off.” 

Luckily, Sue’s experience landed her another job with another financial institution, but the layoff helped the Harpers reevaluate their goals.  “The goal that we’re working towards is to have our business be ours, and have our job be our business, so that we’re not dependent on any company,” Lee says. 

Lee realized that his eBay store wasn’t the best option for marketing on the Internet.  “Yes, somebody can come to eBay and type in a search, but the majority of searching done today is going to be done on Google, on Yahoo, on MSN.  And so those searches that are done on those engines may or may not come to your store,” Lee says.  “It may go to somebody else’s eBay product.”

Lee attended the StoresOnline all-day workshop with a business partner.  While looking for a new website, Lee had two reasons for building his own rather than having someone else build it for him. “One,” he says, “it will be easier for us to change it later, without paying somebody to change it.”  His computer experience makes that easy enough.  “And then number two, I didn’t want to have somebody else doing something for me and then have to go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, to get them to do it the way I wanted it done.”

But what most impressed Lee was StoresOnline’s marketing training, including search engine optimization strategies and how to advertise on the Internet.  Lee and Sue bought six websites and began brainstorming ideas for products they could sell. Lee had kept a flier from a street vendor who sold tamales, so the Harpers contacted the company.  “And I said, ‘Would you like to have a website?’ And he said, ‘Man, it’s very interesting that you should call because I was just thinking that we should have a website.”

Four months later, in December, Lee and Sue published thetexastalmalewarehouse.com.

A week later, they started online advertising, and within hours of posting the ads they had their first order.  “I call it the grand opening, because you can launch a website,” Lee says, “and it can sit there for the next ten years, but if you don’t have any good marketing, nobody’s going to show up at that website, of course.”

With the December rush, the orders poured in.  “A month later, we had grossed $10,000.” Lee says.  From their initial success with pay-per-click advertising, Lee and Sue are now focusing on natural search engine rankings rather than pay-per-click advertisements.  “That is probably the key thing that StoresOnline gives us,” Lee says, “the ability to increase the natural marketing, or organic marketing on the Internet.”  Lee’s goal is to transition out of paid advertising.  “If you don’t pay for the ads, but you get high engine rankings, then you’re going to get visitors and you’re not going to have to pay for it.”

“If somebody received an invitation from StoresOnline and asked me, I would say, ‘Yes, I would highly recommend it,’” Sue says.  It’s an awesome opportunity to get hands on experience and training.” 

Lee agrees. “80 or 90 percent of the solutions out there today—you can pay somebody thousands of dollars to develop a website and get nowhere.  You can pay somebody else thousands of dollars to bring your search engine ranking up, but only get a little bit and have to pay for a whole lot more.

“With StoresOnline, you have an original outlay, but after that, basically, you have everything at your fingertips,” Lee says.  “The information is there.  You just follow it step-by-step.”

Visit the Harpers’ site at

http://www.thetexastamalewarehouse.com/

 

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