08/18/2026
October 24, 2004: I was living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, doing trade shows and running perfume stores in malls with my wife, Ami.
At our first show back in 2000, we fit our entire inventory and racks into a Ford Ta**us station wagon. I'm not exaggerating...it was, without question, the most hideous booth at that show.
But we kept showing up.
Also, at the time, we were running stores across Milwaukee, Brookfield, Racine, Madison, and Appleton.
Most of those years, we worked 8 to 11 hours a day, 7 days a week, longer during the holidays, because that's what the mall hours demanded, and because we were building something big.
Within a few years, we'd grown our booth to one of the largest perfume booths in B2B trade shows in America, known for having the widest variety of hard-to-find designer fragrances anywhere, and one of the most efficient teams in the business.
We also had the highest variety of designer fragrances in the state of Wisconsin.
Our next move was expanding into the Chicagoland area. Our Milwaukee mall managers put in a good word for us with the mall managers in Chicago, and that's how those doors opened.
We were building something real.
Brick and mortar. With our own hands.
Then things started shifting.
Internet happened.
It's easy to buy fragrances online because usually people know what they want and can compare prices. Our foot traffic started drying up.
And here's the part I don't usually say out loud: I was already in debt when this hit.
At the time, the only way out was going online.
So I started calling around to get quotes for a website. A perfume e-commerce site needs a page for every single product, and with the number of fragrances we carried, that meant at least 5,000 pages.
Nobody quoted me less than $30,000. I didn't have $30,000. I didn't even have $3,000.
So I locked myself in our warehouse for 30 days and taught myself how to build websites from scratch. That's how GrandPerfumes .com came to life.
I thought that was the hard part. Once the site went live, the orders will come pouring in.
But nothing happened for weeks.
That's when I realized there'e something called traffic!
A website nobody can find is invisible. So next I taught myself SEO & social media.
No courses, no shortcuts, just grinding it out day after day.
Eventually I got that site ranking on page one of Google, Yahoo, and MSN for hundreds of keyphrases. Orders started pouring in from all over the US, from Europe, from Australia.
Piece by piece, I paid off everything. The malls. The suppliers. The banks. The credit cards, interest and all.
Every single person and every single place we owed money to got paid back in full.
Meanwhile something I didn't expect happened. Other business owners started noticing and asking me how I was getting customers from internet.
I told them, for free, every time. But almost nobody actually went and did anything with the advice.
That gap is what changed everything for me. If people weren't going to implement it themselves, I'd do it for them instead.
That's the real origin story of Killit Online, my digital marketing company.
Looking back, the lesson is simple, but it took almost losing everything for me to learn it. I didn't see the internet coming.
I wasn't proactive about it. I built our entire business on one source of traffic, the mall, and I never asked myself what would happen if that one source dried up. It did.
And I had no backup plan.
That's the lesson I carry into everything I do now. I never let one business, one channel, one client, one platform, one website, or one habit become the whole business again.
The moment something feels too comfortable and too dependable is exactly the moment to start asking what happens if it disappears...
..I see that same blind spot happening again right now, except this time it's AI. Business owners not paying attention to AI, the same way I didn't pay attention to the internet back then.
Here's my gorgeous bride and me at our perfume booth in Rosemont on October 24, 2004 in Chicago (By tehn we had to rent Penske trucks to haul all this inventory)
So what lessons have you learned in business? What's your story?
