Boy with a website makes millions

Some of you may have discovered that happiness doesn’t arrive just because one has attained material wealth. However, in this day and age money has become as necessary as air itself for most people to survive. Back in 2000 a lot of people invested in the Internet in hope of making it rich quickly, few succeeded. That’s all changing now. I’ve just read about a 19 year old boy in the USA who has become a millionaire simply because he had a great idea and put a website on the Internet to promote it. That’s all it takes people. If you’ve got a new idea, or believe that you have a product or service that is better than the others around, you need to get a website on the World Wide Web.

Sean Belnick and his step-father started a website on the Internet just 5 years ago selling office chairs at www.

BizChair.com. It was Sean’s idea, and he was only a young teenager at the time. Now, when you type ‘Office chair’ into Google his site is the first link that comes up on the whole world-wide list. Their company makes over 15 million dollars a year and it’s rising fast, with huge deals being made providing chairs for everyone from American Idol to the Pentagon. This just proves it. It doesn’t matter how old you are, if you’ve got an entrepreneurial bone in your body you have to realize that the Internet is only now coming out of its infancy, and that if you’ve got a dream, it is the only place to make it come to fruition. This business started out of the boy’s bedroom with customers calling on a 1-800 number. It now sells over 2,000 products and has over 40 employees, plus owns a warehouse which covers 40,000 square feet. This is how all great business ideas begin: small. You needn’t be afraid that you don’t have enough capital. All you need is a great idea, and a website for people to find out about it. How does your page ranking go up on Google? First, you have to be ‘out there’. Secondly, you have to be doing a good job. The more other people mention or make links to your site (because of your high quality, or your efforts in networking) the higher you become on that magic money-making search engine list. Let me give you a little example. I very fortunately recently went on a vacation to Costa Rica in Central America. While there I went to one of the many Internet cafes in Tamarindo Beach to search for a hotel to stay in at Arenal Volcano which was over 5 hours drive away. I didn’t want to make the whole trip only to find that there weren’t any vacancies in the whole town. Plus, I couldn’t call around because most people only spoke Spanish, as well as the strange fact that calling other towns in Costa Rica was as equally expensive as calling back home overseas. I searched the Web and found the Volcano Lodge (http://www.arenal.net/hotel/volcano-lodge.htm), and subsequently stayed there for 3 nights watching lava spew forth out of the volcano’s two huge craters. There were heaps of hotels near the volcano that I hadn’t seen on the Internet, as well as some which had low-quality sites (ugly or hard to navigate). Others didn’t even work so no matter how pretty they were they didn’t give me much motivation to stay. In the end I chose the one that best fit my budget, as well as having shown me through pictures and information that it had the most features, services, and of course the best view of the volcano for the price. They got my money because they were on the Internet, near the top of the list, and had a website that attracted my attention.

Business isn’t all seriousness and Sean Belnick of the office chair fame will tell you that because his company was a family-based enterprise, it has actually brought his relatives closer together through the working experience. So, let’s get back to that opening thought. Material wealth doesn’t necessarily make one happy. However, if you follow your dreams and ideas through to the end you might just make a healthy living, and having fulfilled the goals that fueled your quest, happiness may just sneak in for the ride.

Thank you to Andrea Jones at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper whose article ‘Teenager sits atop office chair empire’ on April 28, 2006 inspired this article.