How I Learned the Hard Way That Real Business Is Built on Service, Not Snake Oil

I got married at 19. My wife, who was a little older than me, had a two-year-old daughter, and I essentially adopted her. She’s in her 40s now and still calls me Dad.

I was young but I also wanted to be a father, and a better father than mine. My father was an alcoholic who abused me when I was young. After my mother left him, the state institutionalized him. He had Korsakov’s Syndrome, a degenerative brain condition caused by years of alcohol abuse.

I carried that weight for most of my life before I understood what it actually was. That context matters because it drove everything that came next.

Bankruptcy at 23 Taught Me More Than Any Course

Wanting to fight my fear of rejection, I went into sales. Insurance, specifically. It seemed like the right kind of exposure therapy. And of course, I failed, spectacularly. Working on straight commission in a rural territory where I knew no one, I accumulated debt on eight credit cards just to buy groceries. The debt started piling up at 21, and by 23 I had declared bankruptcy. Young, foolish, desperate to provide.

Being a licensed insurance agent saved me there. An agent can’t stay licensed while insolvent, so the judge gave me a special dispensation, and I was discharged within two or three months.

But failure has a way of making you resourceful. Instead of cold calling doors that slammed in my face, I tried something different. I wrote a letter and mailed it. A simple offer: a free policy audit. Only a few people called. But those calls didn’t feel like rejection. They felt like permission.

That year, I became the top salesperson in my district, then in all of Canada. It didn’t last long. But something had clicked. Copywriting, writing words that move people to act, piqued my interest in a way that nothing else had.

From Insurance to Infomercials

I left insurance and took a job at a hair replacement clinic, working on commission again but in a growing industry. I wasn’t satisfied with the volume of leads coming in. So I quietly took over the clinic’s marketing. I wrote the newspaper display ads, the direct mail pieces, and the scripts for their late-night TV infomercials. Bookings skyrocketed. I was still in my early 20s and making more money than I ever had in my life.

When the clinic expanded to multiple locations across Canada and the US, I handled marketing, copywriting, advertising, and training their sales and marketing staff. That’s also when I built their first website in 1992, applying the same direct response principles I had been using offline.

What I had figured out, without anyone telling me, was that the Internet was just mail-order marketing in a faster medium. The channel changes. The human psychology underneath it does not.

The Accidental Career

None of this was planned. After spending so much time building marketing systems for other clinics and neglecting my own commissions, my income dropped. So I did the logical thing and hung out my own shingle as an independent marketing consultant.

In the early 90s, I put together a booklet called The 10 Commandments of Power Positioning. It was originally a marketing tool for my services. By the mid-90s, I split it into standalone articles and submitted them to online publications. One caught the attention of The Internet Marketing Chronicles, and they hired me as their editor and main writer. At its peak, the newsletter had 120,000 subscribers.

The late Corey Rudl, who owned The Internet Marketing Center, eventually acquired the magazine. He kept me on as editor and hired me to write his marketing materials, website content, and an autobiography as a ghostwriter. That opened the floodgates.

One of my bigger clients in the mid to late 1990s was a hair restoration company with offices across the United States. I worked out of their Chicago office, spent time at their head office in Orlando, and helped open their New York office, which meant living in Manhattan for about eight months.

I incorporated as The Success Doctor, Inc. in 1997. Speaking gigs followed, from a few hundred people in New Zealand to 10,000 in the UK. I shared stages with Dan Kennedy, Jay Abraham, Gary Halbert, Jay Conrad Levinson, Russell Brunson, and many others.

And that’s where things started to go sideways.

The Seedy Side I Didn’t See Coming

To understand this part of the story, you need to understand what the “internet marketing” world was in the late 90s and early 2000s. It wasn’t what most corporate professionals would recognize as digital marketing today. It was a parallel ecosystem, largely built around direct response copywriting, email marketing, and live seminars.

Some of it was brilliant, led by people who deeply understood persuasion, positioning, and conversion at a level most agencies still haven’t caught up to. And some of it was predatory.

The seminar circuit looked like education. But it was mostly a pitchfest in disguise. Speakers sold courses on how to make money. Some were legitimate. However, a growing number were packaging business opportunity schemes, “businesses in a box” that essentially taught people to replicate the same scheme they had just bought. Pyramid schemes dressed up as education. Snake oil wrapped in testimonials.

I was young, naive, and broke enough to find it all exciting at first. I wrote salesletters for some of these promoters. I spoke at these events. I was part of the machine without fully understanding what the machine was.

The first time I spoke at one of these seminars, I didn’t know I was supposed to sell something from the stage. The promoter took a 50% cut of speaker sales. I made nothing for him that day. Other speakers criticized me for it, some teased me for years afterward. With ADHD comes rejection-sensitive dysphoria, and the pain of that public humiliation was real and lasting.

But a few years later, the same promoter gave me a second chance. I came back prepared. I broke the event’s sales record and was named the top speaker. My pitch was for a copywriting critique course. Genuine education, real skills, real delivery.

The difference between embarrassing failure and success is often just deciding to try again when the fear is loudest. That distinction would matter more to me later.

When the World Turned Upside Down

In 2003, I met my second wife. She was running a customer support business that served many of the same clients I did. We merged our businesses, and eventually, our lives.

Then, shortly before our wedding in 2006, she was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. Over the next nine years, her disease became the center of our lives. We stopped speaking at seminars, stopped attending, stepped back from the industry entirely.

What I saw from the outside, once I stepped back, was disturbing. We were hearing more and more stories of people refinancing their homes to buy $20,000 “coaching programs” that delivered nothing. Boilerroom telemarketers were closing deals using whatever credit remained on a card. Some of the very people I had worked with were being investigated by the FTC for deceptive practices.

And when my wife was in the middle of chemotherapy, a handful of these same marketers hounded her with pitches for “natural cures” and pseudo-scientific nonsense. One accused me of being a shill for Big Pharma for supporting her medical treatment.

That was the last straw. My wife wrote a report called Internet Marketing Sins. It made us enemies. We stopped receiving speaking invitations and affiliate partnership offers. We were completely fine with that.

The Losses That Shaped Everything

In 2008, my mother was diagnosed with the same disease as my wife. Breast cancer. She became terminal in 2011. We set up a hospice in our home. She died the morning after my birthday.

Just a few months later, my wife’s cancer returned and spread to every major organ. Just a month before she passed in early 2015, my father died in his sleep at the institution. His heart had weakened from the same disease that had destroyed his mind decades before.

2015 was the worst year of my life.

Two years later, my sister, my only sibling, who had struggled with multiple health conditions her entire life, also died in her sleep.

I’ve done grief in a lot of ways. The one that works best for me involves a drum kit. I’ve played drums since I was young, and for the past several years I’ve been playing with a band on a regular basis. It’s not a metaphor or a productivity hack. It’s just the thing that quiets the noise.

After my wife passed, I didn’t have the heart to continue the agency we had built together. When I met my current wife, I joined SEO Twist, a digital marketing agency in Ottawa, just before we married. SEO Twist also acquired my agency. I worked there as SEO manager and director of marketing communications, with a team of content writers and developers at a Google Premier Partner shop.

That role led to my growth leadership years. As Director of Search at seoplus+, I ran the paid ads, SEO, and content marketing departments while ARR grew 197% to roughly $5 million. As VP of Growth at Musora Media, I helped a SaaS platform break through its plateau with a 244% lift in organic traffic. And as Head of Growth at Consulting Success, starting in early 2025, I led the work that grew sessions from AI search 924% year over year. I break those roles down in my post on the fractional CGO role.

What I Actually Believe About Growth

Grief changes your relationship to work. It clarified mine.

I no longer believe in teaching people how to make money. Not directly. Money is a byproduct of running a business, serving a customer, and solving a real problem. The business opportunity industry had it backwards. It sold the byproduct as the product, and charged people dearly for the privilege of chasing it.

The quote from my late wife’s report still guides how I think about this: “Make money at the service of others, not at the expense of others.” That principle is the foundation of everything I now do as a growth strategist.

SEO, it turns out, is not so different from copywriting. Both are about understanding your market, identifying the problems they face, and answering their questions as clearly and credibly as possible. The channel changes. The medium changes. The underlying discipline does not.

David Garfinkel once asked me on his Copywriters Podcast, “What topic makes your heart beat a tad faster these days?” My answer was SEO. It surprised him. I think it would still surprise some people.

But the discipline itself never surprised me. It felt like the natural next chapter. Know your market. Know their problems. Know how they talk about those problems. Answer them better than anyone else. That’s copywriting. That’s SEO. That’s content strategy. And done at the C-suite level, that’s Power Positioning. Today, the same discipline decides whether AI names you when a buyer asks for help, which is what my AI Shortlist Study set out to measure.

The Pattern I’ve Spent 35 Years Documenting

Through all three of those roles, I kept consulting part-time, on contract for several agencies and for independent clients, including medical aesthetics clinics in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal. Today my fractional practice is my main focus. I step into CMO, CGO, and CSO roles for growth-stage and expert-led firms that need the strategy without the full-time overhead.

What I keep seeing, in every engagement, is the same pattern the internet marketing industry had in a more refined form: businesses investing heavily in tactics without a system, chasing short-term conversions without building long-term authority, and measuring success by metrics that don’t connect to growth.

The reason I can spot this pattern quickly is that I’ve already lived through the extreme version of it. The internet marketing world was a laboratory for every growth mistake a business can make: overpromising, underdelivering, optimizing for the wrong metrics, and mistaking activity for progress. The companies I work with now aren’t running pitchfests. But the structural problems are the same. They just wear better suits.

The fix is not a new tactic. It’s a different way of thinking about growth, one that treats positioning, visibility, and demand as a single, integrated system rather than a collection of disconnected campaigns.

That’s what I built my career trying to articulate. And after everything it took to get here, I’m finally in a position to deliver it without compromise.

Lesson learned. And lesson earned.

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