When most people decide to start an online business, the first thing they think about is what to learn. What course to take, what skill to pick up, what niche to research. The assumption is that building something online requires starting from scratch, and that whatever they’ve spent the last 10 or 20 years doing professionally is not relevant.
But Tim Hewitt’s story is a pretty good argument against that.
A few years ago, Tim found himself sitting on about a million dollars’ worth of unsold golf inventory from a business that had dried up. He’d listed old driver heads on eBay hoping to get them off his hands but no one bought them. So he took the same products, relisted them as mini drivers, and they sold right away. It was the same physical item just positioned differently. And that’s exactly what he’d been doing his whole career, taking what already existed and repositioning it for whoever needed it next.
That same instinct is what eventually led him to build an online business he runs from anywhere in the world. But the more interesting part isn’t what he built. It’s how he figured out that he’d had what he needed the whole time, and what that means for anyone who thinks they need to start from scratch.
What He Was Before the Internet
Before any of this, Tim ran a golf business that hit $2 million in revenue during the Tiger Woods era. It was part driving range, part online component supply shop for custom club builders. The competitive edge was simple: everyone else took a week or two to ship. But Tim shipped the same day.
Then 2008 happened. Disposable income for golf dried up almost overnight, and Tim went from managing a warehouse full of orders to sitting on a million dollars worth of inventory nobody was buying.
He’d spent years before the golf business working as an engineer, doing factory consulting work he was good at but had already decided to leave behind. When the golf business collapsed, his old boss called with a consulting job at a factory in Malaysia, and Tim took it because he didn’t have many other options. He was back to analyzing operations, finding inefficiencies, helping factories run faster and cheaper. The skill was still there but the passion for it wasn’t.
But that period clarified something. Every job Tim had ever had ran on the same thing, walking into a broken situation, figuring out what was wrong, and fixing it. And when COVID eventually shut the factories down and Tim had to figure out what came next, that instinct pointed him somewhere new.
COVID and the Pivot That Fit
When COVID hit, Tim’s factory consulting work stopped almost immediately. No site visits, factory floors to walk, or problems to diagnose in person. He tried remote visits, someone walking the factory floor with a camera while Tim watched from his computer, but it wasn’t the same and he knew it pretty quickly.
So he went looking for what was working online. He found a program called Legendary Marketer run by David Sharp, which introduced him to affiliate marketing and eventually to ClickFunnels. And through ClickFunnels he found Russell Brunson’s frameworks, which came down to one core idea: almost any skill, packaged the right way, is something people will pay to learn.
That hit differently for Tim. He’d spent thirty years solving problems for people across factories, golf shops, and consulting rooms, but nobody had ever told him that was expertise worth selling. But Russell’s model said it was. And the more Tim sat with that, the more he realized the online business he was looking for had been sitting inside his own resume the whole time.
How He Found His Own Expertise
The thing about Russell’s expert model is that it sounds obvious until you try to apply it to yourself. Tim knew the framework. What he didn’t know yet was what his expertise actually was.
He started where most people start, promoting other people’s products as an affiliate and figuring out how to get traffic to his offers. That process led him to solo ads, a traffic method where you pay list owners in your niche to send your offer to their audience. He got good enough at it that he eventually wrote a book on it called Solo Ad Secrets. But the more he worked with people trying to build their own online businesses, the more he kept running into the same conversation.
They didn’t need help finding a niche. They already had one. What they needed was someone to help them see that what they’d been doing for years was something other people would pay to learn.
That realization is what pushed Tim toward the work he does now. And the first place he saw it clearly was with authors.
What He Builds for Authors
Most authors think of a book as the product. You write it, you publish it, you sell it for $20 on Amazon, and that’s the business. But Tim sees it differently.
A book is a front door. And what’s behind that door is where the income is.
When Tim started working with self-published authors, he noticed they were leaving most of their potential income on the table. And it wasn’t because their books weren’t good. It was because Amazon was taking a significant cut and the transaction ended there. Nobody was capturing email addresses, nobody was offering anything beyond the book itself, and most authors had no idea that a $20 paperback could be the beginning of a much longer customer relationship.
Tim’s answer is a book funnel, built inside ClickFunnels, that turns a single transaction into a full customer journey. Someone buys the paperback, and instead of the transaction ending there, they’re offered the audiobook, then a signed hardcover, then potentially a course built around the same expertise the book covers. The price goes up at each step, and the author keeps the margin instead of giving it to a retailer.
The print side works through an integration between ClickFunnels and a platform called Lulu, which handles print on demand. When someone buys, ClickFunnels sends the order to Lulu automatically and Lulu ships it. The author never touches the inventory. Tim points out that Lulu is currently the only print on demand vendor with an open API that makes this possible, which means most authors don’t even know this option exists. They just need someone to show them what’s possible. And that’s what Tim does, and it’s what he’s always done.
What Tim’s Story Teaches
Every chapter of Tim’s career looked different on the surface, the golf business, the factory work, the online business he runs today, but the same thing drove all of it. He never needed a new skill. He just needed a new context for the one he already had.
Most people looking to start something online assume they need to reinvent themselves. But Tim is proof that you don’t. The skills you’ve built over your career are already the product. You just need a way to package and sell them.
Here’s what Tim would tell anyone starting out:
- Your existing skills are the starting point. You don’t need a new niche or a new identity. Tim went from engineering to golf to online business without leaving behind a single thing he knew. He just kept finding new rooms to use it in.
- Test before you scale. Tim never throws money at something unproven. He tests small, watches what happens, and scales only what works. He does it with solo ads, with book funnels, with every new offer he puts out.
- Own your email list. Social platforms change, algorithms shift, and accounts get shut down. Your email list belongs to you and goes wherever you go.
Tim’s starting point wasn’t so different from where a lot of people are right now. Years of experience, a skill set that felt too industry-specific to translate online, and no clear path forward. But Tim figured it out once he found the right tools and the right framework.
If you want to build something like what Tim built, you need two things: a way to capture leads and a way to follow up with them. ClickFunnels gives you both, and you can try it free for 14 days.