Dan Lewis began his career in marketing while only 12 years old. He built a “Haunted House” in the family basement, charged the neighbor kids 25 cents admission, and sold them refreshments. Dan created several profitable ideas during his youth and by the time he graduated from high school, was already self-employed, selling biodegradable cleaning products.
His passion of studying the sciences would later pay off by giving Dan a wide range of knowledge to draw upon in dealing with businesses across all industries. He also studied marketing by taking classes, reading countless books, and working with experienced salespeople. Marketing would eventually become his main focus.
Dan worked as quality control manager in ’73 and ’74 for Wismer & Becker electrical engineers on the Trojan nuclear plant construction project near Rainier, Oregon. In 1979, he became a journeyman carpenter, and by ‘82 had started his own general contractor business in Longview, Washington. Despite headlines of the “Worst year in construction history”, and while others were going out of business, he built up a ten-man crew. But after a few years, he decided to move to the nearby city of Portland, Oregon to pursue his true passion of marketing.
Dan started his own marketing consultation firm in 1984 and assisted new companies with their marketing strategies and helped them raise capital. In ‘86, he did a project for Surety Life Insurance (a subsidiary of SEARS), and was instrumental in creating one of the most powerful and successful marketing feats ever achieved in the insurance industry. Within only four months, the East Portland office of Surety life grew from 40 to over 300 agents. They were writing in excess of one million dollars in business per month. This office became number one nationwide.
In early 1989 he started a lead-generating company, LTE (Lewis Telemarketing Engineers), and began hiring and training his own people. As his associates, clients, and friends would confirm, Dan Lewis is one of the very rare people who can manage phone rooms effectively, with a zero turnover in staff, and no public complaints.
LTE generated hundreds of sales appointments per month for companies like Surety Life, Whirlpool, John Hancock, Sears Siding, New England Life, MONY Financial, and many independent salespeople. He later compiled his years of practical data about the most successful methods of telephone appointment setting and managing call centers into a book that he used as his training manual. This book, “The Science of Telemarketing”, was one of the first complete instruction manuals ever written on the subject.
Dan then moved his business to Los Angeles in 1993 and during his first year there, he sent one home services company to the top of their industry, increasing their annual sales from $1 million to over $5.3 million, making them #1 in the nation for their industry.
By 1995, Dan had expanded LTE to over twenty employees, handling 60 to 70 clients at a time. One of those clients just happened to be a web development company. In a meeting with that client, Dan saw his first glimpse of the Internet. As a marketing expert, he became very excited and immediately signed up with AOL. Within weeks, he realized this new media would soon become the number one method of marketing everything in the world.
Dan began serious research into the Internet’s mechanics in 1996. He studied the new web design and marketing technologies for 10 hours or more per day, seven days a week, for the next three years. He wanted to know how to position a website at the top of the list in any search engine. He knew that having that knowledge would be invaluable to client companies. He became so excited about the Web that he shut down LTE and moved to Denver, CO in 1997, and continued his studies.
In January ‘98, he moved to St. Petersburg, FL where he planned to launch his own web development company. Dan refused to start it, however, until he could prove his own ability to place a website on page-one of major search engines for any given keyword. After investing about 11,000 hours in research, in the summer of ‘99, he had proven himself by placing a website at the top of any search engine. On September 17, 1999, he launched Profit Gate, Inc. (www.profitgate.net).
Since then, Dan Lewis has helped hundreds of client companies to make money with their websites. It is estimated that the websites created and managed by Profit Gate have produced sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars since he began. He has also expanded Profit Gate’s services to include web design, web hosting, web marketing, website management, creative writing, video production, online and offline advertising. Profit Gate currently has over 100 active clients.
During his first decade in the website business, Dan Lewis noticed many business people being deceived by con artists that took advantage of those who knew little about new web technologies. In 2010, Dan decided to take all of his experience and write a book that would help anyone to understand how business websites actually work. Now sold at Amazon.com, his book, ‘Business Websites 101 – Secrets Revealed’ is a simple summary of what all website owners need to know to avoid becoming victims.
Today, Dan continues to manage Profit Gate from its Clearwater, Florida office. Helping others with state-of-the-art marketing technologies is still his greatest passion.