Jeffrey and Deanna Vaughan never imagined that Jeffrey’s debilitating knee injury would be the beginning of a successful e-commerce business. 

The injury couldn’t have come at a worse time.  After working for several different companies, Jeff had grown tired of the restrictive atmosphere and started his own safety consulting business in 2001.  Due to state and federal regulations, Jeffrey often had more demand than he could keep up with. 

But the regulations changed, taking a heavy toll on Jeff.  “In a single vote in the senate and in a single vote in our state government, business that was booming one day was gone the next,” Deanna explains.  “He’d come home and there were times where he would just lay in the middle of the living room floor and just look at the ceiling.”

Jeff and Deanna had set a goal for Deanna to remain home with their three sons, so Jeff started to find other sources of income. He even made some small profits through building his own safety product site. It was around this time that he was contracted to interview several successful StoresOnline merchants. Their answers intrigued him, and he thought that he would like to try it when he had more time. 

At this low point, Jeff suffered a severe knee injury while coaching his sons’ soccer team.   It was then that Jeff realized some of the problems of having most of the business revolve around his own work.  “The business was me,” he says, “and I guess I didn’t think a whole lot about the risk of that until I lost the ability to physically go and do the work.  And once I lost that ability, when I had that knee injury that kept me from going out to the factories where I would do the safety training, that kept me from going and, you know, developing safety programs for my clients, I realized that I had put my family at tremendous risk.”

“I was basically forced back into the workforce,” Deanna says, “because we were in a position where we didn’t have benefits, other than the ones that we paid for ourselves.”  Luckily, Deanna had a teaching certificate, allowing her to teach at her local school and still spend time with her family. 

At this point, Jeff went to the StoresOnline workshop, where he was impressed with the business principles being taught.  “What the trainers would say is these principles apply to any online venture,” Jeff remembers.  “So I said to myself, ‘If that’s really true, then lets take some of these principles and apply them to the site that I already have, that I built myself, and see if it works.”

Jeff was amazed with the results.  “Within a few days of trying some of those principles, I saw that it helped that website start being more profitable.”  So Jeff, still slightly skeptical, created his StoresOnline site and compared it to his original site.  “Over time, we became so overwhelmed with orders that I couldn’t possibly do it all myself with this other site,” Jeff says, noting the lack of marketing tools and integration with accounting and shipping programs. “It became a burden for me to even keep that site online.”

Deanna recalls leaving Jeff lying in bed with the laptop computer and phone before heading off to school. “I’d come back and he’d be so excited because he found some little gadget or something related to the safety work we’d been doing and he’d say, ‘Look.  I can sell these.’”

Deanna agreed to give Jeff twelve months to reach a reasonable monthly sales goal.  He reached that goal in five.  Soon the entire family was excited with their new e-commerce business.  After seeing the number of LED safety lights on coolsafetyproducts.com, Deanna had a brilliant idea of creating a site specializing in that one product.  “I think it was the girl side of me,” she says. “I saw all these lighted things, and things that would work for parties and weddings and all that stuff, and I said, ‘Oh, table decorations, center pieces.’”  After a short time, littlebrightlights.com caught up to the first website.

From two shelves in their garage, the Vaughans have expanded their business to a warehouse and several employees.  All three of the boys are excited about the family business.  The oldest likes helping put products on the Internet and even asked if he could have his own office.  The other two enjoy helping out at the warehouse. 

Jeff is very grateful for the opportunity StoresOnline provided in his life.  “I feel a lot better about myself, and our family is in a situation that’s much more secure than when I was relying on some corporation to take care of me.” 

“My grandpa tells the story about being on the old family farm.” Deanna says.  “This is our family farm, in a sense, where we’ve been able to work and grow together as a family, and at the same time provide well for our family.”

Visit the Vaughans’ websites at

www.coolsafetyproducts.com
www.littlebrightlights.com

 

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