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Meet the Store Coach Team
Meet Our Team | Our Key Milestones | Our Incredible eCommerce Journey
Meet the Store Coach Team
Dave Hermansen

After various offline entrepreneurial ventures and corporate job positions, Dave got started in eCommerce in the Spring of 2003. With nothing more than a $50 e-book he purchased on How To build a Yahoo Store, Dave largely learned eCommerce through trial and error. Over the years, he would participate in several Internet Marketing and SEO programs/courses, though he still credits most of his "education" to his hands-on experience through the 180+ stores he's built and operated. Dave is the creator of the majority of the content within our free eCommerce training course here on Store Coach.
Kevin Hermansen

Despite making good money and being on the fast-track to become a partner at his CPA firm, Kevin saw how much fun Dave & Mike were having and envied their flexible lifestyles. In 2009, Dave & Mike convinced Kevin to join them full-time in eCommerce. A few eyebrows were raised when Kevin told the firm's partners that he was resigning to go off and start building eCommerce sites, but Kevin hasn't missed his job in corporate America for a second! Kevin oversees all accounting for Store Coach and also oversees our Brokering Service here at Store Coach.
Mike Hermansen

Mike began his eCommerce career in 2006 while simultaneously attending Idaho State University and working a couple of part-time jobs. After seeing immediate success with his first eCommerce store, Mike decided to go "all in" and joined Dave full-time in 2007. Alongside Dave (and later Kevin), Mike has helped build, market & run over 180 successful eCommerce stores and has also coached and mentored thousands of students during that time! Mike is in charge of customer relations here at Store Coach, as well as all web development.
Scott McKirahan

In 2009, Scott was laid off from his job. While searching for income opportunities online, he stumbled upon Coach Dave's story and eCommerce training course. He dove into the course and launched a couple online stores. Within a year, he was making twice what he had made at any "real job" he'd ever had! After working closely with Scott in the Store Coach community the Hermansen Brothers made Scott an official member of the Store Coach Team. Scott is an expert at on-page SEO and has coached many Store Coach students over the last several years.
A Few of Our Key Milestones
2003
Textbooks for Sale
It's pretty crazy to think that buying textbooks from our local college's clearance bin and reselling them on Amazon is what got us into internet retail! :)

2005
Our First Huge Success
Equipped with nothing more than some basic SEO knowledge, we launch two online parrot cage stores & have our first ever $100,000+ net profit year in eCommerce!

2006
Everything Birds Sells for $200,000+
After nearly 2 years of clearing 6-figures of bottomline net profit from the two sites that made up Everything Birds, we sell bird-cage.com for $173,000 on Flippa, and bird-supplies.net for $40,000 to a private party.

2006
Featured in The New York Times
The attention garnered from selling bird-cage.com on Flippa for $173,000 landed us in the New York Times as the featured story in the Business section (see the article here).

2006
Featured on Fox Business News
Fox Business News also heard about our ongoing success in eCommerce and interviewed our very own Dave Hermansen on one of their broadcasts (see the interview here).

2008
Sold PitchingMachinesNow.com for $149,000
The pitching machine store that we had launched a year earlier sold on Flippa for $149,000. This transaction lands us in a featured case study on Flippa's blog.

2010
StoreCoach.com is Born
After the sell of Pitching Machines Now, the Hermansen Brothers turn their full attention to launching Store Coach, with the goal of turning it into the world's best resource for entrepreneurs who are dedicated to selling products online. The backbone of Store Coach was then, and still is today, our 100% free training on how to build an online store.

2014
NFC Performance is sold for $100,000+
After starting with a run-down website that cost a couple thousand dollars, NFCperformance.com is transformed into an online specialty store worth 6 figures. A minority partner on the project buys the Hermansen Brothers out on the project based on a valuation of $115,000.

2015
Our Brokering Service is Announced
After selling dozens of our own e-commerce businesses to private parties, Store Coach launched their own brokering service in 2015. The motto "Net More. Pay Less." still holds true for clients of the brokering service to this day. The launch of our brokering service also meant the birth of our Website Marketplace where we sell the eCommerce businesses we're contracted to sell through brokering.

2020
Free Store Building Training is Released
After 15+ years and 180+ successful e-commerce stores of their own, Store Coach announces their first ever free training course on building profitable eCommerce stores. The course covers everything from choosing a niche to build & marketing a killer Shopify store.

Our Incredible eCommerce Journey
Roll back to the Spring of 2003, when Coaches Dave & Kevin launched their very first two online stores! They were equipped with nothing more than a cheap "how-to-build-a-store" guide and positive (although naive) mindsets! Long story short, their first two stores flopped and they ended up back at the drawing board to regroup.
Coach Kevin bailed on Coach Dave at that point, and turned his focus to getting an accounting degree! Coach Dave (the less risk averse brother) turned his focus to learning how to drive "high intent" visitors to web stores.
After yet another failed attempt (and all the education that came from those first 3 flops!) Dave finally struck gold with a store he called Everything Birds (launched on bird-supplies.net in 2004 & later migrated to bird-cage.com in 2005). In Dave's first full year of operations that little "at-home business" turned a net profit just North of $100k! Which got the attention of Dave & Kevin's younger brother, Mike, among other family members & friends.
Unsure that Mike was committed to the e-commerce career path long-term, rather than letting him in on Everything Birds right out of the gate, Coach Dave partnered with him on a startup project called Jerrys Paintball (JerrysPaintball.com). Within 3 months of launch this new project was clearing $6,000 a month in bottom-line net profit, and Mike (not Coach Mike yet!) was convinced that eCommerce was the career for him!
With a list of new store ideas in hand and a store launch model that was really starting to take serious shape, Dave & Mike got Jerry Paintball listed for sell on Flippa and sold it for $60,000 (all cash) within just a matter of days! Then that lead to them also deciding to move Everything Birds, and they did so just months later, which banked them another $173,000!
After the sale of Everything Birds, The New York Times & Fox Business News both got a hold of the story and helped spread the word that the Hermansen brothers were the real deal when it comes to eCommerce! (In fact, that might be how you found Store Coach in the first place!)
Crazy enough, the above successes were truly just the beginning... Dave & Mike continued to roll out successful niche store after successful niche store (and still are to this day!). A few years into this crazy win streak, in late 2007, Dave & Mike launched one of the most successful digital products the internet had ever seen to that point, a training program called Niche Blueprint. (It was supposed to be available to buyers for a full week, but the doors had to be closed after 36 hours because there were simply too many sign ups to offer support to!)
Annually updated releases of Niche Blueprint were rolled out in 2008 & 2009, and after years of Dave & Mike pushing Kevin to join them, he finally gave in and quit his partner-bound career path at a CPA firm for the final release of Niche Blueprint in 2009.
The "Niche Blueprint days" consisted of far more than just training people on the niche store model the Hermansen Brothers had created. Behind the scenes they were building a nice portfolio of successful niche stores. This is when Coach Scott (one of the most successful Niche Blueprint students, see his story here) and Coach Zach joined the team and started helping them further build out their e-commerce portfolio! (This is the time period in which our team built out and sold off PitchingMachinesNow.com for $149,000!)
In 2010, rather than continuing to do annual updates to Niche Blueprint and leaving most would-be-buyers out in the cold, we opted to launch an "always open" eCommerce hub called Store Coach where people can buy/sell/build eCom businesses! (Which is obviously where you are reading this now!)
Our team has been creating e-commerce training courses since 2007, and it has evolved continuously over the years as our internal systems have been optimized & perfected. In recent years our model has evolved to focus on selling our own private label products with our own made up branding as well as dropshipping well known branded products.
This is for two primary reasons... 1) traditional dropship ecommerce has become so competitive over the years that margins for online retailers in that space has dropped to almost nothing in most markets, and 2) selling your own private label products eliminates direct competition and allows you to basically name your own margins! (This is why private label e-commerce businesses are selling for millions these days, whereas all of the older traditional dropship stores typically maxed out in value somewhere in the 6-figure range!)
Along the way we sold so many of our web businesses, and we were so darn good at getting top dollar for them, that folks in the Store Coach community started asking us to sell businesses for them. That's why in 2015 we started brokering the sell of websites, and that parlayed into us launching the best eCommerce business marketplace on the web!