About

Welcome to My Blog!

I’m Brad Smith, and like many of you I worked in a conventional job for many years before I finally was able to build a full time business and escape “cubeville”.  My main business is selling software and more recently writing and self-publishing books.  I started Online Business Zen to help teach others how to escape their cubicles – hopefully more quickly than I did!

What you won’t find here is a bunch of “get rich quick” hype – I’m interested in teaching people who want to build a real business – not selling you the latest pyramid scheme.

A Little About Me…

I’m not sure what was different, but since I was a teenager I’ve always dreamed of owning my own business and being free from a job.  I remember while I was in college I had a job doing sweeping floors and cleaning up – I dreamed desperately of being the owner of the business and not an employee.  Despite the fact that I did take a regular job and eventually get a PhD, I always had “the entrepreneurial bug” in the back of my head pushing me to build businesses on the side.

It took me quite a bit of time and a lot of mistakes to build my side businesses but I learned a lot along the way.  I started my first business in 1989 with a partner, and it was a dismal failure.  I started my second business selling accounting software for the brand new Windows 3.0 operating system in 1991, and was successful with that business until the late 1990′s when I throttled back on the business to finish my PhD in Computer Engineering.  In 2003 I wrote a little program called BeerSmith for beer brewing enthusiasts that has done very well, and in 2008 discovered blogging and internet marketing – my beer brewing blog now attracts nearly a million unique visitors each year.

Now I continue to write software, write books, blog, podcast and do a little consulting to provide the bulk of my income.   I started Online Business Zen to share the many lessons I’ve learned since 1995 when I built my first web site.   I really am passionate about building internet businesses.  I’ve spent a lot of time the last few years mastering many of the new Web 2.0 social media tools and internet marketing.

I have a PhD in Computer Engineering and a Masters in Business Administration, plus a few other degrees.  I’ve been online for a long time – I started with the ARPA net back in the 1980′s, sold my first pieces of software via the old Bulletin Board Systems and Compuserve in the early 1990′s (both of which were pre-internet networks), and started building my first web site in early 1995 in raw HTML.  Now the web has matured , so just about anyone can create a blog and build a business around it.

Even after I had a successful business, it took me some time to finally let go of my day job and start living a life of freedom.  I’ve built my businesses around passive income so I truly can enjoy a degree of freedom that few others have – last summer I took six weeks off and rarely worked about 15 minutes a day.  My business clicked along just fine and continued to generate income the whole time.

As a result I’ve been able to enjoy the beach, relax on a lake in Maine, go fishing or to a matinee in the middle of the week, go Punkin-Chunkin with my friends and enjoy a lot more time with my family.  While I still work hard developing new products, I know I can walk away at any time for weeks or even months and still enjoy financial security.

My goal with Online Business Zen is simply to teach others to do the same, so they can enjoy the freedom that I now do.

Want to start your online business today? – I’ll send you a Free Lesson Each Week:

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