tim "tj" erway

Tim "TJ" Erway

Co-Founder of AttractionMarketing.com

Hometown

San Francisco, CA

Career

Firefighter / EMT

U.S. Coast Guard

Serial Entrepreneur

High school dropout. Fast food manager. Coast Guard enlistee.

And the man who quietly started a digital revolution that most of the network marketing world spent years arguing couldn't work —right up until they started doing it themselves.

Tim Erway is the Co-Founder of AttractionMarketing.com and the original architect of what the industry now calls attraction marketing.

His fingerprints are on virtually every major success story in digital network marketing —most people just don't know it yet.

Long Road to Figuring It Out

Tim grew up in California, hated school, got kicked out of regular classes, and ended up in continuation school —which he also couldn't stick with. (His teacher nicknamed him "Runaway Erway" after he started jumping out the window.)

He dropped out at 17, signed up for Amway with his mom's permission, and started trying to build a network marketing business while managing a fast food restaurant.

It didn't go well. Neither did the next attempt. Or the one after that.

He joined the Coast Guard partly to escape the rut he was in, earned his GED, got a waiver to enlist, and deployed on the Coast Guard Cutter Durable —where, within two days of arriving, he was fighting a boat fire off the coast of Guantanamo Bay. Classic Tim.

Back stateside, he kept trying network marketing. Three of the companies he joined got shut down by the FTC. He built teams only to watch them disappear overnight. He was introverted, hated cold prospecting, and found the one-on-one grind completely unsustainable.

But instead of quitting, he did what most people don't: he went looking for a fundamentally different way to build.

That search led him deep into internet marketing — SEO, Google AdWords, email lists, direct response copywriting. He studied the greats: Dan Kennedy, Jay Abraham. He printed out courses and read them at the grocery store. He broke things, wasted money, got back up. And slowly, he cracked the code —learning that the real power wasn't in selling one-to-one, but in marketing one-to-many.

By 2001, Tim was using online strategies that almost nobody in network marketing had heard of — building teams, generating leads, and growing audiences through systems instead of hustle. He built a team of over 1,732 people in under 30 days. The story landed him in Six Figure Income Magazine, one of the first publications circulated to the network marketing industry. That article changed everything.

Building the Movement 🧲

One of the people who read that magazine was a young network marketer named Mike Dillard. Mike called Tim, asked for mentorship, and Tim obliged. Tim started coaching Mike on the strategies that had worked for him — and Mike, being the kind of person who executed instantly, ran with every piece of advice. In 2005, Mike launched Magnetic Sponsoring, coined the term "attraction marketing," and started a revolution.

Tim joined as a partner in 2006, and together they grew the company to over a million dollars annually. Tim then helped scale it past four million the following year by building the team, systems, and processes behind it.

Around that same time, two students in their community — a couple of scrappy SEO guys named Ferny Ceballos and his partner Ray —caught Tim and Mike's attention by freely sharing everything they were learning in the Magnetic Sponsoring community.

No pitch. No ask. Just genuine value.

Tim saw it immediately: these guys had it. He and Mike brought them in to co-lead events, and a long-term partnership was born.

When Mike stepped away from the company in 2010, Tim took over operations. He rebranded the company through several iterations before eventually bringing Ferny in as a full partner —the move Tim calls one of the best business decisions of his life.

In 2014, they officially became AttractionMarketing.com. Tim has since stepped back from day-to-day operations, handing the CEO role to Ferny, and now serves at the board level.

Legacy

His legacy? Over 1,000 network marketers mentored to six, seven, and eight-figure incomes. A coaching tree so deep that most of today's top online network marketers can trace their training directly back to Tim —even if they don't know it.

And a philosophy that turned out to be exactly right, even when the industry spent years insisting it was wrong.

The high school dropout who jumped out the window built something that's still running strong 25 years later. Not bad.