AS A SEALS-AND-GASKETS MIDDLEMAN, Jerry Whitlock used to hound Lockheed Martin Corp. to get his foot in the door. He'd spend months making phone call after phone call to its gigantic Atlanta plant, trying to figure out the right maintenance guy to pitch. If he were lucky enough to finally locate him, he'd have to wait up to six months for an appointment - usually to find the guy had no desire to switch from his current suppliers.

No more. Today, Lockheed comes to him - right to his home office in suburban Atlanta. And Whitlock, who now goes by the jaunty title of "The Seal Man," is wearing blue-jean shorts and a golf shirt rather than a suit and tie when he pulls up their inquiry on his website. "What a change!" he exults. "A seal is half-sold when they find me."

Whitlock, 46, is a dramatic example of how a savvy entrepreneur can use the Internet to create for himself exactly the life he wants. He runs his business, EPM, Inc., out of a den and a back porch - but no one anywhere in the world would guess that, looking at his polished, 2,000-page website - www.thesealman.com and www.epm.com. And although he is mostly doing the same thing he did 30 years ago - buying specialty industrial seals and gaskets from manufacturers, repacking them in boxes, and mailing them out again - everything else is different. In his early days, he literally "chased smokestacks" - he would drive to a nearby town, look up to see where the smokestacks were, then make cold calls. "You guys use seals?" he'd ask. Today, cell phone in hand, sitting on the dock at his lake side retreat, he has closed big sales to customers in China he'll never lay eyes on.

Why has Whitlock succeeded in the pressure-packed cyberspace arena where so many resellers find themselves floundering? He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the seal business - combined with a grasp of Internet dynamics. "I found out early on that the guy with the most information mixed with the latest technology can rule his niche market," he says. Plus, a health crisis gave him a strong push to move to a less frenetic lifestyle. Today, he's so much his own man singing his own tune that he happily turns down business. Whitlock's seal savvy came after decades of hard labor. "I'm one of three people in the United States at the level where I am in terms of seal knowledge and applications," he says.

Born and raised in Jonesboro, Ga., Whitlock couldn't go to college because his truck-driving father lacked the financial wherewithal. In 1973, two years out of high school, while working in the circulations department of the local newspaper, he got a phone call. A local businessman was looking for someone to run the inside of his two-man seal reselling operation. "I wasn't sure what he was talking about," Whitlock recalls. "I asked him, 'What is it you really sell?' He showed me these black round things, and told me they're used everywhere that fluids have to be sealed. 'Are you sure we can sell enough to make a living?' I asked him."

Sure enough. Seals as large as five feet in diameter prevent oil from leaking on the rudders of ships and in the machinery at steel mills, paper mills, and power plants. And at the other end, seals that are just a tenth of an inch in diameter ensure laboratory pipettes don't leak chemicals. "I was his boy Friday. I did everything. I answered the phone. I ordered the parts. I placed them. I shipped them. I did the banking. I learned the business from the ground up, and I got better at it than he was," says Whitlock. Soon, Whitlock had purchased the business with partners, and was working the other end of the business - sales, traveling a 10-state region.

He tripled sales in six months, and in 1978, left to start his own operations, AAA Seals and Packing Company. " I had to sell something every day because my babies needed new shoes," he recalls. At 20, he had married his sweetheart, Rita, 18, whom he'd met at church. Now they had two toddlers, Priscilla and Millie. To work a sales route that involved less travel, he switched his focus from selling seals for product manufacturing to selling seals used in factory maintenance and repair. Rita joined him in the business, doing the books and helping him ship product. It was before the advent of fax machines, so orders were received and processed by mail. Shipping out of their sleepy town was often done by Greyhound bus. A key to their success was a small mountain of catalogs and bulletins from seal and gasket makers that Whitlock had meticulously catalogued and cross-reference in black binders.

By 1989, the company had over a million dollars in annual revenue, a warehouse and seven employees. That year, Whitlock purchased an innovative $150,000 seal-making machine called the Seal Jet. Business boomed, and when he wrote a letter of appreciation to its Austrian manufacturer, company executives arrived at his shop and proposed a merger. "They had the wherewithal financially, and I had the know-it-all with seal applications and marketing," he explains. "Life went bananas."

From 1990 to 1993, the company, Seal Jet USA, exploded to 67 locations nationwide, with 300 employees. Creating a corporate structure and hiring and supervising people, Whitlock crisscrossed the country and the world. Typically, a European trip involved a private jet and meetings in cities from Milan to London. He wore Armani suites and Gucci shoes. He and Rita bought a bigger home, drove a BMW and a Mercedes, and ate at the finest restaurants.

But at a price. Whitlock left home before dawn and came home way after sunset. He was working 80 to 100 hours a week, and once went seven weeks without taking a day off. He struggled with managing the personnel issues of a large work force. "Sometimes if felt like day care for grown-ups," he recalls. "I grew old in a hurry." Rita recalls, "I worried that he was going to work himself to death, and that our kids were going to grow up and we wouldn't even know who they were."

In September of 1992, just back from a 10-day European trip, Whitlock collapsed on his bed, as pains radiated from his chest down his arm. "If I didn't know better, I would think I'm having a heart attach," he told Rita. At the hospital, his cardiologist found that Whitlock had an inherited heart condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. He warned, "If you don't slow down, you're going to die a young man." So Whitlock took two weeks off, but soon was back to 12-hour days, only to wind up at the same hospital. "You won't have a third warning," said the cardiologist. "You're just going to die."

Convinced, Whitlock sold his business. A two-year non-compete contract he had signed previously kept him from repeating his hard-driving ways. As he convalesced with fishing pole in hand, he began formulating a plan. "I'm going to do it again, but do it differently," he remembers thinking. "With all this new technology, there's no need for a building." The technology he turned to first in 1995 was a fax machine, a cell phone, and a beeper. Each night, from his den, he sent out 150 marketing faxes to factories promising to find "hard-to-find parts" for "rush jobs." When emergency calls came in, he'd track down the product in one of his black notebooks, and order it for next-day delivery. When it arrived, his wife repackaged it and sent it out again - a turnaround that yielded a 60 percent margin.

The Internet was just emerging, and Whitlock immediately grasped its potential. "I'm a geek, a gear-head," he says. "It was like a light went on" No one will know my business is in my home. And as long as I provide good service, they won't care!" In 1996, with the help of a website designer, he launched the first seal website. That year, the company did well in sales, and it's grown at about 30 percent a year since then. He's among the top sites listed in search engines, and not by accident. At least 15 times a day, sitting at his custom-built Pentium 500 MHz computer, Whitlock pulls up search engines like Yahoo, and Google and Lycos and types in "seals" and "hydraulic seals." I have spent a lot of time learning all the algorithms of each search engine," he says. "I see which competitors pop up and study what key words they're using. I've become fairly astute - I know a good idea when I steal one!"

In his converted den, he sits at a U-shaped desk surrounded by equipment. "I see it as the cockpit of the airplane, the control center," he says. To his left is a Brother MFC 4350 fax machine, chosen for its huge paper tray. "It's nothing for us to receive 100 faxes a day," he says. To his right is a computer, printer, and scanner. Within easy reach is his Rolodex - the old-fashioned paper kind, which he prefers to his electronic models - as well as the black binders and a notebook-based tracking system for orders. On the left-hand wall are four clocks with the time in England, Portugal, Turkey, and India - the places where he does the most business. On the right-hand wall are four clocks with U.S. time zones. Rita, who is the purchasing agent, works at an L-shaped desk in the glassed-in back porch, with a view of flowers and trees.

Two years ago, Whitlock bought a used Seal Jet machine and began manufacturing seals in a warehouse 10 minutes away. He also owns 50 percent of a seal factory in India, which offers low-cost labor. Whitlock ambles into his office about 9 a.m., sorts through the faxes and e-mails, and makes calls. " I don't mind working 12 hours a day. Just let me pick which 12," he says. He takes frequent breaks, to lunch with buddies or to lounge on his bed and rapidly channel-surf - one of the few remnants of his Type-A personality. Instead of the Franklin planner and two-page To Do lists that used to obsessively drive him, he uses a Post-It note with no more than three tasks. "If it was more than three things to do, it's too much," he says.

Life in the Whitlocks' 4,000-square-foot English Tudor-style home revolves around a family room with a sunken floor, Berber carpet, massive stone fireplace, and giant TV screen. Findings from his travels decorate the room: jade carvings from Mexico, bronze plates from Lebanon, carved candlesticks from India, pottery from Cyprus, a wicket ball and bat from Trinidad. When the occasional customer visit occurs, that's where conferences are held. Almost every week, the Whitlocks drive 90 minutes to their townhouse on the shore of Lake Oconee in Eatonton, Ga. "When I'm there, I don't want to know what time it is," he says. " We eat when we're hungry, go to bed when we're sleepy."

They fish for large-mouthed bass and race through the water on jet skis. But they also bring along their Rolodex and their laptop, a Compaq Presario 1235, and switch their phones over, just in case of a big order from China. To stay in touch, Whitlock uses a Nextel wireless I-1000, manufactured by Motorola, that acts as a cell phone, a two-way radio, a pager, a Web browser, and an e-mail sender and receiver. In the next year or so, Whitlock wants to scale back his work to three days a week, cruise with his wife through Greek and Alaskan waters, and spend more time on his hobbies - day trading and Rolex-collecting. So his business has to be exactly the right size - not too small, and certainly not too big.

So these days he finds himself throttling the business back - cutting back his marketing, turning down orders that are too small or bothersome. Sometimes he recalls how he used to chase down every dollar of business, "and I ask myself, why am I slowing this down" But I know the answer. If I grow it bigger, I'll have to hire more people, and I don't want to create a lot of things that have to be managed," he explains. "I feel relaxed now. It's growing exponentially already, and I'm accomplishing that with the least amount of effort."