Picture this scenario: Someone is in a dead-end career or job. They know they will have to work 45 or 50 years without any real satisfaction, swap through many different jobs, struggle to get by, and then retire on half of what they used to make.
They get an opportunity in our profession to take their life back and create financial freedom for themselves. For the first time in their life, they have real agency to create better options for their future.
It won’t happen overnight. To build something real in our business takes solid work and actual time. People who go all in and work their ass off can create a solid business with residual income in two years. For most people working 10-15 hours a week, they can do it four or five years.
Now four or five years is no joke. That takes dedication, determination, and resilience. But the payoff is worth it. Undisputedly worth it.
We are talking about investing four or five years in creating a residual income stream that can provide freedom and security for the rest of your life.
But what happens far too often?
Someone joins our business and goes through a few months of learning. They are not a millionaire by month two, so they drop out. To do what? To go back to working 45 or 50 years without any real satisfaction, struggle to get by, and then retire on half of what they used to make.
This is totally crazy behavior. But it happens in our business all the time. And that means we haven’t done our job as leaders, creating the right expectations.
One thing we must teach people is that their business will never be more difficult than it is at the beginning. The first month is the hardest. The first week is the hardest. But if I have learned anything in more than four decades of network marketing is this:
You make or break your new distributors in the first two weeks – and the first 48 hours is critical.
Teach your people this reality and let them as long as they keep showing up, the results will come, and they will be greater than anything they’re likely to experience with their job.
Okay, your hot prospect never showed up for the presentation. That’s cute.
Okay, someone you signed up last week decided to quit. Is the world coming to an end?
Okay, a prospect refused to watch your video. Is that the worst thing that happened to you today?
Somewhere in your town today, a person just got a devastating medical diagnosis. Someone lost a loved one in a tragic accident. Others are facing foreclosures and bankruptcy.
We all have had challenges. And we’ll all have more. But we must learn from those challenges. Use them as stepping-stones to become the person and leader you are meant to be.
No one dies when you get rejected, nothing tragic is going to happen.
The important thing to remember: the longer you stay in the business, the easier it will get.
The people who drop out in the early stages throw away the investment they made in your future, to go back to one they already had rejected as inadequate. We have lost millions of people over the decades who could have built a dream life in our profession, but they dropped out too soon.
This was the motivation for writing my latest book, The ABCs of MLM. It’s not a “how-to” book, it’s a “why-to” book. I designed it to be read by someone as soon as they join the business. It will anchor their belief, build their confidence to recruit, and inspire them into action.
The book is priced very inexpensive, so leaders can buy them by the hundreds, and companies can buy them by the tens of thousands. My vision was that companies would include them in their distributor kits, or leaders would buy them in enough bulk so that every person who joins the team will read this book as part of their new distributor orientation process. (And I’m delighted to tell you this is exactly what is happening with savvy companies.) You’ll want your new team members to read the book before they contact their first candidate. They will make those approaches with rock-solid belief!
Our job as leaders is to transform hope into belief.
People join our biz because they hope they will qualify for that free bonus car, win the luxury trips, find a rewarding new career, and have those meaty commission checks deposited into their account every week. They hope the business will work. And as long as that hope stays alive, they stay active. If that hope dies, they drop out. This means that every new distributor in your team is a flight risk to quit.
Until one specific dynamic happens…
Their hope is transformed into belief. We call this process “getting someone over the line.” Because once they cross that line from hope to belief, there’s a disproportionate chance that they will never quit. And then we all win!
Let's go one step farther...
My latest podcast is about your own belief - knowing what you got! Look for the Duplication Nation MLM Podcast on your favorite provider, or you can watch the video below:
Where can I find your book?
You can get all the details here: https://randygage.com/the-abcs-of-mlm/