“Just Give Me Your List and I’ll Do All the Work”
IN early 1990, Mark recruited a man whose father-in-law owned the largest citrus company in the South and had access to the most prestigious office address in Florida. Their boardroom,
on the fifty-fifth floor, overlooked the ocean and had seating for 300. We’ll call these distributors by the names of Jeff and Mary.
Jeff and Mary had a Rolodex of over 5,000 people, many of whom were small business owners and most of whom were entrepreneurs. Although Jeff and Mary had thousands of
people to prospect, they fell victim to running an adult daycare center to which anyone in their organization could send prospects. Mark didn’t fully understand the whole problem until it was too late. All he saw were the numbers and their volumes looked great. Unfortunately,
Jeff and Mary began managing their organization prematurely and the group decreased in size from 3,000 to 500 people. Here’s what went wrong.
Never tell people that all they’ve got to do is sign up, give you a list of potential distributors, and then you’ll do the rest. It doesn’t work. Jeff signed up ten people on his front line, then
immediately told those men and women—some of Miami’s real movers and shakers—to start sending prospects to his weekly meetings conducted exclusively on the top floor of their corporate building. He explained that he and Mary had the time to do the meetings and train
the distributors and that his people would merely need a wheelbarrow to take to their mailbox each day in order to carry all the money!
For two months, everything went fine. Every one of the noon meetings on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were filled with curious prospects sent by bosses or close,wealthy friends to investigate this business opportunity. By the middle of the second month Mary also had to launch Monday and Thursday meetings, and by the end of the next month,those too were filled. Many prospects were signing up and their weekly volumes, in starter kits alone, were going through the ceiling. But everything changed the Monday that they announced that people were going to have to start doing their own presentations at their own homes in order to take care of the spillover. Just imagine the chaos.
To begin with, Jeff had trained no one to do anything except send him leads, and none of the frontline people who had signed up under his ten personally sponsored folks had been
trained to do anything but send in their prospects. Simply put, in month three, Jeff and Mary were so caught up in the muck and mire of the Management Trap that they couldn’t move in any direction.
Some new distributors were saying they’d been misled and demanded their money back. Some were angry that they hadn’t yet met qualification requirements. After all, they’d been
sending Jeff and Mary leads for eighty days. Where was this $15,000 a month they’d heard about? One small group revolted and went to another office complex to begin their own meetings, but no one wanted to go there or send their people because the leader wasn’t as good a speaker as Jeff and they complained that the office wasn’t as attractive. Two couples got together and hired an attorney on a contingency basis and filed a
misrepresentation/fraud case against Jeff, who then had to spend countless hours preparing for depositions.
Mary and Jeff, without Mark’s presence in Florida to supervise what they were doing wrong,
purposefully hid from him the system they were using. They knew he deplored big recruiting meetings, that he spoke against offices, that he taught everyone to avoid baby-sitting distributors at all costs. They fully understood his “Go wide fast” advice, putting as many people on one’s frontline as possible until wealth had been achieved. Yet they fell victim to the Management Trap. Had Mark been in Florida instead of Austin, Texas, he might have been able to steer them right. Or had they been honest about their methods, he could have salvaged the situation. All he heard about were the many great people they were recruiting and
all the great volumes being achieved. By the time he discovered the truth, it was too late, for they had both mentally and emotionally burned out.
Within five months of the day that Mark sponsored Jeff and Mary, they were selling everything but their clothes and leaving town humiliated. Mary’s father had virtually disowned
the two of them for embarrassing an “old money” family in the Deep South where image is everything. And we can tell you unequivocally that with their talent, and with all the names in
their Rolodex of reputable entrepreneurs whom they knew on a first-name basis, all they had to do to succeed was teach the big hitters to begin with their twenty-five prime contacts, do in-homes and “Go wide fast.” Those three magic words are synonymous with building your
front line, not your depth, as quickly as you can. The depth takes care of itself with sufficient numbers in width. Jeff and Mary needed to do only two simple things in order to avoid their problems and ultimately become successful. First, look for close friends who were entrepre-
neurial types, ready for change and fed up with stress, and then show them, by example, the wonderful simplicity of in-home recruiting meetings. Second, do the first couple of meetings for each new distributor, then cut the cord thus enabling their distributors to become leaders
themselves.
Ours is a business of leaders building their front lines and teaching their people to do the same. Those with leadership ability will seek out other top leaders to mentor them and give
them help in closing serious prospects. It is in this way that genuine support is given. Rather
than working your new associate’s list, teach your distributors how to work their own. They can come to you for support, that is, assistance in closing, after their prospects have been shown the presentation. How do you support a large group, you may ask? By teaching them three words: “You call me.” And when those calls come. be there for them. Be there to
render moral support, coaching assistance, help in closing prospects-but don’t do for them what they must do for themselves. They must prospect, recruit, and train their own frontline associates.
HARRY SIR LOFTY.
0240787223
BADENYA HARRY 