# CHAPTER TWO 2
AVOIDING THE MANAGEMENT TRAP
Reinforce Self Sufficiency Rather Than Dependency
NETWORK MARKETING IS BASED on a team-building philosophy rather than a supervisory one. Perhaps the single most frequent cause of failure in network marketing is the mistaken
belief that we must manage our downline distributors. Typically, after new associates spend their first month or two recruiting ten or fifteen friends, they end up devoting the rest of their time attempting to make those few people successful-that’s what we call the Management
Trap. Let us quickly point out that there is a significant difference between managing and supporting a down line organization. Playing caretaker to their organization causes new net workers to spend a disproportionate amount of time on a particular leg or legs of their downline to the exclusion of everyone and everything else. It creates a false codependency, doing for others instead of teaching and encouraging them to do for themselves.
The Management Trap creates two serious problems for a business builder.
First, it produces weak and lethargic distributors because someone else is doing their work for them.
Second, while managing others, that networker loses valuable time that could be more wisely invested in prospecting and recruiting new frontline distributors. And remember, “New blood is the lifeblood of any organization.” Continually sponsoring new associates adds vitality to an entire business. If you stop recruiting before you are earning enough to live
comfortably, then you lose valuable ground. And worse, since ours is a business of leading by example, your leaders will emulate you, so that everyone ends up managing and no one is prospecting or recruiting. Supporting an organization, on the other hand, is part of the
team approach inherent in network marketing. It involves responding to legitimate requests on the part of any and all of your associates to help close a serious prospect or give them
encouragement when they are feeling down.
In this chapter, we intend to describe the difference between creating dependency in your organization and reinforcing self-sufficiency.
It is critical that novice network marketers recognize the difference between productive activity and ineffectual. time-wasting practices.
Sponsoring Family Members and Building for Them
MARK discovered the pitfalls of supervising his family’s line the hard way when he recruited his own father. As he tells the story, “It really hurt when my father said, ‘Son, you’re
embarrassing me and ridiculing the family name in Missouri by selling snake oil in one of those damn pyramid scams!’ It hurt because I had always loved and respected my father. He never made much money while we were growing up, but he did start his own advertising and public relations firm. He also wrote two novels, one of which, Mantrap, became a bestseller in 1948. Dad was a proud man who always told me that integrity is more important than
wealth and to never do business with a man – whom you can’t trust with a handshake.
“By the time I was a sixteen-year-old sophomore at Glendale High School in Springfield, Missouri, Dad left the field of writing novels and magazine articles to launch an advertising
agency. I was so proud when he trusted me to go out and solicit clients. He said that if I could get a client to use our agency, he would let me have a shot at writing the copy. I was so enthusiastic that I went charging out and actually obtained a client the first week. The guy’s name was Jerry Vaughn, and he was preparing to launch a new pet store in a little shopping center near our home. Somehow, probably on sheer guts and enthusiasm, I convinced him to give me a chance.
“I went back to Dad’s office scarcely able to contain myself, and broke the good news to him.
I don’t remember Dad ever really getting too excited about any of my accomplishments, but I could tell he was pleased. For the next several years, I wrote copy and created ads for clients whom I picked up along the way. Some of my ad campaigns were quite well received, while others were not so successful. But through all the years, Dad supported and encouraged me. That is, until six months before my graduation.
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but Dad really wanted out of the stress. Apparently, in my ignorance, I failed to see his hope that following college graduation-an event, by the way,
that never occurred-I would be interested in becoming his partner, perhaps even one day taking over the entire ad agency. I had other plans. In hindsight I suppose my
pronouncement at our 1971 family reunion that I intended to enter seminary and ultimately become a minister really caused him pain. I later found out from Mom that he saw it as a real slap in the face after all the years of working together. But, that’s life. I was to become a minister several years later after a series of sales jobs.
“Just about the time my father was accepting my ministry and actually beginning to tell our friends with pride how his son’s church was growing, I told him something that would result in our not speaking for nearly a year. I told him on the telephone that I had become a distributor in a new company in the field of network marketing. I’ll never forget the uncomfortable two-minute silence that occurred when I asked, ‘Dad, can I send you some shampoo and conditioner? I know you’re going to love them.’ Silence.
“After a couple of minutes—minutes that felt like an hour each—I broke the uncomfortable stillness by asking him to which address he wished me to mail the shampoo. That’s when it
hit the proverbial fan.
“‘What the hell, son. You go to seminary, become a minister, now you’re quitting that too.
You’re a quitter. And how could you disgrace the family name by getting into a pyramid?’ He abruptly hung up.
“Naturally, I was miserable with rejection. That all changed, however, when I received an apology call a year later. Dad had heard from my sister that I’d built a sizable downline and
was earning more each month than he was earning in a year. He called and congratulated me for my success. Then he came clean about his health. The stress was causing him heart
problems and in addition to apologizing for judging me so harshly, he also intimated that maybe I could help him get out of the rat race of public relations.
“That was all I needed. The next week I was on a plane to Missouri to sign up my father and get him out of traditional business. I was very excited about the prospect of helping my dad change his life. And the reason I explained our backgrounds here in such detail is to help you understand my reason for wanting so desperately to help him. You see, this was my first experience with the formidable Management Trap, that is, the supervision of one’s downline.
Before pointing out my mistakes, I want the reader to fully understand the situation. And I want to do everything possible to help you avoid this devastating trap because it is very
counterproductive and most often leads to failure. Our parents, siblings, and closest friends are usually the ones who lure us into the Management Trap.
“I spent four months in Springfield, Missouri, helping my father build his organization. The problem was that all Dad’s people looked to me for leadership because I was doing
everything for him. Not only that, but the rest of my entire group was suffering because I wasn’t available to respond to their questions. Those four months that I dedicated to
managing my father and his entire group were the most counterproductive of my entire career in networking. The only real value to come out of it was that I learned about the devastation
of playing nursemaid to one leg of my downline and began immediately to incorporate it into our training sessions in order to keep others from making the same mistake.
“When I left Springfield, everything I had built began to crumble immediately. The new people on my father’s front line regarded me as their mentor, and when I no longer had time to support them as effectively as I had while living in Springfield, several became
despondent and quit in the first month. Dad was frustrated because he had no idea how to lead his people and they didn’t look to him for leadership anyway. I created a cripple of my own father because, for all practical purposes, I became the director of an adult daycare center. But here’s the real tragedy: Dad had the ability to succeed dramatically in network marketing. He had great communication skills, loved working with people, and had the overall competence in business that would have allowed him to build and run a quite successful organization worldwide. But I ruined it for him. You see, I loved him so much and was
so committed to his success that I inadvertently created a weak person out of a strong one.
“My father’s gone now; he passed away last year. And sometimes, while sit-ting in the solitude of my study thinking of Dad, I secretly wish an angel would appear and wave a
magic wand leaving behind a tiny golden plaque above his ashes which reads: ‘Here lies a great man, Duane Yarnell, who could have been greater had his son not loved him too
much.’ But, because I didn’t know then what I know now, I feel no real guilt. Dad and I had a great friendship to the very end.
“Next, I headed straight to Orlando where my sister Melissa was a very successful executive analyst for the Tupperware Company. With my sister I had a legitimate reason to enter the
Management Trap, or so I then mistakenly thought, because I felt that she had a personal conflict of interest. Because Tupperware is a direct sales company, Melissa felt that for her to
build a network in another company would be entirely inappropriate. I admired her decision and decided, once again, to manage my sister’s entire downline. I recruited her frontline leaders, trained them, and supported them because Melissa just couldn’t violate the trust
Tupperware had placed in her. Once again, I fell unwittingly victim to this administrative role.
Meanwhile, all my other organizations across the country were feeling the frustration of seldom reaching me because I was so vitally focused on managing my own family’s groups.
“To make a long story short, when I went back to my own home in Aspen, Colorado, I had successfully wasted over eight months building executive down-lines for both my father and
sister. Within a year, both relatives had quit and virtually everyone in both of their organizations had either quit or become wholesale buyers of the product. I had wasted so much time and worse, by loving them too much, had unwittingly stripped them of their leadership roles.
Fortunately, Dad had managed to recruit a couple of my old high school and college buddies, Gary Turner and Jim Grundy. Over the years they did quite well, but in the end both
opted to pursue other avenues and today we earn not one penny from the efforts of extensively working with relatives. Taking on the position of caretaker to my group served to
lower my income, spoil both my father’s and sister’s chances to succeed, and throw me off track for nearly a year. The truth is, I should have spent only one week in each city training Dad and Melissa—then they might have both been prepared to build their groups.”
If you find yourself alone in network marketing, with none of your family members supporting you, there are better ways to transform them than trying to coerce them into the business and then doing it all for them. If we want to change others, we begin by changing ourselves,
and alterations in their behavior will naturally follow.
The truth is that we are empowered far less by heredity, luck, and circumstances, than by our vision of what we believe is truly possible for ourselves. Jimmy Kossert of Renton,
Washington, is one of the legendary “big money” earners in the networking industry.
But it took an early morning self-evaluation to break an inherited cycle that had predominated in his family for over a century. He explained it to us in this way:
“It was near the end of my first year in MLM that I chose, early one morning at 5:00 A.M., to break the cycle of poverty that had been in my family for generations. Everyone I recruited
had quit… everyone. Everyone I loved had told me no. I had no money coming in, no chance to return to a downward-spiraling real estate market with any hope of financial recovery, no experience in other fields, no college education, and no will to persevere. My great-
grandfather had been poor and uneducated as had my grandfather, my father, and now me.
Poverty, I thought, just ran in the family.
“My wife and children slept silently, and as I sat contemplating these people I so loved and our uncertain future, a blinding flash hit me. Everyone in my past, perhaps at one time or another, had probably lamented the rotten hand they’d been dealt, but unlike them I had one
ace in the hole. Unlike my ancestors, I was now privileged to be in a great company where people were actually earning unlimited income. None of my forefathers had ever been given
that option. I, Jimmy Kossert, had been chosen to lead the charge out of generations of servitude and mediocrity for an entire ancestry who, before me, were never so privileged as to be able to restore dignity to our family tree. As I tiptoed to the bedsides of my one- and
three-year-olds, I silently affirmed, ‘I will do for you what my great-grandfather would have done given the same opportunity. I will finish this race and I will win.’
“From that moment on, I set out to break the cycle of poverty. I know my predecessors might have done so themselves, had they been blessed with an unlimited income opportunity.
My wealth now stands as a testament to a great-grandfather who persevered in everything he
did in a generation which offered no possibility for wealth and time freedom for poor, uneducated people. None of my kids will ever have to sit in the dark at 5:00 A.M. and feel
depressed because they’re impoverished. Thanks to network marketing, the cycle is now
broken.”
HARRY SIR LOFTY
0240787223
THE INCOMING NETWORK MARKETING APOSTLE
BADENYA HARRY 