18: MLM's Revenue Activities

Hey, what's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen and you're listening Secret MLM Hacks Radio. Oh yeah. Here's the real mystery, how do real MLMers like us read and cheat and only bug family and friends want to grow a profitable home business? How do we recruit A players into our down lines and create extra incomes, yet still have plenty of time for the rest of our lives? That's the blaring question and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Steven Larsen and welcome to Secret MLM Hacks Radio. Hey, what's going on everyone? Hey, I'm super excited for today. My dad was really into teaching me how to work. I grew up in Middleton, Colorado. I was the oldest, still am, oldest of six kids. Had a great childhood. We played hard.

We worked hard. It was really important for my dad for us to know how to work and I'm really grateful that he taught us that. We would be out in the yard weeding on Saturdays for like six hours. No joke. Whenever there's a big problem to solve, instead of giving us the answer, he'd be like, "What do you think? What do you think?" I really appreciated that he did that with us because when it comes down to it, the person who's willing to work, I mean you're just going to go so much further. There was one day though he took me to the side and I was getting ready to go to college, I think so, I think that was about that time or I was in it or something like that. Regardless, it was a long time ago. He said to me, "You know one of the reasons why ..."

We weren't like wealthy, wealthy or anything like that, but were certainly not struggling. My dad definitely knew how to provide. He was awesome. We had a lot of awesome fun family trips and memories and all those things. It was really great. I promise this ties right into network marketing. He taught me this lesson that has stuck with me for years and still to this day. I believe it's one of the major reasons why I really believe that it is one of the major reasons why I have been successful with the things that I do. It all comes down to this concept that he told me. I was the age where I understood, "Oh my gosh. Dad makes money. Oh my gosh. He probably makes around this much in order for us to have this life." You know what I mean?

I was around the age when I start putting all those things together and I was like, "Oh wow." I can't remember how really or when or where. Just around that time in my life the whole conversation came up of what your role in a company is. He said to me, "Steven." He said, "Steven, there are two kinds of businesses. Sorry. There's two kinds of employees in a company." He said, "The first kind of employee resides on the cost side of the business." Now there's more security there, right? Meaning your job does not provide revenue for the company. There's more security, meaning your part of the normal job functions. Let's say you're part of HR or you're part of billing, right? You're part of some kind of management role.

Meaning there's a lot of security in it, but you're not really directly responsible for any revenue into the bottom line of the company. I was like, "Okay. Sounds good. This was the first kind." He's like, "First kind, no revenue to the bottom line. You live on the cost side of the business." He said, "The second kind of person though is on the revenue side of the business and the revenue side of the business is slightly more risk, however, vastly more income is available there. Salesmen." There's a reason salesmen get paid so much money because it's not easy job, number one. Number two, not many people want to do it. I mean there's more risk. If they don't sale, they don't make their commission, they don't eat.

If you get someone whose good, you get someone whose actually awesome at it, they get paid a lot more money. Typically, salesmen, if they know how to make it rain, holy crap, they'll get paid a lot than the people whose jobs and their positions ride on the cost side of the business. I was like, "Okay, dad. Yeah, that's cool. That's interesting and everything." I didn't realize how much that would affect me both in my own MLM and my own business, in my day job, and all the things that I've been doing. You know what I mean? I had no idea how much that would affect me. He's right though. I mean every single job that I've ever had where I've been sitting on the cost side of the business, I mean growing up that's mostly where your teenage jobs are.

You know what I mean? Those are like the nine to five or even later and earlier. Construction style jobs that I had, the labor jobs. I'm so grateful I had those. They were hard, but they were good, right? I was on the cost side of the business. I was not adding to the bottom line. If I was a door-to-door salesman like I was for a while or I did telemarketing, one sale would result far more money than I'd make doing those other kind of jobs. I would try and get a couple of them a day. It was like, "Holy cow. Way more earning potential comes to those people whose position sit on the revenue side of business." Right? It's an area that is a little bit uncomfortable for people to think about.

One of the problems that I've seen people run into before when it comes to their MLM is they treat their business as if they, even though they're the CEO technically, even though they are the little entrepreneur of their own little business and they should run it like their own business like it's its own entity, their activities day to day sit on the cost side of the business. They go make dumb business cards. I don't have a business card. I should probably get one, but I don't know. What kind of revenue can I measure from it? I've never been able to measure anything from it, so I don't make them. Right? I'm not saying you should or shouldn't, whatever, but I don't think you should. I think it's a distraction based activity.

I think it's something to fool your brain into thinking that you're being an achieving person because you came up with a logo. Maybe you bought a domain. It's like cool. Who'd you sell to? You know what I mean? It's funny because every single time I've been in a position or a job where I've been able to go make a lot of money compared to the rest of the employees. There's a bit of a separation that begins to happen. Other people look at you and go, "Gosh. What are you doing? You're so freaking lucky, Larsen. You're so lucky." It's like no. I actually decided to take on a little bit more risk.

Yes, while the person who brought you into your down line was right, you can have the lifestyle you want working a few hours a day, you can have the lifestyle you want, but the reality is you need to understand that where you're sitting right now, all the activities you're doing, they might be actually activities that are distracting you from being successful because you're not focusing on revenue generating activities only. Man, you outsource the rest of that stuff. Mostly the rest of the stuff doesn't even matter. Right? I think I said in the last podcast that an entrepreneur only has two roles. That is to innovate and market.

Those are both revenue generating activities, but we all like to think that it takes more than that and it's more complicated and I got to have a domain set up and I've got to have all the stuff set up. Yes. Yes. All of those things do matter. At the end of the day, it means nothing to you, right? Those are cost activities on the business. Anyway, I've had these just kind of run into my head the last little bit because I've had some people reach out to me and say, "Steven, how do you set this up? Steven, how do you set that up? How do you get this going?" I'm like, "It's good you're asking those questions, but are you fooling yourself in thinking that that thing you're trying to set up is the only way for you to make money?"

Because my first time MLM, I literally went door-to-door down Main Street my first month. I mean I recruited family. I recruited friends. I did it all the ways. I hate doing it. I never do it anymore. This was for almost four years ago now. You don't need any of that stuff. I literally went down Main Street. I recruited 13 people my first month. Now that's not a ton of people, but it's not a small amount of people either. It's not a short amount of people. It's not bad. The problem was the quality of the individual I was getting wasn't very good. Anyways, that's all I'd say real quick. This is kind of a faster episode, but just know that ask yourself when you wake up in the day, number one, hey, what am I doing that's actually a revenue generating activity?

Is it recruiting somebody? Is it selling a product? Outside of those two things I don't really know what else you're going to be doing that's actually a revenue generating activity. You as the entrepreneur has to be the expert in your business at the revenue generating activities. How do you expect to move forward and grow yourself and scale it and duplicate if you don't even know how to sell it? Right? Get good at selling. Get good at what it is the act of selling your product. Where's the best place people are where you can go recruit them or the place where people are who will buy your product? Where are those people? How do you expect to help your down line if you don't know those answers? Right?

I know these are kind of challenging questions to ask and they're a bit nerve-racking if you're brand new into MLM or any kind of business or activity or entrepreneurship or anything at all. They're the most important ones to ask. Who the heck are you trying to sell to? Where is that person? You can't duplicate yourself. That's where all the hiccups and hangups happen when you don't know what the answers to those questions are. My advice to you would be to understand that for the first like few months you should probably just realize and understand and be okay with the fact that you're not going to know how to sell it very well. Honestly most of it comes through bruises of you trying to figure out how this thing works.

I remember when I was doing door-to-door sales for the first time. I actually wasn't very bad because I have been doing a lot of door-to-door prior to that in other areas. It was a lot of fun, but man, I stumbled through like crazy. I was one of the most awkward kids on the doorstep. Oh my gosh. It was so awkward. It was so awkward. Before I went out to door-to-door and started doing door-to-door sales, I was like, "You know what? I'm going to try and recruit a team prior to me getting out there. I'm going to do my very, very best to get out there and have people below me and grow my own little branch underneath this office," even though I've never done or sold door-to-door for this style before. What I did was is started trying to talk to some of my buddies.

I was like, "Dude, come sell door-to-door with me." They were like, "I don't know." I was like, "Okay. Let me ask some of the people in my classes." I was like, "Okay. Hey dude, come over here," and then I just start talking to random people. Okay. That didn't work. Pretty soon I was like, "What if I treated this like an ad?" All right. I know that the average direct response ... Excuse me. I know that the average ... If I was to go put out 100 mail pieces, I would get an average of one to two, maybe 3% response from those mail pieces if I literally went to someone's mailbox and put something in there. It was like okay. Interesting. If I want to recruit like 10 people, I would need to have at least a thousand little flyers out on people's doorsteps.

What I did is I went out and I actually wrote out this little flyer and I said, "Hey, come to this meeting. Free pizza and stuff." There's my free little hook. There's some little pieces there and here. I said, "Why don't you come on out?" What's so funny is I literally had a 1 to 2% response rate of people who showed up with that flyer. I grew this little team and I got eight. I think I hit 11, but a couple of them left early, but it was a great experience. I was like, "Holy crap. That works." That was the marketing tactic that I chose in order to make this work. Then the next time someone came up to and said, "Hey, how do you do this?"

I told them I was like, "Honestly, I know it's a little bit ghetto to be honest, but I'm just printing these things out and I'm chopping them in half like with just a normal pair of scissors and I just listen to podcasts and walk around apartments and drop these flyers in people's doors and they come." They're like, "Are you kidding me?" I was like, "No, but it's way easier than me talking to people because I don't want to talk to anybody. That's just a little tactic I'm using." They were like, "Oh my gosh." That's what I was using for door-to-door sales as far as recruiting a team and such. Anyway, the whole point is that you just got to know what those revenue generating activities are. When somebody's excited and they're in the brand new zone of, "Oh my gosh.

This is going to be a great experience. I'm so excited to be a part of this. Yes, thank you. Let me get into your down line," you will know exactly what activities they need to be doing first because an individual who just barely joins, put yourself in their shoes. Their bright eyed and bushy tailed. They've got to have something to do. There needs to be something that they do. They're going to want to feel action. They're going to want to feel that progress. The way they will do is by doing what they think means business. They'll go make a freaking business card. They'll spend for putting a logo together and freelance it out to someone.

It's like none of that stuff is actually going to grow their business or yours. Know what those things. If you don't know what those are yet, just get really obsessed over it for the next two or three weeks. I guarantee you you'll start to see patterns emerge. Oh my gosh. That did that work at all. Hey, check that out. That worked. I'm going to tell my down line to do that. You know what I mean? Those little things become marketing tools that you offer people as kind of bribes when they join your down line because now you're different. Now you know what your marketing plan is. Now your team just became unique. Does that make sense? That's one of the secrets of you becoming duplicatable.

That doesn't happen without you and your team having the culture of a very specific, very deliberate marketing plan. What are your rituals? What are the things that you do to market the MLM? Anyway, that's all I've got for you guys. Are you doing revenue generating activities or are you living on the cost side of your own business? Guys, thanks so much. Talk to you next episode. Hey, thanks for listening. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Would you like me to teach your own down line five simple MLM recruiting tips for free? If so, go download your free MLM Master's Pack by subscribing to this podcast at SecretMLMHacksRadio.com.