An Open Letter…

I wrote this letter to my team just a short time ago. I thought it might be appropriate to share it here with any readers of this blog.

I’m writing from my hotel room in Cleveland, OH where we have just concluded the best ACN International training that I have ever attended. I’d like to say that I am “fired up” but that would not entirely be accurate. That would seem to indicate that my state of mind is one of emotion (and therefore is subject to change). Rather, I would say that I am walking away from this weekend, “resolved.” The dictionary says that to be resolved is to be “decidedly firm on a course of action.”

I want to begin by apologizing to each and every one of you. For those of you who were not here with us this weekend, I owe you an apology for not conveying the importance of these International events. I feel such a burden. I have let you down terribly by not pushing you to be here. My life changed this weekend. You deserve to have had your life change this weekend as well.

This was my fifth International Training since I have been back in ACN and it was the BEST event (by far) so far. While all the ACN trainers were phenomenal (including Debbie Davis, George Zalucky and Janel Presant), I was especially moved by this morning’s worship service led by Pastor Kevin Boyd and today’s Keynote speech delivered by Andy Andrews. Andrews has published several books, but today he spoke about “The Seven Decisions that lead to Personal Success.” There is no way that I could do his 90 minute talk justice in this email. However I did find a PDF that he created on his website (www.andyandrews.com) that discusses those seven decisions. I have downloaded that and attached it herein. Please take the time to review this, it is life changing.

I also owe you an apology for not leading by example these past few months. I don’t want to get into the reasons why, nor do I have any desire to make “excuses.” I merely want to tell you that I know that our team should be further ahead than it is right now, and I accept complete and full responsibility for that. There comes a time in every ACN Reps life where they must draw a line in the sand and say “enough is enough.” That line has been drawn for me this weekend. Forgetting what is behind, I am resolved to do the work to attain the prize that lays ahead.

ACN really and truly is the most amazing company/business model that I have ever seen in my life. It is an honorable business, dealing with legitimate products and services that we all use all the time. This is NOT the company that I knew in the 1990’s. I sit here in wonder, as I think about the company it will become as this current decade plays out. I can’t believe that God has shone His light upon my life to reveal this opportunity for me and for each of you.

I’m resolved this week to pique interest with at least 25 new people.

I’m resolved this week to call each of you personally to see how I might be able to serve you in this business.

I’m resolved this week to focus on becoming a hero to my own children thru this business.

I’m resolved this week to honoring my wife with my work ethic.

I’m resolved this week to allowing God to work thru me so that He can use me to be the man He created me to be.

I love each and every one of you, and am thankful for the commitment that you made to be a part of the remedy, when you paid your $499 and joined ACN. The second half of 2010 is going to be an amazing ride. I don’t want any of you to miss out on that. There is room for each of you to change your life this year.

We will resume our regular Monday night conference call this Monday June 28th at 9 p.m. (Pacific time). The call-in number is (712) 432-1413 and the PIN is: #916261. I look forward to reconnecting with each of you on tomorrow night’s call.

MONEY DOESN’T CHANGE YOU

A long time ago, I heard:

“Money doesn’t change you, it just magnifies who you already are in the first place.”

I had an epiphany yesterday. I’ve done alright in life, but it’s been awhile since I was “ahead of the game.” I’ve had my share of “daily bread,” but it’s been awhile since I have felt the blessing of God shower upon me.

And that’s when it hit me. Money amplifies who you are in the first place. Truthfully? If I had to look at the man that I have been over the past few years, I wouldn’t want that man magnified.

Change is hard. But the banner above says it all: “If you want life to change, YOU have to change.” For the first time in a long time though, I’m not at a crossroads where I need to start all over again. I’ve changed. I’ve adopted disciplines and routines that are positive and advantageous. I realize that though, that there are new disciplines to incorporate into my life.

I’ve been a very selfish, self-absorbed man. God has given me a gift thru ACN. I get paid to be professional relationship builder. That’s what a networker really is after all…a relationship builder. It’s perfectly suited for my temperament. People are attracted to “what’s in it for me.” I know this, but I’ve neglected it. I need to invest myself IN people. I need to take more time to find out ABOUT people and what I can do FOR them.

In this business of networking, we need to find out:

• what troubles people?
• what keeps them up at night?
• what their life is like right now?
• what are their living circumstances like?
• what’s missing from life?
• if they could change any part of their life in the next six months, what would that be?

And then we need to give a damn enough to find opportunities to fill those needs.

Sometimes ACN is the answer. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes people need a friend to talk to. We can be that person to listen to them. More people are lonely than care to admit it.

Sometimes people need supernatural intervention. We can be that person who offers to pray with and for them. When was the last time you asked someone if you could pray for them? When was the last time that someone offered to pray for you?

The world needs more relationship builders. We need more people who will listen and invest themselves in the lives of others. We need more people who are willing to make themselves vulnerable to ask how we can best pray for others.

That’s the type of man that deserves to be magnified.

GLENDORA SATURDAY TRAINING

We relaunched the Saturday Training in Glendora, CA this past Saturday. Rich Secchiaroli provided us with an updated and condensed Powerpoint deck of slides. After some aesthetic revisions, we realized that we can now get thru the Business Overview and Training material in two hours. As a result we are reverting to a 10 a.m. to noon Saturday schedule. Less can indeed be more.

If you would like to view/download the slides that we are using in Glendora,you can do so by clicking here. You may have to create a Dropbox user account(it’s free), if you don’t already have one. But you’ll then be able to keep up to date on any revisions we make to the presentations and documents(launch/24 hour gameplan).

BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD

My daughter left for Louisiana two days ago. I miss her like crazy already. It’s been so nice to have her home the past three months. She had been away at college for three and a half years.

It was nice having her here every morning to talk to. It was inspiring to want to set an example for her in terms of work ethic. I felt warm just being reconnected with my first born.

The last two days, I have been in a daze. I have been experiencing the doldrums for two days. Tonight, I forced myself to go to the Glendora BOM. I did the 4-10 part of the presentation. In the audience were two of the stupidest rotten apples you’ll ever run across.

They wanted to know how much they I was going to pay them to go to training. They asked if I would front them the $499, since it’s such a great opportunity. The whole thing was amazingly amusing. I haven’t dealt with such stupidity in quite awhile.

I told them that there are three parts to the ACN equation. We know the Compensation Plan works. We know the products and services work. The only REAL variable in the equation is them, we have no idea if THEY work.

When you’ve been in MLM as long as I have, no one is going to surprise you with any stroke of brilliance. I’ve seen and heard it all. I entertained Beavis and Butthead’s questions for a few minutes because I wasn’t quite sure if they really were just “slow” or if they were attempting to be funny.

After a few minutes, it was obvious that they were just too “smart” for me. I told them that they were obviously intent on being employees and that this wasn’t for them, nor were they who we are looking for. And with that? I dismissed them.

The whole thing made me laugh. It shook me out of the daze of funk I had been in the last two days. So I’m thankful they showed up.

Goodnight Beavis.

Goodnight Butthead.

MY ONLY VICE

I’m a changed man.

Over the years, I’ve indulged in my share of vices. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve let go of them all one by one. I don’t smoke. I don’t do drugs. I don’t drink to excess. I don’t chase women.

There’s just one left…

BASEBALL!

I jones for it in a terrible way. And I have no desire to ever give it up. My ideal vacation is spending the month of March in Arizona and/or Florida watching Spring Training.

I play in an 18-team 5×5 Roto League (that I’m going to win this year by the way). Our Draft was this past Friday and I’ll admit that I’ve been consumed the past week or so. Today was Opening Day and I was glued to the TV watching my Dodgers drop the season opener to the Bucs.

For years I’ve subscribed to the MLB Extra Innings package and I would sit and just jump from game to game, night after night. But not this year. This year I’m on the road to RVP. So I gave up my Extra Innings package. I also gave up the MLB Network. I did so by giving up DirecTV…I switched to DISH Network.

Ugh, I’ve dreaded doing this for a year. I HATE DISH Network. I’ve been a DirecTV customer for 8 years. But I need the customer points, so I switched.  There are seven games scheduled tomorrow. Only one of them (Angels-Twins) will be on TV locally. BLECH.

I suppose the bright side is that there’s nothing to do but make phone calls and work. I’ve promised myself that when I go RVP, I’ll reward myself and go back to DirecTV so I can once again bathe in a pool of my favorite vice in 2011.

Time to go to bed now though

APRIL FOOL

I hate April Fool’s Day. Most of the pranks are so lame and unoriginal, that it’s exhausting dealing with the day. So needless to say, I don’t participate (willingly) in the “zaniness” of the day.

But I ended up doing something foolish this afternoon. I had a one on one scheduled this afternoon with a friend of mine (from high school) who is a teacher. She’s also a soccer mom. So we met at a park where her daughter was practicing.

So I had my list of things that I had to make sure that I took care of prior to leaving for my appointment. It was like a checklist of sorts. I found myself running through it in my mind as I drove to Ayala Park in Chino.

• I charged the battery in my portable case, so that I could demo the video phone.
• I made sure that I had a magazine and DVD to give her afterward.
• I made sure that I left in plenty of time so that I would meet her on time
• I remembered to take a 1-10 sheet with me…DOH TWENTY MINUTES AFTER I LEFT THE HOUSE!!!

So I ended up telling the story from memory. I was authentic and she was skeptical. But I continued to be real and upfront, and she came around. We agreed to get together again next week to go over things in greater detail. It’s been eleven years since I had seen her, and it had been eighteen years before that. Credibility and trust take time.

Thank God April Fool’s Day is over

THE PHASE ONE FUNNEL

It’s the end of the day, on the last day of the month. It’s late (about 10:30 p.m.) and I need to be up at 5:30 a.m. to take my daughter to swim practice, so this will be short.

Phase One is all about seeing the people, showing them the plan, getting them to training and enrolling them in the process.

A month ago I started tracking my daily and weekly numbers. I created a new list of people in the area.

• I called 85 people
• I actually spoke to 36 people
• I piqued interest with 29 people
• I invited 19 people to presentations
• I presented to 10 people
• I followed up with 6 of those I presented to
• None of those have enrolled (yet).

This has been an interesting month for me to actually begin tracking my Phase One numbers.

I can look at the above numbers and see that I was only able to reach 42% of the people that I called. I left voice mails and emailed others, but it took 85 calls to reach 36 people. If I want to talk to 50 people, I need to make 118 calls. If I want to talk to 100 people, I need to make 236 calls. In reality? That’s 11-12 calls a day (factoring a five-day work week).

The other thing that stands out to me is that when I DO get in touch with people, it’s become relatively easy to pique interest with people. Two-thirds of the people are open to looking. Not surprisingly, only half of those actually show.

Any direct sales opportunity is just a numbers game. I need to increase my numbers, to increase my productivity. Right now? I need to put March (and myself) to bed.

ANY TIME, ANY PLACE, ANY WAY

Today I got a late start. I had trouble sleeping last night and then had to get up at 5:30 a.m. to take my daughter to swim practice. Since I didn’t fall asleep until about one this morning, I was operating on about four hours of sleep. So I went back to bed after dropping my daughter off and decided to let my body dictate when it was ready to get up.

I am not the kind of person who lives to sleep (unlike my teenage daughters). My body told me it was done sleeping at 9:20. So I got in a solid eight hours. That is one of the benefits of working for yourself. You don’t have a boss dictating when you have to get up.

I went thru my morning ritual of reading and journaling, got caught up on some Spring Training baseball news and then I was off for a lunch meeting with a friend of mine from my high school days. This friend of mine was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” when we graduated from high school. She has always been a hard worker. She has also become a great networker. She is the PR Director for a major health care provider.

The last time that I had met up with this friend, we had coffee and I used that time to pique interest with her. I showed her the videophone and she told me that she had already been exposed to ACN because a friend of hers had tried to “get her in” for years. I asked her at that point if she was open to talking about ACN some more, and she said yes. So we met today to talk about again.

There are times when you have to play things by ear. Today was not the time to go thru a standard 1-10 presentation with her. It would have been boring. It would have been insulting. She’s already seen it before. So instead I brought the 1-10 sheet and had it available just as a reference piece to refresh her memory.

What I really wanted to know was what her life looks like right now and what she would like it to look like. While she maintained that she loves her job, she also acknowledged that she wouldn’t mind running her own show and calling her own shots. She said that her job is extremely stressful and non-stop. She also has some other issues in life right now that make starting a new venture just a bit complicated.

But she also admitted that she isn’t above leaving her current position for another company. She also said that when her youngest daughter graduates from high school in a few years, she would probably go back to school for another degree (she’s a very intelligent woman).

We talked about ACN being a vehicle to set up the rest of her life. I even had one of my partners (who went to high school with us) drop by to say “hi” and talk to her about why he is now with ACN. In the end? She said that the timing probably wasn’t right for her and ACN at this point. I invited her to come to our Business Overview Meeting this Thursday. I sent her the details and we’ll see if she shows. If not, hopefully she’ll help me out as a customer.

After she left, my business partner and I talked about launching a weekly Saturday Training in the area. The Redlands office closed recently and we both agreed that there is a vacuum in the San Gabriel Valley and Inland Empire as far as training is concerned. So we’re going to approach our upline Rich Secchiaroli about supporting us with a Super Saturday to kick things off in about a month.

When I got home this afternoon, I emailed the directions to Thursday night’s BOM to my friend from lunch, and returned a few other emails. I then got on the phones and made an appointment to do a 1 on 1 with another old friend from high school. She’s a single mom and is a teacher.

When I asked her if she is open to making some extra money outside of teaching, she said she is looking into becoming a Notary to make extra money. She can’t make it to our Thursday night BOM, so I am going to her kid’s soccer practice Thursday afternoon to talk to her. Sometimes you can’t lead the horse to water. Sometimes you have to take the water to the horse (sorry Patty…you’re much prettier than any horse I’ve ever seen). And that’s the point. Personal presentations can take place any time, any place, any way.

If you want to have what other people don’t have, you have to be willing to do what other people won’t do.

COMMITMENT TO DAILY DISCIPLINES

I’ve come to realize that I have not done a great job of updating this blog on a regular basis. One of the things that I have come to realize over the past few weeks is that success in any venture is a matter of committing to a few daily disciplines:

• Adding new names to my contact list
• Contacting a few people to pique interest with them
• Seeing the people, showing them the plan
• Listening to training podcasts and CDs
• Reading personal development material (books, Success magazine, blogs)
• Writing this blog

Daily disciplines are all about making new routines. Getting into a groove. I begin each day by reading the Bible for a few minutes and journaling. That has become a routine that I have not missed in weeks. I’m now making a decision to end my days by updating this blog about my day. That’s the only way to truly chronicle my journey to RVP.

Today my youngest daughter had the day off from school (Furlough Day for teachers). It was also the end of her Spring Break. And so I took time to take her (and my oldest daughter) to the movies. I followed up to confirm a meeting for tomorrow and we just had our weekly Remedy team conference call. But other than that? It wasn’t a super-productive day.

I can’t afford to have too many days like today. But every once in awhile? It’s nice to be able to take time out to spend the day goofing off with the people you love. It’s easy to let one day like today, turn into two. Two become three and then before you know it, a week has passed. Weeks can turn into months, months turn into seasons and seasons become years. Before you know it? Decades can escape you. The days fall like dominos.

It takes a conscious decision to  stop the falling dominos. It’s back to work tomorrow.

GO FOR NO!

I’m an avid reader. I tend to read at least one book a month. February’s title was “Go For No!” by Richard Fenton and Andrea Waltz. While it’s a small volume (only about 70+ pages), it is packed with game-changing (and by extension LIFE-CHANGING) wisdom.

Written as prose, the book chronicles four days in the life of a struggling salesman and how he learns that getting “no’s” is a part of the sales process regardless of your product or profession. Once this is understood, then not only should we be “willing” to get no’s, we should WANT to get no’s. We should embrace and in fact, CELEBRATE the no’s.

For example, if you knew for a fact that to become an RVP, you have to get thru one hundred no’s personally first, why wouldn’t you just want to get them out of the way? If you know that three out of every ten people that you talk to about the business are going to “get in,” then you should be ecstatic when you come across the seven no’s.

On his classic recording, “Building Your Network Marketing Business” the late Jim Rohn says, “look I’ve got a new business, and I’m getting about three out of ten to join. And I don’t mind you just come to the meeting and be one of the seven.” Jim Rohn understood the lawa of averages and that “going for no” is just a part of the process.

While the premise of this book may seem like an absurdly simple process, there is genius in the paradigm shift that occurs while reading this book. One of the biggest challenges that most people face is not failing, but rather…having a little success. When we get one or two “yesses” most of us tend to take our foot off the gas. But by focusing on the need to get 100 no’s, a modicum of success will not allow us to take ourselves out of the game. This has been my biggest challenge.

I have always been “willing” to risk failure. I have never actively pursued it though.

All that changed after reading “Go For No!” In the last week, I increased the amount of phone calls I had been making by 400%. I’m on track this week to exceed that amount this week. I have presentations scheduled today, tomorrow and Friday. But even MORE significant? This is duplicating in my downline.

I’m not sure that I will ever meet Richard Fenton or Andrea Waltz, but they saved my life.

YES is the destination, but NO is how you get there.