Building It Really Big
By Greg Arnold

Your networking business is a generation-to-generation business. As the line of sponsorship goes deeper and deeper, you are developing children in your business and grandchildren, great grandchildren and so on. One of the challenges you will face is passing on duplicable success techniques from one generation to the next. Just like in your own family, it is difficult to pass on accurate information much beyond a few generations.

When you are just starting out in your business you must be committed to paying whatever price is necessary to get to the top. First, you must become an upstart. You must come from the ranks of the unknown to compete with the big boys. Then you must become a contender by beating a few of the big boys on a regular basis. Then you will have to win the biggest dogfight of your life to become a champion. Then you must do the impossible and build a dynasty. In order to become a champion you must have a duplicable system for success. In order to build a dynasty you must have a duplicable system for building champions.

Since you cannot control people, you need to learn how to control the flow of your organization. To control the flow you must have a system which helps your distributors become successful as they follow it.  A system is nothing more than something you design to accomplish an on-going task and carry out exactly the same thing over and over again. In order for your system to work, you must have a duplicable training program that teaches greenies each step of the system as well as the reasons for each step. In an ideal system, once a person has gone through the complete training program, he not only understands the how and why of each step but he also understands the entire system and can duplicate it exactly.

In a martial arts program, the student has learned to perform almost every physical movement by the time he is at the level of brown belt. From that point on, 10% is devoted to perfecting the movement or the external form of the art and 90% is devoted to the philosophy or the internal form of the art. The same is true of network marketing. By the time you have spent two years building your business, you know almost every external form of your business; what to say, when to say it, how to promote your product line, etc. Now it is time to work on the philosophy of Networking or the internal side of your business.

You must learn that your business is recruiting-oriented and everything that happens within a super successful networking business is a byproduct of recruiting or teaching to recruit. Retailing products should be the byproduct of the recruiting process. Recruiting is the life-blood of every successful organization.  Because it is a process of duplication, you also must understand the multi-generational aspect of your business. You must be thinking 10 to 15 generations deep with every decision you make. Whenever you make a decision that effects the team, try to look at what that decision looks like as your team expands 10 generations from now. Will it perpetuate into something that benefits your organization and helps it to grow or, will it turn into a lot of momentum killing mess?

That is why perpetual systematic recruiting is so important. When you stop recruiting, your organization begins to die. Recruiting is the daily exercise you must perform to keep your organizational body strong. The system you design to build a championship team and then an empire must be one in which the act of recruiting is the center of all your team activity and never stops.

Quite simply your system must: 

·         Recruit new people,

·         Teach those new people how to recruit more new people,

·         Teach those now experienced people how to teach new people to recruit even more new people.

In other words, your system must be learnable, teachable and repeatable. If anyone, at any given time, is doing anything within your system, they should be recruiting someone, learning something about recruiting (preferably in the field with a trainer talking to the trainee's own personal prospects), teaching something about recruiting (again, preferably in the field) or duplicating the process of recruiting. Everything else should be a byproduct of these things.

You must systematically teach your people about human nature, about leadership, about goal setting, about treating their business like a business, about sticking with it for the long haul, about the perpetual nature of their business in general, and about winning when everyone around them is having a tough time. Your system must help them to grow to reach their full potential. It must teach them about the compounding effect of building a successful team. Most importantly, it must systematically teach them to teach these things to others, thereby duplicating the process.

McDonald's is an extremely successful organization because: #1 - Recruitment of new franchisees never stops, and #2 - Each franchisee is systematically trained to make his franchise an exact duplicate of the original successful outlet. Networking is the same thing, only it has three distinct advantages over franchising.  1) There is no red tape.  2) There are no large start-up costs, and most importantly, 30 Each new distributor (franchisee) has the opportunity to also become a franchiser simply by recruiting other new distributors which opens new part-time outlets or profit centers for them.

In order to build an empire you must provide each new distributor (franchisee) with the success system they need to win big, like McDonald's does.

How to Develop a Duplicable System to Help People Become Champions

Everyday: Make field training available to anyone who wants it. In the field, teach your new recruits how to recruit and invite others to opportunity meetings. Don't get wrapped up in too much classroom training. Activity will produce knowledge but knowledge won't necessarily produce activity. If one of your distributors wants more training, take them to the field to see a few people on their prospect list. Not only will they be better trained, they will also be more excited with the results and have more money in their pocket too.   Three-ways over the telephone are synonymous to live 2 on 1 field training.

Every week: Hold opportunity meetings for those invited guests to take a SECOND look at your opportunity. Never invite guests to an opportunity meeting unless you have shown them the business opportunity presentation in their own home first with a two on one presentation. Also, as I said before, if you do not pick up your guests to bring them to the meeting, they will not be there.  It's the same thing for opportunity conference calls; they should be a second look after an initial three-way and you should three-way your prospects in to the conference calls so you know they will be there.

Every month: Have a potluck to develop family relationships and to recognize your top 20%ers for the month. Give out pencils for each new recruit for the month and for each person brought to opportunity meetings. Give out a small plaque for top recruiter and top team builder. Never miss an opportunity to tell your team you love them and to recognize them.

Every three months: Hold a one-and-a-half day training school. Invite company heroes from other areas of the country to speak. Teach the basics of your system and how to build it big. Also, get your local heroes up in front of the room to help train. This makes others want to be up there also and it builds strong leaders.

Every six months: Hold a leaders retreat in a special place for your top people and your top prospects at each level of development. This lets your potential best get to know the best of the best more intimately. Hold a few informal meetings to give a few growth tips and to talk about how good it is to be winning. Remember this trip is for your up and coming winners only. It must be earned.

Every year: Attend the company convention. This is important. Don't miss it.

Emergency meeting: When needed.

Blitz: To pick up momentum. Example: A four-day recruiting blitz. Start it at 10 o'clock p.m. on Wednesday and end it at midnight Saturday. Call it the 'Maniac Blitz'. All you have to do to get in is be a maniac and go for it.

Also, develop a format for your opportunity meetings, in home presentations, and follow-up interviews. Once you have developed this format be sure you put it in writing so it can be duplicated from generation to generation.

As you grow and commit your system to writing, you will be developing your franchise operations manual for success, just like McDonald's did. Then your every three-month training school becomes your McDonald's Hamburger University. Once you have put all this together and begin to build champions, building a dynasty becomes possible.

Teach correct principles, set a good example, put your success system in writing, and then let your team members govern themselves. If you do these things consistently, over time, you will build a dynasty. Remember, the art of network marketing is an acquired skill. It takes years to perfect your craft. It is not some get-rich-quick deal. In fact, chances are you may choose the wrong company or companies when you first start out. However, you must look at each failure as a career-path learning experience.

Also, you must keep working and keep learning and keep growing in your craft. That is the only way you will reach the top of your new profession. Your U.S. census says that only one in a hundred people are rich at age 65. That means one of you are happy and the rest lead miserable lives. Of that one percent, 10% are doctors or lawyers, 10% are CEO's for big corporations, 5% are super salespeople, 1% inherit or hit the lottery and 74% are entrepreneurs. None of them got there by working a job, it simply isn't an option. Your only choice is to build it big and have everything you ever wanted or be sad.

The second aspect of building a dynasty is understanding that you are not only building a business dynasty but potentially a family dynasty as well. Your network marketing business can be passed on from generation to generation. One day it is possible there will be third and fourth generation family networking businesses that are bigger than anything you ever imagined. Get your kids involved in your business early. Teach them positive winning principles and prepare them to take over the business when you retire.