The Butler Project

One of the interviews I’ve done was with Todd, an incredibly successful network marketer. Todd is 26 years old; he’s been working at this for 5 years now, and he brings in over a million dollars a year with his partner, who also happens to be his brother.

Mark: Having been on the path that you’re on for a while now, and having accumulated some money, if you could only give me one piece of financial advice, or a couple, you know, what would the advice be?

Todd: You know, it really comes, my perspective also comes down to understanding the type of money I’ve made because when you make money in network marketing, it really is a different vehicle. And I guess my advice would be to create an income or incomes that are not completely dependent on your showing up. Whether that be through becoming a manager of a sales office where you’re getting paid a percentage of the sales of the other sales people that you have or a percentage of profits, or whether that be investing in things that are going to pay an annuity or a residual income or whatever it may be.

The fatal flaw that most people have in their idea of creating wealth is to work a job to where they make a good income and to save that and put it away, and the majority of people just don’t do that.

If you can create an income that is ongoing; it’s a hard thing to do, but there’s a lot of ways to do it, and I’m not saying that network marketing is the only way to do it. You can do it in real estate, you can do it by owning a parking lot, you can do it by building your own company; I mean there’s a lot of ways to do it. But creating some type of passive, residual income or multiple forms of it is really the only way to create total retirement freedom for yourself.

Mark: And, network marketing, there’s no question that’s a tough business; that’s a business with a lot of rejection in it on a daily basis, but you’ve had success there. Looking back now, five years later, thinking of all the crap that you did have to deal with and go through; was it worth it?

Todd: Oh, absolutely, I mean if you were to do it from a numbers perspective . . . if it were 8000 people that had rejected me in the last five years, I get paid more than 10 dollars for every one of those people who rejected me every single month.

I’m laughing.

Todd: I mean if you break it down to actual numbers, I’d say I’d probably been rejected realistically by maybe 1000 people so I’m making [more than $80] a month off of each of those people

Mark: (Still laughing.) That’s 80 grand!

Todd: You know, if you look at it from that perspective, oh yeah, who cares?!

Mark: That puts it in some pretty amazing terms . Maybe that’s gonna turn some of us on to network marketing.

Todd: Yeah, [you] could definitely do worse.