The Butler Project

Here is more from my interview with Todd, network marketing millionaire. One of the things I love about Todd is that he’s very aware of his own actions–the how and the why he does things.

Mark: What do you feel has been your key attribute that has contributed most to the success you’ve had?

Todd: I think more so than anything is my ability to communicate. You know . . . you can be involved in any different type of business, but you and I and the majority of people out there are involved in the exact same business and that’s the people business. Whether you’re selling x product or whatever it is or you’re selling . . . a service . . . whatever it may be, the ability to communicate clearly and to get your point across and to understand people and develop relationships . . . I think that’s been definitely the most important piece for me.

Mark: Do you feel that is something you were born with? Or even if you were born with it, how did you magnify that ability? How do I help myself develop the skill?

Todd: There are a couple of things. I do feel like, for me personally, I feel like that’s one of the God given gifts that I was given, but I feel like any gift that you’re given, if you don’t develop and hone that skill, it’s going to go away.

I think [there are] a couple of ways you can do that: one, I personally read probably more than anybody I know in terms of leadership books, books on communication, tapes, all those types of things, and so I’m constantly trying to learn from other people in that regard.

The other thing that I’ve done is I have spent a lot of time recording myself and recording other people and going back and listening to it and practicing in assessing my ability to communicate and trying to make that better. You know, I know that in what you do, you have sales calls and . . . I’ve done millions of conference calls and recruiting calls and . . . I’ve recorded hundreds of those and gone back and listened to them and said, “OK, where can I be better? That didn’t make sense. Why did I stutter there? How can I say that a little bit clearer? How can I answer those questions? When I came across those objections, how did I handle it? Did it work? Did it not?”

And then [I] also listen to other people who I respect, who I believe . . . I want to work with them, and spend quite a bit of time assessing what they’ve done, and then try to incorporate that into what I do.

I think that you learn best, and you’re probably the best judge or the most honest judge of your ability to communicate when you listen to yourself, more so than getting feedback from anybody else because you actually listen to it when you give it to yourself.

As I was listening to Todd talk about the value of communication skills and analyzing his interactions with people, it made me think of a good friend, who is now also a business partner of mine. When I first met him, he had been working in sales at the same company as I and he was terrible. You couldn’t point to many other people in our sales force that were worse than he was. He was probably making about $50 per 40 hour work week. Yeah…Fifty Dollars.

But he was determined to succeed in sales, and told me later that he would never have quit. The only way he was going to leave the job was if he was forced out (something I had lobbied for coincidentally).

To make a long story short, he ended up being one of the most successful sales reps in the history of our company, and he has now moved on to pursue our business full time.

How did he go from being so bad to being one of the best? Every week he would go to the Quality Assurance department of our company (we worked in a sales office where all our calls were recorded) and he would ask for recordings of both his own calls and those of the most successful sales reps. He took those CDs home and studied them for hours every night. He wrote down every word the successful rep said, and then practiced saying it how they said it. This went on for weeks and then months, and he started to improve.

An additional benefit of all this study was that he became one of the best listeners I’ve known. As he listened to all these sales calls he started to understand the meaning behind the clients’ tone of voice, and their non-verbal communication.

Now my friend has these skills forever. They served him well in his previous job, they’ll help our company immensely, and he’ll use them to enhance his personal life for a long time to come.

Like Todd said, we’re all in the people business. Whether you’re a stay at home mom, a school teacher, or a construction worker, you interact with people every day. Your communication skills determine how well that interaction goes and the relationships you’ll form.

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.