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 ...