94: How To Rate Your Business (Part 1)

Let’s talk about HOW to judge if you're own MLM position is performing how it should...   First of all, I'm not talking about rating the company that you've chosen to be a distributor for.   What I'm saying is...   How do you rate your MLM position?   I want to teach you a really cool model that you can use to see how you're doing in business.   One of the biggest questions I get is, “Stephen, I've built this thing and I don't know what to focus on next”.   In order to know what you need to do, you need to know where you currently are. This is a rating system that is used in real businesses.   Major businesses Multi-million dollar companies   I'm gonna teach you how to do it for your specific MLM position inside of your company.   RATE YOUR CURRENT MLM POSITION   This will help you go in and say, “Okay, here's my current place and where I am” and it'll be very obvious to you where you're weak.   I'm gonna teach you how to go through and rate your current MLM position.   This will help you create a roadmap.   I recommend that you take out a piece of paper.   This is literally how I go through and do this with my own business on a routine basis. And I know it's one of the reasons why we have such focused action inside of my company.   Because I take a moment to figure out where we are and where we're trying to go in relation to those two things.   It's very easy for me to see where we're weak. I sell my strengths, but I still need to go in and fix the weak spots, as far as the systems go and I'm gonna explain that to you moving forward.   One of the biggest things I run into inside of MLM is that people don't treat it like a business, and I know I've said that on this show.   “But Stephen, how do I treat it like a business?”   You need to know why it hasn't felt like a business and why you have not been treating it like one.   This episode will teach you the systems needed so you can treat it like a business, so that you're not the business. So that you're not treating like a hobby and so that you have something that's measurable.   You need to know if your business is actually growing and THIS will teach you that framework.   WHAT IS A BUSINESS?   When I was in college they would ask questions like, “What is a business?”.   We had to write a paper about what a business is…   At the beginning of my entrepreneurship classes there were some specific books that I was told to read.   I'd read the book and the first half of the book was great but the second half of the book was really awkward.   The reason it was so awkward is because they would say things like...   “The business has a soul” “The business wants to expand” “It's ready to grow and it's ready to breathe”   … and it got fluffy.   And I gotta tell you guys… I'm not into that type of business belief AT ALL.   I don't believe in business WOO WOO.   What I practice is measurable activities that will guide me to success.   I don't care about ART.   I'm not saying ART ART…   I love art but art by definition is sometimes hard to define…   And because it's not to define-able, it's hard to design ahead of times. There's things in this life that you have to design. There's things you have to discover.   I want to know, in business, what I can design ahead of time.   I want to know that when I do A + B I get C   This is how I KNOW what to do next in my business. It is a way to rate how you're doing in whatever business you're in.   I'm not trying to say how to rate your MLM business as a whole. What I'm saying is how to rate your performance in your MLM position in your business.   How do I rate it and how do I know what to do next?   WHAT TO DO NEXT IN YOUR BUSINESS   THIS IS POWERFUL STUFF.   This is this is one of the coolest ways to know what to do next.   I had to do redesign what a business was in my head.   You might know this story... But one of the first funnels that I ever built was for a company that wasn't an MLM but they had a two tiered affiliate system. Sometimes they were mistaken for an MLM.   It was the first major success I ever had on my own while I was still in college. And it was for this water company. They're selling water machines and wateriners, water ionizers, Kangen Water, stuff like that.   I did all this marketing research and I did a bunch of Ask campaigns. And I found a whole bunch of people who had a lot of questions. They wanted MORE from the company.   Since they already had an existing customer base, I dropped a question out to their people. “What are you still struggling with?” and I got 157 responses.   What happened next was shocking. I spent the next week reading those. It took me three different tries to get through them because they were so intense.   The topic was intense as I asked people, “What are you guys struggling with you...