It's almost 20 years since I first saw direct selling and in this post I'll explain why I've never been able to let go of the idea.
Imagine you're handed a turnkey system where the material is already made, the company has hired staff in marketing, finance and customer support who work for you. Distribution is handled centrally so you never have to deal with any products. The customer orders straight from the website, the products are shipped straight to the customer's home and you have full visibility through a back office that doesn't cost you anything. That concept is served up to you, so let's look at the added values you could only have dreamed of.
1. THE ENTREPRENEUR SCHOOL
You learn entrepreneurship. It's a school in personal development, leadership, presentation skills, communication, marketing, selling and everything to do with entrepreneurship that you never learned in school.
You get out into real meetings with real people without taking any risk. Getting started isn't a big decision. You don't have to take on debt. You don't have to change jobs, buy a house or get married. You're acquiring a right to take part and earn money. It costs nothing, you're not tied to anything. You're acquiring a right. What you do with that opportunity is up to you. The point is that you get to make a decision and stand for something. What you need to do is sit in meetings to get products out on the market, but you don't have to do that on your own.
2. THE MENTORSHIP
When you start you have immediate access to mentors who help you get going and teach you the basics. It's by far the best apprenticeship system in the world, where the person training you has already mastered the first steps you're about to learn. The system continuously quality assures the process so nothing is unclear: everything is plain.
You have free access to a whole chain of mentors who want things to go well for you. They'll invest time in helping you and will never invoice you a single krona for that time. They're there as a safety net no matter what happens, and step by step you get help to learn new things, and in time you step into responsibility and leadership that you master, because by then it has become a part of you.
3. THE LEADERSHIP INCOME
You develop and grow as a leader and one day you'll realise you've become the entrepreneur you dreamed of being when you started. Building a leadership income differs in several ways from being employed. You have no boss, so you have to make sure yourself that you do what you promised yourself you'd do. Two things are needed for you to develop a leadership income.
CUSTOMER BASE
First, it's about learning to get customers so that you can teach others to do it. Over time you build a customer base with your team that gives a passive income from recurring orders.
LEADERSHIP
The second thing required is leadership. This is about going first and showing the way, coaching and training people in the system. If you don't work on developing your own and other people's leadership, you won't be able to build any leadership income either.
PASSIVE INCOME
The passive income so many people are looking for today comes as a consequence, and it can certainly be a large part of your total earnings over time, but if there's no leadership and you're not active, growth will slow down. An organisation without leadership doesn't grow. And if it doesn't grow it dies, because standing still isn't an option. We shouldn't attract people who are looking for passive income. There's no profession out there looking for people who don't want to do the work.
LIFESTYLE
You're looking for people with big ambitions who are prepared to work to realise them. You're looking for people who want the freedom and the lifestyle of being able to work anytime, anywhere. Personally, I'm looking forward to the active income in the building phase of a customer base of 100,000 customers, and even though it will become a good passive income, it's the journey that's interesting.
More and more people are realising that a safe and secure job isn't that appealing any more, given what the market looks like. They're after the freedom this profession can give them. Employment is a fairly new phenomenon that came with industrialism. In the farming society most people were self employed. Now we're going out and helping people become entrepreneurs again.
