Every profession has its own way of doing things. Some do things because they've always done them that way. Some do things because they've proven to work best over time. In a bakery, a café or a restaurant people often talk about a recipe. It's fairly simple to do what you've done before if you want the same result you got before. The same goes for business systems in entrepreneurship.
Every successful organisation has a system. Tim Sales talks about his military background and his former profession as a bomb technician. They used systems for how they did things, because if they didn't follow the system a bomb could go off, the worst possible scenario. They learned how to do things from their mistakes. Tim built his first network organisation with more than 50,000 distributors in the 90s during the recession. His point is that if you're going to build a big network you have to follow a system.
He talks about ”Do the pipeline”. In a way we've worked out the system that has proven to work absolutely best over time, while we now also need to think online because of the current situation.
The strength of a ready made concept is that so many people before you have worked out the system that exists. We can be sure it works, because otherwise we wouldn't have done it that way. Otherwise we'd have other kinds of approaches that had proven to work better.
It's a safer way to start your own business. I listened to a live broadcast about franchising where the guy talked about why someone spends 200,000 to 300,000 kronor on a franchise concept. Franchising comes from the Latin franco, which means right. You pay to get the sales rights and the manual. It's about getting the recipe. Getting the system for success.
In network marketing we don't tie ourselves to a lease on a business premises. We don't pay 300,000 kronor for a system. Our licence fee is free, which makes many people trivialise the system.
Tim Sales talks about doing the pipeline. We've built an infrastructure across the whole country in quite a few towns to handle the pressure that comes from basic work, which is when you sit with people in a first meeting and maybe a second meeting as a follow up. After that the system needs to take over and move people along and help them see a bigger picture. If that step doesn't exist, it's up to the individual to make something good out of it. I can tell you I've tried companies that have no system, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
I've worked in countries that don't have the system in place, and getting people to do their own things without following a system gets very messy. The guy talking about franchising said you can handle 4 to 5 people without a manual. After that you need a system, because you can't scale the business without it.
By doing the pipeline we help each other, regardless of organisation, to build a network and a leadership. If there's no pipeline we won't be able to help each other. Then we won't be able to build anything together as a team, instead it's up to each individual to start up and handle the whole process themselves, each on their own. If we instead link arms and do the third step in the pipeline together, we get a completely different effect. If there are 10 of us building a shared business presentation, we can each do 10% of the work, because together everyone creates more (TEAM=Together Everyone Achieves More). We don't have to limit ourselves to 10. We can be 100 people in one town who together create the basis for a business presentation. A meeting like that exists because so much BASIC is being done in the field that the system and the organisation almost require one more step, because it's unmanageable to start up that many people otherwise. As I said, you can help 4 to 5 people without a manual or a system in place. You want to be able to pass people on to the next step in the pipeline.
If you want to do the pipeline there has to be a business presentation. We build the pressure towards an AP as we call it, then we help each other set up an AP with different areas of responsibility, because we want to create as good a meeting as possible together. We're very careful to think about future expansion and who will be holding the presentations then. Otherwise we'll have built an AP where we ourselves are the main attraction, which can be gratifying for the ego if we're driven by being seen, but it limits your business because you can't be everywhere all the time by yourself.
We need to bring as many as possible into this training process and teach them how to run an AP. Because unless more people step into responsibility, nothing happens. Then you're the one running it. Then you have to run everything. The presentation. The training. Then you have no system. The art is to involve people in different areas of responsibility so that everyone feels like a co-creator, because that builds personal leadership and with it the future leadership in the organisation.
Then suddenly people start talking about contacts in other towns. Then it's possible for a driven person to start up in a new town, because that person has been part of building the town you're in. Then you can support that person by helping out in the beginning and being there now and then, but the person has every part of the system. All the puzzle pieces and all the parts of the recipe. The person can start their own AP and build their own leadership. Link arms with everyone in the town regardless of organisation and build another AP where everyone feels like a co-creator, where everyone feels their responsibility. Where everyone gets the chance to take personal leadership. Where everyone gets the chance to grow. A very permissive environment, which makes people feel seen, feel liked, and we build the culture everyone wants to be part of. If you zoom out you can see that it's a school in personal development.
As someone said: network marketing is a personal development programme with a compensation plan. Products are good. Without products going to end customers there's no economy in it, but the real product in the organisation is a personal development programme. It's the chance to grow in the community.
If you don't let everyone into different areas of responsibility they don't become co-creators. Then you have an audience rather than a team. That has rarely proven to work. You reach a level where it becomes unmanageable, just like the guy talking about franchising said. You can handle 4 to 5 people but you can't handle much more without a manual if you lack a system…
Now that we're going online the rules of the game change somewhat, but it's extremely important that people feel involved and like co-creators. Extremely important that people feel a personal commitment, responsibility and leadership. If they don't lead themselves they won't lead a team later on.
It's important that we keep hold of this and develop new leaders by engaging as many people as possible who get to be co-creators. There will come a day when we can be at different hotels again. If we haven't engaged ourselves during those 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, however long it takes… Then the offline leaders will be rusty and the leaders who reached titles along the way will be clueless, and those who have carried everything will have to work very hard to build the infrastructure up again.
Those who have engaged themselves, taken responsibility, personal leadership and been co-creators of the AP Online, on the other hand, will just switch back to physical meetings. They'll have an army of people who know exactly what to do, because they've trained themselves along the way.
I know that some people become recruiting machines, I know that other people are sitting at home stuck in ”management mode” and don't know what to do. The best thing you can do right now is to act. There are people waiting for your call because they need this, they just don't know it yet.
What I'm going to do over the next 90 days is to talk to everyone. Everyone I've ever spoken with. Every business card I have. Every contact. I'll ask how things are. What they're doing. How they're feeling. What they're going to do. Then I'll start building pipelines. I'll balance this recruiting work with training and with continuing to build leadership.
We're going to create a leadership academy that knows exactly how to set up the system step by step. At every level there are new things to learn. The day it opens up so we can run APs at hotels again, our team at least, our army, will be more ready than ever. We're ready because we know exactly what to do. We've trained people in how we do things. We build pipelines.
