By Randy Gage

April 14th, 2009

In the 1970s, Network Marketing learned a lesson from franchising.  Top leaders began to understand the importance of having a duplicable system to follow.  The business, which had been almost the exclusive domain of blue-collar workers, started to attract some more white-collar professionals.

Old school distributors mostly looked at the business as a sales business, with many actually going door-to-door. These new people realized the power of leverage, worked relentlessly towards duplication, and saw this new occupation not as a part-time job, but as something that could replace their income or even their job or career and become a true profession. The thing that made the difference was the concept of a duplicable system.

A system is the road map to how success is created in your company. It should completely delineate and spell out the entire process that a distributor will follow: where to find prospects, how to approach them, how to sponsor them, and how to train them to reach the higher pin ranks.  Each stage in this process should be clearly defined and taught to the distributor at the appropriate time.

At the foundation of all this is the formula for creating true duplication and wealth in our business. It may strike you as simplistic, but I promise you it is actually quite profound. This formula is where duplication lives. It is:

“Lead a large group of people—to consistently do a few simple actions—over a sustained period of time.”

You’ll notice there are three sections that make up the formula. First is the large group of people. You need enough critical mass to get traction and for duplication to take off.

The second element is to have those people perform only a few actions and to keep those actions simple. One of the biggest mistakes newcomers make is to try and quantify everything, and in doing so they add too much complexity. For true duplication we need to focus on actions simple enough that everyone in the large group can replicate.

And finally, you need this to happen over a sustained period of time. I believe building a solid network is a two- to four-year plan. Mark Yarnell says five, and he’s one of the brightest minds in the business.

So it doesn’t happen in a month or two or even six. We need people to consistently take the actions for a sustained period of time. This is how wealth is created in MLM.

The next thing that’s important for you to understand is how you get that formula happening in your team. It doesn’t come from speaking or training it. It comes from modeling the behavior. What your people see you actually do is what they will duplicate.  That’s where we’ll pick up on the next post.

-RG

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