Do We Stay or Do We Go?
It is Monday and the weekend was too fast and paced slow at times. Do you ever feel like your weekends are like this?
I have left you hanging long enough!
Here is where I left off…
We, the leaders of this company, were making high six and 7 figures! But the owners sold it. They had been featured in Magazines, catching the attention of JD Powers and other companies. When someone offered them Millions, they jumped and sold. Only…wait, there is a deal on the table? This was so confusing! So we all just stood still while we got news day after day.
No sales were happening, no recruiting…just still. Just watching the emails. Then a webinar…okay! Now we will have answers! But nope, in true MLM fashion, it was hype of celery with no sign of even salt or peanut butter to digest it better.
We were told that the company would be staying open to service the clients because they were contracted for life. There was funding that had been put in place with every sale that would handle that aspect of the company. Whew, okay, that was covered. At least I would not be fielding calls from all the clients I had sold to; they would never know what was going on because the company at least held to that commitment!
But what about the rest? I guess they had picked 10 of the top leaders in the company (that had the largest overall team sales). So, you guessed it, I was not in that meeting but the guy who recruited me was(because he had my team’s sales as his TOTAL SALES VOLUME!),….and yet, I was out selling at least 3 of the guys in that meeting. Heck, over half of the people in those 10 people’s downlines were in my training calls every week.
I digress! Sorry, but they should have asked the entire field….would we be willing to take a temporary cut in pay to help the company transfer some financial strains they had on servers (they needed a server overhaul if we were continuing with growth at the pace we were at).
But the 10 morons said, no, we won’t take a cut in pay, you need to run the business better! So, the owners decided they would take the funding set aside for the clients and drop down to minimum staff to service those clients. And the field would be done. Just like that…. done!
We could stay with the company. They would be revamping everything! They had not figured it all out on how we would be paid or what this would look like. At this point, we had gone 2 weeks, waiting on emails and conference calls with nothing but, we are not sure. It was painful!
When you make a couple hundred a month, it’s not a bid deal. Don’t get me wrong, I know not having money come in makes an impact on everyone. However, when you make high 5 figures every month….2 weeks with nothing coming in is a lot. We had reserves, and we owned property outright, so we should be okay to weather it out.
We had equipment that was rented and had contracts. Because we dealt in contracts, we had high powered copy machines and service contracts on those. We had staff that depended on us to feed their families. We had retainers for professionals that are needed when you run a bigger business.
We watched the next few weeks roll out, in what seemed like slow motion. It was gut wrenching. We worked on getting out of the contracts we could. We paid cancelation fees on others we could not just quit outright. We took all our reserves, paid all the employees, and let them all go.
My mom lived with us, so she was working for us and we took care of her in return. There was now nothing for her to do, but we still had to support her and the girls. We could figure this out, right?
We put the duplex up for sale, that would hold us over for a few months so we could regroup! Then, like Covid hit all of us out of the blue, the great crash of the housing industry slapped us in the face! Our business revolved around helping people get their mortgages and debt paid off faster. But we saw people in $600,000 homes, so excited to have equity in their homes. The crash pushed their homes into negative mortgage states.
That means, in simple terms, that we had all worked hard to get our mortgages down below the value of our homes. We had equity and were headed towards paid in full stamped on the title. But this crash meant our homes there were valued at 800,000 were now worth less than 500,000. Maybe the home was valued at 600,000. After the CRASH and that value was 350,000!
So now, we owed more than the house was valued. Some watched as their houses went from $1,000,000 down to $600,000 and they were so happy that they had gotten their debts paid and mortgage down to say $850,00!
What do you do when you owe $250,000 more on your home than it is worth? You can’t sell and banks were getting ugly. They were in a panic. Everyone started doing Modifications. We started helping people with this.
We switched our staff to work with a team of lawyers we hired to handle cases all across the US. We restructured as many loans as we could handle. We knew it was a matter of time before something would prevent people from modifications. Our goal was to help as many people as we could. We reached out to all our clients and word of mouth spread fast! If we could get these loans modified, people would not lose their homes and they would not suffer the upside down effects of the crash in the market.
We would charge an initial fee, do the modification and the client would pay the remainder of the fee once we completed the service. We had a 100% success rate!
Then, the laws changed overnight. And it wasn’t a law to help anyone either. We could no longer charge upfront fees. I had to laugh at this because there were people that we would help and then we would have to threaten to sue them to get the remainder of the fees.
Think about that, we just saved your home, and cut your mortgage by, let’s say $500 a month (and in many cases, much more) and people would have to be threatened to be sued for the $350 they owed us! One guy was saved $1400 a month and we filed to sue him for the $500 he owed us!
So, we were out! We tried a lot of things to make ends meet and nothing would stick. The duplex didn’t have one bite! NOT ONE! People out west were trying to salvage their homes or hoping they could make their payments and eventually the market would come back up so they had value in their homes. No one was buying, unless it was investors buying blocks of properties (whole subdivisions) from the banks!
The market out west was affected more than any other place in the country. We knew we needed to move from there to get a new life.
This is one of those times when life FORCES you to change! We were headed down a hole that was causing blisters on my hands, trying to climb out!
Well…. more tomorrow….do we stay or do we go?
I have to give you the 🤫“dirty secret” I promised and the golden nugget…
Here is my golden nugget for the day…– Did you get your perfect customer done? Did you get a picture, do a collage of what they are interested in and so forth? Here is a great tool…Answer the public. It is a website that you can put in things you want to know about your person. For example, I put in the word makeup. It gave me 80 questions related to this topic that people are searching on the internet! Look at this and then figure out what things you can help your person! How can you serve them better by getting these questions answered and then offering your product to help with some of that too? This will help you with marketing! More tomorrow on this!
Time saver tips for the day- I hope you wrote out your schedule. Today you will put a dollar value next to each of these tasks. Some will have a ZERO beside some of these things.
Let me give you an example…I write books. I do my 3D mock ups (for the most part) because I know what I want the book to look like. I find I can get them done in about 30 minutes or less. If I send to a graphics designer, it will take me days and probably 30 mins to review and make notes on changes to be made. So, in my opinion, it is worth the 30 minutes or less for me to create the whole thing. I can have it ready almost immediately and put no delays on deadlines I have for my projects.
My time income is ZERO on this task — although, if you wanted, you could say about $50-$200 saved. That is because I am not working with a designer. But the time I spend creating the mock up is almost equal to, if not less than, the time I would have spent reviewing and making notes on modifications from a graphic designer! You can look at the big picture and make notes like this. I have decided, for me, right now, this is time that I don’t mind putting into the business. It is more productive for me because of the time saved on production. I have the finished product quicker!
Yes- Word tip notes are coming. Once you get these notes made, how are you storing them? What program are you using to keep up with all this? I suggest a combination of word and excel. We will look at that more this week! 👍
Today’s “dirty secret” your upline doesn’t want you to know:
Recycle — what content have you created that is AWESOME? Take snips of it and reuse. Let’s say I have 3 tips to help X — I could literally dive deep on this and take 1 tip per day for my live focus or blog focus. This one article could stem into 4, even 5 different blog post, IG posts or Facebook! Provide written content in your FB groups as well as video. Remember we all learn differently!
Tomorrow I will give you another “dirty secret” that your upline doesn’t want you to know!
For now, I have to bounce…
Be your best and don’t copy your upline!
Cheers,
Stacey
Ps — I promise that if you follow me for the next 365 days, your business will be stronger. You will have more of the people you WANT in your business and you will be happier and financially stronger!
Like my fan page in Facebook @StaceyMartinCoaching — message me here to see if there are still opening to the inner circle. We are only allowing the first 100 people who join our challenge into this special group!
Dan (my hubby) is hosting special group to help you gain back 7–15+ per week (guaranteed) with various tips and tools, including cooking, menus and so much more! He and I have so much fun in this group, it is personal and yet we give great time-saving tips every week too!
