Sales, spreadsheets and manipulation…
We stayed and tried to “hang in there.” But after a few months, we ended up filing Bankruptcy. After we sold everything, we made the final payroll checks and shut the business down for good. It was a total loss. The THINGS were not the big deal. Honestly, the rentals and vehicles and all that meant nothing. They were THINGS! The hardest part was friends we had for 20+ years were nowhere to be found. It was deafening. We felt isolated in a world where we had so many friends. I honestly never cooked for just our family. There was always someone that would pop in on us. We could never go to the lake without running into at least 10 other people we knew, and we would hang out together. We could never go anywhere without running into a “friend.”
It is a shock to go from that kind of money, getting debt paid down and watching everything you built slowly get chiseled away to the point of Bankruptcy. Even if we could have sold the one duplex (which no one was buying property at that time), we could not survive long on that funding. And where we lived, in southern Oregon, there were no jobs. Most everyone we knew owned a business. Working for someone there was a struggle. The cost of living was high, and wages were low. We had to regroup in the biggest way!
There was a devastation that is hard to explain. It is gut wrenching, don’t want to go anywhere, stay in the same clothes for weeks and curl up in a ball devastation. But I couldn’t! No matter how I wanted to throw my hands in the air and give up on everything, I couldn’t. We had to figure this out.
This crash would be the crash of our life! The crash of the MLM we so loved. The crash of the housing market as we knew it. The crash of having “the things” that successful people have. The crash of a business with staff and contracted workers. The crash of our hearts, our rentals, our team…our home. But the hardest part…the 300+ people we called friends. Only 3 showed up to help us pack our crap into the U-Haul trucks. Only 3!
We decided to just move across the country and picked east Tennessee as the location. Looking back, that was a great move for us. At the time, it was hard to see any positives in the days. I literally had to write them down and post them everywhere to keep me going.
Digging out slowly, we tried several things, trying to find something that we liked and could make money too. When you work for yourself for so long, it is hard to work for someone and the truth is, it is hard to get hired! People know you really don’t want to work for them, so it is hard sell.
When people ask me about my backstory, I can admit a lot of things I did wrong. I knew many of my customers, but not all. I had hundreds in my downline! I literally had just decided it was not worth a revival…and walked completely. I was over the whole thing!
Let me talk about MLM and why I get so frustrated, and yet see a rainbow in them as well. Building a team and having weekly calls was fun. I had this family of people and we were growing together. We were building our lives, literally together. We were watching people pay off debt, buy houses when they were renting, getting better cars, improving their lives. Were there struggles? HECK YEAH!
I knew a few lessons were learned from all this. All of which I could literally, and may one day, write a book about! I knew I was NEVER going to build a team to have a company fold on me like that again! I know I do not have control over a company. You could be in a company that has been around for 30+ years and it could fold tomorrow. However, the part that I lost control of all my customers and team would not happen again. It was all with the company, in their system, which was gone!
Moving forward, I would always have my list of customers and my systems to work with them. I would want to keep them in my ecosystem. This would take a little more work, but it would all be worth it! More on this later!!
We figured it all out and started building our life again. The kids moved on their own, mom passed, and I still felt like I wanted something bigger than the mundane day-to-day. There was something bigger for me, I just didn’t know what.
We worked and I would get approached by people we knew that had MLM’s. I tried 2 others, but the company leaders were too green to get anything that would produce more than 5 figures a month. And we recognized soon after we joined that we would be spinning our wheels trying to grow something build on a weak foundation. I struggled with my mental state of MLM still.
So, as the progression of life continued, I still got calls from people asking me to join their MLM. It was funny, most of them didn’t even know we had went through a BK, nor did they care! It would sometimes make me mad and other times, make me sad that people only cared when we were up, right?!
I heard a joke once…How do you get a person in MLM to stop bugging you? Join their team or buy their product. It is so true. I was guilty myself. The hustle was always about sales and recruiting. We will talk about this later, but I realized this was a big failure of mine!
Several years later….you guessed it….I joined another company. I have lost count of how many this is now, and I didn’t care. I just knew there was something bigger for me than this “regular job” thing!
This time, I was looking for a product and was told about this specific one. Long story short, a friend of mine was using it and selling it. This was a product housed in an MLM. I got curious and thought, let me check this out! I asked her questions, and she could not answer many of them. I knew it was a disaster if her upline could not get back with her and help her. How would they give me information that I needed to be successful?
It just so happens that another friend of mine was selling the same product and this girl was a firecracker. She was the first women in a specific MLM that had achieved 1M in sales. I knew we would be a good fit and team nicely. So, I was in, and running. Within 3 or 4 months, I made Director. Not bad, but not as high as I thought I should be.
Well, in fairness, we were in the middle of a world pandemic (when I joined and hit Director) and everything had to be done online. I knew I did not want to have any of my old MLM people in my downline, with the exception to maybe 1–2 I knew, I would take a hard pass on that option. So, I took a course on how to market using Social Media and followed tips from my upline too.
I even took a course on being a certified Social Marketing Expert!
I soon hit a wall. I had over 2000 people in my fb, but not many of them interacted on fb unless it was a funny meme or a dog picture. It still blows my mind how I can make a post about a special we have, or something related to my business and I heard total crickets. Then I post something with a dog and BAM 267 hits! {MINDBLOWING}
My upline soon hit a huge benchmark promotion in the company…ninja style to the top! I am so stinking proud of her! She tells me that she had to sign a non-compete. Like, you can’t be an influencer and promote the products, we can’t do ads on the product, we can’t take pictures of us with the product, unless we make sure the name is covered.
We cannot be in another company, and the list goes on. I know she was excited, but the “cants” shifted me off the ground I was laying my foundation on!
I think I knew then that, no matter how much I loved…and I do still love and use the product every day….no matter how much I love the product, I could not build a long term business here.
The other struggle I had was, how do I make this product FUN and exciting? It is often hard to do that with your product lines. Sometimes you just can’t! For me to do something long term, there HAS to be some fun in there. I would go to the power hour calls and it was all about sales and spreadsheets! It was all about, well, sort of manipulation really. How to get people on Social Media to interact with you and pitch them. Like, I would not be a friend if I didn’t tell you about this product or this company. It was the same content as all the companies, just with a younger, different colored bow.
I knew there had to be another way. So, I hired a coach. THREE GRAND….LETS DO THIS! Maybe I needed to get out of my way and have a person who was running a multi-million-dollar company teach me a better way. I was all in. Chips in the middle of the table…
Three grand, 90 days to 10K….let’s beginning! Tomorrow!
The 🤫“dirty secret” I promised and the golden nugget…We talked about your dream customer, you need to focus on this the whole week and get all the questions down. How can your product answer some of those questions? Can you help answer those questions and then lead to your product?
How is the organization coming? I will talk about this more in depth this week, so keep working on the systems we discussed, getting everything set up for our next tasks at hand!
For now, I have to bounce…
Be your best and don’t copy your upline!
Cheers,
Stacey
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 timesaving tips every week too!
