117) Repositioning

Welcome new reader!

I am glad you are here.

In the last post you read about how our second home business had failed during the first few months of 2008. I had neglected to adhere to one guiding principle of building a team of dedicated network marketers; follow-through on direct sales.  I had also overlooked due diligence in checking out my enrolling sponsor and entered into a risky side arrangement with him whereby I catastrophically overspent my marketing budget, which yielded no sales and instead directed hundreds of sales leads to the sponsor.

This was my second failed business (depending on how they are counted). And just as in the first, I suppose I was too trusting in these businesses.

But in each of these businesses, I had run into many skeptics. Heck, quite a few of them were in my own circle of friends and family. Hold on, I didn’t have any friends, really.

Being an open-minded sort, I didn’t want to become a person paralyzed with skepticism and therefore unable to lead a self-directed life (even in poverty).

The fact was, despite my self-confidence ( a lot of it ), I had not yet demonstrated I was a business man – or even close.

What was going wrong?

Did I need to go back to college to learn more about business?

Was more formal business education the missing piece to my success with a home business? I had looked around for a business mentor but hadn’t really clicked with anyone.

Maybe I was too headstrong to listen.

I reviewed the circumstances of my life so far (leaving out my accomplishments since it served no purpose here).

I had failed in seven different schools, and now two businesses.

I had graduated from college with a B.S. in Marketing but it had taken nearly 16 years.

I was 57 years old, we had just filed for bankruptcy, had two houses up for sale, Stevie was still suffering from chronic pain and in deep addiction to his pain medications, the economy was in the toilet, I was unable to find a design contract anywhere in the country and we were nearly broke.

And money for tuition? Incomprehensible.

All of the facts pointed to only one conclusion.

It was time to strap it up and go back to school.

Next – Long Odds

116) Losing Everything

The $22,500 we lost through our business deal with Merrill, and the slowdown in the semiconductor design sector, turned out to be catastrophic for us in 2008, even before the global meltdown in the financial markets in September of that year.

I couldn’t find work anywhere in the country.

And although Nadine was still employed full-time, her salary did not even cover our mortgage payment, which was around $4,000 per month.

After three or four more months of this we got so far behind on our payments, I decided our best shot was to seek protection through the courts in our county and declare bankruptcy. If not for the concept of “debt forgiveness” in our bankruptcy laws, our situation would have been far worse. We did not walk away from our house but instead took the more difficult path of a short sale. I am grateful these two strategies were available to us and to a lot of other families during the years since 2008 – more on that later.

Ironically, during the worst time for our little company, Ocean View Marketing,  the parent company Wealth Miners, was undergoing fundamental changes in its approach to marketing. Recognizing that their automated marketing system was not working as its marketing partner Carbon Copy Pro had claimed – at least in our opinion – Wealth Miners went back to basics and began urging its members to begin hosting home parties.

Nadine and I took the training and notified our community that we had something brilliant to share – The Ultimate Wealth Formula – as we called it at the time.

We prepared for 3 of these home seminars; complete with a big-screen multimedia show, flowers and refreshments. We advertised on Meetup, invited our friends and neighbors and posted signs. We sure looked the part with our large, new house, soaring ceilings, and beautiful furnishings.

But we were anything but prosperous. In fact, our greatest achievement during those 3 events was hiding how desperate our personal financial situation actually was.

A total of six people showed up for those three events. Apparently, they were too polite to refuse our invitations.

One of  the hardest things I had to do was call to have my motorcycle repossessed. We simply could no longer justify the payments.

In a cruel  twist of fate, during the time the repo man was duck-walking my Suzuki V-Strom motorcycle from the garage and walking the bike up the ramp on to the trailer, he made the following comment:

“Most guys aren’t honest enough to call us to make pick ups like this. We have to track them down, and even then they never admit their mistakes,” he told me.

Yes, I was honest.

But a failed business and disposing of our house and possessions in full view of our neighbors was humiliating. I felt so badly for Nadine.

I had made some rookie mistakes with Ocean View Marketing. But I had made a worse one buying a large house with a risky loan in a questionable economy.

I was down but not out.

And I had no idea of the events that would transpire between the years of 2008 and 2013, the 58th to 63rd year of my odd and wonderful life.

113) Merrill

Merrill was an ex-marine, who was one of the better salespeople I ever met. Standing 6 feet 2 inches tall with head shaved and twinkling blue eyes he knew how to use his physical presence to either intimidate or make you feel welcome. And if you were part of Merrill’s team – as Nadine and I were – he had a way of making you feel special and privileged. By the time we joined, in December of 2007, then met Merrill at a conference in Dallas in June of 2008, his downline numbered in the hundreds.

In the last post you read about our little home business company, Ocean View Marketing, a limited liability corporation and the way we were beginning to sign up a few members for our own downline (team of commissioned sales people). However, like other start-up network marketing companies, we had two serious problems; cash flow and lead conversion. In this post you will read how Merrill’s proposal offered a solution for the latter and how that proposal changed the direction of our life for the next several years.

The Bait

“Dude,” Merrill told me over the phone as he was making his pitch to me. “a couple of my top people are sending leads to me, and I am closing them.” “We split the commissions 50/50.” ” You would need a few thousand to get my campaigns started on pay-per-click, drive the leads to MY site and me and my sales team take over.”

“How much are we talking about?” I asked.

“We typically set the budget limit at $250 per day in adwords (pay-per-click),” Merrill said, “so this gives us coverage in all the time zones 24/7 without hitting our daily limit.” he explained.

“Oh man, that’s a lot of money,” I said. “Let me talk it over with Nadine.”

“Sure, I understand,” Merrill continued, “You would have full access to my back office sales page, where you could see for yourself that each lead you generate would contain a code, so that when we close the sale there would be no question that it be 50/50 split.” he concluded.

After I got off the phone with Merrill, my sponsor, I remember being so excited I could hardly think of anything else; not my new house, not Stevie’s drug addiction, not sex, not even the stock market.

But taking pride in being accountable, I also realized there was something I wasn’t doing that was dragging Ocean View Marketing down. Nobody was telling me this but nevertheless it is something, as a new network marketer, I knew I should be doing. But I wasn’t.

I wasn’t calling folks that had signed up on our website to get more information about joining our team. I wasn’t following up with them on the phone. This was one of the guiding principles of network marketing. A principle I had learned in every book I had read by master MLM practitioners.

This was an “automated marketing system”, I reasoned. No selling, telling or showing. Prospects found the opportunity on the internet, watched a video, then signed-up. This was the theory behind the automated marketing system and it was one of the big reasons I chose this network marketing opportunity.

What had become clear to Nadine and I in early 2008, was that the system wasn’t working the way we expected it to work. We were near our spending limit on Google driving traffic to our website and producing leads but the people were not signing up for the program.

If we could teach others to do what we were doing, the theory went, we could create residual income.

Something was broken.

Since I had no intention of calling people to sell them on a marketing concept I now knew was badly broken, I began to realize we had wasted thousands of dollars driving traffic to our sales funnel that was anything but automated and required someone to call them and sell them.

There was one way out.

If I accepted Merrill’s offer and funded several large pay-per-click campaigns to drive folks to his website, he would then follow-up with them on the phone – an activity I later learned he relished – and give Ocean View Marketing 50% of the commissions.

Since he was closing about 50% of the folks he personally spoke with over the phone, we couldn’t lose!

It was a rescue plan that would cost me about $7,500 per month for at least 3 months.

Inside of Wealth Miners/Carbon Copy Pro Merrill was a superstar. Still ascending in sales during January of 2008, he was one of the top three highest paid sponsors in the opportunity, was winning awards for having the highest volume month and had chosen me to work closely with him and his team to make us both a lot of money.

In one of the biggest decisions of my life, and after hardly sleeping the night before, I left Merrill a voice mail the next day.

“Hey Merrill, lets get started.”

Next – Setting the Hook

111) The Worse Risk of All

Greetings new readers!

I am happy you are here!

In America, if you have your health, you have the personal freedom to take enormous risks – even in a home business like the one Nadine and I began in 2007.

In the previous post you read about how our network marketing company used pay-per-click to generate sales leads. We called our business “Ocean View Marketing”.

We offered financial information CD’s, seminars and exotic trips to folks we recruited to sell those products to others, who all became part of our team. Sales commissions from these products and memberships became residual income once certain levels of performance had been achieved.

Since residual, or passive income is based on the performance of others on your team, that income is paid as long as certain criteria are met. It does not matter if you did not personally make the sale; only that the criteria is satisfied. In theory, this arrangement can create a stream of income that continues, indefinitely. This is the beauty of operating a business that has the capability of creating residual income. Top performers can get very rich – essentially off the achievements of their team members.

Such was the promise of “Ocean View Marketing”.

By mid February of 2008, Ocean View Marketing (OVM) had recruited about 3 individuals using pay-per-click to drive “traffic” to our company website. This was not cheap. But the promise remained big. Still, Nadine and I weren’t setting the world of home business on fire.

In December of 2007, we had purchased the M1 Masters Program at a cost of approximately $1795. This was our gateway to become home business owners/consultants (rights to build a team). But we knew the serious players were coming in at M2 for $8995, M3 for $13,095 or all three.

Although we had spent our $35K reserve on landscaping, and had virtually no cash on hand, I felt very good about our situation. We had just moved into a beautiful new home, my chip design contracting career was still lucrative, and more importantly, my unshakeable foundation for achievement was very much intact. I felt we had found the right business opportunity, that if delivered on only 25% of its financial promise, we would on a solid path to financial freedom, by way of residual (team) income.

But coming in at M2 would be a problem. We didn’t have the money.

In February of 2008, in spite of having no money to buy the M2 Masters Program, for $7950 (discounted from $8950, if we acted within 10 days) we put the M2 on a credit card.

Looking back, I recall feeling so confident, so optimistic about the prospect of coming in at M2 (and the status associated with it, to some degree), that I did not do any analysis on how I would pay the money back. I did not have a chip design contract at the time, so it was a very big risk indeed, based only on my level of confidence.

It turned out to be my first error in judgement with OVM; unfortunately, the first of many.

A month later, the cash flow for OVM was truly anemic. I had very little money for pay-per-click – my sponsors preferred channel of securing sales leads – and no other proven means of getting people to sign up.

Taking my cue from our sponsor, I decided to find a way to fund pay-per-click (at least we were getting leads with it) no matter what it took.

Taking business risks based on a hunch or overconfidence is the worst risk of all. At least when we base our decision on the facts on hand, we have done our best, even if things go bad. But taking on risks based on intuition alone is usually a symptom of being in denial – or even worse, not able to see whats in plain view.

Next – At The Dentist

109) Attraction Marketing

Hello new reader!

Welcome to my life story.

Who am I?

The story of my life has been about achieving my life’s dream of becoming a dedicated (although imperfect) family man. Of course I have done many other things along the way, as I hope you will read here on these pages.

But my life has also been about a quest to find my life’s work – meaningful, independent, creative work that supports my financial goals, is satisfying, leaves a legacy and involves giving hope to others, which helps to fill my spirit.

In the previous post, based in 2007, I set-up the circumstances and some of the details of a new home business, I was attracted to at that time.

It was also a time during which the phenomenon of “attraction marketing” had taken hold. The concept of attraction marketing is not new. But the application of it has grown right along with the use of online marketing. Attraction marketing is the idea of having business prospects come to you rather than going to them. Simple.

Here is a link to the Big Daddy of attraction marketing as applied to building a network, in 2007.  He is Mike Dillard and he created the concept of Magnetic Sponsoring (not an endorsement).

http://magneticsponsoringonline.com

Mike really makes the important points in a professional way, there in the video. Sometimes, when the message is so clear, its source so authoritative as to be unquestionable and its timing so perfect, it gives its viewer no reasonable choice but to write a check.

Why is this important in my story?

It is important because you will see on the next few pages how search engine marketing, using Google’s Pay-Per-Click is really a form of attraction marketing. And using Pay-Per-Click to “attract” prospects to my network marketing business had a very big effect on Nadine and I, which I hope you will read about in the next post.

108) From the Kitchen Table

Greetings new reader!

Welcome to my story.

In my previous post I talked a little about my thought process as I was making the decision to open a home business in 2007, from my residence in Loveland, Colorado. In this post I will share, in detail, the methods and approach used by Wealth Miners and Carbon Copy Pro to enroll new members, and my personal experiences with the organizations, as honestly as I know how with full accountability – as is my habit.

As I write this post, here in 2013, the mechanisms by which we operate home businesses have improved – quite dramatically. Yes, application software has evolved. E-commerce platforms look and work better than ever. Creating and delivery marketing content has improved. And if you decide to go into business you can choose a business coach or mentor that will structure a program to help you for nearly any business model.

What Every Business Needs

But every business large or small needs a source of sales leads, or they cannot survive.  The only question is how these leads are obtained.

In 2007, since Craigslist was not yet in wide use as a lead generation tool, many of us that were working at home were beginning to use search engine marketing (SEM) to generate sales leads.

Without getting into a lot of detail, search engine marketing is a way to let folks find your business if you have a website. As you probably now know, if you looking for something online – say a book about how to become a more confident person – you can type this in a search box. The search engine will then display a search engine results page (SERP) listing information about ways to become more confident. The entries on this page could be documents, websites, images or videos.

Wealth Miners/Carbon Copy Pro had, at the time, a unique offer in their quest to build enterprise size organizations using the network marketing or direct selling model.

The Offer

Relying almost totally on Carbon Copy Pro to be the public face of the its online marketing presence, the joint venture offered an “automated marketing system” to help its new networker’s painlessly build a downline organization (essentially a commissioned sales force) without “telling, selling or showing” new prospects about the opportunity,

Although they must first discover the website for the aforementioned offer,  new prospects watched a video implying that new members could fire their boss,  earn $250K per year within 3-5 years, using the “automated marketing system”.  After watching the video prospects submitted an application and paid $25 to be “accepted”.

How powerful was this offer?

Enough to snare me.

Here are just a few of the emotional factors that come into play with a pitch like this:

• vanity – only those submitting and passing the application process are accepted
• laziness – use an automated marketing system
• envy – fire your boss (haven’t you sometimes wondered how others have done that?)
• greed and lust – $250K per year is a significant sum of money, even to a well-compensated professional thinking about switching careers

If the psychological factors embedded in this offer weren’t enough, the content of this message – both subliminal and superficial – were delivered in a highly authentic video featuring a young, edgy CEO whose style was just enough “in your face” to challenge you to take action and delivered with a heavy dose of “ I was once a job holder just like you, until found some courage”.

Combining the elements of a work at home business, an automated marketing system, a leading edge information product, the benefits of network marketing (low start-up, training, residual income) and the evolution of YouTube, proved irresistible.

At least for an at-home-business, the stars seemed to be aligned.

I couldn’t write a check fast enough.

I was on my way.

Somewhere.