Today on Memorial Day, I’d like to tell you about someone who was very special in my life.

People ask me a lot why we do mentoring for free. They want to know what my angle is. Some of them really put time into figuring out how I’m going to take advantage of them.

Let me tell you a story.

I was a kid. Maybe 10 years old. My dad heard about a basketball court in a local churchyard where the old backboard & basket were in really bad shape.

Dad couldn’t buy a backboard. So he went to the lumberyard and bought a 3/4″ piece of plywood. He bolted it together, made a nice big, thick backboard, painted it white, put a basketball hoop on it, backed up his pick-up truck.

And he’s standing there up in the bed of the pick-up, on a Saturday, putting this backboard up … when the preacher drives up.

The preacher asks, “What are you doing?”

Dad says, “I’m putting up a backboard.”

Preacher: “Well, I don’t know YOU!”

Dad: “No.”

Preacher: “Well, why’re you doing it?”

I’ll never forget that. Now here’s a man, a pastor, a man who leads a congregation, and he couldn’t understand why my dad was doing that. Wow! I sure wouldn’t want that pastor leading ME!

He couldn’t figure that one out.

That’s The Kind of Stuff My Dad Did All The Time!

I’m so thankful that I learned from him and just took it right over to network marketing.

My father had a garage in Cleveland, Ohio. He had a customer who used to come in, to buy gasoline from my dad. Dad serviced his car, a ‘57 Chevy. It had about 200,000 miles on it, had a bad motor, needed a valve job.

The guy’s name was Ernie. He came into the shop one day and told my dad, “My wife and I & our 2 kids are moving to Florida. Can you check out my car, see if it’ll make it?”

Dad said, “That car won’t make it around the block.”

Ernie says, “I don’t have any money.”

And all Dad knew was, this man bought gas from him. Didn’t know him from Adam.

At the time, my Dad was feeding 5 children, 5 boys. Anyway, Dad did a valve job on that 6-cylinder Chevrolet engine. He put in new belts & hoses, got it in perfect shape, so it would make it to Florida.

And Ernie told my father, “Frank, when I get to Florida, and I get some money ahead, I’ll send it to you.”

And he did. It was about a year, but Ernie sent Dad the money. He had moved to Florida, and he started building homes. That was back in what they called the “5990s”. You got a lot, a new home with a garage for $5,995. They were called the “5990s”. And Ernie became one of the biggest homebuilders in Florida.

My mother had bad health, a bad heart. The doctor said the best thing for her would be to get out of Ohio and move to a warmer climate. Dad said, “How about Florida?”

Well, Ernie Russaw had invited my dad to come down there. Dad & mom went down for a vacation, and when I was 6, in 1959, we moved to Florida.

Diaster - Then a Miracle - In Ohio …

My father used to race stock cars. Work was tough to get in Florida, and after a few years there, my dad went back to Ohio to work in a garage he had. His old stock car buddies convinced him to build them some engines.

My dad built the engines, and his buddy went to the track. He set a new track record with the motor my dad built. My dad was setting the timing on the race car, and you have to rev the engine up to do it. You can’t use the timing light, because it has a big cam in it.

So the car was idling, and Dad revved the engine a couple times. This was a standard shift with a pressure plate, and the pressure plate had a crack in it. It exploded, came out through the bell housing, hit my dad in the left leg. And it cut his left leg almost completely off. 

It severed the bone, crushed the bone. Five inches of the bone was missing. Only thing holding his leg on was the muscle in the back.

So they got him on a stretcher and took him to the hospital. The doctor decided to snip the muscle in the back, amputate the leg.

And my father said, “No. You can’t do that. I’ve got 5 children to support. If you cut my leg off, you may as well shoot me.”

The doctor said, “Frank, there’s no other way.”

And Dad said, “Go to the track, find the bone, find the pieces, put that leg together, and it will heal. I believe it will heal.”

So they got all those crushed pieces of bone, all the fragments they could find. They put the leg together, and they worked to make it the same length as the other one. they put the bone fragments in, sewed it up, put it in a cast … and it healed perfectly.

My father wore a brace for about 3 years. He could still dance with the brace on. He never walked with a limp. You never would have known he had a bad leg.

And Then, a Miracle In Florida!

We made a trip up to Ohio to stay with Dad. I worked several months on a farm to support the family. The labor I did paid for the rent and groceries.

And when we finally got moved back to Florida, my dad needed a garage. He had no money to put down for it, no way to pay. But Ernie built my dad a garage, fully equipped, and my dad ran that garage the rest of his life. Ernie paid my dad back for getting him started on his own trip to Florida.

Was that a stretch for my dad to do a valve job on that ‘57 Chevy? Yeah. We kids probably all ate beans for a few days. But he did it, because that’s who my dad was.

People wonder why Linda & I do mentoring for free. I get asked all the time why I spend 15 hours a week doing conference calls for any network marketer, no matter what company they’re in, for free.

And the answer is simple. It’s the right thing to do. It’s what my dad would have done. I loved that man, and he was a shining example of how to live your life. He would have been GREAT in network marketing!

We Appreciate You
Michael & Linda Dlouhy
Call 1-352-799-8779 (anytime)
Get my FREE ebook: Success In 10 Steps
“Be A Mentor With A Servant’s Heart!”

First of all, you’ve got to have a direct splash page for your #1, #2 and #3 selling MLM products. And please don’t put a business opportunity attached to the splash page. You will literally drive people away from you.

People love to buy a product, but they don’t want to be sold. They absolutely don’t want to be sold. Make sure you have company-approved testimonial pages, so network marketing distributors don’t have to make their own.

The Big Problem

The network marketing company doesn’t offer these single product pages to distributors, so now the distributors on their own go out and create this stuff. They see in the Policies & Procedures that reps are 100% responsible for what they do in building their business. OK. Great.

So the company doesn’t STOP you from putting ads out there that this product cures cancer, grows your arm back, grows your hair back and all that stuff. They let reps make these wild claims. Why? Because the product sales are pouring in.

Some guy reads that ad and says, “My gosh! I’m bald. I want to grow my hair back, I better buy the product.” Or somebody is dying of cancer, and you advertise your “cure.” They say, “I better go get some.” So they do.

And then what’s amazing is, someone writes the testimonial that it grew their finger back. Then the next guy writes, “Well, it grew my hand back.” You have to top that, so the next one says, “It grew my entire arm back - and my leg.”

So they do a one-up on each other. The sales are pouring in. Meanwhile, the distributor’s neck is on the line, because the company can chop it off it anytime … like as soon as the Federal Government says “Whoa! Hey, you guys are making product claims!”

Now, the company has to show the government that they have been going back and terminating distributors who make these unbelievable claims. Meanwhile, product sales in the company are skyrocketing.

The Company Is Making Tons of Money

So much money. They have to go build another bigger building, so they can be bigger than the next one on the block.

They have to have that. And then the 3rd thing these companies do is, they charge people for their back office. It does not cost them $39 a month for that website. It doesn’t cost them FIVE bucks! But they charge the distributors $39 for their whole back office to look at your business center and your genealogy and to organize and so forth.

Companies like that are making $100,000 minimum a month off the distributor’s backs. It’s another profit center, just charging reps for the stuff.

But the company needs to create the pages, so the distributor won’t do it. The company knows better than to put wild claims in there. If they do it, then THEIR neck is on the line. That way, the company is liable, rather than the individual rep.

The only reason to spend your time and your blood, sweat, and tears to build this business is to have it sustain you over your lifetime. Anything that puts you at risk should be eliminated from your gameplan. So be sure YOU aren’t the one making wild claims.

We Appreciate You
Michael & Linda Dlouhy
Call 1-352-799-8779 (anytime)
Get my FREE ebook: Success In 10 Steps
“Be A Mentor With A Servant’s Heart!”

The most amazing stupid tricks network marketing companies do is letting some legal department enforce their policies and procedures.

Give this some thought. If a network marketing company has a legal team that writes the policies and procedures and oversees the legalities of the company, the network marketing company has generally spent about a quarter of a million dollars retaining this legal department.

So now the legal department has to justify their existence, since they just added a quarter of a million dollars overhead to the company. So the legal department  writes Policies and Procedures so convoluted, so confusing … it’s just legalese.

And you have to read chapter 7, and remember 7.C. Then down in 19.D, they talked about it again, and you have to pull those 2 together. They talked a little bit about it up here. Now they add the rest of it down here.

But if you don’t connect the two, you don’t know what they’re talking about.

Lawyers LOVE Writing All This BS!

Example: in some companies, the P & Ps say you are responsible to monitor your downline organization’s activities. If THEY do something illegal, then YOU are responsible for that.

A friend of mine got terminated because one of his downline members recruited somebody who was in another deal sideline, which was cross recruiting. But they held the sponsor responsible, and they terminated him, so they could steal his check. Real simple. Real simple.

And your person signing the bonus checks needs to have built a downline themselves. MLM CEOs who have never built a downline do not have a clue about MLM distributors.

Network Marketing Companies Would Be NOTHING Without Distributors!

CEOs who have built a downline know that. They know that companies are nothing without the distributors.

Sure, they need a product. Yeah they have to ship a product. Yes, they have to send a bonus check. But who built the company? Who built the volume?

Answer: The distributor. And if the CEO realizes that, then they treat the distributors like gold. They don’t have some legal department trying to terminate their distributors.

Stupid Trick #2

And the other stupid thing that network marketing companies do is, they don’t listen to the field. The reps are in the trenches everyday. Companies need to know what their reps see, what they do, what they hear, what they say.

We tell people all the time, “Read your Policies & Procedures.” I got a call the other day from the COO of a company. Actually, his secretary called me to ask some questions about why I am telling people to read their Policies & Procedures. because they have a bunch of people doing it and it ticks them off!

This company, based out of Texas, has the most ruthless Policies & Procedures you’ve ever seen. They are unbelievable.

Want To Sell The Business YOU Built? Fuhgeddaboudit!

For example … if you wanted to sell your downline, sell your business, you have a 10-page document that you have to fill out. And before you offer the business to anybody, you have to offer to the company first.

And when you mail your request for them to buy it, you have to include a $100 nonrefundable fee. And then they can say yes or no!

Next step is, when the company says “No”, they will then send you 3 upline people that you can sell your business to. You have to offer it to each of them one at a time. And the P & Ps stipulate that to buy YOUR business, they must resign their own business.

So usually, they say “No”. And after all 3 have turned you down, one at a time, then you have to offer your business to somebody in your downline. And they make it so clear - they say “if you circumvent any part of this procedure, you are terminated.”

so I told the secretary to have the COO call me and we could visit about the situation. And the secretary said that he does not talk to people directly!

And I said well, “Well, he talked to YOU!” So she told me he doesn’t return phone calls, doesn’t talk to any reps directly.

I was stunned. I sat in my chair thinking, “Wow! This is unbelievable!” Now this guy wants to talk to me to find out why I am telling people to read their policies and procedures. That is amazing. what a trip!

P.S. - Have you read YOUR P & Ps lately?

We Appreciate You
Michael & Linda Dlouhy
Call 1-352-799-8779 (anytime)
Get my FREE ebook: Success In 10 Steps
“Be A Mentor With A Servant’s Heart!”

Most MLM companies rent their software. But they can never tweak it to fit their business model, and the distributor base suffers.

Let me give you a story on that. I was consulting for a network marketing company out in Utah.  They had a binary compensation plan, in other words a 2-legged plan - one left, one right. Real simple, right?

But the software they leased could not be changed from left to right, to reflect the binary. They tried.

They Had To Pay The Programmers To Come Back In & Reprogram It!

You would think that was a simple, simple, simple fix. But it couldn’t be fixed over a 6 month period.

Here’s what happened. Let’s say you already have your strong leg going well. Now you go into your back office and put all your new sign-ups on your weak leg.

And you’re building, building. You have ads running on the internet. People are joining you and your business is growing. And you think they’re going on your weak leg.

All of a sudden, you find out they are all going on your strong leg. And in a binary, you only get paid based on your weak leg production. So this is a real problem.

Now You Have To Fight With The Company To Move Your People!

And what was so amazing about that process that I witnessed was, the company went out and hired more and more and more customer service people to handle the paperwork to move these new reps. And then they started charging the distributors $10 each to move the people that the company messed up on in the first place. 

Finally, they got so overrun with people wanting to change these positions back over to their weak leg where they should have been in the first place … that they finally said, “We are not switching anybody anymore!” They couldn’t handle all the influx of people needing that done.

Now that’s a perfect example of buying your software and not being able to tweak it at all.

And when you rent the software, you better read the fine print, because you don’t own the database.

You Do Not Own The Database!

About a year and a half ago, I saw a downline genealogy for sale on the internet. I happen to know the owners of the company. I called them up and said “Hey! What’s going on? My gosh, your company is doing good, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Company is doing great. But we couldn’t afford to buy the software, so we leased it. And part of the lease deal is, the software company owns the database.”

And this software company thought it would be great to make an extra $100,000. So they put the genealogy for sale on the internet and sold it to 10 companies for $10,000 apiece. So they made a quick $100,000 selling the genealogy. And right in the Policies and Procedures, it said that the software company owned the genealogy. It was right there, right in black and white. How would you like to build your business and then have your organization for sale on the internet?

So before you build big with some company, ask them who owns their software. If they don’t own it, then you could lose everything in a heartbeat.

The big reason they rent it is because it costs them about $2 million to buy it. They can rent it for about $10,000 a month. Most companies don’t have the 2 million dollars to spend up front. 

But the other thing is, if you really truly, understand your business and it functions, doesn’t it make more sense to have someone program your specific software? Then you can work with them.

You Want a Company That Has Built Their Software From The Ground Up! 

When the company has built it and owns it, the distributor base is protected.

Instead, these guys get the idea to start a network marketing company, and 10 minutes later, they are in business. So they call the software companies and find out it’s 2, 3, 4 million dollars to buy the software program, but you can rent it for 4, 5, 10 grand a month and you’re in business!

Now they know this is a tough business, and there’s a very real chance they won’t even be around 2 years. Taking on a $2 million obligation doesn’t make sense to them. $10,000 a month is definitely the way to go. Problem is, you’ve sold your soul to the devil.

An Evil Secret

Another thing that software companies will do is - and this is a very well kept secret - they will be in partners with that MLM company. So there is a downline organization, a leg being built by the MLM company for the software company.

That creates a retirement income for the software company on the bacsk of the distributors.  How hard is it for the owners of the MLM company to move all their orphan distributors  underneath the software company and build them a nice check? That’s a very, very, very tightly kept secret,

It’s just one more reason you need to build your future with a company that owns its own software.

We Appreciate You
Michael & Linda Dlouhy
Call 1-352-799-8779 (anytime)
Get my FREE ebook: Success In 10 Steps
“Be A Mentor With A Servant’s Heart!”