Thursday, August 25, 2016

The Billion-Dollar Pledge

For more than a month now, I have wanted to tell anybody and everybody about the speech that LegalShield's Chief Financial Officer gave at our international convention on July 16th.

Please take a moment to picture yourself at a large corporation's annual event. A salesforce of more than 10,000 people are jammed into a convention center arena. For a day and a half, you have all received training, heard inspiring stories from your colleagues, and watched bonuses being handed out that have made your eyes pop. Now you're all in the home stretch of the company's biggest event of the year, and...

...the CFO is going to make a speech.

Do your ears perk up? Do you lean forward in your chair? Do you say, "This should be good!" and prepare to record it, even though the company has said not to record anything?

Me, neither. Instead, I prepared to be bored as I endured a really dry presentation by an elevated bean counter, whose primary concern is protecting the bottom line by keeping costs under control.

Then Steve Williamson began to speak.

He didn't recite number s. He told stories. Or rather, he told one epic story, with the company itself as the protagonist - the story of its ups and downs on its way to arriving where it is now.

And here's the thing - I had no idea how bad some of the downs had been. Let's just say that they would have killed a weaker protagonist, but LegalShield (once PrePaid Legal) kept going.

And here's the other thing - Mr. Williamson molded the story to his audience perfectly. He didn't just say, "This happened and this happened, and we kept going." No, he knew that he was speaking to people who have staked their own futures, not just on the company's fortunes, but on its integrity, and its dealings with them. And so he said, this happened and this happened, and WE NEVER MISSED A SINGLE COMMISSION CHECK.

And then this other thing happened, and WE NEVER MISSED A SINGLE COMMISSION CHECK.

I'm telling you, he could have made a Baptist preacher jealous.

And THEN, he ended by looking toward the future, evoking our CEO Jeff Bell's vision for growth by the year 2020, and he jabbed the air with his finger and said, "...and we WILL pay out a billion dollars in commissions!"

This is the guy who is supposed to keep costs under control?

I was utterly blown away. I still am.

If you are searching for more income, I wish I could show a video clip of Steve Williamson. But I can't, so I'll just say this: I work with a company that has never missed a commission check, and that has pledged to pay a billion dollars in commissions by 2020.

So, how much do you want?

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