B.C. and Me, Part 2: Humbling Myself

In my last post, I wrote about how Brian Carruthers' book, "Building an Empire:The Most Complete Blueprint to Building a Massive Network Marketing Business," led me to look deeply at my reluctance to have a burning desire for success, which he says is the first ingredient needed to succeed in network marketing.

(I was reading the book because I am an independent associate for LegalShield, a company that offers affordable access to a national network of law firms on a membership basis. It also offers an identity theft program.)

The second ingredient that Carruthers says is necessary for success is "being coachable."

"You must be willing to truly listen to the masters and follow their guidance with focus," he writes.

I did not immediately recoil from this rule the way that I did from the first. On the contrary, I liked it. It made sense to me.

"I'm definitely coachable," I said, "Or at the very least, I want to be."

So I embraced that rule. And it embraced me back.

Then it tightened its grip.

"Are you really coachable? Do you really want to be?"

I remembered how Dan Jendrey, the friend who introduced me to Pre-Paid Legal before it became LegalShield, gave me a CD in which a high-achieving Pre-Paid Legal rep spoke about "10 core commitments." Basically, he said if a person committed to doing those 10 things, their success was virtually guaranteed. And I remembered telling Dan that making 10 commitments was too much for me, that at most I could make three.

Points for honesty - but was I being coachable?

And in fact, I never even stuck with three commitments. Was I coachable?

I remembered how for years, I refused to do certain things that successful Pre-Paid Legal representatives did - like attend the weekly business briefings - because I didn't like how they were done. Was I being coachable?

And then I saw a pattern. Not just with Pre-Paid Legal or LegalShield, but with a range of things, one after another, for decades. Learning opportunities that I rejected out of hand, or that I started to engage with but with which I didn't follow through. Paths that I set upon, then walked away from when they became difficult, rather than pressing on to gain the wisdom that lay beyond the difficulty.

I saw that somewhere along the way, I became highly skilled, not at pressing on, but at quitting, and restarting, and quitting again. And thereby failing to gain, not just material benefits, but wisdom.

In short, I got really good at refusing to learn.

Here's the real kicker: it all happened while I told myself that I love to learn, while devouring books and magazine articles and even imagining writing my own success tome, "You Don't Have To Know What You're Doing - If You're Willing To Learn As You Go!" Reading, thinking, imagining, but not staying the course to take the knowledge from my brain into my bones.

And now, I don't even know why. It wasn't for lack for resources - besides the aforementioned books and articles, I have had stacks of tapes, CDs and DVDs. And I have had real live people, human beings with brains, offer me help that I never fully received because...because of something in me that doesn't receive well. Or at least, that hasn't.

Realizing all of this has been pretty painful; now the challenge - the invitation - is to move forward with change. To live out the truth that a hunger for knowledge is not enough; there must be a COMMITMENT to learn. Not just a desire to gain information, but a determination to gain wisdom.

I consider all of this to be answers to two prayers that I have prayed over the past year or so:

• Lord, please show me where I have been a fool, and help me to stop; and
• Lord, let me experience the death of anything in me that hinders Your purpose.

Now I work to consciously position myself as a total learner, in order to walk humbly with my God (Micah 6:8) - and with fellow humans who know more than I do. And God knows there are a lot of those.

What that means most immediately is truly listening to Brian Carruthers, whose approach has made him $15 million, rather than to Elwin Green, whose approach has left him mostly broke. It means doing what Carruthers says to do in his book, rather than coming up with arguments or excuses not to.

I'll let you know how it goes; it should be major fun. 

Three Priorities For 2014: 2 - Growing Businesses - Legal Shield

I'm talking about growing businesses - I have three that I am working on now. Well, four, but one barely counts.

That's Capital Synergies. I say that it barely counts, because its was created purely to be a holding company for other entities. A couple of years ago, I decided to make it the home for my practice as a representative for Legal Shield.

So what is Legal Shield, and why am I a Legal Shield representative?

You may already know about Legal Shield without realizing it. For decades, the company was known as PrePaid Legal. After its sale to private equity firm MidOcean Partners, the new owners renamed it Legal Shield.

What does Legal Shield do? It provides affordable access to the legal system by providing basic legal services for a small monthly fee. It also offers the opportunity to earn an income by selling memberships to others, and/or by enrolling them as associates who in turn sell memberships.

I think I first became a member and an associate in 2007, when my friend Dan Jendrey, himself a new associate, signed me up. Back then, I did it primarily to help him get started. The idea of being able to call a law firm for an unlimited number of matters for a small monthly payment made sense to me, but I had no interest - NONE - in selling anything.

That reluctance was due to three things: 1) my job at the Post-Gazette paid well; 2) I had other business ventures in mind; and 3) I was totally turned off by the whole multi-level/network marketing thing.

By "thing," I mean both the structure that network marketing employs, which often leads to companies placing more emphasis on recruiting one's "downline" than on actually selling a product/service; and the culture that seems common to network marketing companies, which revolves around what I call "rah-rah."

"Rah-rah" is a way of presenting the business opportunity as a way to get rich - as signified by portrayals of a glamorous lifestyle - with little effort. The lifestyle generally portrayed never appealed to me - I'd rather die working. I'd rather work for free than for money, but I'd rather die working than have a luxurious retirement.

It is only within the past year that I have made any sincere effort - ANY - to sell the service.

What brought me around?

My belief in the value of the service. My desire to have time freedom. My desire to establish a residual income.

A residual income - that is, money that comes in month after month without working for it - is as close as you can get to having a money tree. If I had $50,000 a year in residual income, my wife and I could live quite comfortably, and I could devote myself more freely and flexibly to working on things I care deeply about (including for-profit and not-for-profit ventures).

The final thing that persuaded me to begin working as a Legal Shield associate (as opposed to lying completely fallow) was the availability of a program which can shorten the path to $50,000 in residual income, and which does not rely on "Rah-Rah."

That program is group sales, which is the company's name for employers offering membership in Legal Shield as an employee benefit. Unlike other employee benefits, it costs the company nothing; the benefits to the employee are a discount on the monthly fee, and having it paid automatically from their paycheck. When I learned about group sales, I immediately liked the idea of presenting to groups much more than that of doing one-on-one appointments - first, because I enjoy public speaking; second, because I would rather make sales 10 or 20 or 50 at a time as opposed to one at a time. The fact that group enrollments focus entirely on selling the service, without reference to recruiting people as associates, made group sales even more attractive to me.

So I became a certified group specialist. I haven't made any group sales yet; I'll share more about my journey toward that milestone as I go. For now, suffice it to say that if you own a business with at least five employees, and you would like to reduce absenteeism, increase productivity, and reduce expenses - and come off as a hero/shero to your workforce in the process - then you need to check out Legal Shield's employee benefits program. Then, let's talk (even if you're not in Pittsburgh: I love to drive, and I bought a Toyota Prius in October, and need to practice my pulse and glide).

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Three Priorities: The Complete Series
Three Priorities For 2014 - And Beyond
Three Priorities For 2014: 1 - Encouraging The Body Of Christ
Three Priorities For 2014: 2- Growing Businesses.
Three Priorities For 2014: 2.5 - Why Build Businesses?
Three Priorities For 2014: 2 - Growing Businesses - Legal Shield
Three Priorities For 2014: 2 - Growing Businesses - Homewood Capital Partners
Three Priorities For 2014: 2 - Growing Businesses - Luminaria Productions
Three Priorities For 2014: 3 - Redeveloping Race Street
Three Priorities For 2014: Closing Thoughts

Building a billion-dollar enterprise, 18 - A worthwhile lunch, an excuse destroyed.

Hm. It looks like I have never written here about Legal Shield - or about its predecessor, Pre-Paid Legal.

That ends today, if only because I need to say that I did some activity today as a Legal Shield associate (for those who don't know, LegalShield provides access to quality legal services for as little as $17 a month. For more info on how it works, take a look here.)

I had lunch with Phil Berger and a fellow I'll call Chuck. Chuck is VP, Human Resource and Labor Relations at a company with 10 subsidiary companies in six states.

Phil Berger is a long-time Legal Shield associate who leads the "Group Troop," a group of associates who do group sales of Legal Shield.

Group sales refers to having employers agree to let us offer Legal Shield membership to their employees as an employee benefit, with discounted rates for group participation and payment being automatically deducted from their paycheck (at no cost to the employer).

The lunch with Chuck was to open the door toward doing an enrollment at his company. Phil did the presentation. I mostly watched and learned. Mostly I learned how easy it can be to do such a presentation, once you've done the work to make it so.

I believe it went well. Chuck seemed genuinely interested, and he left Phil with a couple of questions to get back to him on.

If the company agrees to let us come in, we'll be doing an enrollment for about 750 people. Since Phil likes to do enrollments in groups of 15 - 20 people, that would mean 30 or more sessions, stretched out over a week or more.

As someone who enjoys public speaking to begin with, I find that possibility exciting, because it would allow me to gain a lot of skill in doing enrollments, really quickly. In normal circumstances, it could take a couple of years to get the amount of experience as a presenter that this scenario might give me in two weeks.

And depending on how Phil and I split things up, an enrollment for 750 people could wind up providing Capital Synergies with enough to cover not only CSI's bills, but those of Luminaria Productions as well - and to fund a 401k.

Wow, I'm really tired. Just sitting here staring at the screen; nodding off; waking enough to stare some more. But just want to say that I am glad that this day I did something with the distinct purpose of making money; something less speculative than a Cafe Press shop on Homewood Nation.

Even if we do get the enrollment at Chuck's company, though, it could take months to reach that point. So I need to push myself on offering memberships to individuals. I have always preferred the idea of doing groups to that of doing individual sales. But Phil described a way of doing individual sales that made me say, when I heard it, "Even I can do that."

Phil started out operating under a restriction by his wife that he could devote only five hours a week to Pre-Paid Legal. Being a methodical guy, he worked out a system under which he made phone calls on Thursday evening until he had secured two appointments for the following Saturday morning. By doing those two things - making phone calls Thursday evening and going to appointments Saturday morning, for a total of no more than five hours a week - he made his first sales within his first month, and had sales every month thereafter.

On top of that, at the appointments, pretty much all he did was play a Pre-Paid Legal tape (remember VHS?). That was enough for about one out of three people to sign up. And after they did, he asked them, "Would you be interested in knowing how much money I just made?" And that led to one of three new members also becoming associates. 

I can do that. All of it.

But after saying, "Even I can do that," I found ways to avoid doing it. Most recently, I told myself that in fact I couldn't do it, because I don't have a car. And as long as I told myself that I couldn't do it, I prevented myself from seeing how I could. Excuses are self-blinding - they prevent us from seeing what is possible.

Over the weekend, it struck me that I know a bunch of people in Homewood, all of whom would be within walking distance. I checked my Gmail contacts to see how many of them live in Homewood, and surprised myself with the number: 65.

That's 65 people within walking distance, and with whom I already have some degree of relationship.

I told Phil today to expect a call from me within the next couple of days about how I'm doing with calling my 65 people.

I need to go ahead and make my first personal sale. And my second, and my third. I need to just get past that bump. Having 65 people within walking distance means that

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UPDATE: When I first wrote this entry, I wavered about whether or not to designate it as a BBDE post, and decided against it, titling it merely, "A worthwhile lunch, an excuse destroyed." But with further thought, I 've realized that one of the things that this this day's activity was about is learning to do new things. Or better, learning a new way of doing things: Prepare with the goal of making something simple enough to do that it can easily become a habit.

On a more mundane level, today was about doing what it takes to keep an enterprise going until it becomes self-sustaining. Success with Legal Shield will help to keep Luminaria Productions going. That's about as basic as BBDE gets.