During graduation at Marquette, I was already mentally checked out, unenthused by the ceremonies, the “college graduation” parties. I got the most expensive piece of paper a 3.76 Magna Cum Laude, big whoop. Honestly the one thing in my life that I didn't put my full energy into was the latter part of college because I was smart enough at 19 to realize employers didn't care about grades (University did so I put the time into grades in high school), but I knew early on any future employer only really cared about your experience and the value you could bring. So I prioritized building my business and working three jobs above all else. And still escaped college with a 3.76 studying for all my tests the night before, it's all I had time and energy for.
What I learned from college was not in the classroom, it was everything OUTSIDE of the classroom that I learned in college that laid the foundation I could build on. I’m thankful I faced some of the hardest times of my life and failed in business face-first during this time because I had a lot of my character and resilience built and molded before I was even 22, where I know people in their 30s and 40s today still figuring out those muscles of character and resilience.
I literally went straight from the college festivities to my next job as a trainer that same day at another gym, giving up my past training job that made my senior year a little more feasible financially. Still very broke, but not hungry and almost homeless. I had also landed my first full-time job post school at the same company I had my senior internship. Financially, I finally felt like I could breathe. I was promised a lot of money in my part-time training job (turned out to be the lowest amount of money I ever made) and had another job that would pay me $30k/year starting out. Not the greatest but having a degree in Exercise Physiology doesn’t do much for you financially. Sorry for some of you reading this, but to save you time, either be a physical therapist or a doctor with an exercise science background if you want to make decent money starting out, otherwise it’s very very tough.
Unfortunately within 2 weeks of training for this new job, the company lost a few big contracts and couldn’t afford to bring me on and they also didn’t pay me for the two weeks of training. I was absolutely devastated.
Well, I guess all I could focus on was my training job and building my network marketing business.
Which I continued to do while making less than $800/month, basically twice my 600sq ft apartment rent payment. After my car payment and utilities, I had nothing left for food or my business expenses.
And let the insurmountable financial struggles continue. So my entrance into the real world started that summer going backward $1,000-$1,500/month.
My first apartment after college I was so broke that all my furniture for my desks, my chairs, my kitchen table all came from the dumpster. Even the mattress was used, someone at Marquette sold their mattress to me before I graduated. I knew many friends from Marquette that went back home to the cushiness of mom's and dad's financial help. I didn't have that luxury, I had to figure it out on my own.
My credit at that time was in the low 600s (today around 800) as it was very new, had accumulated business expenses debt, and I was going backwards about $1,000-$1,500/month trying to pay for living expenses and also still build my network marketing business.
I was fortunate enough to get my big break in securing a more solid income through network marketing as I networked with a lot of professionals in Milwaukee and ended up landing my first sales job that fall which led to probably the most uncomfortable 6 months of my life, making 80-100 cold calls a day to business owners, CEO’s, CFO’s, CTO’s, HR Managers…people that I had no business being in the same room with in my baggy suits, my weird tie and shirt color combos (some of the people who know me best saw this young bald-headed unfashionable Joe). I only wish I had taken more pictures as proof! Absolutely nothing compared to how we dress today, lol.
But that kick-started my sales career as I continued to put in the work in network marketing.
To keep this part as short possible as it could drag on with a bunch of useless information that many of you reading this would probably not have much context unless you’ve built a network marketing business:
In that environment, a sales meeting where you sit down and try to recruit people to join your team is referred to as “showing the plan.” Your coaches are called your upline sponsor.
In 4.5 years, I conservatively never averaged less than 20 plans/month, but most months I was doing 30-40 plans/month. And I NEVER missed a month, NEVER, not one month. The only month I was close was when I caught mono my junior year so bad that I was bed-ridden for 3 weeks. That 4th week I got better, I did 8 plans that week.
4.5 year time span
Conservative average at 20 plans/month = 1,080 sales presentations
More likely average at 30 plans/month = 1,620 sales presentations
This doesn’t include any follow up meetings as we had a 3-4 step sales process we took people through.
Sales professionals, sound like a great closing ratio? HELL NO.
Did I still sponsor 80 individuals in that timeframe? Yes. Is that more individual recruits than the majority of the millionaires that build legitimate network marketing businesses had to do to accumulate millions? Yes.
Eats me alive to this day that stat, HOWEVER, that’s why I believe your ENVIRONMENT and WHO do you business with plays so much more beyond individual effort, it’s not even funny.
I was average, probably even well below average. Just by brute force and work ethic was I able to sponsor that many people.
I did all the daily habits required to succeed (never perfectly but consistently), sold a lot of products, read a lot of books, and never missed an event in 4.5 years.
I remember attending an event being held in the Midwest virtually while I was in Hawaii (this was in 2014 well before the pandemic) next to my grandpa’s deathbed in the other room while he was dying from cancer and doing business plans over the phone at 4am Hawaii time.
So when you read on our recent successes, don’t think that building a sales skill set happened overnight, it was built on a DECADE of intense work ethic in sales. And quite honestly, I’m STILL not even the best, in fact far from it. I still think I have way too much to improve on. Greatness requires it. It’s why I have a fleet of over 8 sales coaches, marketing coaches, psychologists, and mindset coaches today. Anyway, point made.
When people say “I never had success in network marketing when I tried it” I am just curious what their calendar actually looked like. If they’re like most people who poked at it, maybe had a meeting here and there but could never string up consistency, well, I don’t know what to tell you, but I’d sure like to see how the other areas of your life are doing and the results created there.
I personally sponsored more people and did more work in a span of 4.5years than the top .0001% of business owners that legitimately were making millions in network marketing at the time.
Me? MAYBE the most I ever made was $600 in a single month. And yet I continued to put in the work because that’s what was taught. “Just keep putting in the work Joe and ONE DAY it’ll happen.” And I believed them. For 4.5 STINKING YEARS! At some point, doing the same thing over and over without results is just straight stupidity and insanity, so I needed some outside advice.
Quick side note, the gym was my saving grace through all this frustration.
“Oh Joe, with doing that on top of your sales jobs, you for sure didn’t have time for working out, I mean how could you?” critics would tell me.
When it’s part of who you are, you just do it, no questions asked. And during that entire 4.5-year period, I still never missed a week at the gym. Here me out though, I said a WEEK. Maybe all I had time to do was 3 workouts that week for 30-45 minutes, but I STILL DID IT. 120 minutes of working out in a week is absolutely minuscule when you legitimately have 10,080 minutes in a week, what 1.2% of your time in a week? Wow.
This was all through some the craziest, wildest life experiences I’ll ever go through (I’ll save many of these stories for a later post). We built character on some of these road trips to different major conferences, taking weekend trips to locations 10-12 hours away to come back only sponsoring no one and no visible results from the work put in, to having a coach bus catch fire and break down in the middle of winter in the Midwest with 50 other people to be escorted by cop cars helping us to a motel in the boonies that you only see in horror films, to every single week after a full work day being in a major city an hour or two away 2x/week not getting back sometimes until midnight/1am only to go to work at 7am the next morning.
When I was given that outside perspective from one of my best friends who had done very well for himself financially in his 20s on how it didn’t need to be as hard as I was working, I knew right then and there something a part of the system or team I was associated with was broken.
But my coaches/upline kept telling me “Joe, you’re three feet from gold, just keep putting in the work, and it’s going to happen for you.”
And I would keep believing them. Until well over 1,000 1:1 business presentations into my network marketing “career”, my integrity would not allow me to continue building it.
There was a point where I don’t know if it was a combination of my coaches' internal pressure with themselves or higher upline pressure but the methods and business practices started to turn on their head, and became very manipulative and coercing to help upline achieve their goals at the expense of their team. It eventually got to an unbreakable point for me that I remember one specific call (and this is absolutely no fault to this particular coach because we all were oblivious and didn’t know what we were doing) that if I were to receive a specific call from a specific corporation, I was directed to not answer or “say this…”. That was all I needed to step away from that environment, the moment that my young naivety, gullibleness and easily impressionable youth was taken advantage of was when no amount of relentlessness or perseverance could force me to do something so out of my character.
Once that curtain was pulled back, I started to see it wasn’t the problem with just my coaches or specific upline at the time, the whole system was rigged in the way that it was, actually against the supplying corporations contract rules and regulations that could cause a business owner to lose their license had the supplying corporation found out, which I found out later, many of them did...
To not bore anyone with more detail than necessary, fortunately I left the environment before I experienced this through the stories and podcasts of others… that this was my first real experience of business lawsuits, coaches pinned against other coaches, investigations by corporations, and no one taking accountability or responsibility for their own actions.
Just a complete collapse of organizations, culture, broken trust, anguish, frustration experienced by MANY would be putting it lightly. And to the few who stayed, I continue to pray for them. They’re either incredible forgivers or sometimes when we’re abused emotionally or mentally, we just keep going back to the same abuser. Either way, I’ve seen loyalty to the wrong people kill more dreams in my 4.5 years in that environment than I’ve seen in any other opportunity I’ve been a part of. I hope to help a lot of these former friends and associates from this time of my life reignite their dreams again and know that it’s still possible, we all simply had a bad hand.
And, of course, I made a ton of money through all this right? No. I was, for a lack of a better term, legitimately scammed. No one actually took money from me directly. However, the way that the business structure was taught I’d find out later was actually unethical where I’d structure my personal recruits in a way in my business that would only profit the people above me instead of myself (there are people doing business legitimately in network marketing doing it the RIGHT WAY where everyone profits and I’d meet those people later). I would do all the hard work to make my upline money. No longer bitter about this, I’ve been far removed from this environment for awhile, but this was a fact.
I was coerced to go into credit card debt to buy products so upline could hit their monthly numbers and get their bonuses. This same upline would later be involved in lawsuits between the company as I mentioned before.
Again, none of this is a knock on network marketing. Some of the greatest entrepreneurs of our day and age have either cut their teeth on network marketing or have built lasting legacy businesses through network marketing.
The sad truth about this industry (and quite frankly MOST industries) is it’s 100% where you land and who you work with. If you work with a bunch of unethical, manipulative “business owners”, it doesn’t matter how hard you work, you’ll never win.
I will say the one thing that I will never respect to this day is knowing the fact that after all the years I dedicated to helping build and scale teams, when I left the environment, all my other cross line friends and team were told that I left because “I had mental health issues.” Man, when people have to propagate “mental health” as the reason people would leave such a manipulative, shame-filled culture that lacked integrity and transparency...it baffles me. This came from the same leader who on stage bragged about how many people their organization sponsored in a year, but then shared their 5% retention rate. Sponsored thousands across their organization, couldn’t even retain a hundred recruits. Tell me if that’s a culture worth sticking it out with.
Sorry, integrity and other people first AT ALL COSTS.
Again, I pray for these people. There are many highly successful professionals today that I built great relationships with who were in this environment with me through thick and thin for a long time before coming to their own realization or version of understanding. I don’t knock the people still continuing to figure it out in that environment, I truly hope it has gotten way better, way less manipulative, and actually ethical since I left. People and environments can change, but for me it was already enough.
Loyalty loses it’s thread where integrity and acting ethically aren’t valued. Let others take part in the Wolf of Wallstreet, that’s never been me and never will be.
Some people say in network marketing you lose your family and friends over it. If you do it in an extremely UNPROFESSIONAL and cult-like manner, you will 100% alienate everyone around you.
Unfortunately for my now wife, it happened with her family. I know she doesn’t mind me sharing this now because we now have an incredible relationship with her parents and her family and a lot of healing has taken place.
But for 7 years in mine and T’s college years and mid-20s, there was almost no relationship between me, T, and her family. For the first few years, they’d only invite T for holidays, specifically not invite me. At the moment, I was bitter and angry about it. Quite a few years later from a subjective point of few, I completely understand their rational and concerns. Now maybe was I judged a little too hard for how passionate I was about everything and maybe some thoughts of theirs were taken out of context? Maybe, I was never mean to people, just had a big dream and purpose. But, I still had way too much growing up to do. Again, all is forgiven with them, and it’s honestly a miracle how God used the covid lockdowns as time for us to heal a lot of relationships. In every adversity there’s a seed of greater or equal benefit.
This is why to this day I still reflect on why I cried 10x more than T at our wedding. It was because for 7 years, it was in my wildest dreams that her dad would be giving her away to me at the altar, WILLINGLY. One year before our then planned 2020 wedding, it was a question of if they would even be there.
Part of me doesn’t blame T’s parents first impression of me. I was quite ignorant, I was cocky, I was a full blown networking marketing maniac on a mission and a dream to prove the world wrong that I would be successful one day. I mean sh**, like where I came from and what I did in high school. I can do anything, I would tell myself.
I didn’t just have A chip on my shoulder, I had a BAG of chips on my shoulder. I was on a conquest to prove to the world, I’d never be the one without monetary success again.
Well, long story short, I retired from my dream of a huge networking marketing influence and business right before the pandemic hit after giving it a 2nd shot putting it a lot of work, only to realize that my dream to have a huge network marketing business had already past.
Unfortunately it took 3 years of mental turmoil and deep reflection to realize I retired that dream in 2020 to build a sales career in insurance that has provided for many of the monetary dreams I had hoped to accomplish in network marketing when I first started at 19.
The pandemic was a very tough time for a lot of people. On the outside, we put our head down, T and I re-planned and paid for our entire wedding, and crushed it financially and physically, the external results were obvious. However, up until the end of 2022, despite the external results and success, the emotional turmoil and dark mental thoughts wrestling with my past and whether to continue with network marketing or not, probably defined the most unhappy period of life I’d ever experienced…
And it’s sometimes in pursuing the wrong opportunity that we’re able to recognize that dream that was actually ours all along…
More to come…but we’re almost done…for now…
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