Defcon 1 Direct Selling

CHAPTER 3How You Become a Model Leader

For my first five years in the business, I struggled financially and couldn’t get anyone to follow me. Later I earned over a million dollars annually in commissions and had followers all over the world. What was the big difference?

Who I Had Become

That’s the funny thing about leadership. Before people follow you, they kinda sorta expect you to possess a certain character, people skills, and, you know, leadership ability.

I’m one of the feel-good, rags-to-riches success stories. The riches are the fun side of the story. The other side is the kind of person I was during the “rags” phase.

I didn’t join the business to save the world, finance orphanages, or fund a cure for cancer. I wanted a Ferrari, a movie-star-level mansion, and enough bling-bling hanging around my neck that I needed help getting up from the sofa. I was the definition of cupidity and joined because I hated being poor and was desperate to become rich.

And desperate people do desperate things. Unfortunately, my desperation carried through in my prospecting approaches, scaring away almost anyone with a good sense of judging people. And the few people who did join my team soon came to resent my constantly goading them to do more, aka make me more money. I was not a leader or anything approaching one. But there was one saving grace of this business that rescued me from certain failure. That saving grace was this fact:

In Leveraged Sales, personal development is baked into ...