Defcon 1 Direct Selling

CHAPTER 5Building a Golden Goose (And Protecting Her)

Imagine you get a new Aston Martin coupe for your birthday. The suspension is fine-tuned, the engine has oodles of torque, and it corners as if gliding on rails. It’s a beautiful and powerful machine, but that machine doesn’t work in a vacuum. You need a dealership to handle maintenance and inventory spare parts. You need roads to drive on, hopefully with signage, lane markings, and traffic lights. You need to know there are service stations to refuel along the route. If that infrastructure were not there, that exquisite automobile would be worthless to you.

Think of your team infrastructure the same way. (And for the corporate execs reading this, your company infrastructure.) You can bring in the most talented people on the planet. But if you don’t have a duplicable system, support materials, and training events to guide them, those people won’t be able to achieve their true potential. It would be like driving your Aston Martin on a sandy beach.

This infrastructure gives your team a track to run on and provides some guardrails to keep them from driving off a cliff. Build it the right way and it will prevent you from having to experience a lot of extra DEFCON 1 situations down the road.

In terms of the big picture, you’re building the golden goose. If you’re not familiar with it, The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs is one of the classic Aesop’s Fables. It’s the story of a goose that magically laid eggs of gold. Everything ...