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An Interview with Simon Chan

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I recently had the honor of interviewing Simon Chan, an MLM industry leader and network marketing expert whose $25 million global business has grown to 18 countries. We wanted to hear what he had to say to new distributors and asked him to share his advice on motivation with our readers at MLM.com:

When starting in the MLM industry, the most important thing to do is to think like an entrepreneur, not an employee. If you have the right mindset, you can overcome a lot of the challenges and sabotages a lot of new distributors experience. Most people quit early because they’ve been programmed since birth to think like an employee, not like an entrepreneur. For example, with a regular job, you work eight hours and you get paid for eight hours. If you work 10 hours, you get paid for 8 hours plus two hours of overtime. If the boss doesn’t pay you, you can sue the company or they can get in trouble with the law because that’s like slavery—working and not getting paid.

Now with an entrepreneur, like an MLM distributor: you could work eight hours and get paid zero, you could work 20 hours and get paid $10, or you could work 100 hours and get paid $50, but if you keep at it and don’t quit, you may reach a time where you’re seriously overpaid. You may work 1,000 hours and get paid for a million by leveraging the downline of your organization.

One thing I share the most is that as an employee, you’re overpaid in the beginning but underpaid the rest of your life. What does that mean? It means your first day on the job, you probably don’t know what you’re doing yet. You need your supervisor to show you what you’re doing but you still get your full salary and your full benefits. You’re really giving nothing in return to the company. Once you reach a point where you’re actually producing, you’re going to be underpaid for the amount of value you provide the company.

As an entrepreneur, it’s the opposite. You’re underpaid in the beginning. Take Mark Zuckerburg, for example, the founder of Facebook. He worked many overnighters and did all this coding and programming and basically doing slave work while getting no money at all. However, now he’s one of the richest people in the world. He’s severely overpaid for the amount of hours he works in a day. You could say the same thing about Bill Gates and many others.

That’s basically what I teach—thinking like an entrepreneur. As an employee, we’re told not to make mistakes, and we’re penalized for them. In school, it’s the same; you want to get a perfect score on your exam, not 50%. But in business, you have to make mistakes and in network marketing, you need to make mistakes. You need that rejection to grow. The only reason I can give a good presentation now is because I gave so many that were bombs. I said the wrong thing, people didn’t sign up, and I lost them. That’s the biggest thing I would tell a new distributor: you learn from making mistakes so think like an entrepreneur not like an employee.

As far as not giving up and staying motivated to persevere, I tell people, “If you’re not earning, make sure you’re learning.” As long as you keep at it, it’s proven you’ll be successful. As long as you do the five things every day that I’ll share later on.

One of the things I teach new distributors is how to invite or how to tell people about the business. “Inviting” meaning how you approach the people—and it’s not about selling. Let’s say you opened up the newest Japanese restaurant that sold sushi. You wouldn’t just tell your friends about it, you wouldn’t just tell a few people, (you’d tell many). Some of your friends might not like sushi and may even think it’s gross but you’d still tell them because they might have friends that like it.

That’s the analogy I use in network marketing training sessions. People say, “Oh, he’s not going to be interested” and end up only talking to their close friends. They don’t know how to approach people and it comes from a common mistake new distributors make: they want to sign everyone up. That’s not the goal; the goal is to let them know you have the business.

With the Japanese restaurant, if I opened one, it would be ridiculous to try to force everyone to eat there tonight. I wouldn’t say, “Oh, you have to go there tonight!” If they say, “But I don’t like sushi,” I wouldn’t reply, “Well, too bad. You need to go there tonight!” If they said, “I’m not even hungry” or “I already made dinner plans,” it would be ridiculous to keep insisting and a lot of people would be turned off. Instead, it’s best to just let them know, “Hey, I opened a Japanese restaurant. You may want to come check it out sometime or if you have a friend who likes it, you may give me a referral.”

Those are the two key things I teach new distributors: the entrepreneur/employee mindset and how to invite people.

Statistics show that if you consistently stay with the same company for 5 years or more, you can make a full-time income as long as you’re doing the 5 core production activities.

These are the 5 things you should do every day:

1. Go out there, meet new people, and build your list.

2. Go out there and prospect by sharing your company, sharing your products, and letting people know about it.

3. Follow up with old prospects.

4. Invest in self-development.

5. You’ve got to communicate with your team: your upline and your downline, cross-wise, you need to update the status of your business.

If you do that every day for one month, I guarantee your total business will change. If you do that for a year or two, anyone can be successful, and that’s with any product because people buy you. It goes back to building the list and expanding the network so they never run out of people. They’re sharing the opportunity, they’re sharing the products with people, they’re following up, and if they don’t know the product, they’re reading books about it, trying it out, etc., and they’re communicating with their team.

To learn more about Simon Chan’s trainings, please visit www.simonwchan.com.

Tomorrow, we’ll post Part 2

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