Defcon 1 Direct Selling. Randy Gage

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СКАЧАТЬ now that is preparing people to be worker drones in the collective. Entitlement mentality is running amok and we’ve forgotten what it means to live a life of meaning. There is nothing wrong with working a job for a salary, getting paid a fair wage for an honest effort. We all must start someplace, whether that is working a drive-thru, scrubbing bathrooms, or washing dishes in a pancake house like I did. But let’s not become immune to the opportunity of developing and progressing, becoming the highest possible version of ourselves in everything we do, including our career.

Entrepreneurship is not for everyone. I get that. But there are millions of people in unfulfilling jobs for whom an entrepreneurial opportunity would provide a much better alternative. And these people don’t realize that opportunity is available to them because they have bought into the “normalcy” of the current system. With this field manual, I’m going to show you exactly how you can best share this opportunity with them. Not with high- pressure sales techniques or hype, but by truly educating your candidates about the possibilities you can offer them.

       It’s not your job to sponsor everyone you know. But it is your job to offer people what you have, allow them to self-select in or out, and then help those who decide to join you.

      Make the commitment now that this is the culture you will create on your team. Don’t “close” people; “open” them to the possibilities.

      The insights you discover in this book are meant to equip you for the dirty realities you will confront and to demonstrate to you that you’re not the first person to face such daunting circumstances. Every great leader must face down extraordinary challenges before they come out victorious on the other side.

      Please allow me to share with you how this book came about.

It was January 2019 and I was doing the final edits on my most recent book, Direct Selling Success. I sent proof copies to more than 20 top income earners in various companies to get their input. It immediately became apparent that the book would be a worldwide smash, an international bestseller. To a person, these leaders wanted to know how soon it would be published, whether they could share key sections with their top leaders, and whether I would give them permission to begin training sessions based on the content.

      And then Something Fascinating Occurred

      For three days straight I received urgent messages from three of those leaders who had read select chapters of the book. Now they were seeking help with a burning situation that had arisen with their teams. They each were desperate to know if I had additional advice that could apply to their unique situations.

      In each of these cases, the leader and their team faced a “DEFCON 1” type of situation. The DEFCON scale (short for “Defense Readiness Condition”) measures the alert level of defense forces. DEFCON 1 is the maximum level status, used to describe preparation for imminent nuclear war. Obviously, these leaders were not facing anything close to an actual war. But they were facing exceptional, crisis scenarios that threatened the ongoing existence of their business.

      In one case, a lot of their top leaders had lost confidence in the company and left en masse to join another one. In another case, the company had made major changes to the comp plan, and the results were causing a huge drop in volume and lots of resignations. In the third case, many leaders had been influenced by an outside generic trainer who had taught them systems that were actually eroding their businesses. These three leaders needed to act fast, or they would lose their teams and their livelihoods. If you develop a large team, at some point you too will face a “DEFCON 1” type of scenario for your business.

      And That’s Why I’m Writing This New Book

Here’s the thing about leadership, particularly in Direct Selling. (For most of this book, I will refer to this as Leveraged Sales, which I believe is a much more appropriate label for this business model.) Most people believe leadership is about being positive all the time, sending out lots of happy, smiley emojis in their WhatsApp groups, and always giving positive motivational speeches. But the truth is, that’s not leadership—that’s propaganda. Well-meaning propaganda, surely, but propaganda nonetheless. And you’re going to have to do better than that.

      That’s not to say there is no place for the “moonbeams, unicorns, and rainbows” perspective in leadership. There most certainly is. But that positive, optimistic, motivational outlook is only one element of leadership.

      Because True Leadership Deals with the Messy, Complicated, and Dark Areas as Well

      How do you stay true to your principles and lead the team forward when their world is falling apart because of a comp plan change, regulatory attacks, or a competitor poaching away top leaders? Or when 90 percent of the product line is on backorder, the company can’t make commissions, or there’s a sociopath in the sponsorship line above you? You’re going to need to exercise a higher level of leadership. One that reflects the yin and yang dichotomy of leading in the real world.

      Here’s how I define leadership in our space:

       Inspiring people to become the highest possible version of themselves—and building the environment that facilitates this process.

And to do that, you can’t just play the “only happy news” channel; you can’t just be the positive, motivational “I did it, you can do this too” channel. Your people require more from you. A lot more.

      This book you are reading now is the brutal, unvarnished truth about leadership. A book like no one has ever written before. Because it is a manual for field leaders on how to handle the most challenging elements of the Leveraged Sales business. I will share with you everything I have learned over almost four decades of leading huge teams all over the world.

      I’m going to reveal the entire panorama of leadership—the joyful empowering moments and the messy, discouraging ones. I’ll give you case studies and examples of my best leadership success—and lay bare my foolish, vain, and destructive mistakes as well.

      A note of warning: A lot of my work is family friendly. But in my private coaching sessions and strategy sessions with my top leaders, my language is raw and uncensored (which is a nice way to say I swear a lot). Because this is meant to be a field manual for use in the most urgent and threatening emergencies and crisis situations, I’m not sugarcoating anything. So if profanity offends your sensibilities, this may not be the right book for you.

      One of the Most Important Leadership Skills is the Ability to Tell the Truth

      And to tell that truth with love and compassion and empathy, but truth nonetheless.

This book is a demonstration of my modeling that behavior for you. By the time your organization grows large, bad things are sometimes going to happen. Your company will make mistakes, your sponsorship line will make mistakes, other people in the profession will make mistakes, and you, yes you, will make mistakes.

      There are no great leaders who don’t make mistakes. That’s only in the movies. In the real world, leadership is about recognizing, acknowledging, and owning your mistakes. And when the mistakes do happen, it’s about not trying to gloss them over, not hiding them from the team, but to concede them and explain:

       How they happened, why they happened, and why they won’t happen again.

      Regardless of who makes the mistakes, they will happen, and you are going to sometimes face СКАЧАТЬ