Getting Past the Grind: Why Zero Is the Hardest Thing You’ll Ever Duplicate
You have a team site with a color scheme picked out. You have a welcome video ready for a team that doesn’t exist yet. You might even have your own funnel half built, the one you’ve been tweaking for three weekends straight. What you don’t have is a sale this week. Or last week.
That isn’t a discipline problem. It’s a sequencing problem, and it’s the specific gap this lesson exists to close. As someone building a network marketing or affiliate business right now, you already know the particular anxiety of staying busy all day while the income stays flat. The teaching here is blunt about why: every business moves through distinct phases, and the surest way to stay stuck at zero is doing phase four work while you’re still standing at phase one.
Why is the grind supposed to feel this hard?
The training calls this first stretch the grind, though the preferred word for it is the flow: a run of time, a week for some people and ninety or a hundred and twenty days for others, where the only test for any activity is whether it leads to a sale today. Not general prospecting. Not answering messages for the sake of looking active. Selling, or the short list of things that lead straight to selling, all day and, if you’re working this around a full time job, most of the night too.
Here’s the part most beginners skip past: being at zero is fine. It might be the easiest place in the entire business to be honest about, because the only direction left is up. The people who struggle hardest with this phase usually aren’t struggling with the work. They’re struggling with being seen doing it, worried a friend or a former coworker will notice they’re still at zero three months in. That worry produces exactly the wrong behavior: instead of selling in public, they retreat into private, solitary busywork that looks like progress and produces none.
This is also why the training tells you, flatly, not to worry about duplication yet. As Dave Wood puts it in the Classic Masters Course, “I’ll tell you what the hardest thing to duplicate is, is zero. Some of you all get two, and you think they should do something. Like you. Now how exciting would that be if you got two and they got two? Well, then you could have four. Pretty cool. No, not really. Still broke.” Two people who haven’t sold anything yet don’t multiply into income. They multiply into more people doing nothing, which is still zero, just with extra steps.
Why do so many beginners build a team site before they’ve made a sale?
There’s a specific trap here, and it’s disguised as leadership. A new distributor watches someone above them running a polished team site and assumes that’s the next move, before they’ve personally sold anything. The site itself isn’t the problem. The timing is.
Dave draws a specific income line before that kind of setup work earns its place, somewhere around twenty to thirty thousand dollars a month in his own history, a personal benchmark rather than a promise about anyone else’s timeline. As Dave Wood puts it in the Classic Masters Course, “Do you know that you should not set up a team site until you’re making 20, 30,000 a month? Do you guys know that? It’s a waste of time. It’s completely wasteful, because what are you going to teach people to do?” Below that number, a team site doesn’t teach a new recruit how to make money. It teaches them, in perfect detail, how to spend ninety days building a site instead of making a sale, because that’s the only example you’ve given them.
Strip away everything that feels productive but isn’t, and this early phase gets short:
- Sell, personally, every single day, before you touch anything else.
- Skip the team site, the training products, and the culture-building content until you have a team worth training.
- Treat duplication as something you earn the right to teach, not a diagram you draw before you’ve sold a thing.
The same trap shows up in a technical costume. A new person watches an experienced leader running an elaborate system and decides that’s the missing piece, so they spend months and a chunk of savings trying to build something similar before they’ve made a single sale. The people running those sophisticated systems almost always built them only after months of steady, comfortable production, not before it. Skipping that order doesn’t shortcut anything. It just moves the grind from selling, where it actually pays you, into a code editor, where it doesn’t.
What actually moves you past your first real production month?
Once you cross that first real production month, the mechanism changes, and it has almost nothing to do with talking anyone into anything. The training’s answer for what comes next is uncomfortable in its simplicity: tell the truth, in public, about what you’re actually making. An honest email or video, sent to the exact list of people who have been circling the fence for months, does more persuading than another conversation ever will. People don’t join because you convinced them. They join because the proof did the convincing before you ever picked up the phone.
The other half of this phase is turning whatever you’re still doing manually into something that runs without you standing over it. Ask what a business at this stage actually looks like day to day and the answer is almost boring: managed paid traffic, one blog post, most days an email, one call on a set day of the week, and everything else running on its own. None of it is glamorous. All of it is what separates an income that requires your constant attention from one that doesn’t.
Why does hiring become the next move, not a luxury?
Money changes what’s available to you, and pretending otherwise just keeps you doing things you’re bad at for no reason. The training’s own founder describes visiting the corporate office behind the business for the first time and finding fifteen people running around handling work he used to do solo, most of them noticeably better at it than he had ever been. His honest self-assessment: he wasn’t good at customer service, and copying and pasting a curt reply to every request was never going to scale into a company.
Hiring the right person for the piece of the business you hate is often the entire difference between one income level and the next, especially once you’re doing well enough that your own time is worth more spent elsewhere. Someone who’s happy running the part you can’t stand, and better at it than you are, is the whole mechanism that lets a business outgrow what one person can physically do.
What keeps a team together when everything falls apart?
There’s a version of duplication that gets drawn on napkins and whiteboards across this industry: get five who get five who get five, and by the seventh generation down, the math says everyone on earth is enrolled. The training rejects that version outright, for a simple reason: in every case anyone in the room had actually seen, it never once happened that way. Real duplication doesn’t come from a diagram. It comes from a science of getting a team to grow without you standing in the middle of every conversation, and that science has a name: culture.
The training even jokes about calling this piece “cult building,” and clarifies immediately what it actually means: a strong shared culture, not robes and a countdown to a spaceship. Stripped of the joke, it means building processes that keep a team together and still growing even when the person who originally held it together steps back for a while. Skip this piece and you’re stuck running everything yourself forever, pumping up a discouraged team member today and a different one tomorrow, on a treadmill that never lets up.
The clearest proof of what a real culture buys you shows up in one story from early in the company’s own history, when a crisis hit that, by every pattern anyone in the room had ever watched play out elsewhere, should have ended the whole thing.
How many of you know that most companies would have gone under and everybody would have left with what happened to us our second month? You guys know that? You guys know in everything I’ve ever seen anything like this happen, everyone jumped ship and left and it went down. Well, how did we keep it together? Not only did we keep it together, I had, we had some merchant companies were looking at us and they were amazed that people were just commenting and pumped and excited about when we’d be up again.
That’s the entire case for building culture on purpose instead of leaving it to chance. Money and systems get a team through a slow month. Only a team that feels like it’s part of something bigger than a paycheck gets through the kind of month that sinks most companies outright.
None of this gets fixed with a better technical checklist, and the training is upfront about skipping that part on purpose. If you need to know how to set up a website, that’s a free search away and always will be. What can’t be searched for is the sequence: which phase you’re actually standing in right now, and the specific, short list of things that phase requires you to stop doing.
The full lesson goes considerably further than what’s above: the complete breakdown of scaling paid marketing once you have money to work with, the specific approach to outsourcing and building a small team around you, and the full walkthrough of building the kind of culture that survives a crisis instead of scattering at the first one. The entire course, including this lesson and everything built on top of it, is available for $99 through the Classic Masters Course.
Get the course, watch the rest of this lesson, and figure out which phase you’re actually standing in before you spend another ninety days decorating the wrong one.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
So you need to figure out, number one, where you're at and be okay with it, and then leave here being able to do whatever it takes. Now the beauty is, if you're already making a lot of money, it might actually be less work to make more. Some of y'all, you make good money, and you're picking up the phone, still, for some reason. God knows why. It's awful.
Right? I'll tell you how much I pick up the phone every couple of days. I pull up my Skype, because you know, remember, I don't have a cell phone, and I delete all my messages. That's about how much I pick up the phone. Right?
So, I don't actually even know who called or why. And I don't care. Right? Because they can come to the next event and talk to me there. Right?
Or they can be on the conference call. And the truth is, is that, you know, sometimes I'll sit there, and it'll be late at night, and I'll be drinking a glass of wine, and I'll be sitting in front of the computer, and the Skype will ring, and I'll just pick it up and say hello. And somebody will be like, Dave, you know, I'm sitting here, and I'm looking at the website, and I was thinking about getting in, and I said, well, if you're thinking about it, don't call me until you're in, and I hang up. Right? Now, I wouldn't have done that when I was new.
Right? Because when you're new, you just, you gotta get them in. You know what I mean? When I was new, what I would have done was they would have called me, and I would have picked up the phone, and they'd say, hey Dave, I'm thinking about getting in, and I'd say, well, tell me, tell me what you're looking at. And they'd say, well, I was just looking at this video, and I said, which one?
You know? And I'd say, well, how much are you making right now? Well, fantastic. In front of the computer right now, as a matter of fact, I am, well, let me help you get started. Right?
And I would have gotten in, but now I just, I don't want to talk to somebody if they're not going to spend any money. Right? Because I have money, so it's a waste of my time. Right? I'd rather take that time and market more than talk to them.
But there's a transition. You guys understand that? Right? So those of you who are at zero, this is what you're going to go through is the grind. Right?
Now, that sounds painful, but the truth is, it's beautiful. Because there's nothing like being in the flow. We should call it the flow, really. I think I said that at the beginning, but I'm tired. But really what it is, is you are in a production flow.
I don't care if it's a week. I don't care if it's three weeks. I don't care if it's 90 days or 120. You need to be in that state where all you're doing all day and night are things that lead to sales. Right?
Or if you're working full time when you're here part time, or whatever it is you're doing, all you need to be doing in your business, the only thing you should be doing are things that lead to sales, whether you're taking, not prospecting, eliminate that, because it is a waste of time. Right? In what we're doing. But you need to be doing all day and night what leads to sales. Whatever it is.
And I don't care what it is. Right? Maybe you're making a video, and as you're making a video, you get a phone call, and you've got to interrupt the video and pick up the phone and close somebody. Right? And that's where you need to be.
Right? Now here's what I want you guys to be okay with, is I want you to be okay with where you are. Right? I want you to be okay with it. Like Dave Sharp was saying.
I want you to be okay if you're at zero. Zero is a beautiful place to be, because you know what? The only way is up. You can't go down anymore. I mean, you could get into debt or whatever, but you know, really, zero is the same as debt, because if you can't pay off the debt, it's the same as zero.
Right? So some of you guys, you just need to take massive action. You need to produce. And what do you do when you're in that phase? Whatever leads to sales whenever you have time.
As much sales as you can make personally. And you don't worry about duplication, because I'll tell you what the hardest thing to duplicate is, is zero. Some of you all get two, and you think they should do something. Like you. Now how exciting would that be if you got two and they got two?
Well, then you could have four. Pretty cool. No, not really. Still broke. Right?
Still broke. Right? So what do you need to do? You need to sell stuff. Right?
All day and night. That's what we do. Right? That's what we do. So that's the grind.
And that's what you need to do, and you need to do it now. And you're doing everything in the world to avoid it. You're setting up a team site to teach your team how you make no money. I mean, I know the secret, and the secret is, is when I have a team site, right? People want to get in with me, because they'll want to be like me, and for their first 90 days, they'll set up a team site, too, and also make no money.
So now not only do you have anybody, but the only guy that you do get in also does nothing for 90 days. Do you guys know that? It's a waste of time. It's completely wasteful, because what are you going to teach people to do? You know what I mean?
All the things, I'll tell you what I'm going to teach you to do. All the technical skills I've learned in the last 90 days of setting up this beautiful team site with flowers on it, and now I'm ready to get in the sale. Why don't we make a sale first, right? You know what I'm saying? That's the attitude of a new person, right?
Is you go out there, and you make, you produce personally. Now, some of you guys have been doing that, and you've kind of been going through the grind, and you've been doing things like this, and, you know, you need to go, and then you need to take into a phase where you leverage your success to create a bigger story, right? Because you know what the beautiful thing about the grind is? If you know how to use it properly, you only got to do it once, right? Showing people how much money you're making and emailing it to them, isn't that true?
Right? You don't even need to talk to them. You know what I mean? It's amazing. Isn't it amazing how that works?
It's like, you know, I just made, you know, you make a video, you say, you know, I want to tell you guys thank you because I just made 50,000 last month by just getting two people a day and following the eight steps. If you're not in, don't be a damn weenie, just get in. No? No, they just do. Isn't that beautiful?
Isn't that right, Chris? Yeah. Right? Isn't that right, Lawrence? I mean, Lawrence, how much easier is it?
Hold on. I'm going to get in this thing because I can't remember we're in video. Right? They want proof. You show them proof.
I'm like, all right, just do it. It's easy, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, there's no excuse that works. Right?
Well, I don't believe it'll work. And you just burst into laughter. You say, well, then continue to make every two years what I make a month. And then you're with me. And then you laugh.
Right? I want to talk to my wife about it. Well, that's okay. You can go, you know, be a weenie, you know, and listen. Right?
I mean, there's no excuse that works, isn't there, Dave? You know what I'm saying? At this phase where I'm at, you know, somebody gives me an excuse and I just burst into laughter. I don't try to even overcome it. I just burst into laughter and hang up.
You know what I mean? Because I just don't care. Right? You're up now. How do you do that?
Well, we're going to talk about that because there's, you know, like we're going to actually talk about duplication because here's the truth is that there's a certain kind of duplication I just disbelieve in. And here's the kind. Get five, who get five, who get five, who get five. You want to know why I disbelieve it? Because it never happens.
Ever. There's nobody ever who's done that. Right? Their first time, they go get five guys and they got five and then seven generations down, not only is the world in, but we're also sponsoring the people who live on Mars. Right?
And that's just the most ridiculous thing ever. But here's what does happen is there's a science to making your team grow with you doing nothing. Right? And that's what I'm going to be talking about. That's what we're going to be teaching.
Right? Now, we got some skill in here in that and we've done it. Right? Now, here's the thing. It's like, what did Dave and I really do as far as building a business?
Right? And it's the same thing most of our leaders do. Well, we, you know, run some paid traffic, which Dave manages. Right? And then I, you know, blog a little on my, you know, blog. It's got some nice stuff attached to it.
Right? And then we send e-mails most days. And then we do a call on Mondays. And then the rest is systematized. Right?
And then that's about it. Now, this month our affiliate account is on track to do... This month is, like, two hundred and twenty-five. or $10,000 from our actual affiliate account. Just from that.
Now, who in here thinks that's actually fairly easy compared to what most people do for a living? It's not very difficult to do. So how do we do that? Well, we do that by systematizing what everybody else does manually. We're going to teach you how to systematize what everybody else does manually.
Now, here at Empower, we kind of do that automatically. But some of you are in other things, and you can do it there too. You can systematize what you're doing manually, because I'll tell you what sucks. It's doing manually what can be done automatically. Did you know that if you don't have systems in place to train and motivate people that you've got to pump people up all the time?
It's awful. Because people get unmotivated every day, don't they, Lawrence? I mean, they get in, they're all excited, and then the next day they're unexcited. You know what I mean? But if you have a system that just kind of keeps them pumped up all the time and just kind of loops back in on itself, which we're going to be talking about when we talk about colts.
By the way, at the end of the meeting on Sunday, we pass out some Kool-Aid. Kidding, right? But that's where we go. Now the next thing is scaling marketing. We're going to talk about that.
And we're going to talk about some different things on that, because what you can do when you have money is something you can't do when you're broke. That's really cool, and this is, Sophia's really good at this. She runs the paid media for your unpaid media, right? How much do you guys spend on ads? A month?
I'm just curious. Probably about $12,000 right now. $12,000. That'll scare the crap out of most people, right? That's, yeah, that's our low side.
That's a low side. That's a low side. But it's okay, because that $12,000 makes you 90. Yeah, exactly. You know what I mean?
So don't let that scare you. You're not taking $12,000 on a credit card. You make money, too. You know what I mean? You know what I'm saying?
So we talked about this weekend. But most people, they don't get into paying for stuff because they want to be involved in everything. They want to be on every call themselves. So they're afraid to get phone centers to call people. Lawrence, he just gets phone people.
You just get people called, don't you? You don't necessarily do calls yourself all the time. No, you don't want to be screening prospects. Yeah, you don't want to be screening prospects if you got money. No.
Right? Even if you got a little bit of money, you just stop doing dumb stuff, right? So we're showing you how to transition through that, because there's a science to it. Now, Dave and I, we've been going through a process of learning how to hire people to do stuff, right? And it's really cool now, because we have like 15 people working for us in our corporate office.
We have a corporate office in St. Petersburg, right? I went in there and I visited. I didn't even know how many people worked there, and there's like 15 people running around busy all day. You know what I mean?
And they're doing stuff. They're not just pretending and doing what I did at work, which was doodle, mostly. Unless the boss was looking, in which case I looked like I was typing, right? I shouldn't say that. But in any case, in any case, they're running around busy.
I was sitting there, and this is what I realized. I realized that when I was new, I was essentially doing the work of what now 15 people do, right? And most of it I was doing kind of a bad job at. I'm not very good at customer service. I don't know if any of you guys have ever sent me a customer service request, but I just have kind of a thing that I copy and paste that says, don't be a wussy.
You said, hit reply. Right? So we got people to do stuff that they're better at and they enjoy, right? And sometimes they're better than you. Like cleaning your house, right?
Some of you guys make money and you still clean your house. God knows why you hate it, right? I'll tell you what's way cooler is you just you know, mess stuff up and leave it around, and then you wake up and it's clean. How do you do that? Mates.
Right? You know what I'm saying? Some of you guys need mates. Because it saves me like an hour a day cleaning up after myself because I'm a walking tornado. Right?
But everything in business is like this. You want to get people to do what you don't want to do, and they're better at it, and you're not good at it. Right? So we're talking about marketing and scaling a business. Right?
And we're also going to talk about systems. Right? Now, there's some things, and this is this is where we get into what you guys are doing when you're new that's so dumb. Because some of you guys like to get started, and you're like I know how I'm going to succeed. I'm going to build a system like Chuck Marshall has.
Right? And you spend six months trying to figure it out. Now we'll teach you how to do it. Right? Now Chuck Marshall's got a system that helps him get people in power.
Right? You've got that. You've got a system. Don't you? Yeah.
Yeah, he's got a system. Now he brings a lot of people in power network. He's got his own system. Right? We'll talk about how to do that, how we do it.
Right? And some of you guys, you're new, and you're like, I know the secret. I'm going to make a system. I'll put it on a credit card, take eighteen months to study technology. You know?
And you didn't do that when you were new, did you? No, not at all. How much were you making before you did that? I'm curious. Before I had my own system.
Before you made your own system. Within power? No, just before. Before all this. Because you've been doing this stuff for years, so just be fair.
Like a great month, well, you know, between like twelve to twenty thousand dollars a month. So before you did that, you were already making good money. Right? And most of you, you know, you get started, and you're like, I know the secret. I'm going to sit there, I'm going to sell like Dave Wood does.
And you know, some of you can do that, but you can't do it now. Right? And you don't have time to do it, and you don't have the money, and you don't understand how to do it at all. And so you spend ninety days going to all the webinars, all the conference calls, all the courses, and then ninety days from now, you're ready to start marketing, except for you realize you spent your last cent on that server bill to handle all the traffic you're going to get when you're ready to flip the switch. But then you realize something that you're not worth listening to, because what are you going to teach people how to do?
How to go broke making a system that teaches people how to sell nothing and spend lots of money doing nothing for ninety days? Is that what you're going to teach them? You know what I'm saying? This is what people do. It's the most hilarious shit ever, really.
It really is, isn't it? So what you need to do is you need to get started and take action. Now, some of you guys are there, so the next thing we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about how to create we call it cult building, and the reason I say cult building is because it's funny. Because some people, they go like, cult? I actually told my brother this.
I came up with this term. I can't remember what it was, but it had the word cult in it, and he was like, I wouldn't be a part of that. And I was like, it's just a word. You know, cult is like a strong culture or something. I don't know what it means, but we're not talking about drinking Kool-Aid and riding a UFO to Jesus, you know what I mean?
What we're talking about is creating processes that keep teams together. Right? That keep people growing without you. Right? Keep people growing without you.
Now, there's a lot of ways to create culture. Right? But there's a formula to it. Now, here's the thing. If you don't create a culture, here's what you have to do.
You have to run ragged all the time. Forever. Never stops. Never stops. You've got to do things that systems can do.
You've got to pump your team up all the time. Right? You've got to motivate everybody in your organization all the time. Every six months, your whole team jumps to a new deal. This is what happens if you don't have a good culture.
It's what happens. You've seen it happen all the time for the last few years, right? What happens? You know, people network marketing. What we do, we talk about the residual income and the dream and the lifestyle.
Right? And they're talking about it in some, you know, scheme or whatever. You know, selling. This month, it's, you know, they're selling a, you know, pantyhose and the next month they're, you know, selling the new berry juice that, you know, was, you know, just found in a new country somewhere. Right?
And they're always talking about the dream and the lifestyle. It's going to happen two to four years from now when they're in their 15th deal that they've jumped to with everybody that keeps getting in with them all the time. Right? There is a different way than that to do it. Right?
How many of you know that most companies would have gone under and everybody would have left with what happened to us our second month? You guys know that? You guys know in everything I've ever seen anything like this happen, everyone jumped ship and left and it went down. Well, how did we keep it together? Not only did we keep it together, I had, we had some merchant companies were looking at us and they were amazed that people were just commenting and pumped and excited about when we'd be up again.
You know what I mean? That would put most people out. How do you do that? You do that with culture. Now once you know this stuff, here's the beauty, is that no matter what you're ever in, okay, you can do this stuff on your own if you need to, if you've got the talent and skill.
Okay? But right now you'll have a plan to go from now to where you want to be. So that's what the intention is this weekend. Now this is a formula to go all the way, if you understand these steps, to go from zero to a half million a month. Right?
Because there's nothing that won't be covered. Now what we're not going to be talking about is a lot of technical stuff. Why? Because I don't understand any of it. You know?
People are like, well how do I set up my website? I actually don't know, truthfully, how websites work. I used to know how to install WordPress and I actually tried to do it a few days ago because I was curious if I still could do it. Because it's been a couple of years since I've tried. And I was sitting there and I was trying to follow the instructions to set up this little site for one of my buddies, because I just wanted to see if I could do it.
And I didn't remember how to set up a WordPress blog. Right? I really don't know how it works, nor do I care how it works. So we're not going to be talking about it. Why?
Because if you really want to know, there's something called YouTube. And it's free. It doesn't cost $5,000. You can go on there and just find how to set up a site. There's a guy in India who makes free videos because he makes no money.
He's fine with it. Because tech people really aren't that expensive. Right? What we're going to do is we'll teach you how to find things that you don't have. Right?
We'll teach you how to find it. How to access it. The concepts that drive it. Right? Now we're also not going to be talking about the structure of SEO.
Why? Well, because we do that from time to time and then the next month, we've got to take the video down.
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