Why Commissions Aren’t Profit: The Real MLM Math (Wealth Plan 3, Part 2)

David Wood tells his audience that it took him 65 days to go from starting out to making over a thousand dollars a day in his business, and that he did it without the commission structure he says he is about to lay out for them. The point of the talk is not the number itself but what sits behind it: a claim that the process for making real money online is simple, and that almost everyone who could teach it buries it under noise.

He tells people to join before he explains why

Before he gets into any of the substance, David tells anyone watching who is not already in Empower Network to act immediately. “Scroll down to the bottom. There’s an add cart button. Just get in, okay, hit the button now,” he says, pointing to a entry product. He repeats the instruction almost word for word a few minutes later, telling viewers to open a new window, buy the product, and keep watching the livestream. He tells them he will explain later in the talk why the purchase matters and how it fits into the process he is about to describe, including for people who are building some other business entirely.

He blames hype and product launches, not the concept

David’s argument is that the actual process for making money online is “so simple, it’s unbelievable,” but that it gets buried by what he calls bullshit, by concepts that do not hold up in reality, and by a constant stream of hyped-up product launches. He is careful to say he is not against buying information products himself. “There’s nothing wrong with buying info products, because I spend a lot of money on my education,” he says. His warning is narrower: if anything distracts a person from the specific process he is about to show, it will take them forever to make money. He says that when he got on the internet he did buy a lot of products, but that he stayed, in his words, “focused like a laser” on the thing he is about to show in this talk. He did not have the math worked out the way he says he is about to present it, and he could not make money as fast as he claims the audience now can, but the focus is what he credits for the 65-day result and for later making more than a thousand dollars a day.

A thousand dollars a day in commissions is not a thousand dollars a day in profit

The center of the talk is a distinction between commissions and take-home money. David says most people in the industry will tell you they are making thirty thousand a month and never mention what they spent to get it. He mimics the kind of answer people give: “I don’t spend any money on advertising,” and then walks through the follow-up questions he says need to be asked instead, one after another:

How much did you spend last month flying around doing meetings? How much did you spend on travel, right? How much did you spend on hotels? How much did you spend renting hotel rooms? How much did you spend on advertising to get people to those hotel rooms on passing out DVDs or whatever it was? How much you spent on voice broadcast, right?

His point is that making a thousand bucks a day is not the same as collecting a thousand bucks a day in commissions, once travel, hotel rooms, advertising, and voice broadcast costs are subtracted. He tells the audience he intends to show them how to generate commissions well above a thousand dollars a day precisely because some of that money has to be put back into the business. What he says he will teach is not how to earn a thousand and spend seven hundred of it. He puts it directly: “What I’m going to teach you how to do tonight is, I’m going to teach you how to pocket a thousand dollars a day after you pay for all your advertising and expenses and travel and marketing.”

The instruction repeats before the explanation arrives

David closes this portion of the talk the same way he opened it, telling anyone not yet enrolled to scroll to the add to cart button, get in for the product, and stay watching. He frames this as the easy way of doing what he is about to lay out, and says the reasoning for the purchase, and how it fits into the money process and into whatever other business a viewer might already be running, is still to come.

Written up from the original recording. The full transcript is below.