Why Most of Your Team Will Fail, and Why You Still Have to Take Their Money

You finally get someone on the phone who’s ready to buy in. They’ve got the money, they’ve made the decision, and right as you should be closing, something in you hesitates. What if they don’t do the work? What if they quit in three weeks and you’re the one who took their money? So you soften it. You add a disclaimer. You talk them out of the size of the decision they were about to make on their own.

As someone building a team in this business, you already know that flinch. Dave Wood spent a chunk of a live Classic Masters Course training addressing it head on, going around a room full of people who’d been in the industry for years and asking them a question most leaders never ask out loud: what percentage of your team actually makes it.

Why does closing a sale suddenly feel like a moral problem?

Here’s the quiet belief that wrecks more new producers than any objection ever will: if I take this person’s money and they fail, I did something wrong. It feels responsible. It feels like empathy. It’s actually a decision to stop selling, dressed up as a virtue, and it shows up as hesitation on calls, discomfort asking for the close, and a habit of talking prospects out of decisions they came to you already having made.

Dave doesn’t let the room dance around it. He names it as something almost everyone who’s ever built anything in network marketing goes through, including people standing right there in the room. His own brother struggled with it. Leaders with years in the industry struggled with it. The problem was never unique to beginners. It’s just that beginners haven’t yet done the one thing that fixes it: looked directly at the actual numbers instead of guessing at them.

What happens when you ask a room full of veterans what percentage of their team actually succeeds?

So Dave asks, one person at a time. Curtis, 23 years in network marketing, puts it at five to eight percent, maybe up to 20 for people who reach some worthwhile level. Lawrence, running two teams plus other affiliate business, says less than ten percent. Chris Darty, spread across roughly 80 different things, says the same, under ten percent, and admits it was a struggle to get okay with that when he first started noticing it. John Ambrose, with hundreds of people in his organization, lands around ten percent too. Tony, 17 years in the industry, says five to eight percent. Chuck goes lower still, somewhere between two and three percent.

Nobody in that room disagrees with each other. Five to twenty percent, best case, across every one of them, in every kind of company, high ticket or low ticket, nutritional or affiliate or Empower Network itself. That’s not a bad month. That’s the actual, permanent shape of the industry, confirmed independently by six different people with decades of combined experience. The people who succeed at this long term are not the ones who found a company where everyone makes it. There is no such company. They’re the ones who stopped expecting one to exist.

Why do you have to be okay with taking the money anyway?

Once the real number is sitting in front of you, five to twenty percent, the guilt logic falls apart on its own. If you refuse to sell to anyone unless you can guarantee they’ll succeed, you will never sell to anyone again, because that guarantee does not exist for any product, in any industry, sold by anyone. What you can actually guarantee is narrower and it’s the only thing that was ever yours to guarantee: that what you’re offering has real value, and that the decision belongs to them.

Dave answers this with a story from his own phone. As Dave Wood puts it in the Classic Masters Course, describing a call he gets on a regular basis, “if somebody calls me and they say Dave should I buy the 15k I’ve only got a thousand bucks left I say well yes I don’t have an issue with it”. That’s not recklessness. It’s a producer who separated his job from their outcome a long time ago. His job is to make sure the thing he’s selling is real. Their job is what they do with it. Collapse those two jobs into one and you’ll spend your whole career apologizing for other people’s choices.

push people out of their business because they’re not okay with failure they’re not okay with taking people’s money right and a lot of you just will not succeed until you let it go most people fail you got to be okay with taking money to succeed all right you got to be okay and the next thing you got to be okay with is you got to be okay with doing whatever it takes to produce okay you got to be okay with it now what do I mean doing whatever it takes to produce I mean in the beginning guys I don’t care what you’re in and I don’t care what the model is right all there is is you

Read the first half of that again. A leader who can’t stomach the failure rate doesn’t stay neutral about it. He starts quietly sabotaging his own team, softening pitches, discouraging investment, talking people out of the size of commitment that actually produces results, all because he can’t carry the weight of someone else’s choice going badly. The team doesn’t get smaller because the leader is careful. It gets smaller because the leader stopped selling.

What does “whatever it takes to produce” actually look like day to day?

Now read the second half. The line “all there is is you” isn’t a metaphor. Nobody below you has hit a rank yet. Nobody is passing sales up the chain. There’s no team to lean on, no duplication to ride, no downline covering for a slow week, because none of that exists yet on your side of the business. The only way anything changes is you get off the sidelines and go produce.

He asks John, a leader in the room with real duplication under him, whether anything besides recruiting and selling actually makes money in this profession. Sitting on a webinar, waiting, organizing, preparing content nobody asked for. John’s answer is immediate: nothing. Every dollar in this business traces back to one of exactly two activities, and every hour spent on anything else is an hour spent on something that, by itself, pays you zero.

So how much recruiting and selling is enough? Dave’s answer is as much as you can, and when you hit a new personal record, do more the next day. He backs it with a specific mechanism.

As Dave Wood explains the math directly, “if you get two people a day it is impossible to not make money right you will make money period if you get two people a day it doesn’t matter if your team duplicates”. Two isn’t a magic number. It’s just a volume high enough that the five to twenty percent who were always going to succeed have enough raw material to actually show up in it. Stay under that volume and you’re not failing at the business, you’re failing to feed it enough people to reveal who the producers were going to be.

Why does the two to four year plan quietly turn into a decade of nothing?

There’s a trap Dave calls out that has nothing to do with failure rates and everything to do with patience misapplied. Somebody decides they’ll get two people a day, those two will each get two, and eventually the whole thing compounds into a real income, five years out, if they just stick with it. Dave’s read on that plan is unsentimental: the two to four year plan quietly becomes the four to eight year plan, and then the eight to ten year plan after that, while the person is still, technically, telling themselves it’s working.

He tells a story from a live event to make the same point land differently. A hotel coordinator pulls him aside mid event, worried, pointing out through the door at a crowd of 1,250 people, half of them trailing one particular leader around with cameras and recorders like he was some kind of celebrity. That leader wasn’t famous because he found a shortcut. He was followed around because he’d been producing, visibly and consistently, for long enough that people wanted to know how. Nobody follows the person who’s still getting ready.

And getting ready, Dave points out, is its own specific trap. He describes the people who stopped actually recruiting and selling in their old business, the ones who filled their days instead with webinars, conference calls, and organizing for a productivity system they never used. Ask where those people ended up, and the honest answer is a shift at Walmart, because they stopped producing and a job doesn’t require you to.

The producers, the two to five, three to twelve, sixteen in a good day people quoted right there in the room, never had a cleaner story than that. They just kept doing the two things that pay, every single day, long after the excitement wore off, long after “getting ready” started looking easier.

The full lesson goes further than what’s above, the complete room-by-room breakdown of what “whatever it takes to produce” means for someone brand new with zero team, the specific daily numbers different leaders in the room were actually hitting, and the follow-up questions that pin down exactly where people quietly let themselves off the hook. The entire course, including this lesson, is available for $99 through the Classic Masters Course.

Get the course, watch the rest of this lesson, and start counting how many people you actually talked to today instead of how ready you felt.