MC09 – Leveraging the Success of Others – How to be Noticed by Successful People and Leverage Their Success
You’ve sent the message. Maybe several. You reached out to the top producer in your company, the leader whose training changed how you think, and you got nothing back. Silence. And somewhere in your head a little voice decided it was personal: they’re ignoring me. They’re discriminating against me.
Dave Wood has been on both sides of that silence, and in this session of the Classic Masters Course he explains exactly why it happens and, more importantly, the one reliable way through it. Successful people are not avoiding you. They’re buried. The person you’re trying to reach may have tens of thousands of people in their organization trying to hammer them to death for attention. You will never out-message that crowd. But there is something that cuts through it every single time, and this lesson is a step-by-step demonstration of it, told through two people it worked for.
Why does “ramping up slowly” guarantee you never produce?
Dave opens with the belief that quietly kills more businesses than any tactic ever could. People think they’ll ramp up over a long period of time and then eventually start producing. From what I’m doing today, the thinking goes, thirty days from now it’ll ramp up, and then I’ll start producing. Dave’s verdict is flat: it’s not going to work, because you’ll never produce. The ramp-up never ends, because ramping up is more comfortable than producing. Most people who aren’t succeeding have been doing exactly one thing: waiting. Waiting and planning, and planning and waiting, sometimes after years of doing things that don’t work, but lately just waiting.
To break the pattern, Dave brings up Chris Daugherty. Chris had been trying to make it as an entrepreneur across five or six different deals over roughly twenty years, starting at sixteen, when he ran a phone-based dating service he promoted with yard signs around town and small classified ads. His wife watched him struggle through eight years of marriage. She was okay with it, she says, because he’d always had the entrepreneurial spirit, but it was a struggle the whole way. Then, about twelve months before this retreat, everything changed at once. Dave asks what the difference was, and Chris’s answer is worth memorizing: I got plugged into the right information, and I started taking action in a way that made sense to me, that fit my personality and who I am.
What did Chris actually do once he started?
Not something clever. Something relentless. Chris went through a course Dave was teaching, and from the moment Dave showed him what to do, he did it, right then. His days were creating content: blogging, making videos, working through a challenge Dave had issued to create something every day. He didn’t always hit the daily mark, and he’s honest that he’s slow, a single blog post can take him a day, sometimes two. But when he produced something, it produced results.
What did he write about? He looked at the small online community his target market lived in, found what there was buzz about, and wrote about that. A lot of the buzz was about Dave Wood, so Chris wrote about Dave Wood, playing up a tongue-in-cheek “secret alliance,” a secret inner circle so secret Dave himself didn’t know about it. People wanted to read it, and they opted in to hear more.
And then there was the sheer volume of presence. Ask anyone who was in that niche at the time and they’ll tell you the same thing: Chris’s face was nowhere, and then it was everywhere. He became the top leader on TribePro by syndicating other people’s content. His posts showed up in every Facebook group. He had a new post up every day. He was on five leaderboards. When Empower Network launched four months after he started, he walked into his first event and stranger after stranger said the same thing: you’re the guy on Facebook. Yeah, he said. I guess I am.
What do you do when the people at the top won’t talk to you?
Here Dave tells a story he says he doesn’t tell often. When he got started online inside a system, he tried to talk to the people at the top, and they wouldn’t talk to him. They wouldn’t pay attention at all. His own sponsor forgot his name twice. Dave called to say he’d just joined, and the man said congratulations, welcome aboard, I’m going snowboarding. That was the whole relationship.
So what did Dave do about being invisible?
So, you know what I did? I started out-producing everyone. And guess what happens when you out-produce everyone? Because the people at the top will give you a call. And be like, what the hell are you doing?
That’s the entire mechanism of this lesson in four sentences. He worked his way into every circle that had influence as fast as he possibly could, and became known as somebody who produced, sold, and worked. Tracy, who was an established name on the leaderboards when Dave was brand new, confirms it from the other side: as this unknown name climbed past everyone, her inner circle started trying to figure out who he was and who his sponsor was, and nobody knew, because his sponsor wasn’t anywhere on the board. It was genuinely mysterious, she says, this guy living in a van whose face was suddenly everywhere you looked. Production created the mystery, the mystery created attention, and the attention came from exactly the successful people who wouldn’t return a message before.
There’s a twist Dave adds with a grin: the best thing his sponsor ever did for him was refuse to teach him anything, because if Dave had copied him, he’d never have out-produced him three times over. Silence from the top isn’t always a curse. Sometimes it forces you to become the producer instead of the student.
How does the leverage actually happen once you’re noticed?
Watch how it worked for Chris, because the sequence is the lesson. Dave ran a contest for the best testimonial video for something they were both in. Chris made a video funny enough that everyone talked about it. Dave watched it, and in that moment realized he’d been seeing this guy’s face in what felt like four thousand places. He checked two teams he was in at the time, and Chris was a top producer in both. So Dave called him up, they started hanging out and talking, and from that moment, in Chris’s words, everything took off.
Notice what Chris never did. He never begged for a mentor. He never sent the “can I pick your brain” message. He produced so much, so visibly, in the places where influential people were already looking, that a successful person did the reaching out. That’s what leveraging the success of others actually means. Their attention, their circles, and their momentum become available to you the moment you’re the kind of person they call.
And before you file this under “easier said than done,” hear Dave’s closing point: none of it is complex. If you’ve been in this business for a month, you know enough about basic SEO to get some traffic to your content. If you’re in three Facebook groups, you already know how to talk to people there. It’s not hard. It’s just that people avoid it, because production is visible and waiting is safe.
This is one session from the Classic Masters Course, where Dave and the leaders around him break down each phase of building from zero, in the words of the people who did it. If you’re new to it, the entire Classic Masters Course, this lesson included, is available for $99 at the Classic Masters Course.
Your assignment: stop waiting to be noticed and become impossible to miss. For the next thirty days, publish something every day where your market already gathers, and let your production do the introductions. Get in productive mode.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
Give Darty a hand, everybody. This is what I want everybody here to get started with. Here's what people think. They think that they kind of ramp up over time and then start producing. They kind of ramp up over a long time and then eventually you're producing.
People think that a lot, don't they, guys? I'm going to ramp up over a long period of time and then start producing eventually. From what I'm doing today, 30 days from now it's going to ramp up and I'm going to start producing. And it's not going to work because you'll never produce. So Darty, now, I'm going to pick his brain and what I'm going to do, guys, is I'm going to be pulling people out who are different phases this morning.
This is what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about what you need to do when you're new. And the beauty is we've got different personalities. Darty's kind of weird. Lawrence is normal.
He's the normal guy in here. Huh? For an agent. Yeah. The normal, the weird, right?
And then we've got baby boomers. We've got young people. We've got everybody in different ranges. We've got people with money, people that don't. And they all do different stuff, but it produces the same thing.
Now, you got started, gosh, a little over a year ago. Twelve months ago. In a course that I did. Last month was twelve months. Now, we talked yesterday about how you had failed for years, right, when you're in.
Yeah. Now, how many? How many deals were you in before you started having success? Probably five, maybe six over the course of, what, twenty years. Twenty years?
The first deal was when I was ten. Dude, you're not that old. You started when you were ten? Well. How old were you?
Actually, the first deal I got in, I was really sixteen. I don't know if I was supposed to be or not, but. Well, Rob Forst's son's going to do it. We'll talk about that later. I got a dating site.
No, it wasn't a site. I got my own dating service. Really? I was here. Sixteen?
Sixteen. I was posting yard signs around town. I was in high school. The second year of ninth grade, I think it was. I think I'm going to pay Chris Dougherty fifty a month to just him teach me how to date.
Yeah. Well, I. No, it wasn't online. It was a phone number thing. I bought it from Don LaCrea.
I don't know if you remember him. Oh, yeah, yeah. And from Washington? Yeah. Yeah.
I was placed in small ads all over. So, anyway. So, you had a dating service at sixteen. You graduated to some deal. Got grandma and a few things.
But it was like failure, failure, failure. I had a curiosity. How long of Chris Dougherty failing? I mean, were you kind of just like this the whole time? What did you think about it?
Were you worried about it? I wasn't overly worried about it. He's always been an entrepreneur, and I kind of have an entrepreneur spirit. And so, I was okay with it. You were okay with it?
Which is helpful. Yeah, it was. We struggled, though. How long for? I mean, how many years was this that you saw him struggle?
I have no idea how long you guys. You've been married, like eight years, right? Yes. So, you guys struggled for eight years? Yes.
Eight years. And then all at once, apparently, you broke through, right? Yeah. What was the difference? Well, I got plugged in the right information.
Right information. I started taking action in a way that made sense to me, that fit my personality and who I am. Now, you did primarily content, right? Yes. Tell us a little bit about just what your day looked like.
We're talking when you're new, like a year ago. Right. Just new success. Right. Right.
The 30 days after. You went through that course with me. Right. Just what did your day look like? It was creating content.
I mean, I was blogging. I was making videos. I was in a challenge, right? You put a challenge out to create something every day or whatever. I didn't always live up to the challenge, but when I did something, it produced a lot of results.
I was, you know, I was all day long. You know, stuff takes me forever, really. I mean, I'm kind of slow when I do things. And blog posts will take me, like, a day. Sometimes two days.
Doesn't that sound ridiculous? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you have really good content. It's a little different. And guys, what we're going to go over is people have different personalities, but the point is, is that he learned what he needed to know.
And I did it. And he did it. I just started doing. Then. Right then.
Right then. Right? Right then. Now, you were okay with taking calls and closing people on the phone, right? At the time?
I took a couple, yeah. You took a couple calls. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did. I was on the phone.
He was on the phone. He took calls, right? Closed people. Yep. Now, today, maybe it's slightly less calls to close people.
Probably. Yeah, I don't. I don't. What did you recruit the other week? Like, 500 people in a week or something like that?
Yeah, the other week. Well, the last three weeks, I think we brought in over 700 people into two different companies. I mean, it was a year later. You know what I mean? Right.
Right. You know what I'm saying? So, what? When you first started blogging, what did you blog about? This guy.
Yeah. I wrote about Dave Wood. I looked in the market, and I seen what there was buzz about, right, in the little community that we kind of all exist in, and I wrote about the buzz topics, and stuff that people would be interested in reading, right? My target market. What they would be interested in reading.
That's what I wrote about. And people were like, oh, well, good. You know, I formed a site. I formed a secret alliance, and Dave didn't know about it, but me and him had. It was that secret.
It was that, exactly. It was that secret. Dave didn't even know about it, but we were on this secret inner circle on the internet. The circle. And everyone was like, this guy, you know, he's tied into Dave somehow.
I was like, yeah, he's telling me the secrets. Opt in here, and I'll let you know what he told me. Well, I don't need to take this. But no, here's, I'm going to ask Chris some questions, because I want you guys to get this. And really get it, okay?
And most people in here still, who are not succeeding now, what you've been doing is you've been waiting to take action. You've been waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Maybe before you took action, doing things that don't work, but for the last little bit, you've been waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting, right? It's what people do. They wait around, and they plan, and plan, and plan, and plan.
Now, you wrote. Now, here's the thing I noticed, okay? I want to talk about for a second. I taught him what to do. From that moment on, Chris Daugherty's face was everywhere.
Right. Everywhere. He just kept popping up all the time, right? Now, he attended the webinars and stuff we did after that, right? You were on them, like, with a team, most of the time.
But from that moment, when I taught him what to do, right, which at the time, he was like I was. I connected with Chris because he's very similar, very spacey, rambles about nothing, and really creative, but he's got a talent there, right? So, I connected with him on that, because I kind of marketed, and it was a similar situation when I started. From the moment I taught him content... Listen, there was blog posts from him everywhere.
Anybody here run into him when he was newer? Anybody in the room? You did? What do you notice? His face was nowhere, and then he was the top leader in TribePro, syndicating other people's stuff.
His posts were in every Facebook group. He had a new post up every day. He was on five leader boards, right? Because he just took massive all-out action when you're new. Yeah.
I mean, when we launched Power Network, that was four months after I started, and I got there, and it was like, everyone there was like, you're the guy on Facebook. I'm like, yeah, I guess I am. It's the first event I've been to since we started, and it was like, I know you from Facebook. Yeah. He was out everywhere, all right?
Now, I'll tell you guys something that I don't talk about a lot, because it's, you know, I don't really do it so much anymore, and I always believe in teaching about what I'm doing now. But when I got started, okay? Because, you know, in a system, I got started online, I tried to talk to the people at the top, right? And you know what? They just wouldn't talk to me.
Anybody here ever been in somewhere, you're trying to get a hold of somebody at the top, and they won't talk to you, or for whatever reason? Right. And you think that they're hurting your feelings, you know what I mean? It's like, they're discriminating against me. And you don't realize they got, you know, 40,000 people in a team who, you know, are trying to hammer them to death.
Right. Right? So, they wouldn't talk to me. You know what I mean? They wouldn't pay any attention.
So, you know what I did? I started out-producing everyone. And guess what happens when you out-produce everyone? Because the people at the top will give you a call. And be like, what the hell are you doing?
So, I started out-producing, and then, you know, my sponsor, he didn't remember my name twice, you know what I mean? I called him, I was like, I just joined. He's like, well, congratulations, welcome aboard. You know? And I'm going to go snowboarding.
Okay. I was like this. I was like, what? You know? So, I was like, okay, whatever.
Now, here's the best thing he did for me, truthfully, is he didn't teach me what he was doing. Because had he did, I wouldn't have out-produced him by three times. Right, Tracy? You know? So, it was the best thing he did.
So, but here's what happened. Now, Tracy, real quick, sir, stay up here for a sec. Now, Tracy, she was around when I was brand new. Right? Now, I was nowhere.
And then, where was I? Everywhere. Everywhere. I was involved in every circle. Yep.
Right? I was in leaderboard. Leaderboard's everywhere? Your name climbed. I was on the leaderboard at the time that you entered the system.
And as your name climbed the leaderboard, our little inner circle began to try to figure out who you belong to, who your sponsor was. But we didn't know your sponsor. Yeah. Because he was on the leaderboard. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And then, all of a sudden, you became the person that everyone else was looking to, to find out what was your secret. And it was kind of mysterious. It really was mysterious because you were in a van.
I was in a van, right? But I was everywhere. My face was everywhere. No matter what somebody looked for, there I was. Now, how did I do it?
Well, at the time, I was doing some SEO, a little bit. But I'll tell you how I did it is I worked my way into every circle that had influence as fast as I possibly can and became known as somebody that produced and sold and worked my ass off, is what I did. That's what I did. Isn't it the same thing? Yeah.
Works? Pretty much every time? Yeah. Now, if you had just hung out and said, well, okay, Dave, I'll do that once I know the secret, right? Probably would have taken a little bit longer, right?
Well, you ignored me the first month or two anyway. Yeah, I did. Until I started producing and you're like... Well, and here's what happened. I want to tell this story is I did an article contest on who could make the best testimonial for something we were in, right?
And you made this hilarious video, right, that everybody thought was great. And then I looked at the video and then all of a sudden I realized that I'd been seeing your face in like... Like 4,000 places all over. I looked in two teams that I was in at the time and he was a top producer in both. Right.
You know what I mean? From nowhere. And I called him up, I started hanging out and talking with him. Yeah. And then from that moment, just everything took off.
Right. Right? Just worked that fast. Yeah. Okay?
Now, that sounds complex to people. It's not complex, folks. You know how to... If you've been in for a month, you know enough about SEO to just get enough traffic to stuff, right? If you're in three Facebook groups, you know how to talk to people.
On Facebook, it's not hard. It's just people avoid it. Don't they? See what you see? Is what you do very complicated?
I mean, it's weird, but it's not complicated, is it? No, it's not. Now, you're a social guy. Everybody is. But give Chris Nardi a hand.
Okay? Guys, you get in productive mode.
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