Do As I Do: Why Helping Your Team With Everything Is Teaching Them to Fail
Somewhere around the twenty five dollar level, a stranger becomes your responsibility. They join your team, they have a question, and you answer it, because that’s what a good sponsor does. Then they have another question. Then a support request. Then a Facebook post asking where you are. A few months later you’re checking your phone every twenty minutes, your team’s group is a running commentary on when you’ll wake up, and despite doing more for more people than you’ve ever done in your life, your production has gone from two sales a day to zero.
That’s not a story from a burned out beginner. It’s a leader named Eve, on stage at a Classic Masters Course event, walking Dave Wood and a room full of other producers through exactly how she broke her own business by trying to help it.
Why does helping your team feel like the responsible thing to do?
Eve’s numbers, before any of this, were strong. She’d stripped her business down to one system, stopped splitting her attention across half a dozen tools, and gone from two sign ups a week to two a day, bringing in fifty people in a single month. Then the same people who’d just joined at the $25 level started asking her for help, and she gave it to them, because that’s what she’d always done in a job.
As Eve told the room, “I’ve been so used to like in a job being like a people pleaser and doing what people expect me to do. And then these people come in at the $25 level. And they expect you to help them.” So she answered every question. She built a Facebook group to centralize it. And the group turned into exactly what she was trying to avoid: a queue of people waiting on her personally, announcing to each other that a question would have to sit unanswered until she woke up.
What happens to your production when hand-holding becomes the job?
The math here is blunt. Eve had been averaging roughly two sales a day, mostly without ever picking up a phone, because the time difference with her team made calls impractical. Then she started fielding every email personally, and within weeks her production didn’t slow down. It stopped. Her stress level, in her own words, went ridiculous. And her team, the fifty people she’d worked so hard to bring in, went quiet right alongside her.
The mechanism behind that collapse isn’t mysterious once you say it out loud. Every hour spent answering a question for someone already on your team is an hour not spent finding the next person to bring in. And the demand doesn’t stay flat. Answer a question once and you’ve taught your whole downline that a question gets an answer, so the next email arrives faster, and the one after that faster still, until a leader who was closing new people twice a day is spending her mornings triaging a Facebook feed instead of prospecting.
Isn’t refusing to help your team just abandoning them?
This is the part of the lesson that makes a room uncomfortable the first time they hear it, and Dave doesn’t soften it. Standing in front of the group, he draws the line plainly: this isn’t about being a martyr for your team, and answering every question personally isn’t generosity. It’s a slower way of teaching people to fail. If you’re the one solving every problem, your team never learns to solve one, and the day you get tired, or simply disappear for a weekend, the whole thing stops with you.
The instruction he gives next is almost aggressive compared to how most new leaders are taught to behave. If a Facebook group turns into a running log of unanswered questions, delete it. Point people to a customer support request instead of your personal inbox. And the best thing you can do for someone you just brought onto your team isn’t to answer their question, it’s to go find the next person, and show your existing team, by example, that the business runs without you personally solving every problem in it.
- Delete the group chatter instead of letting it sit there as an open queue of unanswered demands.
- Redirect questions to a support process instead of your personal inbox or phone.
- Spend the freed hours bringing in new people, which teaches your existing team more than any answer you could give them.
Why does teaching someone everything you know sometimes teach them the wrong thing?
Eve has her own version of this same problem, and she names it herself, mid-story, almost as a realization happening in real time. She wasn’t just burning her own hours. She was teaching her team to plateau at her own level, not the number most of them had actually joined to hit. Answering every question personally doesn’t just cost you time, it teaches your whole downline that sitting around hand-holding people is what production looks like, when it’s the opposite of production. Do that at scale and nobody underneath you ever learns to bring in a new person, because everyone’s too busy hand-holding the two or three people already assigned to them.
This is also the trap Dave describes falling into early in his own career, before he understood what he was actually selling people when he offered to “help them with everything”. He used to pitch new recruits on exactly that, framing his own personal attention as the reason to join his team. It worked, and then it broke him. The more successful he got, the more he got pounded with requests, phone calls, and people wanting him to close their prospects for them personally, until the help he was offering as a bonus became the thing eating every hour of his day. So he flipped the pitch entirely. As Dave Wood tells it in the Classic Masters Course, he started telling new prospects
the reason you should join my team is because I won’t help you with anything.
It’s because if you got a choice, right, and let’s just say it’s A or B, and this is only two choices you got, and choice one is to, you know, make $100,000 a month and work your ass off all day and night, and choice two is to make $100,000 a month and go to the beach and do nothing, which would you prefer?
The favor isn’t in what a leader does for a team. It’s in what they refuse to do. Help your team all day and your day fills up with helping your team, and the bigger the team gets, the fuller that day gets, until there’s no room left for anything else, including a life. The whole point was a business you could have a life next to, not one that swallows every hour you’re not sleeping.
What actually replaces hand-holding once you stop doing it?
None of this works as advice unless there’s something to put in hand-holding’s place, and the training is specific about what that is. Group mechanisms instead of individual ones. A recurring team call, run on a fixed schedule instead of on demand, does the emotional work that a hundred one on one messages used to do, at once, for everyone, without requiring you to personally reassure each person standing in the queue. Dave says a call like that eliminates ninety percent of the one on one traffic by itself. The goal isn’t distance for its own sake. It’s replacing a system that scales to zero, you, answering everyone personally, with one that scales to any number of people at all.
Dave describes running his own team this way for years, and the examples land almost flatly because there’s nothing dramatic in them. He never called leaders on his team for years just to encourage them, never phoned someone new to check in and pump them up. Asked directly, on stage, whether he’d ever done that, one leader who’d been on his team for two years answers simply: no. Not once, in two years. That leader still built a real business under him, because personal hand-holding was never the obstacle people assume it is. More than one leader in the room describes the same relief once they stopped: happier almost immediately, the phone quiet, the low hum of obligation gone.
What do your team members actually lose when you solve everything for them?
Eve gets to the real cost near the end of her own story, and it lands harder than the production numbers do. As she put it, “I want to tell people, you are my sponsor in Empower, and I’ve never once talked to you in Empower, but I still went out and figured it out myself. And I think that sometimes what happens when you don’t let them figure it out for themselves is like, and I’m just learning this right now, is that they don’t have the belief in themselves. They have the belief in me, and they go, OK, great, I’m going to watch you get better and go further. But they don’t believe that they can do it, because they think that they need me to handle everything.”
That’s the actual trade being made every time a leader answers a question their team member could have solved alone. You’re not giving them an answer. You’re giving them one more reason to believe the answer lives with you instead of with them. Do that enough times and you’ve built a team of people who can recite exactly what you did and cannot do a single piece of it without you standing next to them, which means the day you slow down, they slow down too, because you were never actually building their belief in themselves. You were building their belief in you.
What’s here is one slice of a full lesson recorded live in the Classic Masters Course, where Dave and the leaders around him work through the entire “do as I do” principle in more depth: how to run the kind of group call that replaces individual hand-holding, how to handle a Facebook group that’s turned into a support queue, and the exact reframe to use with a team member who thinks refusing to help them is somehow the same as not caring about them. If you’re new to it, the entire Classic Masters Course, this lesson included, is available for $99 at the Classic Masters Course.
Get the course, watch how the rest of the session unfolds, and go find the next person to bring in instead of answering the last one’s question.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
What were you doing? Just talk about it for a sec. Well, what I was doing is I basically, I went to Atlanta. And in Atlanta, I realized that I was complicating a bunch of stuff. And I realized that I wasn't just trusting you guys.
And I was like, okay, either these guys know what they're talking about, or why am I following them? So if I'm following them, and I'm not doing what they're telling me to do, then why am I even doing this? So I decided I was going to prove you guys wrong. Or I was going to just prove the system and prove it right. So I got rid of all the extra crap that I had.
And I said, I'm just going to use your stuff. So I actually got rid of every tool I had. I even had another blog that I just put it on hold. I just put a static page on it saying, hey, you guys, this blog is my baby. But this blog over here at Empower works way better.
And then I just focused on using Empower stuff. And you brought in like 75 people. No, I brought in 50 in a month. And before that, I was doing two a week. And then it was suddenly like flipping a switch two a day.
And you were grinding a little bit to do that. A little bit. I don't talk to people on the phone. Because the time difference is really difficult. So what I've done is I've started to just use the systems to get them in.
And then once they're in at the 25 level, then I was talking to them. And you're upselling from there. Upselling. Yeah. Now, somebody told me something.
I'm not sure if this is accurate or not. But one of the other leaders, I can't remember who it is, said they were talking to you. And you're bringing a bunch of people in. But then you kind of started helping everybody and stopped the freeing. Can you tell us about that and what you did?
I want to talk about this here for a second. Very common. This is actually part of what I was talking with Ashley about last night. Which is that I've been so used to like in a job being like a people pleaser and doing what people expect me to do. And then these people come in at the $25 level.
And they expect you to help them. And so I was helping them. And I was answering their questions. And I created a Facebook group. And it was in order to kind of help them all in a centralized location.
But then what was happening is they were all hanging on the Facebook group saying things like, oh, there's this question. We better wait until Eve's awake, you know, to come on and answer it. And yeah, it was like eating me alive. And then. Just time consumed with helping everybody.
Well, it's just like my stress level was like ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. Like I was only spending two hours on the phone a day maybe. I wasn't talking to them on the phone.
But it was just like an email would come in. I would feel like I would need to answer it because I had set that expectation. And the more you answer it, the more questions you get. That's just so everybody knows what happens, right? You do it once and then you just get beat to death, right?
Yeah, absolutely. And now it's like. What happened, just real quick. So you were producing about two sales a day. Yeah.
Right. Not really on the phone a lot. No. But you started helping everybody. Yeah.
And what happened to your production? It's like totally. Like it stopped. And you go. Right?
Yeah. And then your team just all goes. Yeah. And I ran into the, like a little hiccup in my marketing. And I was just like, I just didn't even want to recover from it.
Because I didn't want to recruit people and then I have to deal with them all the time. So. I've done this, by the way. That's why I'm asking. Because she just did it.
And I'm just going to tell you guys. Because, you know. It really sucks. This is so common. Eric, you've never done that, by the way.
I'm curious. Oh, same thing. It's the worst thing ever. Tracy's just like, oh, God. Right?
No. Now, guys. This is not about being Mother Teresa. Right? This is the thing.
The best thing you can do for these people that you just got in is go get more people in. And show them that you don't need them. And you're going to do without them. Right? And if there's something that's going to teach them what to do, it's that.
All right? So, you know. If you've got a Facebook group and it's just filled with chatter all day. You just, you know. Hit the delete button.
You know what I mean? And say go, you know. Put in customer support requests. But also, you notice how in our group. Before Facebook deleted it.
Of course. But the, you know. If somebody put in support requests, we'd say, hey, you know. Read the rules. No.
None of that here. Right? And then if they kept doing it, we'd just delete them from the group. Right? Why?
Because this happens. Yeah. Yeah. And helping people like that does not help them. Right?
We're talking about this earlier. We're talking about being okay with people failing. Right? But it's not even that. This isn't being okay with people failing.
You're helping them fail. Right? By trying to help them with everything. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I realized just today is that if I'm teaching them how to do everything, I'm teaching them how to make, you know, between five and ten grand a month, which is my level.
Like that's, they don't want to make that. They want to make more. They want to make the money that everyone else is making. And then I'm trying to teach them what I'm doing. And what I'm doing isn't making the money that they want to make.
So I'm handicapping them by taking them away from the tools and the people who, like, train them. I'm teaching them how to do this, though. Because you're not teaching them how to make five to ten grand a month. If you were, you'd be getting new people in. What you're teaching them how to do is you're teaching them by sitting around hand-holding is you're saying, sitting around hand-holding people is how you make money, which it isn't.
So what you're actually teaching them how to do is how to make no money at all. Because if you have 50 people to hand-hold, they've got two. You know what I mean? So then they're going to say, well, you know, this is how you make money. And so they're going to go hand-hold their 30 people, and then those people will hand-hold their two people, and nobody will make any money at all.
Right? But here's what happened to me, and I'm telling you this because you just did this, okay? Here's what happened to me, is I used to get people in the internet by telling them I'd help them with everything. Because I was like, it's a great bonus, isn't it? I mean, isn't it a wonderful bonus that Dave Wood's going to help you with everything?
It's like, hey, you should join my team because, you know, I'm going to help you with everything. You know? And I had all this sales stuff in there, too, that actually made them make the decision, but I thought it was a good bonus. But then I started getting some emails. I was like, well, you know, this is where, you know, you find a blog.
And then you start getting pounded with more emails, and my phone starts blowing up. Then people want me to help them close their prospects, and then people want me to help them put presentations on their site, and then people want me to answer their questions personally. But here's the problem, is the more successful I got, the more I got pounded to death, right? So then I changed my funnel around, and I said, the reason you should join my team is because I won't help you with anything. And at first, people go like this, but then I explain it, and I say, let me explain why I'm not going to help you with anything, and it's good for you at the same time.
Right? And so here's the question for you. The question is, is that if I help you all day, what do you have to do? You have to help your team all day, right? If you help your team all day, what is your day going to be consumed doing?
It's going to be helping your team all day, and the more big your team gets, the more you're going to be helping them, and the more your life's going to be awful. So I'm actually doing you a favor by not doing anything for you. Let's build a business and have a life, and they're like, yeah, and then they join, just in larger numbers, but now I had to, I got no phone calls. My phone calls just dropped, right? I figured I'd tell you that, because you just did it.
I did it like two years ago. I know. I was in that group. And then we saw the change. I used to help people, and then you're like, hey, you stopped.
Yeah, you stopped. Yeah. That's when I immediately got 10 times as happy. And what the thing that has been frustrating me is I want to tell people, you are my sponsor in Empower, and I've never once talked to you in Empower, but I still went out and figured it out myself. And I think that sometimes what happens when you don't let them figure it out for themselves is like, and I'm just learning this right now, is that they don't have the belief in themselves.
They have the belief in me, and they go, OK, great, I'm going to watch you get better and go further. But they don't believe that they can do it, because they think that they need me to handle everything. It is. It is. Give her a hand, everybody.
So, hey, what are you going to do next 30 days? Are you going to hand-hold your team? I don't need this. Are you going to hand-hold your team? No.
No. OK. Give her another hand. All right. Stop it.
Right? So again, let's define what you do again. You're not hand-holding your team. Right? This is why we do a Monday call, right, because then everybody can get together and get pumped up.
It eliminates 90% of the one-on-one stuff. I'm going to talk about that more tomorrow with culture stuff on how to pump people up without being around. Right? How to pump people up without being around. Who here would rather pump people up without being around all the time?
Right? Who here... How many of you in here... Just think about this for a second. How many of you guys have ever gotten a personal phone call from me or Dave Sharp to pump you up?
Aki, my brother. Justin. You know. I don't remember that, but probably. Did I?
I called you? Personally, just to pump you up? Oh, yes. He just made money. So I called him to record an interview so I could put it in the inner circle to pump everybody else up.
Right? But that's the point. Lawrence, you were in my team for what? Two years? How many times did I call you and just be like, Lawrence, let me pump you up?
No. Not ever? No. In two years? No.
Never? Not a single time? No. No. No pump sessions?
No. No pump sessions. Right? John and Rose joined my team and then never did anything for a while. It was before Power Network, but I never just called to just say, hey, can I pump you up?
No. Hey, John, I want to just give you a back massage. No. Hey, let me hold your hand and walk through a field of flowers with you. No.
None of that stuff? Yeah? Here, Rob Ford. This is a great one. Bring Rob Ford.
On the fast track. On the fast track.
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