The Weekly Call That Turned Zero Results Into a Sixty-Person Team

Michael Martin’s starting point wasn’t a humble brag added after the fact for stage effect. In 2008 he and his wife lost a business, got foreclosed on, and watched the strain nearly take the marriage down with it. Years later, at his very first Empower Network event, he still couldn’t afford a hotel room close enough to walk to, so he stayed a mile off and hoofed it back and forth on foot. Alex Zubarev noticed him anyway, bought him a burger because his stomach was audibly growling, and treated him like he belonged in the room before he had a single result to point to.

Alex and Anna Zubarev brought Michael and his wife Chrissy up on the Lake Las Vegas stage to tell that story themselves, and what came next is worth more than the applause line it got. It’s a real answer to the question every new marketer actually carries around, which is less about strategy and more about how anyone survives the stretch where nothing is working yet.

What actually gets you through the part where nothing is working yet?

Michael is blunt about year one. It was tough. There was a process to learn, and for a long stretch there was nothing on the board to show for the effort. His own language for that stretch, the one he repeats to his team now, is direct.

the hardest part is sticking through when you’re getting zero results

Not the pitch. Not the funnel. Not the launch. The actual hard part is the invisible middle, the weeks where you’re doing the work and nothing on the screen moves. Michael’s answer to that stretch wasn’t a new tactic. It was a decision, made once, that quitting during the flat part wasn’t an option, followed by treating the business like a business instead of a lottery ticket he checked every morning.

By his second year he’d started climbing, and the business kept compounding even while he stepped away from it completely to do months of mission work in Africa and then South America. That detail isn’t in the story for flavor. It’s the actual proof of the model doing what it claims to do: a business that keeps moving, keeps talking to a team and an audience, even while the person who built it is somewhere else entirely, doing something that has nothing to do with checking a dashboard.

What replaces the event once everybody goes home?

The real teaching in this session isn’t the redemption arc. It’s the specific habit Michael named as the actual engine underneath the growth, and it has nothing to do with any single event, this one included. He calls it team consistency, and it started as a phone call between two people: himself and a teammate named Ed Perez in Brazil, checking in on how the week was going.

Nothing about the format was complicated. They talked. They invited someone else onto the call. Then another. Then another, until the call needed a second time slot because everybody couldn’t fit on the first one anymore. What began as two people talking is now two team-only masterminds a week, with fifty to sixty people showing up and participating on an ordinary Tuesday. The events people fly to a few times a year aren’t where the business actually gets built. That happens weekly, in the trenches, with whoever shows up on the call.

Why does following the system without arguing count as the whole answer?

Alex points out the one trait he thinks explains all of it: Michael never questioned anything he was told to do. Told to work through the core commitments, he worked through the core commitments. No renegotiating the instructions, no waiting for a version of the plan he liked better. Michael says the same thing about himself, and adds the part most people skip past when they hear it: it’s about daily action, not heroic action. You don’t need eight hours. You need to be present in the business for an hour or two, every day, without fail.

He reaches for the business he used to run to make the point land. As Michael puts it, “I can’t open the restaurant two days a week and be successful. That’s a myth. That’s a lie.” A restaurant open half the week doesn’t fail because the food is wrong. It fails because customers can’t build a habit around a door that’s only sometimes open. A network marketing business runs on the exact same law, and most people who stall out aren’t missing a better strategy. They’re missing the door being open every day.

None of this erases how good it feels to watch a man go from foreclosure and a mile-long walk to a hotel, to standing on a stage with a wife who just left her corporate job and a team that flew in from Brazil, Finland, and Peru to stand behind him. But the redemption story isn’t the part you can actually take home and use. The transferable part is smaller and far less dramatic. Get on a call with the two people who’ll actually answer. Do it again tomorrow. Keep the door open even on the days it doesn’t feel like it matters. That’s the whole mechanism Alex and Anna handed the microphone to Michael to prove, in front of a room that needed to hear it from someone who’d actually lived the zero-results part first.

The full session goes further than what’s above, including the full introduction and how the team-only masterminds are actually run week to week. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

Alex and Anna Zubarev. I love you guys. You got it. One, two, three, now!

Wow, guys, this came really impromptu, so we're extremely grateful to be here on stage in front of you today. I'm grateful, always, for the love you guys give us, for the wisdoms you guys share with us, for the stories you share with us, but we all have a little bit of a time. I know you know our story. We're here for one sole purpose, is to see our team rise up.

We see how much dedication I see every single day my husband puts out to send the messages to J-Kron, so you can only imagine how much dedication it takes to for him to help his team rise. Alex. Can you guys hear me? Man, this feels like Atlanta.

How many of you guys been in Atlanta? Just curious. I see, I see, I see hands. Awesome, awesome.

This energy is amazing, guys. This feels like Atlanta back in 2012, and Dave Wood probably did an awesome job last night conveying that message to you. I feel it inside out, Anna feels it inside out, Jonathan Kratstead feels it. But yeah, it's not about us.

Like when in our business, we're all focusing on like our needs, right? And that's where I've been probably the first year, and once I started going through the products, I realized that I need to shift my focus to you guys, to my team, right? And really create success stories, because ultimately Empower Network is the leadership factory, right? It's really my pleasure to bring on stage a superstar.

Superstar, yeah. who is number one, I think, for the last 30 days on income leaderboards, and maybe you'll learn a couple of secrets from him directly. And the best part about him, his wife is all in with him now. That is the best thing.

He was able to retire her. So without further ado, the superstar Michael Martin and Chrissy Martin. Come on stage, bro. What's up, guys?

All right, quick question. Who is in Austin, Texas? Awesome, awesome. God, I'm shaking like a chihuahua pooping in a pine cone, man.

This is freaking ridiculous. But anyway, it was funny because I heard them bring up, you know, Paul and Kimberly bring up Austin, Texas, and that was my first event. And I remember when I didn't even have the money to be in a hotel. I stayed about a mile away in a different hotel.

I hoofed it back and forth. But Alex believed in me for some reason. For some reason. For some reason.

He saw something. And he bought me a burger. He bought me a burger at the event. I guess he could hear my stomach growling.

Who knows? But while I was at that event, the stories that he didn't know behind the scenes were we were being foreclosed on. We had lost a business back in 2008, and it crushed us. It really crushed.

It tested our marriage. It tested everything. And I had, from a normal person looking at me from the outside looking in, and probably would say, you have no business being at that event. No business being at that event.

But we're not normal. Are you guys normal? Exactly. So something started happening at that event, and I just had this breakthrough.

And I just made a decision then that I was going to be powerful. That I was going to build a team. You know, I love watching Tracy Walker and some of them with the way that they just build culture and build a team. And this event is powerful because we brought a team.

And I want to invite all of my team to come up here with me real quick. Team consistency. Team consistency. Come on, guys.

And some of you are in the back. That's cool. All of you come up. And I'm going to share something about this in a minute.

What's up? What's up, bro? That, to me, that's power. So we built this team.

And I'll share really quickly, in a minute, how we actually created this. And it's not rocket science, honestly. But so fast forward through the first year in Empower, and it was just, it was tough. I mean, we had to learn things.

There's a process, you know, and but we stuck it through when we're getting no results. I always tell the team, the hardest part is sticking through when you're getting zero results. But you just got to push through. It's business.

You know what I mean? This isn't this isn't a lottery. So, so fast forward. Through the year, we started gaining some income, gaining some steam, and then, um, we got to the second year, which is 2014, right?

All right, we'd already just started over, started from scratch, and I just felt a calling, um, to go into global missions. Um, I felt that I was becoming powerful with our business. You know, we were making some income. She was still working.

She didn't like that. But, you know, I still said, I feel this calling to go to Africa. So I went to Africa, did mission work there. Uh, that summer or no, that, that, that spring and then got called in the summer to go to South America.

So still building this business. That's the power of just having an online business that can just fuel you while you're doing all these other things. So, um, then something happened. I don't know what happened.

I came back from, uh, from South America and, um, I finally got outside of myself, you know, I had finally been giving all the stuff that we heard about. Yesterday about, you know, you have to, like, when you start believing in other people or you have to believe in yourself before you can start believing in other people. And then when I started actually getting outside of myself, cause I was believing in myself by then. So, uh, we went to other countries and did work like that.

And it seemed the more that I put out there, uh, in the mission field, doing God's work, the more that was just coming back. And so then, so then right before, uh, right. Before Orlando, uh, we, we broke a first, our first five figure month and, uh, kind of walked into Orlando. And I love it.

Michelangelo always says, once you break your first five figure month, it's easy after that. And, uh, it just, it just started going crazy. And, uh, Alex got a little mad at me cause I pass them on the leaderboard and, you know, and this is coming from a guy who asked like how much money you want to make per month? It was like, Alex, three to $5,000 per month.

I was broke. So, uh, so fast forward to now, uh, we were expanding our, our vision's gotten bigger. Uh, we retired my wife last Friday from her corporate job. And then, and then we got to bring her on her first trip after that.

And we had to celebrate in Vegas, which that's pretty damn cool. And then we got to come celebrate it with this awesome team in our family here with you guys. So it's just, it's just amazing. And, uh, I can't be, um, I'm just grateful.

I'm just humbled. Like it really, I'm not, this is really my first time speaking on. Stage and, uh, scaring the crap out of me, but, but we'll do it like a hangout. So, um, so you probably wonder how we did this, like, how do you create this?

And it's, um, I just take pride. I started doing hangouts with my team team, only masterminds, what we call it. Yeah. And, and so, you know, we always say get to the events, but the events just don't happen here.

The events happen weekly in your business, being in the trenches with your team. And it was really just me and. Where's Ed, Ed Perez from Brazil, man. We were just, but, um, it was just me and Ed and we'd sit there and just talk about our business.

How's it going? Great. Well, then we finally invited a couple more people. Then a couple more people would come on and we would just kept sharing and sharing and sharing and inviting and inviting and inviting all our new members.

You got to tune in, you got to tune in. So it went from me and Ed or Ed and I to a couple more people. Jason started joining us. Then we had to add another hangout.

Cause you know, no, everybody couldn't get on. And now we're rocking team only masterminds twice a week with over 50, 60 people on them. So, and they're all participating. See, that's the power of those masterminds is you find your winners, the winners show up.

You know what I'm saying? So that really identifies who you want to work with in your business and help them in theirs. So, so we've done that. We've built culture, we built passion and it's just been amazing.

And so I'm just grateful. So thank you. Awesome. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you guys.

I wanted to add something and say specifically because of Michael persistency who came all in since Austin, Texas, I've seen him rise from zero to hero guys. He's a hero because you know what? Because of him, we have everything. We have our team that consistently shows up to the events, consistently shows up to our weekly calls, consistently, consistently produces results.

So Michael is a hero. Michael is a superstar, not only because he's crashing on leaderboards, but because he's putting it all together. And he believed in Alex and Alex believed in him. So thank you.

Thank you everyone. Thank you. I really also wanted to point it out that Chrissy, I want her to say something because it's important. You are brand new on stage.

So please. Anything you want. Um, I'm thankful for empower network, um, because it got me here, not being confined to corporate America and to be able to be free and yeah, I'll, I'll be able to pursue my passion with my husband and travel and meet a beautiful friendship and family. And you couldn't ask for anything more having a friends all over the world.

I mean, that's pretty powerful. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So also, I wanted to specifically say thank you from the team who traveled from Brazil at from Brazil, right?

We have teammate Joe who came all the way from Phil and frozen Finland. All right. All right. And we have a teammate.

Paula Paula came all the way from Peru. I mean guys, it doesn't take much. It really doesn't take much to get here. Once you get here, everything else is a different process.

You get here. Everything else is a different process. Once you get here. You get your mindset.

You get the connections that you were not getting on Facebook. It's irreplaceable, the mindset and the connections you make on the events. So with that, guys, I appreciate every single one of you. I really do.

I really do. So I love the team consistency. I just wanted to add, number one quality about Michael is he never questioned anything. Whatever I told him, he just did it.

He didn't question it. I told him, go through eight core commitments, it's done. Yeah, one thing I'll add real quick, now that I'm not so nervous. But anyway, it kind of just went away.

But that's what a lot of people ask me. They say, how are you doing it? How are you doing it? How are you doing it?

Yeah, we talked about the team side of it. But I just followed the system. I followed the steps. And people hate that answer.

You're like, no, that can't be it. No, that's it. And the biggest part of it, though, that everybody misses is I call this team consistency because it's about the daily action. There's four commitments in there that are all about daily action.

If you're not taking the daily action, it's not going to pop. It just won't. And it doesn't mean you have to be daily like eight hours a day. Just be daily.

Be present in your business an hour, two hours a day. But be present. It's kind of like when I owned a restaurant. I can't open the restaurant two days a week and be successful.

That's a myth. That's a lie. So be present in your business. So I'm done.

Thank you, guys. Thank you for showing up. And. Thank you.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you, guys. It's my pleasure to introduce our next power couple. Our friends.

Our friends. We know our favorite rock stars from Canada. There's two superstars and two rock star couple. The best people.

I mean, honestly, I mean, I've seen them being consistent with their business, with their daily productions and everything. It's our honor. And a pleasure to introduce to you guys, Toby and Layla Black and B. Come on, guys.