Tissa’s Story: Why Serving His Team, Not Chasing Commissions, Saved the House

Nine days. That’s how long Tissa had left before the bank sold his family’s home on the courthouse steps, and he was sitting in a leadership training room in Austin surrounded by people who had no idea. Not one of them knew that the house he’d built at the height of his online career, the one with the lot he and his wife had picked out together, had been in foreclosure for a year. Not one of them knew the SUV he’d surprised her with, bow and all, had already been sold to keep it from being repossessed. He tells this story on a Chicago stage a few months later, and it isn’t a comeback story about a check. It’s a story about what he actually did differently once he got home.

What does it look like when the proof that you’d made it quietly disappears?

Tissa had built real success online years earlier, the kind that buys a home outright and funds gifts that make a point. Then the business slowed, and rather than face it, he and his wife kept the appearance going while the mortgage went unpaid behind the scenes. Lawyers got hired to buy time instead of the bank getting paid. The propane ran out one December, no heat and no hot water for three days, and his wife started taking their two kids to the gym, not to work out, just so they could shower. He sat through a speakers’ training days later carrying all of that in silence, next to people he respected, saying nothing.

That gap, between what a room believes about you and what’s actually true at home, is the exact discomfort a lot of people in that audience were quietly sitting in themselves. Tissa didn’t dress it up. He just told them where he actually was.

What did he do differently once he got home with nine days on the clock?

He’d already made one decision in December, the moment he started promoting Empower Network alongside the other program he’d been running: change how he was living, on purpose, instead of drifting. Getting invited to Austin for leadership training confirmed something was working, and he made the second decision there, to go all in, even though going all in and covering the mortgage weren’t both financially possible at the same time. He chose going all in.

Here’s the part worth sitting with. He didn’t go home and grind harder on his own sales. He flipped the whole approach.

When I went back home, instead of me focusing on making money, I focused on helping others succeed. I gave and I gave and I gave and I gave.

He kept believing out loud in what his team members could do. He kept handing over whatever value he had to give. And the commissions started arriving, not as a lump sum, but as one mortgage payment, then a second, then two in the same week, then two more the week after that, until the exact payment that would have been nine days late instead landed on time.

Why does serving the team, not chasing the commission, actually move the number?

This is the part of Tissa’s story that’s easy to hear as a nice sentiment and miss as an actual mechanism. He wasn’t generating income by working his own funnel harder. He was generating it by making other people’s success his daily focus, which meant his team had reasons to keep going, kept producing, and that activity is what showed up as commission on his end. Serving came first. The number followed it, not the other way around.

As Tissa told the room, closing out his story, “it’s not the money that you need, it’s the belief that you need.” He wasn’t only talking about believing in the business. He meant believing in the people standing next to you enough to give them your attention before you’ve gotten anything back, especially on the weeks when your own house, in his case almost literally, is on the line. That’s a hard thing to do from a place of fear, which is exactly why he names the decision, not the outcome, as the moment everything actually turned.

Watch Tissa’s full session for the rest of the story, including what happened the week the last payment cleared and how he built out the team that carried him there. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

Oh, come on! I want to give you guys a hand for being here, for showing up. Let's each give each other a hand. Way to go, way to go.

So, I don't have a lot of time here, so I just want to tell you a little bit about myself, about my background, where I'm sort of coming from. I, back in 1999, I turned online to make money online, like so many of you have. You turn online, look to the internet for ways to make money online, right? And so, I started out in 1999 as a typical affiliate marketing ClickBank products, promoting all sorts of different programs.

And long story short, in 2006, I made my first million. I made a million dollars online, right? 2007, I made another couple of million dollars online. And so, we bought, we built, your life was good, right?

We built a million dollar mansion. It's kind of a funny story, actually, because we built our home, and we kind of picked out the lot, the land first. And my wife… My wife, who's here, she really wanted a Volvo SUV, okay?

That was like her thing, she wanted a green Volvo SUV, right? So, what did I do? I bought her a green Volvo SUV for $60,000, right? And it was kind of interesting, because I surprised her with it.

I put this big red bow on it, parked it on the lot where our home was going. It was going to be built. Drove up one day, and there was this Volvo, this SUV with a big red bow on top, you know. And I think that was around the same time I…

Her birthday's in April, I think that was in April. And, you know, again, life was good. We were making all of this money, and I bought her this… I still remember this $15,000 Tiffany diamond bracelet.

$15,000, right? right? Anyway, so that's what I've been doing, right? So let's fast forward to December last year, four months ago, December of 2012, when I started promoting Empower Network, yet another program that I was promoting.

And I started promoting it in December, and leading up to Austin, there was a contest. And I did really well in the contest. I think I placed 13th in the contest leaderboard. And Dave Wood sends me a message on Facebook, okay?

And he says, listen, I want you to fly out to Austin before the event for leadership training, for speakers training and everything. And I'm like, wow, that's pretty cool, right? You know? So the event, I fly out, on a Tuesday.

And the event was in Austin, much like here, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, right? I fly out on a Tuesday, because Dave Wood has said he's going to fly me out, right? Because I'm doing so well in Empower Network. So I fly out on a Tuesday, check into the hotel, and the front desk person says, you know, Empower Network paid for your first night.

Can we please have a credit card to charge $500 or $600 for the next five or six nights, right? And my heart sank. My heart completely sank. Everything inside me just dropped.

Because the next day, while I was sitting in a speakers training meeting, with bad asses like Lawrence Tam and Justin Varangia and Toby and Layla Black and Aaron Rashkin and many, I can't, John Morose right there. What they didn't know, what no one knew, no one, is that that million dollar home was in foreclosure. And it had been in foreclosure for the past year because our business had taken a downturn. And our bank had tried to sell that million dollar home from under us three times they tried over the past year.

And each time it was cheaper to hire lawyers than it was to pay our mortgage, to buy time. And they had sent us a letter they sent us a letter and they said if you don't pay us everything you owe us all those overdue mortgage payments by April 10th as in nine days ago we're going to sell your house on the courthouse steps. I have the letter. What those people didn't know, what no one knew is that that Volvo SUV that I bought for my wife with the big red bow on it, sold.

We had to sell it to prevent it from being repossessed. That's how far behind we were. Plus, we needed the money to pay for our health insurance to cover our family. We have two children, Alex and Emma.

Nine years old and four years old. That $15,000 Tiffany bracelet? Gone. Long time ago.

Sold. Why? Because we had to pay to have our propane tank filled. In December, this was in December, the height of winter, okay, the propane tank was empty, no heat, no hot water for three days in our million dollar mansion.

Okay? My wife was taking the children to a gym, not for the same reason most people go to a gym, but for the same reason most people go to a gym, but to give the children a hot shower so they could take a hot shower. And yet, here I am, on stage. Here I am on stage in front of all of you four months into Empower Network.

I made $65,000 last month. I'm up to $135,000 last time I checked. But, but here's the thing. How did I do it?

That's what you want to know. How did I do it? Right? Well, here's what I did.

The first thing I did is I got to Austin. I got to the event. Like all of you are here right now. You're at the event.

Okay? I got to the event. The next thing I did was go all in at the event. Because let me, let me tell you, let me explain the process here.

Because it was in December when I joined Empower, or I started promoting Empower Network. I made a decision to change my life. I made a decision that I was sick and tired of living the way my family was living. I made a decision.

Change takes time. Decisions happen in an instant. So I made a decision to change my life. To live life on my terms.

To live life on purpose. Okay? So we would no longer have to, we couldn't send Emma, our daughter, to dance class. Because we couldn't afford the $185.

No more. So I made a decision. And I got to Austin. I went all in in Austin.

And when I went all in, we had a choice to make. We did not have enough money to go all in and pay the mortgage. So we made a choice. And I chose to go all in.

And when I left Austin, just like when all of you leave Chicago, when I left Austin, I left with everything I needed to get to where I wanted to be. And you want to know what the secret is? I'll tell you what the secret is. When I went back, when I went back home, okay, when I went back home, keep in mind that the bank was going to foreclose on our home, sell our home if we couldn't pay them by April 10th.

When I went back home, instead of me focusing on making money, I focused on helping others succeed. I gave and I gave and I gave and I gave. Whether it was believing in other people in what they can achieve or whether it was providing value in the tools that I was providing my team, but I gave and I gave and I gave. And you know what started happening?

When I started staying positive and believing in others and giving value to my team members, you know what started happening? The commission started rolling in. The commission started rolling in. And we were able to make a mortgage payment.

And then we were able to make another mortgage payment. And then one week we were able to make two mortgage payments. And then the next week we made two more mortgage payments. And on April 10th, I kid you not, on April 10th, when the bank had told us, if you don't pay us what's owed, those late payments, we're going to sell your home, on April 10th, we made that last payment to become current on our mortgage.

Folks, I know so many of you, I know so many of you are going through struggles right now. For so many of you, getting here was a struggle. I know that. And so many of you believe that it's the money that you need to get through those struggles.

And what I'm here to tell you is that it's not the money that you need, it's the belief that you need. Believe in yourselves, surround yourself with like-minded, like-hearted, like-spirited people, like all of you who believe in each other, and incredible things will happen. The money will follow. The money will follow.

But you have to make that decision. You have to make a decision to change your life, to live life on your terms. You have to believe in yourself. And you know what?

If you don't quite feel yet that you're capable of doing it, all of us here believe in you. I believe in you. I believe in you. I believe in you.

I believe in each and every one of you. So make that decision. Because once you have that belief, and you surround yourself with people who believe in you, that's when you start to see the change. So last but not least, I want to give a shout out to Team Tessa!

You guys, all of you believed in me. Like I believe in you. And sweetheart, thank you for believing in me. And just very quickly, folks, just the last thing I want to say is, you know, I know that so many of you don't, aren't so fortunate.

We have family, we have friends, the naysayers, for whatever reason, they don't believe in you. It's just another one of those internet schemey things, right? You know what I'm talking about. It's okay.

Because there are 5,000 other people here who believe in you. Okay? I'm done, and I have 25 seconds left. Folks, obviously the income examples discussed in this video are extraordinary.

The income claims presented are not intended to serve as a guarantee of income. Instead, they're designed to give you an idea of what's possible. Success in this business requires leadership, hard work, and dedication. Since we want to help you make an informed decision, we've gone above and beyond with our income disclosure document.

If you want to see the average earnings, please visit the page at www.EmpowerNetwork.com. www.EmpowerNetwork.com. www.EmpowerNetwork.com.