Pointing to Resources: Why Helping Your Team Less Makes Them Grow Faster
Your team is growing. Your inbox is growing faster. Every new person who joins comes with the same five questions the last fifty people asked, and you answer every single one of them personally because that’s what a good leader does, right? Except your income isn’t growing at the same rate as your headcount, and some months it’s actually going backward, and you can’t figure out why more people under you keeps meaning less money for you.
It isn’t a mystery once you see the mechanism. It’s a direct trade you’ve been making without noticing: every hour you spend personally rescuing someone who hasn’t done the basics yet is an hour you didn’t spend producing, and a team leader in the Classic Masters Course walks through exactly how she caught herself doing it, and what she replaced it with.
Why does a bigger team sometimes mean a smaller check?
The leader in this lesson describes running her business the way most caring, competent people run theirs: personally. Every question got a personal answer. Every struggling team member got her direct attention. She calls it babying the team, and she says she did it constantly, to the point where she and another leader used to compare notes on how stressful it had become.
Here’s the part that should stop you: the more she trained people one-on-one, the worse her results got, even while her team kept getting bigger on paper. In her own words, “the more that I trained and the more that I babied and the more that I handheld, the less I would make consistently, even though the team was growing.” She had more people under her and less money to show for it, and the reason was simple once she named it. A team full of people waiting on her personal attention is a team full of people doing nothing until they get it.
That’s the trap hiding inside good intentions. Helping feels like leadership. It feels responsible, generous, like the opposite of abandoning your people. But every minute spent rescuing someone who hasn’t done the one or two things that actually move the needle is a minute not spent on the only activities that generate a check: producing, and helping people who are already moving produce more.
What do you replace personal hand-holding with?
She didn’t stop helping people. She changed what “helping” meant. First she moved to an auto-reply email that pointed anyone who wrote in toward a blog post answering frequently asked questions, then toward a short list of resources, her YouTube channel, her Facebook page, and eventually an assistant who could filter further. Over time that evolved into something even leaner: a short, repeatable system built around four things, blog daily, market daily, and consume two specific kinds of content every day, audio and reading.
The redirect became automatic. Somebody calls with a problem, and the first question isn’t “what’s wrong,” it’s whether they’ve done the basics yet. If the answer is no, the conversation ends there, not out of coldness, but because there’s nothing to diagnose in someone who hasn’t done the minimum yet. Skipping straight to personal rescue for someone who hasn’t done the fundamentals doesn’t fix anything. It just teaches them that skipping the fundamentals gets them your attention anyway, which guarantees they’ll skip them again.
Why does the same thing happen at 40,000 people, not just at 100?
Dave Wood makes the same point from the other end of the scale. With tens of thousands of people inside his organization, personal access simply stops being mathematically possible, no matter how much he might want to give it. As he puts it plainly, “there’s 40,000 people at Empower Network, and sometimes people just still get mad that I don’t return their calls.” Of course he doesn’t return every call. Nobody could. The alternative, letting everyone call, would collapse the entire operation under its own weight long before it ever helped anyone.
What’s useful here isn’t the number 40,000. It’s the fact that the exact same dynamic exists at 75 people and at 100,000. The moment your team crosses from small enough to personally manage into actually growing, which happens faster than most people expect, usually within a few weeks of anything actually starting to work, you either have a system standing between you and every question, or you have a bottleneck standing between your team and their own growth. That bottleneck is you.
What happens when someone goes around you looking for a softer landing?
There’s a specific trap that shows up once you stop personally hand-holding people: someone in your downline gets frustrated that you’re not rescuing them, and goes looking for a different leader who will. It happens constantly in teams built around a single company, and it’s tempting to solve it by softening your own boundary so nobody ever has a reason to look elsewhere.
The lesson here is to hold the line instead, and to make sure every leader around you is holding the same one. If a team member goes to a different leader hoping for a different answer, the answer has to stay the same: no, you’re still not going to get personally rescued for skipping the basics, here or anywhere else in this organization. Consistency across leaders is what keeps the standard from quietly eroding one soft-hearted exception at a time.
How do you make the redirect actually work instead of just deflecting people?
The real craft in this lesson isn’t the boundary itself, it’s what you point people toward. A generic instruction to go figure it out isn’t a system, it’s a brush-off, and people can tell the difference. What works is pointing to something specific enough to actually solve the problem and valuable enough that it keeps paying you while it does.
So I say, well, I’ll tell you what. I cannot do for you. I can’t do for you. What listen to that audio every day for the next month can do. I can’t do it. I cannot help you close as good as if you drive around in your car on your way to work tomorrow, listen to Dwayne Pyle on how he makes $10,000 a month, closing 85% of his leads. Can you promise me something? Yes, I can. Can you listen to that audio every day for the next three weeks?
That single redirect does three things at once. The team member gets a better answer than a rushed phone call would have given them, because the resource was built specifically to teach that one skill in depth. The leader earns a commission on the product the team member now has a reason to own. And the team member, having bought in, keeps encountering the rest of the material inside it, which sells itself the entire time the leader is doing nothing at all. One well-built resource replaces an unlimited number of personal rescues, and it gets better at its job while a live phone call never does.
This mechanism isn’t new. It’s the same one Dexter Yeager stumbled onto decades earlier building an early Amway organization, when he noticed his own presence was the bottleneck: he’d travel to a region, energize everyone in the room, watch production spike for a few days, then leave and watch it collapse again the moment he was gone. He started recording those sessions onto audio and selling the recordings instead of showing up in person every time, and the regions that used to need him stopped needing him at all. His personal presence had been the ceiling. The recording removed it.
If you’re still personally answering every question your team sends you, you’re not being a better leader than the people who’ve stopped. You’re standing in the same spot Dexter Yeager stood in before he figured out the fix, and your team’s growth is capped at exactly however many hours you have in a day.
This lesson goes considerably deeper into building your own resource stack, what belongs in it, how to structure the redirect so it doesn’t feel like a brush-off, and how leaders keep the standard consistent across an entire organization. It’s part of the Classic Masters Course. If you’re new to it, get the entire course, this lesson included, for $99 at the Classic Masters Course.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
We're bringing her up once this weekend, but guys, I just want to go, are you guys starting to see this, the difference between what people that make money do and then all the broke people out there that, you know, they're working really hard at nothing, you know what I'm saying? It's a pretty obvious difference, isn't it? Like when you're actually looking at what we're doing. You're awesome, by the way, here. Thank you.
Now, she's entertained. She'll just do the rest of the training this weekend, but now you're 50,000, what did you make last month? I don't even know. 39,611. 30, just under 40.
Well, you probably had some affiliate income. It was over 40. Oh, yeah. Well, it's Empower stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So this is Empower stuff. So you don't, you used to baby your team a lot. All the time. All the time you used to baby your team. Yeah.
I actually remember you doing, I think I had a conversation with you about that. We did. We used to talk about it on Skype. Yeah, talk about it on Skype. It's stressful, isn't it?
It's very stressful. I could relate to the young lady so much because as a woman, which is a totally different perspective, I think some men do. But as a woman, it's, you have that need whether you're in business or not. And so when you get in business and someone reaches out in a cry to say, could you help me? And we know the answer.
We want to give them the answer. And I was in that exact situation where the more that I trained and the more that I babied and the more that I handheld, the less I would make consistently, even though the team was growing. And that was a problem for me. I'm saying I have a larger team, but I'm making less money. Why?
Because more people are doing nothing. So I stopped that. And now I just don't. What did you switch it with? I mean, what did you replace?
So you were hand-holding the form, baby. Well, it wasn't a cut and dry thing. I felt bad, honestly, to do it. So I kind of transitioned into an auto-reply email. That if you send me an email, then...
And it would go back to you, it would direct you to my blog that had a video of me giving frequently asked questions and answers to them. Or, and then the next three resources that I thought would be of value to them, which would be my YouTube page, Facebook, or at that time it was like MySpace. And then, you know, you can call my assistant. And then she would filter from that point. So I still felt like I was helping people.
It's just I wasn't doing it personally. Right, right, right. Now I'm at the point where I don't really want anybody to help. I don't want to help anybody other than you help yourself. And the way that you help yourself is by, we have like a little four-step thing.
And it's literally, it's blog daily, it's market daily, and then it's the audios and read. And we pound audio and read. So if anyone calls me with anything, first thing I say is, you know, did you listen to the inner circle? Or did you read? And if the answer is no, then it's, I got to go.
Call me back once you've done that. Yeah. So there's no help now from that standpoint. And I want to point this out as a difference, guys. Because one of the biggest problems you're going to run into, and it's not a long time from now.
It's like pretty much two or three weeks after you start succeeding, you're going to run into this problem where your team is going to start getting too big to deal with if you're doing everything personally. Right? I mean, there's 40,000 people at Empower Network, and sometimes people just still get mad that I don't return their calls. You know what I mean? Well, it's like, of course I'm not going to return your calls.
What if I let everybody call me? It'd be awful. Right? I could do it anyway. What I actually found amazing is, and I know that the other leaders experience it too, probably from other people.
So from team members and other leaders' teams, because I get it from you, and I'm sure other people get it from me, it's, well, I signed up with Dave, and Dave isn't helping me. Can you? So in other words, Dave's too important to help you, but I'm less important, so I've got time to help you. And I say, well, no. I think that the way Dave is doing it is probably, I think he should stay, because I'm doing it that way too.
So if you want to join me, you're going to still not get help. Yeah. It doesn't matter, because I'm Tracy. That, you know. The help issue isn't there.
And I know people jump and try to do it, and some people might go to Tony and say, well, Tracy isn't helping me. Can you help me? No. It's the same. You're not going to handle it with me either.
No. I'm just curious. Okay. I used to feel bad when people would do that, though. I would feel bad if I found out that one of my team members went to Tony to get help, then inherently I felt I had failed at servicing that particular client or customer.
And so I would try to do everything in my power to get that person back. No, I will help you. Well, let me tell you guys how to actually make money answering questions. You guys, because then that's interesting. Because here's the problem.
If you've already got somebody in, there's no commissions except for what they're paying every month, right? And so then you're wasting your time doing something that generates no money. But then you can do it, and you can make money. So what I learned a while ago is you take everything that comes in as a question or something struggles with. But really, I mean, what do we struggle with?
Five things? You know, it's like, how do you get traffic? Okay. How do you email the leads? And, you know, how do you upsell stuff or close people?
I mean, there's a lot of stuff. There's like three or four skills that exist. You know what I'm saying? Not a lot. Three or four.
So what I started doing was just saying, hey, have you listened to that? You know, somebody says, how do I close people? You know, it's a fantastic question. We have an audio in the inner circle by a guy named Dwayne Pyle who closes about 85% of his leads. Would you like to know how he does that?
Well, yeah. Have you listened to the audio yet? No, I don't have the inner circle yet, Dave, which that audio also happens to sell other products in it as well. So I say, well, I'll tell you what. I cannot do for you.
I can't do for you. What listen to that audio every day for the next month can do. I can't do it. Can you promise me something? Yes, I can.
Can you listen to that audio every day for the next three weeks? Right? Now, here's the thing. Number one, I earned a commission. Number two, he can't listen to that thing for three weeks without buying the rest of the stuff.
Because Dwayne Pyle's talking about making commissions off all this other stuff. That's right. Right? So they listen to it, and then they buy more stuff while I'm doing nothing, and then they just don't bother calling back because we talk in the audio about not calling me back. Right?
I think I made a ton off Inner Circle with Justin's Inner Circle. Because even though I'm a blogger, I blog from my heart, right? And so I can come up with stuff that I guess other people just don't come up with. So when people would ask me, well, what should I blog about, it was difficult for me to tell people what to blog about because I blog about from what's on the inside, not because I'm I picked something. Well, Justin's Inner Circle was all about how you go to a particular website, copy and paste some information, give credit to the author of that particular content, post it on your blog post, syndicate it, and get traffic.
And so I would just constantly say, well, did you listen to Justin's Inner Circle? Did you listen to Justin's Inner Circle? Did you listen to Justin's Inner Circle? And people were buying Inner Circle because of Justin's Inner Circle. So thank you, Justin.
So think about this, guys. Okay. So rather than training your team and lowering your commissions and lowering the... Your production and wasting tons of time and hating your life, now you're making more money doing less and getting better duplication at the same time. Do you guys understand why we do that now?
Then what happens is that the people that get that at the beginning that are working with you, they become the saviors for the group. And when other people come in, they train them to follow suit with what you taught them. So now you're out. You're out. You've got a group training the group.
Let me tell you guys how this actually originated the first time. This is an interesting story that I only know because I met this guy that has been neighbors with Dexter Yeager since before he was in Amway. Okay? So I know the original tools business story. Right?
So this is what happens is Yeager starts... Who knows who Dexter Yeager is, by the way? Most of you. He's like the biggest network marketing person ever because he was one of the first guys to really build a big Amway organization. He's got like 10 million or 20 million or 50 million people on his team.
Just retarded. Right? And he's going around and he's building this business. But what he noticed was he'd go to an area, jack everybody up, right? And they'd get all pumped up and produce for three days.
And then he'd leave. And then this area would stop producing. Then this area would get pumped up that he went to. So he's constantly running around, right, to keep everybody, you know, pumped up. And his organization stopped growing when he started succeeding at a big level.
And it got more stressful. Right? Probably you guys have experienced something like this. So he asked himself a question. He's like, I wonder what would happen if I recorded one of these and just put it on an 8-track and just gave it to everybody.
But he couldn't give it to them for free. So he started selling it. Right? So what happened was as he goes to an area, jacks everybody up, it records it, puts it on a little 8-track audio, right, and then starts selling it to everybody for 10 bucks copy. You know?
Well, what happened was now he left an area and leaving the area and stopping helping them, it blew up. Because then without him, people were driving around their car. Listening to Dexter Yeager, jack them up and teach them how to be rich in Amway. So now he could go to an area, bam, bam, bam, his organization started to grow. But not only that, he was making, you know, triple the money from tools as he was from his business.
Right? So he's like, this is a pretty good scheme. And that's kind of the advent of how network marketing systems started in its rudimentary form. But guys, what you want to do is you cannot, and this is what I want everybody here to really understand. We do this automated.
But if you're doing some other organization and they don't have the tools, you're not going to have something like this. Your life is going to be full of pain because you're going to have to do, unless you put this together, you're going to have to do manually what a system can only do with more people than you could imagine dealing with. Right? What if your team gets to 10,000 and you're trying to help everybody? You imagine how bad that would suck.
It'd be awful. Right? So you want a system to do for you what you can't do. Right? Does that make sense?
Yeah. Yeah. You can sit down and stay up. Give her a hand. Grace Walker, everybody.
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