Cult Reinforcement Patterns: Why Some Teams Last Fifty Years and Yours Lasts a Month
You know the team leader who never stops. Every week there’s another rally call, another voice memo begging the team to hang in there, another late night talking somebody off the ledge who was about to quit. It works, sort of. The team stays together for a while. But the leader is the one holding the whole thing up with their bare hands, and the moment they get sick, go on vacation, or just run out of energy, the team stalls with them.
As anyone who has ever built a team already knows, that’s not what a real organization looks like. Most network marketing teams last a month or two before everybody scatters. The ones that hang together longer usually do it by grinding their leader into the ground to keep the energy up. Dave Wood spent years thinking about why some organizations, from Amway to entire religions, hold thousands of people together for decades without anyone personally cheerleading each one of them, and he built the answer into how Empower Network runs.
Why does keeping a team together usually wear the leader out instead?
Picture the standard version of team leadership: constant motivational calls, personal check-ins, late-night pep talks to keep people from quitting. It’s exhausting, and it doesn’t scale, because every person added to the team is one more person who might need that same call next week. The leader becomes the fuel source, and fuel runs out.
Dave noticed something different studying groups that actually last, from old-line direct sales companies to the church he grew up in. Those organizations aren’t held together by one person’s constant energy. They’re held together by a structure that runs on its own once it’s built, the same way a habit runs on its own once it’s formed. The hard part isn’t keeping people motivated forever. The hard part is designing the thing correctly once, so it doesn’t need a cheerleader standing over it.
This has nothing to do with manipulating people into staying somewhere they shouldn’t be. Most people joining a team have short attention spans and busy lives, and if the only thing holding them there is your personal charisma, you’ve built something fragile no matter how good you are at motivating a room. The groups that actually last fifty or a hundred years figured out how to make the structure itself do the holding, so the people inside it stay for reasons bigger than one leader’s mood on a given Tuesday.
What actually holds a group together for decades instead of months?
Every organization Dave found that stuck around for fifty, sixty, a hundred years shared the same basic shape, whether it was a corporation, a church, or a network marketing giant. There’s an inner circle at the top that people have to work to reach. There’s a clear vision behind that inner circle. And there’s an instruction system, a specific set of steps, that decides who gets in.
As Dave Wood explains it in the Classic Masters Course, “there’s a mastermind right there’s a vision that leads the mastermind they have rules to get into the mastermind.” That structure isn’t decoration. It’s the reason people chase the standard instead of drifting away from it. Wanting in on something exclusive pulls harder than being handed the same thing for free ever could, and once that pull exists, the steps underneath it can be almost embarrassingly simple.
How did a daily listening habit turn into over a thousand people at one event?
The steps themselves matter less than whether they feed each other. Dave built the whole system around a handful of habits, chief among them a daily audio and a weekly call, that reinforce the same message so consistently that the team starts moving without anyone personally pushing them. The proof of it is what happened before the company’s first major live event.
if you get your team driving around in their cars right listening to those audios it will change their life over time but here’s what it will also do they’ll just show up at the next event with no launch process no sales cycle no convincing no personal phone calls no emails of any kind they’ll just show up how do we get 1,250 people to our last event we tell everybody to listen audios every day the audios talk about the 8th floor steps one of which is being at the next event you don’t do it you’re not serious and so we said the next the first event we’re doing is Atlanta and 1,250 people showed up with no launch cycle or anything because they’re driving around their cars being told to go to the next event so they do that
Nobody phoned those 1,250 people individually. Nobody ran a launch sequence to hype the event. The habit did the convincing on its own, because the habit had already been repeated daily for months before the event was even announced. That’s the entire difference between a system and a personality. A personality has to keep showing up in the room. A system just has to keep running in the background of somebody’s commute.
Why does changing your message even slightly reset the whole thing?
Here’s the part that trips people up once they try to build this for themselves. It isn’t enough to have simple steps. The steps have to stay exactly the same for long enough that repetition can actually do its work. Every time the message changes, even a small tweak, the team has to relearn it, and relearning resets the clock on the entire pattern.
That consistency is also what makes the pattern durable enough to survive without the founder in the room. As Dave Wood puts it, describing the actual point of building it this way, “we want to create a system in a culture that sustains itself when we’re not around.” That’s not a side benefit. It’s the design goal. A team leader who’s still personally convincing every single person to stick around hasn’t built a self-sustaining pattern yet. They’ve just built a very demanding job for themselves, dressed up as leadership.
- An inner circle with real rules to reach it, so people chase the standard instead of ignoring it.
- A small number of steps, repeated the same way every time, that reinforce each other instead of competing for attention.
- A refusal to change the core message, because every change quietly resets how long the pattern needs to run before it catches.
None of this replaces genuinely caring about the people on your team. It just means the caring gets built into a structure that keeps working when you’re not the one making the phone call. That’s the actual difference between a leader who’s exhausted by their own success and one whose team keeps moving whether they show up that day or not.
The full lesson goes considerably further than what’s covered here, including the rest of the eight core steps, how they’re sequenced to feed each other, and how Dave applied this same pattern to turn a blogging habit into the backbone of an entire company’s culture. The entire course is available for $99 through the Classic Masters Course.
Get the course, watch the rest of this lesson, and start building the handful of steps that will still be running your team long after any single pep talk wears off.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
Yeah. Yeah. See what I'm saying? So, you know, sometimes people look at us, especially when you're new and failing, you're not really failing. You're just in really cheap, really valuable school.
Right, make sense to everybody? You're not failing. You didn't fail for years, right, Mike? You didn't fail. You're just going and you're learning, right?
So what I wanted to cover in a real brief time span is what I think is, I think this is worth a million dollars, honestly. And it's something that I thought up, so I've never heard somebody train this, but I thought about it from thinking about what I learned from those old Amway guys for years. You know what I mean? Because after I got out of it, I just was, you know, they programmed me so good, I just kept thinking about it and thinking about it and thinking about it, driving around. And I grew up Mormon, right?
Mormon church has one of the strongest cultures ever, right? A lot of religions do. And so I thought about that for a long time, too. You know what I mean? Because it was just a different kind of organization.
And I've always wondered, how does somebody get a group of people together and keep them together for like 50 years? You know what I mean? It's super unique. If you guys look at almost anything in life, it's just super unique. Most churches don't do that.
People go for a few years and then jump to something else. Most network marketing organizations last, you know, they last maybe a month or two. And most people just don't keep people around for a long time. And most of the people that do keep people around for a longer than average time run around ragged to do it, right? You guys met the team.
We talked about that a little bit earlier, but the team leader that's constantly doing inspirational calls all the time to pump their team up so they'll just keep, you know, going out another day, right? So I always wondered what the difference was between not working so much but keeping people around, right, then not working and everybody stays around, right, which is what we all want to do so we can make money doing nothing, right? So this is the concepts that I've come up with, and first I want to go over just the structure that I see, right. And this is just, this is trans-industry, this goes across every industry, it goes across religious organizations, cultures, like, you know, AA and these kinds of organizations, they have a similar thing. In every organization that I've seen that's been there for like 60, 70, 100 years, they all do this stuff, and nobody ever really talks about it, right?
And so here's what I noticed, is that everything, you know, groups have in common that do a successful job at sticking around for a long time, is they've got some kind of a mastermind at the top, right, that has rules that you have to fight to get in. Right, you have to kind of fight to get in the mastermind. There's kind of an exclusive group of people at the top, and there's rules on getting in the group, right? It's kind of not out of reach, but at the same time it is, you kind of got to work to get in it, you know what I mean. Like I learned a while ago that sometimes people will be more motivated if I tell them they have to do something to talk to me again than if I just tell them what to do, right. If I tell them what to do, and I, you know, I say, I say, you know, do this, they might do it, they might not. But if I say, here, before you talk to me again, this is what they'll go fight to do it to talk to me again, right? And that's more of a pull than a push as far as building an organization goes.
But there's a mastermind, right? There's a vision that leads the mastermind. They have rules to get into the mastermind, and then what they have is they have some kind of instruction book or instruction system, or whatever, and then they've got like a group of, you know, commandments, I'll say that because it's funny, right, commandments. And if you don't follow the commandments or the instruction book, then you can't get into the inner circle, right? So this is what every organization does. Corporations do it, Amway did a really good job at it, right, the Mormon church definitely did it, and Christian church did it too, you know. I mean, every large organization that sticks together has a unified message that everybody follows, right? Makes sense?
So here's the thing that's really interesting, and this is the thing I noticed when I was just thinking about this for a long time, because I was like, you know, why does somebody, you know, like if you got rules, how do you get this massive, unbelievable rules or commandments, or, you know, eight core steps, I stole that from Amway because they had eight core steps, and so I just called it the same thing because I thought it was funny. But, you know, how do you get like a hundred thousand people to all do the same stuff without running around, or like, working at all, right? This is what I wondered how to do.
And so I thought about it for a long time, I noticed this thing that's present in a lot of organizations, that, I know you'll think this name is funny, but I call it a cult reinforcement pattern. I don't know how to spell reinforcement, I think it's like, now my brother hated this term, I explained this to him and he said, I don't like that, but I think it's funny. So, cult reinforcement pattern. Now this is essentially, here's what it is, it's a self-feeding activity loop, a self-feeding belief system, or something like that. For example, I was in Amway, right, and they had an audio of the week program, right, and I was told to be on this program, I had to be on it, right? Aki, you were there. I couldn't talk to the upline if you weren't on it, I mean, they just wouldn't talk to you, right?
Well, the audios essentially, they had eight steps, right, and they had events every three months, and the audios told you to listen to the audios, follow the steps, and go to the next event, basically, and then told a bunch of stories, right? So basically, the hardest part was getting somebody into it, right, and getting somebody a part of it, but once they were a part of it, you could essentially just move away and leave them alone, they're just running themselves, right? That makes sense to everybody in here.
So it's a self-reinforcement pattern, right, and you can do this with anything, you can do it with belief, right. Like if I go up to somebody, and you say, why do people believe certain things, well most of the time it's just a circular logic pattern that feeds itself, you know what I mean, there's just this logic pattern that runs around in a circle like this all the time, where, you know, people believe that money's bad, right, because, you know, their parents told them so, and they looked at their parents, and the only time their parents have money they were frustrated, and so when they go out and they try to make money, you know, they just repeat, the belief in their life gets frustrated, that means it's true, they just believe it because it's just a big circular logic pattern that feeds itself, right?
Well, you can do that for cool things too, right? So I look at it like this, I look at, when you have an organization, the biggest, the most important thing to do, right, is to determine what you want to accomplish with it, right, what's the vision, what's the mission of it, you know. If we wanted to say we all want to make a bunch of money, well then we create a pattern in one way, right, and it'll work. But if that's not the only goal, you need to change some stuff around. Like we were talking about earlier, there's a lot of ways to duplicate an organization, right? There's a lot of ways to train a team.
We can have everybody do a personal, you know, thing where they ran over all the material in the Fast Start videos, for example, you know, and you sit down and you have a strategy session over a coffee, right? Well, the problem is, what if somebody joins 5,000 miles away, you know? What if you get five people to join in a day, and then it starts getting awful, right? That make sense? So you have a self-reinforced progression.
Just let me give you an example of, you know, what something like this looks like, and you can do it in anything, and every big organization does it, and once you get it, this is super cool, right? And you can do it with literally any concept you want. You can create a concept that just self-perpetuates itself. You just start it, right.
And then it just kind of feeds itself. And this is the rule that I have, is you create some kind of a system, a belief system, a series of steps, traffic system, wherever it is, where you put a certain amount of energy into the system, energy, work, recruiting, whatever it is, and after a certain time period of energy going into the system, the cult reinforcement pattern produces more activity than you ever put into it. So, for example, like with duplication, for example, we have pass-up sales, right? It's super predictable the point at which people get more pass-up sales than they pass up. That make sense?
You pass up your second, fourth, sixth, and every fifth sale until somewhere between 70 and 90 people, right, as long as you're following the system. Somewhere between that, and for most people, they start getting leveraged pass-ups in larger numbers than they're passing up. Make sense? Right. So, here's what we do, is we have eight steps, right, and I'm going to talk about it real quick, and keep this in mind as we talk about it.
Five, six, seven, eight. And they feed each other, right? They feed each other. And the most difficult part of our job is getting people to actually just start doing it.
Right? But once they start, you can essentially just leave it. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
You know, the last time you do it, it's going to get really bad, right? And this is how people do it. They can't do it, they're just going to leave.
And it just keeps going, right? This is how the Amway guys hold their organizations together. Because you get, if you think about it, you're doing a conference call, and we do a conference call, well what happens when Empower Network goes into 18 countries, which it's in more, right?
Well then people can't dial in with a call, because it's, you know, 5 in the morning, and, you know, they're in a country, right? That make sense? So, you know, ours are fairly simple. But there's a few that are the most important to talk about all the time, because those steps are the ones that feed the whole system, all right. And they are the weekly call. I'm not going to go over all the eight steps because you could just log in and look at the Fast Start tab, but the weekly call, right, and we'll have some, you know, we put those up in the audio of the week if somebody misses it, because there's, you know, in the UK, I don't know what time that is, Simon, it's like four in the morning, so, right, weekly call, the daily audio, the daily audio specifically, the next, those three things feed the culture of our whole system and keep everything running together without doing anything other than just showing up, right.
So, in other words, if you get your team listening to audio, right, and blogging daily would be another one that would probably be as important, but it won't feed the beliefs the same way that the audios do, right. If you get your team driving around in their cars, right, listening to those audios, it will change their life over time, but here's what it will also do, they'll just show up at the next event with no launch process, no sales cycle, no convincing, no personal phone calls, no emails of any kind, they'll just show up. How do we get 1,250 people to our last event? We tell everybody to listen to audios every day. The audios talk about the eight core steps, one of which is being at the next event, you don't do it, you're not serious. And so we said the next, the first event we're doing is Atlanta, and 1,250 people showed up with no launch cycle or anything, because they're driving around in their cars being told to go to the next event, so they do. That makes sense to everybody in here, right?
So the audios feed the whole culture system, but they do some other things as well. For example, upsell. Now there's a lot of ways you could sell stuff, you need to do personal calls, Fast Start coaching sessions, we send out voice broadcast to new members with the, you know, Fast Start training call, I don't know if everybody in here has heard that because it's a new thing that increases upsells fairly dramatically, we have, you know, the eight videos, all the stuff. But what the audios do, and why they're important, is because the audios create a belief system that's conducive to selling stuff. If you have an organization, right, the audios teach people where to find training and products, right. So if somebody wants to close better, and they start listening to the audios, and they start looking for audios on closing, and they listen to any of them for a few days, if they don't have the Costa Rica Intensive or the 15K Formula, they'll just go buy it on their own without you convincing or doing anything, because they're driving around in their cars hearing about a product, and they say, I need that, and they log into the back office, click on a tab, there's a sales video, they just buy it. That makes sense, everybody, okay?
That's why we do what we do. We want to create a system and a culture that sustains itself when we're not around, okay? The only way we can do that is to have a unified message, and that unified message also changes people's lives, because there's not a better way to inspire and teach people than to have them being trained in their downtime. It does work.
Now, as an example, I want to share something we don't share a lot. We actually have people, I get about three emails a week of people that quit drugs, right, because they heard him talk about it in one of the calls, the audios, how many quit drugs, right? We have a guy who's, that guy that you were telling me about, which one was it, hold on, if you just call them down here real quick, this guy, can you come down here real quick? I heard the story, and here's the thing, is I get things like this, not quite like this, it is a little bit unique. A lot, okay, and this is kind of the mission and kind of a greater vision here of what to do. You might, you might give me a hug, by the way, appreciate you coming down here. You might share.
Yeah, that's what I wanted to share this. Well, first I want to say, I'm so jacked up being here. Best experience I've ever had in my life, actually, first vacation ever, and well-deserved. And I'd like to say I've met the best people out here than I've ever met anywhere in my life, and my appreciation for that experience, couldn't get that anywhere else in my life, and thanks for welcoming me just as a person, you know, no judgments made. But there is one thing I did, I do need to share, and just a few weeks, it wasn't a regular day, I'm in the medical field, and what I, what I was actually doing was ending my life. The supplies from the details of what that, I didn't have, believe. So I was driving home, and I live in Southern California, about two hours east from San Diego, it's usually over 100 degrees, but this particular day it was actually pouring down rain. Through this intersection, my car actually stalled, and there's hundreds and hundreds of cars going through, and just for some reason my car stalled, and I barely had enough momentum just to pull over on the side. I was actually stuck there for 30 minutes in my car, so I just started playing one particular message that David Sharp said that really made me start believing again, and it's, there is a bigger purpose for you in your life, and what you're doing right now, and we're here to do it together. Calm down, it was the best one of these.
Here's the thing, guys, and just, you know, stories like that, reaching into somebody and making them believe in themselves again, we can reach more people than you ever thought you can reach, what you let go, little, you know, because think about, think about, first, second, yes, Dave wasn't willing to share his story, and when you are young, that's what we do, we love each other.
A story about the struggles we had with addiction, you know, I mean, and we have the ability through our culture to create a new kind of belief in somebody, right? What happens to somebody when they disbelieve in themselves, they don't believe, they believe everything in life has to be painful and difficult and hard, right? And when we come in and we change that, which is not instant for most people, right, they got to go through a little bit of a process, right, they got, somebody says that's brainwashing, you say, well, some people's brains need to be washed, right, and you get them believing that making money is easy, change their whole life, right, change their life.
And so not only do we create things in a way that sustains itself, but we create things in a way that can change people, because there's nothing more powerful, this is the last thing I want to say, there's nothing more powerful than believing in people and getting them to believe in themselves again, and giving them the tools to be able to live their dreams and accomplish their dreams, accomplish their mission, accomplish their vision, right. That's the real vision in Empower Network, to lift people up.
Now, just financially, guys, there's a bigger picture here. What about all the people who have been out there in the business world that never fit in, they're always a cog, you know, they're always, you know what we say, a square peg in a round hole, you know what I'm saying, we come in and they can just be themselves, right? So there's a bigger vision in everything that we do, and it has a purpose, it works, right, and these are the reasons why it works. And just keep that in mind when you're going out there and you're doing things. If you do have team sites and things, Tracy's team sites work the way they work because she's reinforcing our system, and she's her own independent team identity that reinforces that system, so her team duplicates the system, and she's even a little bit better because of that. Makes sense to everybody in here? So we're going to give Scott a round of applause again.
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