Using Your Own System: How Other People’s Promotion Builds Your List For You
You’ve got a list. You’ve got a few people in your downline. Every one of them, you got yourself, one call, one message, one video at a time. That works, right up until it doesn’t, because you only have so many hours in a day, and your business can only grow as fast as you personally can talk to people.
That’s not a work ethic problem. It’s a structure problem. You’re not lazy. You’re the bottleneck, and being the bottleneck gets old fast, especially once you notice everyone above you in this business seems to be growing without doing every single thing themselves. You built something that requires you to be the one doing the reaching, every single time, and there’s a ceiling built into that model whether you’ve noticed it yet or not.
As someone who’s already got a team going, you’ve probably been told to build a system and pictured something technical: funnels, software, a tech stack you’d need a programmer for. In the Classic Masters Course, Dave Wood sits down with one of his own team leaders, a guy named Chuck, and walks through exactly what Chuck built instead, and why it never looked anything like what most people picture when they hear that word.
Why did a tool that had nothing to do with Empower Network end up growing it?
Chuck didn’t set out to build a recruiting machine. He built something to build his list, a free tool he handed out to help people market or make a little extra income without spending much to do it. At the time, it had no connection to Empower Network at all. It existed because he wanted a way to stay in touch with people and, eventually, make them an offer.
For a while, that’s all it was: a separate list-building habit, run apart from anything he sold. He’d email that list about Empower Network occasionally and pick up a sale here and there, but the two things lived in different lanes. Most people stop right there. They build the list. They build the offer. They never connect the two on purpose.
What changes when your main offer rides in on the back end instead of the front?
Chuck’s move was to stop treating the tool and the opportunity as two separate projects and put one inside the other. He relaunched the tool with Empower Network attached as the offer waiting at the end of it, the thing people saw only after they’d already gotten something useful for free.
Here’s how Chuck described that shift, in his own words, when Dave asked him to walk through what he’d changed:
And then Empower came along, and I still hadn’t done anything, like, with the two of them combined at that point. So I would send emails, you know, to that list of people about Empower, and I would build some, get some sales that way. But then I thought, well, what if I put this as part of my presentation, like, as a, as like an upsell or something to the, you know, Empower is the upsell on the back end of what I’m offering. And I relaunched it that way at the end of May, which just, you know, a couple months ago.
That single restructure, moving the opportunity from the front pitch to the back end of something people already wanted, was the whole difference. Chuck said his income jumped enough after that relaunch to move him up a full income bracket. He put a number on the projection during the month of the Atlanta event, thirty thousand dollars, and on where his most recent month had actually landed, over fifty thousand.
As Chuck put it, describing that stretch directly, “I think that was at the month of the event in Atlanta, right? You think you were projecting, I’d end up like 30,000. I think I ended like over that. And then last month, you know, over 50.”
Why do signups show up from people who never even join you?
Here’s the part that actually multiplies the effort. Once the tool is out there working, other people promote it, not because they signed anything, but because it’s helping them too. The same free value that originally built Chuck’s own list is now getting handed around by people who use it. Every one of those promoters is, without meaning to, building Chuck’s list right alongside their own.
There’s a rule sitting underneath that keeps the whole thing fair, and it’s the same rule that keeps this from feeling like something shady. Anyone already sponsored inside Empower Network keeps their own sponsor. Nobody’s sales get redirected. But if the person clicking through has no sponsor yet, somebody has to be the default, and that default is whoever built and ran the tool.
Chuck put it plainly when Dave pressed him on whether that felt like taking something that wasn’t his: “anybody who’s in the system and they’re in, in power, everything goes to them. You know, I’m not about trying to snake somebody’s sales or whatever. So if, but if they’re not in, they want to join in power, then I’m just the natural default.”
- Anyone already sponsored inside Empower Network keeps their own sponsor, no matter whose tool sent them through.
- Anyone with no sponsor yet defaults to whoever built and ran the tool.
- The promoters build your list right next to their own, whether or not they ever join your business at all.
That’s the whole mechanic. It isn’t network marketing anymore in the traditional sense, at least not the part producing the growth. It runs closer to a small franchise for list building: hand people something worth using, they use it, they show it to more people because it’s genuinely useful, and your name is simply the one already sitting at the end of the pipe when a stranger with no sponsor decides they want in.
Why did charging for training grow the team instead of shrinking it?
There’s a second piece here that most people get backward. For a long stretch, the instinct in the room was to train the team for free, on the assumption that free is generous and generous is what a good leader does. Dave admits he ran his own team that way for close to a year and a half before he stopped.
What he noticed wasn’t subtle. People who got the training for free treated it like it cost nothing, because it did, and they acted accordingly. The moment he started charging for it, two things happened at once: the money coming in went up, and the team actually started showing up and using what they’d been taught. Free access and real engagement turned out to be two different things entirely, and he’d been assuming they were the same one.
That matters here because it’s the same principle sitting underneath the whole system move. Free isn’t the point. Useful is the point. Chuck’s tool worked because it solved an actual problem for the people using it, not because it cost nothing. Positioned correctly and packaged as something people genuinely wanted to pass along, it did more for his list than another year of one-on-one recruiting could have.
Why is this the wrong move to make on day one?
None of this is a starting-line strategy, and the lesson is direct about that. Chuck didn’t put this together until he was three to four months into being active in Empower Network, after he’d already done the unglamorous work of sponsoring and selling one person at a time. The system didn’t replace that skill. It sat on top of a skill he’d already built.
That sequencing matters more than the tool itself. Build the multiplier before you’ve proven you can sell and sponsor without it, and you’ve built a very efficient way to distribute something that doesn’t convert yet. Build it after, once you already know how to close a conversation and explain the opportunity clearly, and every hour you spend selling suddenly becomes worth several hours more, because other people are now doing part of the reaching for you. That’s the actual prize: dinner with your family while the tool is still out there quietly adding people to your list.
- Prove you can sponsor and sell one person at a time, with no tool doing any of it for you.
- Build something free that genuinely solves a problem for the people using it, unconnected to any pitch.
- Once it’s working and people are voluntarily passing it around, attach your main offer to the back end of it.
- Let unsponsored signups default to you, and let sponsored ones go where they already belong.
What’s above is the mechanism. The full lesson runs longer: the promotional cycles Dave and his team ran to actually launch Empower Network, how they built contests and events around those cycles, and a longer walkthrough of exactly how Chuck built and repositioned his tool from the first version through the relaunch. That full video, along with the complete transcript, is part of the Classic Masters Course.
If you’re new to it, the entire course, every lesson and every transcript, is available for $99 at the Classic Masters Course. Go build the tool once you’ve proven you can sell without it, not before.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
We're going to talk about systems, and then we're also going to talk about promotional cycles and launches, and we're going to tell you what we did to launch Empower Network. You're going to also identify some things that we do on a regular basis with contests, with events, with products, and then we're going to talk about what we're going to do specifically. This is just as an example, as a case study about what we're going to do with this particular product here over the next 30 days. All of those who are in Empower Network, specifically speaking to you guys and girls, are qualified to also sell this product. So by coming here, that qualifies you to sell the product.
Make some noise. Yeah. Pumped up. That's what we're going to talk about for the last hour here, is how to get lots and lots of money, essentially, honestly, because without good promotion, good frenzy marketing, right? I mean, you can get money, but it's usually those just piddly, itsy-bitsy, weeny little things in just small amounts of money, when what we do with these promotional cycles is we command commissions into our bank account, like commission commanders, right?
Which Carol gave me that idea of a name last night, commission commander, so Dave, we'll talk a little bit about systems here for a couple of minutes. Yeah, yeah. You know, we're not going to spend a lot of time. We're not going to spend a lot of time on this, and here's why, is we kind of covered it already. All I'm going to do is we're going to spend, hey, Chuck, if you come up, give Chuck a hand, by the way.
As you go through your business, you're going to evolve, right, everybody in this room. You're going to go from one phase to a new, you know, we talked a lot about this weekend about how just get out of the grind as fast as you can. You know what I'm saying? Like, if you're making zero, well, the goal is not to go, you know, be a genius, you know, be a guru. You know what I mean?
Let's get you a story that we can sell. That makes sense, everybody in the room? Everybody okay with that? With just going out there and making it happen and just cutting the bullshit out of it, right? Now, we have an easy way for people to do that here, obviously, in Empower.
Now, as you, you know, you start to get a good skill going on or something like that, you become unbelievably talented in a certain area. You know, you start having some stuff you can offer people, and that's where systematizing what you do. Systematizing your skills can come in a lot of handy, right? For example, Chuck, you know, hold on a second. You have a system that you have, right?
It's like the, I can't remember what it's called, but it doesn't matter. It's where essentially most of your signups here, they come from, you know, you doing that, right? Right. Can you just explain a little bit the psychology behind what you're doing? Well, the psychology behind it was to let leverage, like, a big team of people to help grow, you know, our whole group at Empower Network.
And when I first created that system, I, it was just, it was actually just a way for me to list build, really. Yeah. You know, and I was just giving it away for free and just helping people make a little bit of additional money with it. And it had nothing to do with Empower, really. Yeah, it was before we were around.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, so I was building a list, and I thought it's something I can use to maybe, you know, send offers to later, just do something with. And, yeah. And then Empower came along, and I still hadn't done anything, like, with the two of them combined at that point.
So I would send emails, you know, to that list of people about Empower, and I would build some, get some sales that way. But then I thought, well, what if I put this as part of my presentation, like, as a, as like an upsell or something to the, you know, Empower is the upsell on the back end of what I'm offering. And I relaunched it that way at the end of May, which just, you know, a couple months ago. Yeah. And from that point on, I've, my income has now jumped up huge amounts.
Like I got out of the, you know, when you had the five stages there, I'm like moved out of the, like, second one and like, I forget what the income brackets were in that, but in, into the, like a third stage there. So I, and I was able to do that because I'm leveraging a ton of people that are using this system. And I built that so I could help, you know, solve a problem. I think like Adam and Mike said that earlier is that, you know, help them have another way to market or help them have another way to make some income without having to like shell out a whole bunch out of their pocket to do it. And then when Empower came out and I decided to add it to the back end of that, that's what really grew my income a whole bunch with it.
So, so basically, and, and this is just an example guys of things you can do when you've got a little bit of leverage going on, you've got some skills. If somebody doesn't join Empower Network, but they're promoting your little thing, the signups will just like roll up to you. Yeah. So it becomes easier for him to sign people up, you know what I'm saying? And I want you guys to think about that for a second because everybody in this room, like even, you know, I, I saw some breakthroughs in people's faces when we were talking about not training your team and then charging for training if you do, right?
A lot of people just try to, I tried to do everything for free for my team for, you know, gosh, a year and a half. And then I stopped. Yeah. I stopped it because I noticed when I gave stuff for free, people just didn't listen. Right.
So not only did I make more money from selling them, right, but also, my team listened to more. Right. Well, yeah. I mean, that's, you know, I think that was at the month of the event in Atlanta, right? You think you were projecting, I'd end up like 30,000.
I think I ended like over that. And then last month, you know, over 50. So it was just, yeah. It keeps. So the leveraging part of it works.
And the nice thing is, is that anybody who's in the system and they're in, in power, everything goes to them. You know, I'm not about trying to snake somebody's sales or whatever. So if, but if they're not in, they want to join in power, then I'm just the natural default. So just leveraging all those, you know, just leveraging that one, one other thing we're talking about traffic and leads obviously yesterday and what this is obviously more advanced strategy. Okay.
More, more advanced. This is what we want to do in this particular course. Versus give you guys what you needed for each phase of your business. But I mean, what this is, is, is essentially kind of a similar version of what we did here at empower, but you have found a way, right. To get other people to build your list for you and to leverage other people's it's kind of like network marketing, but for list building, it's kind of how the best way I can describe it.
Yeah. That's a good way to put it to you. I mean, it's definitely not something that anybody like has to do in the beginning, but, you know, as I'm moving through the phases of my business, just like you guys mentioned on the beginning of the, of the weekend here, I mean, I'm just now, or I was at the time at the point in time where it's time for me to take the next step to, which was after how long, just curious, probably about like, you know, between the three and four month mark of being in within power. So, okay. So you don't have to do it in your internet marketing for like six years.
Oh, okay. Yeah. I thought you were talking about five years. I'm talking about both, but just was asking. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it's actually super simple and that's a great example of how a system works because if it's, again, it's a smaller version of what we've done here at empower. It's just, I mean, everybody is slamming his system, his capture page, right? Building his list for him.
Same thing that you guys just did recently, Adam and Mike, and, and it's a great way to just leverage, leverage other people's, just efforts, you know, cause we're like providing, you know, you know, they're also getting some value out of it as well. So it's, it's nice cause it, everybody wins if they, if they want to participate in empower, it's, it's great. So yeah. Yeah. And guys, I want to, this is, this is what we wanted to talk about cause we talked about this already.
I mean, we talked about systematizing things for about an hour and duplication and obviously we didn't show you anything technical on how to do it because the truth is, is that I don't even know, you know, you hire a programmer to just take what you're doing and replicate it for everybody. You know, I don't know how any of it works. I don't think he does either though. Honestly. I mean, some weird thing worked on his site about a year ago and he said, I don't know, it's pretty cool though.
And then I told my programmer to do that. Right. So, you know, if you have an extraordinary skill that you're getting results from, you can replicate that for people to use and then people can use it to get results. It's a useful thing to do at a certain point in your business when you're, when you're a leader that allows you to get some leverage. You know, it's, it's no different really than, Darty, you know, he's, he does things that are a little bit weird, you know, one of the things he's been really good about doing.
since, you know, he went through a course of mine is, you know, he didn't really charge for stuff like that, but he had, he'll sell it and create a little selling process and then his whole team will be promoting his face all over the internet, through some scheming Facebook application or something that they don't know they clicked on. They'll be all over. but it, it, it makes it to where if you can kind of after time shift, you can shift some energy from a lot of people towards, you know, people promoting you and it makes it a little bit easier to grow a business. similar to how, you know, we talk about Tracy Walker all the time. She has a team site, her team starts thriving and growing and talking about the team.
Her team gets bigger and just random people will go just seek her out. You know what I mean? and, and so that's just something that you've done a good job with. Figured we'd mentioned it for everybody cause we don't really have time to go into a lot of detail on. Hey Chuck, thanks for being a part of what we're doing, brother.
No, thank you. Thank you guys. Give him a hand.
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