Stop Watching the Prison Get Built: Jon and Natasha on the Plateau

You built something before this, put in the work, and watched it get taken away by forces you didn’t control. Maybe a law changed. Maybe a market turned. Jon and Natasha had done exactly that, twenty years of businesses across financial services, real estate, and straight affiliate marketing, all of it profitable at some point, none of it built to survive what was actually coming. When their financial services company was legislated out of existence almost overnight, they didn’t need more hustle. They needed a model that couldn’t be pulled out from under them by someone else’s decision.

Their session tracks event by event, and the tags around Jon’s neck, one from every event they’ve attended, become a physical timeline of that rebuild. But the real content isn’t the trajectory. It’s what they did at the two moments most people quietly quit: the beginning, and the plateau.

What actually happens the moment your results stop matching your effort?

Jon names the foe directly: self-doubt, and he calls it one of the hardest to beat because it doesn’t show up when things are obviously going wrong. It shows up when you’re doing everything you’re supposed to be doing and the results still haven’t caught up. That gap between correct behavior and visible proof is exactly where most people quietly stop, convinced something about the business, or about them, must be broken.

Jon and Natasha’s answer wasn’t a new tactic. It was recognizing the gap for what it is; a normal, temporary lag, not a verdict. Knowing that in advance, they say, is half the battle. The other half is just continuing to work while you wait for the lag to close.

They point to a short list of decisions that got them through both the early stretch and the plateau later on, decisions that had nothing to do with finding a smarter tactic:

• Treat a slow stretch as a normal phase of any business, not a sign the model is broken.
• Keep doing the same daily activity you were doing before results existed to prove it was working.
• Get to a live event when the doubt is loudest, because a room full of people already past that exact stretch resets your belief faster than reading about it alone ever could.

Why does a plateau scare off exactly the people who most need to push through it?

Their timeline includes a stretch where momentum flattened out entirely, months where nothing seemed to be moving after a period of real growth. Jon points out that anyone without prior business experience tends to panic at that exact moment, assuming a plateau means the model has stopped working. Seasoned operators read it differently.

stop observing the prison being built around you and instead start removing the bricks.

That’s the closing line of their whole talk, and it names the actual choice at a plateau. You can watch the walls go up and describe them in detail, or you can start pulling bricks out one at a time. Jon and Natasha’s version of pulling bricks was building a shared content system for their entire team, so that people who weren’t confident writers could still put out material as strong as if they’d written it themselves, keeping momentum moving through the flat stretch instead of waiting for it to pass on its own.

What made people actually pay attention to what they were posting?

Jon noticed something specific and slightly uncomfortable: strategic posts about the business got almost no engagement. Ordinary life, a family trip, a picture with his son, got real interaction. His conclusion wasn’t to abandon the business content. It was to understand that people respond to a life they can picture wanting, not a pitch, and that showing the actual lifestyle a business produces does more persuading than describing the business ever could.

He’s candid that none of this made the road smooth. There were real downswings, and they held anyway: “We solve problems. We fight off the foes. We don’t let them get us down. We don’t quit.”

That line does double duty. It’s a description of what they actually did, and it’s the internal shift underneath it, treating a business as something you problem-solve your way through rather than something that’s supposed to work smoothly if you’re doing it right. Every obstacle, in their framing, isn’t evidence you’re failing. It’s the normal cost of building something durable enough that a single law change or a single bad month can’t take it away from you again.

The full session goes further than what’s above, including the entire event-by-event story. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

Welcome to the stage, John Oaks. John Oaks, welcome to the stage. Give it up for Rhonda. Grab the clicker.

Are you going to move him up? Grab the clicker. Okay. Grab the clicker.

What's up, Empower Network family? Awesome, thanks. Let's move him over here. It is so cool to be up here on stage in front of a group that feels like family.

You guys feel that? It's a lot different than anything else you see, right? This is like, well, let me just put it this way. We've been in more than a couple network marketing companies.

We've been up on stages, and never before has it felt truly like family. And it's a culture of transparency and truth. And I think that's so, so important, especially in this industry where we're all trying to strive to achieve success, and we're looking at people up on stage, and we're hearing their message, but if it's not the truth and it's not transparent, that becomes a culture of there's a problem, and it just filters down through the community. So here, you don't have to worry about that.

How many new people we got here? They're at their very first Empower Network event. Put your hands up. Woo!

Awesome. Awesome. Give them a hand, guys. Fantastic.

So Natasha and I were on stage for our first time at the Nashville event, and we shared with you guys our whole backstory, which is really a 20-year journey of entrepreneurialism to achieve a level of success. That's what we've been striving to achieve, which is really the income, but also the freedom lifestyle to go with it. And we've never been able to achieve that with anything until we came here. But this time, we're going to share with you some of that backstory, but we're going to kind of summarize it quickly, because we want to spend more time talking about the journey that we went through once we got into Empower Network, once we found this community and just really plugged into it and decided that we were going to succeed.

So that's where we'll really focus. Well, and just like we talked about, we're going to be very transparent with you. You're going to see some of our numbers here. I have the tags with us of all the events that we have been here with Empower.

And, you know, each one was so different and so moving, and we grew at every event. There was always something new to learn. And when we, before Empower, we had been, John originally, when he and I met, he had gone into software, and he was a software developer. I was doing databases, and we've done network marketing and stock trading and house flipping and rental properties and, yes, commodities.

I mean, just a lot of everything. And not just done them, right? Lots of people have, like, tried stuff. We were actually successful in all of those things.

We've been in all those industries. We've had all those as careers and been successful, but it was not what we were looking for. It did not create freedom, right? You get locked into.

There's lots of things where you can make a lot of money, potentially, but you don't have the lifestyle to really enjoy that. And so that's what we've been in pursuit of for all that time. A business that we could do from anywhere that was leveraged, that allowed us to have the time freedom, to have the joy and the relax, a relaxing day, right? And let us do what we wanted to do.

And spend time with our son. Right, right. You know, really be at-home parents. But he was born in 2006.

And that all started, like, when we first met. Right. We've been pursuing that since 1995. So we're going to back up just a little bit to 2010, right?

Leading up to that, we tried a lot of different businesses and built businesses, been successful, but realized that this was not what we wanted. And so in 2010, we were building a traditional brick-and-mortar business in the financial industry. We had spent all of our entire life savings, sunk it into this business to the tune of, you know, buying a half-a-million-dollar commercial office space, putting another $200,000 into renovations to get the doors open, staff up employees, and all of those things. And we were set in 2010 to have a record year to have a million-dollar income business.

And then the other shoe dropped. Yeah, the law changes in our state, and actually also federally, kind of put us out of business. Things happened very quickly, and in about six months, we knew that that income was going to go away. So here we were to reinvent ourselves.

And John said, well, let's go back into network marketing. I've always liked that model, and I love that leverage model. And I went, oh, okay. It wasn't quite like that.

Well, there wasn't a lot of options. I didn't want a job. You didn't want to get a job. That wasn't an option.

We had to find something. Right. So how did that go exactly? Let's see.

Oh, so we actually were in two different… Well, that period from, you know, learning about that business failing and having to figure out something, we were scrambling for a period of about two years. And we went through two network marketing companies, you know, just worked like dogs to get that going. And it just couldn't get traction.

Some of you guys, I'm sure you can relate to that. It's just very hard to get traction when you're not getting paid enough to make it work mathematically. The math didn't work out. So from there, you know, the thing was I knew it needed to be something.

It was Internet-based. And so I decided that, you know, I was going to definitely build an Internet business. And so I turned to just straight affiliate marketing and started doing, you know, different marketing, different products and marketing online and running traffic. And over the course of about nine months, I spent a ton of money on traffic.

I learned about good traffic, bad traffic, good offers, bad offers. And we connected with several affiliate, you know, like CPA marketing firms that we were marketing, offering offers that they were running. And it was an incredibly frustrating experience because I'd get to the point where I was having a $500 or $1,000 day. And then, you know, you think, I've made it.

I finally made it. You got everything plugged in and it's going, only to have the next week those very same offers are losing you money. And, you know, the affiliate network, after owing you $4,000, goes bankrupt. It doesn't pay anyone.

And that's the kind of stuff that happens in that straight affiliate marketing industry. It's very prevalent. And so we reached a point where we had a heart-to-heart. We decided that Natasha was going to go ahead and pursue being a real estate broker because we knew she could make a living doing that, even though we knew it would take her life.

It would suck my life away. That was what I said. There's, you know, being a successful in real estate, you just literally don't have a life. You give that up in order to reach success.

But we were going to take that income, be able to live on it, help dig out of some of our bills, while I focused on building a freedom business in affiliate marketing. And it was shortly. Shortly after all of that struggle and realizing that affiliate marketing, just, you know, straight-up marketing other people's offers in that fashion, was not going to be the ticket. It was too unstable.

So in October 2012, he came to me and said, Hey, I found something I think I'm really interested in. And just hear me out now. How many of you have done that? Okay.

Okay. Anyway. So I want to get into this. I was involved in this business.

It was Empower Network. And I said, Oh, okay. I thought we weren't going to do any more network marketing anymore. Didn't we make an agreement?

I know. I know. I said, okay, I can support that. And seriously, I did say that, but I said, fine, but you can't use any paid traffic.

Cause I was working my buns off making 5,000 bucks a month. Finally having some money to pay the bills. And I just couldn't have him put it all into traffic. We had to have it to pay bills and pay things down.

So I agreed to that and said, you know, Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to follow the plan. I'm going to do blogging. I'm going to create content. I'm going to market following the eight core commitments.

I'm going to make this thing work. So we just made a decision that this is the business I'm going to do. We bought the products. We got all in, in a matter of about, I think it was about 30 days within getting started.

But the reason I didn't do it upfront is because we didn't have the credit anymore, right? We were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. We had creditors, you know, sending us nasty grams. We were short sailing.

Our home, all the same stuff like Michael Martin had mentioned, you know, you lose your home. It really starts to, you know, build up a lot of stress and a lot of strain on everything else. And for us, because that was on our credit, they were cutting all our credit limits faster than we could charge anything on them. So we had to do some money juggling.

We had to borrow some money from family. But like any business, when you're starting a business, you need to get everything that you need to be successful and do it as fast as you possibly can. So we got all in. And I just, you know, hunkered down and started blogging, started doing exactly what is taught in the eight core commitments.

And for that first three months that I was involved, I got, you know, a couple of people signed up within the first month, actually within the first week, I had two people sign up. Can we have the slides, please? Yep. So in the first three months, I had a few more sporadically signing up in there, but not a lot of activity.

And that's when the first foe really creeps in. Right. Now, you guys will recognize this foe. It's self-doubt.

Right. A huge foe. And it's one of the hardest ones to overcome. And when you start doing something where you feel like I'm doing everything I'm supposed to do, but I'm not getting the results that I'm expecting, that self-doubt will kick in and it can take a lot of people right out of the game.

Right. And so in business or in anything, right, it could be in sports, it could be in absolutely anything. If you're trying to achieve success. Yeah.

If you let that self-doubt get over on you, you have to push through it. And so knowing that is half the battle. So you just battle through it, you push through it, you keep going. And we got an announcement right about that three-month mark that there was an event coming up in Austin, Texas.

And I just knew I had to be there. And not only me, I wanted her to come with me. So I went to her and said, look, we need to go to this. I know we can't afford it, but we just need to figure out whatever we can do.

We have to be there. We have to see it. See? And if I didn't go, I wouldn't experience what he was going to experience at the event.

And I would have missed out on all that emotional and growth myself that we wouldn't have anything to talk about. It would have been, I would have been disconnected. Yeah. Yeah.

She needed to get it firsthand, not from me coming home all excited and then throwing up all over her, not conveying the message right, right? And that's just not effective. And so we decided, we had some miles we could use. So hotel and air, air flight were on our miles and we decided to go and I was sitting in the back and I wanted to know, is this company going to pay me or are they going to run away with my, you know, with my commissions?

That's the accountant side. Okay. I do all the accounting for the corporation. The accountant has that on her mind.

I have on my mind, I need to actually meet these people and find out if they're for real or are they just actors on a video, right? That's what was going through my mind. Now, I believed that they were real, but I needed to meet them. I needed to shake their hands.

I needed to actually talk to them and get to know some of them, which was the goal that I had in mind when I came to the event. So like she said earlier, we kept all the tags and at every event since the very beginning, I took a piece of tape and a magic marker and I wrote the dollar amount that I was at for income on the back of the tag at the event. So there's our tag for the Austin event in January, 2013, total amount of income, $725. You guys can see it on the board there.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So here's what happened to that event.

It was, it was incredible. It was an amazing experience, but a couple of key significant things happen. Number one was my belief shift. You know, I went from being very confident that this was a business I could do to just having no doubt whatsoever that this was what I was going to do.

And there was a moment where I got to, uh, to meet several of the leaders, but what stood out the most was, was about a 22nd conversation with Lawrence Tam. Where's Lawrence? He in here? Yeah.

I can't really see you guys. He's way in the back. Yeah. Okay, cool.

Right on. So LT answered a quick question for me. Just took, you know, a couple of seconds and it wasn't even that significant of a thing except for the fact that it was, it was a conversation I'd been having in my mind and I needed confirmation and he gave it to me. Right.

And it's those little backroom conversations, those two second little nuggets that you get from a leader or from somebody at an event that makes the entire event worth attending. Yeah. And so when I was in the audience at that event, we looked at each other and said, all right, we can never miss an event. We just have to decide right here today that no matter what, we will do whatever it takes to get to the events.

And so that's exactly what we did. And we always come together. So here's what happened after that, that first event, right? $725 to?

Chicago. Chicago. Boom. 8,425.

Right? Oh, the slides aren't up. And on top of that, I made the top 200. That's awesome.

That's awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome. I made the top 200.

So the next event after that was Denver. Denver, Colorado. Boom. $32,000.

Can you guys put the slides up for us, please? Oh, yeah. There it is. 32,000 in Denver.

So three months later, see a significant jump, right? That's now a 10,000 a month income. So I want to also mention that John will pace the house going, how can I deliver value? How can I deliver value?

He constantly is thinking about how he can deliver value for free and give it away for free. So here's the significant thing that started happening here and why I saw this numbers increase. I was, like I told you, I was blogging, I was creating video content and I was, I was working on social media, mainly Facebook. Facebook has been a real key platform for me, but it wasn't always like that because in the beginning when I got started in this business, I had 600 friends on Facebook, about half.

They were high school friends that wanted nothing to do with any of this, right? And the other portion was family, old work people that I knew from contacts, college friends and so forth. They were not interested in any of this stuff. They just weren't.

And so I would do blog posts and I would share my blog post on Facebook and I'd share it on other social sites and it was crickets, right? Anybody experience that? Crickets. Nobody pays any attention to it, right?

But then you go and you post some pictures of, you know, you're on vacation, you post a picture of, of you and your, your wife and your kids doing something fun and it's like, like, like, like, like, like, like, right? You just like, somebody's just sitting there like, like, like. You get 50 to 100 likes and a bunch of people are commenting, hey, that's cool, oh, so much fun, right? That's what gets interaction.

So I learned something very key when it comes to Facebook, which applies to all social public, social broadcasting or, or social distribution of content. That was really key, which is funny because it's really a common sense thing. We all do this when we communicate in normal ways, but for some reason people forget about that on social media sites. And so I, I'm going to be teaching exactly what that is and how you can shift and start getting these kind of results using Facebook and other social sites on our Sunday VIP training.

So if you have a VIP ticket, you'll be able to be there. If you're all in, you'll be able to be there, be there on Sunday because there's going to be some key stuff. That we're going to divulge on that day and you're going to learn how it is that I went from 600 friends to making a shift and doing things a little bit differently and getting to 2000 friends two months later and then taking that to 5,000 friends. And these are not, you know, friends from all over the world.

These are key targeted people that are interested in what it is that I'm doing. And you guys can do the same thing. It's actually very simple to do. So with that, the next event, next event was a regional event.

It was in California. Yeah. And we were at 61,000. 61,000.

That was Anaheim, right? Yeah. Yep. Anaheim, 2013.

And then we moved, and that was October. So then we moved into January to Miami and it was 68,000. Now you guys noticed something on the chart. Taking a dip, right?

Not a dip, but a plateau. Okay. Now here's what happens with people that maybe are not seasoned entrepreneurs or maybe haven't owned a business before, don't have the experience, but they tend to freak out when you see that kind of a plateau. It's like, uh-oh, something's wrong.

What's going on? There must be something wrong with the business. Well, notice three months too. Yeah.

That's three months, only $7,500, right? So it went from making 10 grand or more each month, every month to all of a sudden having like a three month period of not even hitting 10 grand. And a lot of people quit during that period, right? There were things that were happening.

There were shifts and changes going on. But did we quit? No. We didn't.

And neither did the other leaders that are in this room because we know that when you have challenges, or I should say you're going to have challenges in any business, there are always going to be plateaus. There's always going to be periods where you have a downswing. That's when you really grip in, plant your flag, and work out solutions. And so what I did at this particular time was I created a blog for my entire team to use.

I created my content without having to be expert bloggers where we could create what we now call epic content and be able to share that, have it coded to them, and get the kind of results as if they'd written it themselves. Now the really significant thing and why I bring that up is because I'm letting the cat out of the bag that right now as a company, we're working on something for all of you that will accomplish that same thing. Now again, that's all I'm going to say about that because you got to come to VIP day to get the real meat of that and how we're going to use it.

To really be able to leverage that and get the kind of results you want for yourself. Just be there. Be there on Sunday. Do whatever you have to do.

Get all in. Get a VIP ticket. Be there on Sunday. So then after that, we move into April and that was a regional event in Seattle.

Seattle. 97,000. Now look what happened to that trend, right? Because we didn't quit when we hit a plateau.

We just keep working. We get creative. We keep on moving. Then all of a sudden the results are gone.

Yeah. We just turn around, right? You can look at this kind of a trend line for any business across the board. You're going to see these kind of trends where there are up years, down years, up trends, down trends, plateaus, all of that stuff because as entrepreneurs, that's what we do.

We solve problems. We fight off the foes. We don't let them get us down. We don't quit.

When the times get rough, we just work a little bit harder and we get through it and the people that do that, that's what happens. The rewards are on the other side of adversity. Okay. Next event.

Oh, sorry. October. Orlando. 2014.

Orlando. Last year. Boom. $161,000.

So here, this was significant. It was significant. Yes. Because we actually, my mom and dad flew out and brought our son with them and we spent, we pulled out all the stops by that time and we stayed at Animal Kingdom Lodge for another week.

We went to all the parks. And here's a really significant thing about that, what happened at that time period because of what we created here. And because we just, just did it, you know, made it happen, did whatever it took. We became debt free right in that timeframe.

We dug completely out of that giant hole that we were in. So the next event. Sorry. That's Vegas.

Last. Las Vegas. Last January. This past January.

Yeah. January. And it's 219,900. So now you see a little bit again, right?

A plateau. Don't mind. Oh, you're off by one. Click it again.

Oh, am I? Click. Oh, I guess it wasn't. Is that right?

Or was back one? Oh. 219. 219.

Can't read the numbers on there. Oh, it's 161. Kept going. Go forward.

Forward. Yep. There you go. Okay.

There we go. Oh, so it wasn't. So it was. It's right.

It was continuing. Okay. Okay. So back up again, right?

Here we go. So you just see that the road to success is never a straight road. It's always going to have ups and downs. This is Nashville.

This is our first speaking. Nashville, Tennessee. Our first speaking engagement. We got to speak on stage in Nashville.

And 238,200. So we broke that 200,000 mark. And the last event was also in Las Vegas. And that was 266,000, our 11th event.

And we were accepted into the leadership council. So the message here, right, is never quit. When you have something, you have a proven vehicle. You have so much success.

You're surrounded by it. You see all of these people that have achieved it. The message is you just keep going. You work through any adversity, any obstacle.

You know, obstacles are really just perceived. They're not really there. And so, you know, you have to just start becoming accustomed to seeing those and recognizing them. And actually, the cool thing is, when you start to look at these kind of charts and understand what it means, it means that when you see an obstacle, you should get excited about it.

But once you solve it and get past it, that there's bigger rewards on the other side. And then we have one more. Okay. So the last one here is where we're at currently.

We broke 300,000. And that's where we're now at this event. And divide that over three years. It's a six-figure income.

Six-figure income since the beginning. So the really cool thing also is that what we've done and how we've built the business by following the ACOR commitments, putting content out there, doing the kind of things that we teach, we've created an extremely strong foundation for our business. And now, because of these changes and these things that you guys have yet to even learn about at this event, this is going to look like nothing. And from here, the trend line is going to change dramatically.

All right. So a couple other things I want to show you. Just the last couple of months, actually, it was August that we left, right? August 21st or something?

When we left on our trip? 21st. Yeah. 21st.

Yeah. August 21st. We decided to go on a vacation. And we were going to take a three-week vacation.

So we took our family, our son, we took Natasha's parents, her sister. Her sister brought a friend. Your parents even brought some friends. Yeah.

It was a family event. And we just went all out on an extravagant European vacation. We went from our home in Portland, Oregon to Istanbul, Turkey. We stayed there for about four days.

And then from there, we hopped a cruise ship. Mm-hmm. And went to, what was the first one? Mykonos.

Mykonos, Greece. Mykonos, Greece. Messina. Valletta, Malta.

Oh, yeah. Yep. Naples. Naples.

Rome. This is a picture in Rome. This is a picture in Rome of us at the Colosseum, which, you know, I tell you guys, when you start becoming free, where you can travel the world, you can take your family with you, you can do the kind of things you want, it's amazing what happens. And your personal growth takes on entirely new levels.

Yeah. And you can travel the world and experience how big it is. You know, we start to feel really small when we discover, especially like, you know, over in Europe, in Rome, the amount of history that's there and the things that have taken place. And when you can walk on the grounds where thousands of years ago there were chariot races and amazing things happening, it really starts to open up your view of the world.

Dreaming again, right? Absolutely. So, we took that vacation. There's another one in Rome in the Roman Forum.

And then that's a picture of us in… Oh, that's the… That's in Turkey, right? Yeah, that's in Turkey.

In Istanbul. Yeah. So, we just have a blast. And, of course, our son…

He's a ham. Every picture that he's in, he's got a goofy face, right? He's nine. So, some of you guys see these pictures all over Facebook.

We documented the entire trip. We pasted it all over Facebook. It was really cool. And this is the kind of stuff that people respond to, right?

It's not just extravagant vacations, but anything you're doing where they see that you have the lifestyle that they want. That's what attracts people more than the money shots, more than saying things like, join my business. Sign up here. This is a cool business.

Look at my products. We're going to talk a lot more about that stuff on Sunday during the Sunday training. All right. So…

Yeah, because your business didn't stop. You had it all scheduled. Yeah, that's right. Well, and that's…

I mean, that's… You go on a trip like that for three weeks and have your business actually increase, that's what you can do because of this model. And we've been trying to do that. And we've been trying to do something like this for so long and everything we've tried to do, if we ever stepped away, it would fall apart.

Like when you have employees and you have a business and you're thinking, I've got six employees at an office, they can handle it while I'm gone. What it took like one week for it to fall apart and I had to drive all the way back and babysit and take care of stuff and fix problems because they couldn't handle it. And having a business where you don't have to deal with employees or you have systems in place that do things without… That do things without you having to be there and as long as you're consistent and you build it right to begin with, then this is what you create.

So we're going to end this with just sort of a quote, stop observing the prison being built around you and instead start removing the bricks. Thank you. That's it? That's it.

That's all we got. We ended early. All right, guys. Ready?

Let's go, everybody. One, two, three. Hi. Hi.

Course of evil. All right. Thank you. Give it up.

Give it up for John Oakes.