The Law of Momentum: Why Your Team Keeps Restarting From Zero
Your Monday night call used to fill up on its own. New reps showed up every week without you doing anything special, and the numbers just kept climbing. Then things got busy. You skipped promoting the next call twice in a row, told yourself you’d get back to it, and now you’re explaining the business from scratch to a room half the size it used to be, wondering what changed.
That’s not a discipline problem. It’s not that you got lazy and your team got lazy right along with you. Momentum in a team obeys a small number of mechanical rules, and breaking any one of them resets the whole thing back to zero, whether you notice you broke it or not.
As someone building a downline, you already know the feeling of watching something that was growing suddenly go quiet, and wondering if the market changed or your people just stopped caring. Dave Wood spent years watching his own organization swing between real momentum and dead silence before he isolated why it happens, and the reason had almost nothing to do with who was on his team that particular week.
Why does stopping for even a week send your whole team back to square one?
Every organization runs on a small number of trained behaviors that get passed from person to person: how you promote the next call, how you close a conversation, how you welcome a brand new rep. The moment that behavior stops anywhere in the chain, it doesn’t just pause and wait for you to pick it back up. It collapses back to wherever it started, no matter how big the team got in the meantime.
Dave Wood watched this happen in his own business with real numbers attached to it. His organization used to run a repeating process that, without him doing anything extra, kept a weekly call growing week over week. When that process got dropped, the call didn’t dip a little. It fell off a cliff, and rebuilding it took months of deliberate work just to climb back toward where it had already been.
As Dave Wood tells it in the Team Building Formula, “That got our Monday night calls to like 2,000 people. When that cyclical process that did that was removed. Our calls went down to like 400 people. Okay? And then I had to start it again. And now they’re back up to like 1,200 or 1,500 people. And now I’ve got to go through this process of getting it back to 2,000. Why? Because I created a time gap.”
That’s the whole rule in one story. A gap in your promotion isn’t neutral, it’s a debt. You don’t just lose the week you skipped, you lose everything that week would have compounded into every week after it. The fix isn’t complicated, it’s just relentless: you promote whatever’s next inside every single interaction, not as an occasional add-on when you happen to remember.
An event is an event. It’s a group of people. And you are always promoting whatever the next one is. Every time. Every time you’re talking to somebody. Every time you’re selling. Every time you’re upselling. You’re always promoting the next event. Because if you stop that process, then you have to reboot it again.
Here’s why that one habit matters more than it sounds like it should. People don’t just listen to what you say, they copy what they watch you do, good habits and bad ones alike. Skip that habit once inside a team of a thousand active people who are all mirroring you, and you haven’t wasted an hour. You’ve wasted a thousand hours, because everyone downstream just quietly stopped doing it too.
Why should your system stay loose instead of locked to one exact tactic?
Here’s where a lot of well-meaning team builders wreck their own momentum without realizing it. They build a system that’s specific down to the smallest tactic: this exact script, this exact platform, this exact funnel, and nothing else. It works great, right up until the tactic stops working, which every tactic eventually does.
The fix isn’t teaching people less. It’s teaching one smaller, more permanent thing and leaving the execution wide open. Tell your team to market every single day, and let them figure out how. Tell them to do a coaching call with every new person who joins, and let them run it their own way. The instruction stays fixed. The method underneath it can bend with the market, because it was never tied to one platform, script, or trend that could disappear next quarter.
This feels backwards if you’re used to thinking more structure means more control. Structure that’s too specific is actually fragile. The moment a platform changes its algorithm, or a script stops converting, your whole team’s momentum resets, because you tied their behavior to something outside your control instead of a principle inside it. Keep the core instruction unmovable and the tactics replaceable, and a changing market stops threatening your momentum at all.
Why does repeating the same message for years beat upgrading it every few months?
Momentum doesn’t come from a clever pitch. It comes from a group of people all doing a few simple things, every day, for long enough that the habit turns into trust. That takes time you can’t skip, and it’s the part most builders sabotage without meaning to, by changing the message the moment they get bored of saying it.
Picture a leader who changes strategy every few weeks: two customers a day, then one a week later, then a pivot to home meetings, then flyers the month after that. Each change feels like an upgrade. Each one is actually a restart, because nobody’s had the message long enough to believe it’ll work, let alone teach it to somebody else. Dave Wood has said flatly that he’s repeated the same core instruction to his team, almost word for word, across years without changing it, on purpose, because changing it would drag the whole organization back to the point where they were still learning it the first time.
The instruction itself matters less than how long you’re willing to hold it. Pick something simple enough that a brand new person can actually do it today, then say it the same way tomorrow, and the day after, and the month after that, long past the point where you’re bored of your own voice. That repetition isn’t a lack of creativity. It’s the entire mechanism.
Why does exciting the newest person on your team do more for a leader than pumping up the leader themselves?
Here’s the one that surprises almost everyone the first time they hear it. If a leader on your team is stalling, your instinct is to go work on that leader directly: a pep talk, a strategy session, a reminder of their goals. It rarely moves the needle, and there’s a real mechanical reason why.
Familiarity dulls influence. The people closest to you have already watched you be ordinary: tired, wrong about something, having an off week. Their brain quietly stopped treating you as an authority the day they got to know you as a person. But someone several levels below that leader, someone who’s never met you and only hears about you through layers of other people, doesn’t carry that same filter.
As Dave Wood explains it in the Team Building Formula, “the further someone is away from you, the more levels they are removed from you, the easier it is to pump them up, because the further removed you get from somebody, the more powerful you look to them, because there’s multiple levels of edification working in your favor.”
Which means the fastest way to reignite a stalling leader isn’t to work on them. It’s to go several levels down inside their own organization, find someone hungry, and help that person break through. When that happens, it travels back up the entire chain on its own. The leader who was stalling suddenly has a reason to keep moving: someone underneath them just started outproducing them, and nobody wants to be outdone by somebody they personally brought into the business.
- Width brings the numbers in the door, but a team that only ever recruits wide and never builds real depth underneath its leaders won’t hold together.
- A leader becomes close to impossible to lose once they have a handful of fully invested people below them, because now their own team won’t let them quit either.
- The newest, least experienced person several levels down is often the most valuable person in the whole organization to invest your time in, not the leader everyone assumes needs the attention.
None of these rules require you to be more talented, more charismatic, or luckier with who joins your team. They require you to stop creating gaps, stop over-specifying the tactics, stop rewriting your message every time you get restless, and stop assuming the leader who’s stalling is the person you need to be working on. Momentum was never about motivation. It was always about not breaking the machine you’d already built, so you’re topping off an engine that’s already turning instead of restarting it from cold every time.
The full lesson goes considerably further than what’s above: how to handle distractions and negative moments in your team without losing momentum over them, why an organization’s growth quietly caps out at the size of the person leading it, and the complete structure Dave Wood uses for building depth several levels down, not just width across the top. The entire course, including this lesson, is available for $99 through the Team Building Formula course.
Get the course, watch the rest of this lesson, and stop letting the next event go by without promoting the one after it.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
So guys, is this useful for you? Okay, okay, you starting to understand some of the problems that are popping up now? Right? You can use even what I've taught already to solve an unbelievable amount of problems, okay? And the problem with it, of course, is some of it takes thinking, you know what I mean?
Like, you do need to just take action on stuff, but when you're taking action, you want to be running what you're doing through these filters, okay? Because if you don't do that, you've got no way to filter, you know, is that going to actually create the result you want, or is it going to create something different, right? Keep in mind making money is not the same as freedom, okay? You guys realize those are two different things, right? Producing a lot of sales and duplicating is not the same as doing that while having a life, as being able to travel, right?
Those are entirely different things. Most people that I know who have big organizations that are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the size of mine can't travel. They can't. They can go to their company events, that's all they go to. And they're working all the time.
Now, I work all the time at these events, too. It's probably the most intense part of my life. You know, I come here and I just sit there for days talking. But the reality is that if I'm not, like, specifically working on growing something, right, I don't need to be running around all the time. And I don't because I'm constantly feeding everything back into itself.
And that might sound weird to say feeding everything back into itself. Right? But it's like if you could imagine, like, some gigantic, gigantic person that gets bigger by eating themself. You know? I'm actually joking.
I just said that. It's getting late in the afternoon. She was looking at me like, what are you talking about? Right? She actually had a look on her face like, her face?
Her face was like this. You know what I mean? And you think I don't pay attention to stuff. I can't remember my phone number, but, like, I remember the whole structure of this training. Right?
Wherever Chris Rushlow moved to, which is different now, like, I get used to where people are, and then I come back and you're in a different spot. It's freaking me out. Right? So, anyways.
This is helping. This is helpful for you. Okay. So we're just going to kind of continue. We were just talking about the training efficiency law, which is you don't do trainings that you can refer people to.
Right? Why? Because it's a waste of time. The only time you'd ever repeat a training is if you get to sell something while you're doing it. Right?
Because everything that you do needs to make money. Okay? Right? If you're doing something with your downline and it's not increasing their income at the same time, it's not making them money, and it's not making you money, so you might as well just be hanging out. Right?
Like, if we're going to hang out, let's, like, go bowling or something. You know? Or go to, you know, Cancun or something fun. You know? That's more useful.
If you want to hang out with your leaders, go somewhere exotic, because then you're dream building at the same time. We're going to get into dream building in a second. So if you're going to be doing something like that, be dream building. But dream building actually does make people more money. Because when people start filling their mind with different things, they start creating different things on the outside.
They start looking for different things. They start sorting for different things. So if you're going to hang out with people, for heaven's sakes, let's hang out, and let's go do something that's so expensive that you're like, you've got to be freaking kidding me. And then you want to make more money to go get the expensive thing. You know what I mean?
Make sense, everybody? Okay, so that's what you do. So anyway, let's talk about momentum. The laws of momentum. Okay?
How do you create momentum? Now, this is an interesting one, because I've seen myself do it both ways, right? And I've also seen what disrupts and what creates it. And I've also seen myself for years before I ever created any momentum, and why I didn't create it, right?
So we're gonna talk about a few different principles that will help you create momentum in your team. All of these are incredibly important. And if you don't do these, right, you're going to constantly be restarting. Okay? You don't want to restart.
Right? AK, you want to restart and go back to January? Right? You don't want to restart. Okay?
Occasionally, you might have to anyways. But then when you restart, you'll restart. Every organization will go through ups and downs. And this is a misperception people have. And you guys have got to be the ones that are building your own culture.
If you're building your organization, if you ever have 100,000 people in it, it'll go back to 80,000 or 70,000, then you have to rebuild a little. Right? You go through waves like everything. Okay? And it's going to be fascinating watching as you're in this industry.
If you're around this profession for a long time, you got to treat it like a business. If you think about it like a business, you think differently. Right? You know, there's a guy named Brad. He's a guy named Brad.
And he was another one of these Amway guys. And he actually has one of the largest organizations in North America. At the time I met him, he used to do team events with 15,000 people. Okay? For his team.
I mean, this is just his organization meeting once a year for an event called family reunion, which basically means his downline goes to events in North America, 15,000 people. We're not talking about other countries here like we have at our events. This is just his team in North America. Okay? That is a lot of people for one dude's team.
Right? And he's got a lot of people. And, you know, he just said it like this. He said, I've been on this thing for 25 years.
He says every five years, we have an upswing and a downswing. Every five years. So he says, you know what the trick is? He says that everybody, in the downswing, people get discouraged and a bunch of people quit.
Every time. And he said, and they missed the next upswing. Right? And he says, I just sit here and I just do the same thing all the time. Because when the downswing comes and they quit, I'm there for the upswing.
And everybody gets richer but the people who quit. Good perspective, isn't it? You know? What happened when the, you know, I own a company, of course, where we had a merchant shut down really early on because we grew too fast. The merchant shut us down.
Right? They didn't understand what we were doing. And what happened? A bunch of people quit who missed it. Three months later.
They missed out. You know? Right, Lawrence? You missed out a little bit.
But then he came back. Right? But had he not missed out on that bit, he may have missed out on a half million or a million dollars. Right? Because when you stop your momentum, you have to restart it again.
And I've experienced that both ways. You know what I mean? And so this is just from my experience and hopefully this will be helpful for you. Okay? Momentum rule number one, we've got the time gap law.
We've already talked about time. We've talked about time gaps here a lot. Right? What I want you guys to realize is that every time something stops, you have to restart it again. Okay?
So you never want it to stop. Because it replicates. And it replicates on a massive scale. So in other words, if you're in a conversation that could turn into a promotion, and you don't tell that person to get to the next event, this is a rule. You always want to tell people to get to the next event.
And an event could be anything in groups is what I'm talking about. An event can be a home meeting, if you're doing home meetings. It could be a webinar, if you're doing webinars. It could be a conference call. It could be an event like this in person. Okay? We're going to talk about schedules and scheduling events later.
An event is an event. It's a group of people. And you are always promoting whatever the next one is. Every time. Every time you're talking to somebody.
Every time you're selling. Every time you're upselling. You're always promoting the next event. Because if you stop that process, then you have to reboot it again. Okay?
I'll tell you what happens when you have to reboot it again. We used to have a cyclical process. This isn't something that I made as a mistake. We have to use a cyclical process that repeated itself.
That promoted our Monday night calls. Right? Without really doing anything. That got our Monday night calls to like 2,000 people. When that cyclical process that did that was removed,
our calls went down to like 400 people. Okay? And then I had to start it again. And now they're back up to like 1,200 or 1,500 people. And now I've got to go through this process of getting it back to 2,000.
Why? Because I created a time gap. How did I do that? I did that by making a mistake, of not continuing at every single event to promote the next event. And every single time I sell, to promote the next live thing that's going on. And every live event, to promote the Monday calls. Right? Why do I have the commitments that I have in my organization?
Because the commitments reinforce themselves. That's why. Make sense? They remove time gaps. So if I have somebody go through the commitments in our organization
and they say, yes, I will be on the Monday night calls, then the commitments reinforce the Monday night calls, and the Monday night calls reinforce the commitments. And you say, that sounds a lot like church. Yeah.
I want to learn this stuff. Mormons, you know. Mormons and Amway. I call it Mamway. Right?
Right? You want to have everything you do needs to reinforce itself. But also, you never want a gap to exist from you not doing something you could be doing. In other words, if you could tag on selling or promoting to any behavior that you're doing, it automatically removes the time gap.
Right? If you could tag on, instead of doing something one-on-one, you do it in front of a group, it removes the time gap. Right? You want to remove these gaps everywhere. Because think about this when it replicates.
I want you to think about this for a second. Okay? Let's say you've got a big team. Let's just play this out here for a second. You're never going to be perfect here, but you're going to get better and better all the time if you just think about it.
And you learn it and you pay attention to it. So just pay attention to this. Say you've got a big team and say your team got a thousand active people. I mean, a thousand people promoting stuff. Right?
And you, as the leader of the organization, start a replication process because everything you do will duplicate, good or bad, works or not. Okay? Everything. So you start a replication process by doing something. And you do something that in the process of not promoting the next thing, you waste an hour of your time.
Okay? Because you have to restart and you have to start promoting again because you didn't do it. Right? So I'm on the phone. And I didn't promote the event.
Instead I wasted an hour with that person. How many hours did that just waste? A thousand. Because it replicates. Okay?
What if everybody in your organization is doing that? And they'll do it if you're doing it. It replicates. The dumb things you do replicate through everybody,
because they just copy it. They don't think about it. Why do people do that? Because there's something in your nervous system called mirroring neurons and you have an automatic behavior of just replicating things around you. That's why you start moving like your friends and stuff.
If you get around somebody and they twitch their neck like this because they've got an actual neck twitch, you'll start doing it a little. It's unbelievable. You know? When I started working with Dave, he used to do this all the time with his neck, because he had a neck problem.
And I just started doing it. You know what I mean? I don't have a neck problem. My muscles just started doing that from being around him. Right?
People get around me, they start to laugh a little more goofy. Revenge of the Nerds, right? I'm not related to Marty McFly. In any case, like the four of us from the 80s, right? I think that's funny.
So in any case, you create time gaps in all sorts of different ways. Number one, by not promoting what's next. Right? Not promoting what's next. I made a mistake here once where we did some regionals where we didn't sell the next national event at the regionals.
Right? What did that do? It made it so after our event, we had to start the event promotion process. How much of a time gap was created there? Massive.
It made it unbelievably difficult to get people to the next event, because I didn't promote the event at the event. A pretty simple mistake that may have cost us a thousand people in the chairs. You guys understand that? That's what happens when you don't do what's next,
when you're not constantly promoting what's next. You've got to just remember to do it. And it's really easy to remember to do because everything you do should be promoting the next event. Every conference call. Every sales pitch.
Every time you're talking about a product. Every time somebody buys a product. Everything should promote the next event all the time. And you need to go to all your events. Right?
Because if you're not going and you're not promoting, which is easy to do because we're not talking about running around like a rag doll promoting, we're talking about just when you're live, you're promoting. I'm showing you how to compress time. Right? If you don't go and you don't promote them, your team just won't stay together no matter how good you are.
Sorry. And you're going to be a slave to it and we'll all laugh at you because I told you. Your team won't stay together. Right? Go back to the church analogy.
What if the pastor just decides, hey, I'll just show up whenever I feel like it? Right? Well, that's what you're doing. You've got to promote your events. You've got to go to all of them.
Right? All of them. You say forever? Yeah. It's a business.
You know what I mean? What happens if a doctor doesn't get his ongoing education? Right? There's professions where they require you to do things like that. In this profession, we just allow you to sell and make money before you know what the hell you're doing.
You know what I mean? Which is cool. But because you make money, remember, it doesn't mean you understand how you made it. It doesn't mean you know how to hold it together either. And all sorts of people come up and say, you know, I've had teams and they've fallen apart.
Yeah. I don't know how to keep them together. That's why. It's you. All the time.
Does that make sense to everybody in here? So time gaps. Big deal. Right? Also, though, what else can create time gaps?
This is a big one. Every time you stop a duplication process and you have to restart it, it starts at zero, your momentum. Okay? So if you start a process in motion and it's cranking and you just stop it and you have to restart it, it takes you to wherever you were when you started the process the first time. That's how far back in time you'll go.
And every time you make a major change, okay, where you stop doing what you were doing before, you have to restart it again. Because you're not just talking about a system or a funnel or a process or a culture. What you're talking about is a behavior that you've trained into people, who've trained into people, who've trained into people, that people are repeating in conference calls and webinars and team gatherings. And when you stop it, it stops everywhere. And it takes you from zero to get it back again the way that it was.
Okay? Time gap rule. Right? Now that feeds into something called the ambiguity rule. Right?
And this is something that I'm the only one I've ever heard talk about in the context of direct sales network marketing. Right? And that is because you create time gaps every time you stop something, your system and your culture must be ambiguous enough to allow people to do it in different ways. The reason is, I'm going to explain what this means in a second. If it's not, every time the market changes, your momentum will reset at zero.
Okay? Because every time you change something major, if your whole system is tactical, right, and you're too specific about everything, there's a lot of problems that could be created from that. Right? And the reason why my organization has people that market in such different ways is because I'm not very specific. Never.
And I'm unspecific on purpose. Okay? Because if I tell people you can only do it this way, which is normally what people do, there's a lot of problems with that. Number one, what if the way stops working? Well, then you look like, you know, you're giving people bad advice.
The way stops working. And ways of doing stuff stop working. You know? You tried to, you know, SEO something lately. You know what I'm saying?
I mean, Google can change it faster than you can keep up with it. Why do they do that? Because they're trying to keep out the people that know SEO. That's why. Because if everybody could just SEO their way to the top of Google, no searchers could find good stuff,
because whoever's going to appear there are the marketers who are just going to scheme any content they can there. Okay? Right? That's not what Google is for. Google is for good information.
That's why Google is constantly updating their algorithm. It's not to be mean. It's because of people like us. Okay? Because when somebody searches for, you know, a review of an MLM company and there's eight million network marketers, right, saying, let me give you my third party review of the company that I'm in,
okay, and why you should join me rather than all the other reviews, it just looks so stupid when you search for it. It's not real reviews. Right? That's why Google is constantly changing stuff.
So if you're like the SEO guy, and I'm not insulting any SEO companies because there's people that actually keep up with this, my God, they have to sit in front of their computer all day. Right? I know I did when I was trying to keep up with it. What happens?
Right? What happens? You keep up with it and it changes and then you reset because all of your momentum goes away. So that's why when I teach stuff, I say things like, market every day. Right?
Because what does that mean? Whatever you want it to. Right? Because ambiguity allows people to interpret things in different ways. Right?
Does that make sense to you guys? Sort of, at least a little bit of sense. Now, specific enough to keep people unified, ambiguous enough to allow people to do it in different ways. That's why I allow people to do things in all kinds of different ways. Because they're doing that thing, but they're still following the system, aren't they?
I'm never telling them how they can market and how they can't. I'm just telling them to market every day. Right? I'm telling them to blog every day. I don't care what they blog about.
I don't care if they do SEO. I don't care if they don't do SEO. It doesn't matter to me. Right? I'm telling people to do new member coachings, because that's something that is a good strategy that always works.
You bring a new member in. You bring a new customer in. You bring a new rep in. You connect with them. You'll make way more money if you do that with most people.
Like ten times more. Right? And that's always the same. So I can teach that. This stuff I'm teaching today?
Always the same. So I don't have to remake the product every three months. Right? What if I was teaching the latest Facebook hack? Right?
Well, number one, if I put the word Facebook in the product, Facebook might sue me. Right? We saw that happen in the last week. Right? Then if I teach it, a week from now, it might not work anymore.
Right? I'm not going to build a business and a life like that because it's not fun. Right? I used to do it, and I stopped, and immediately became happier. Immediately.
Because all of a sudden, I didn't have to keep up with everything. Right? And allow people to do things in their own way, because here's what I learned. Somebody who's brand new, right, will always put together a better marketing strategy on their own if they just figure it out, than if I could teach them,
because what I'm going to teach them will not work for everybody. So when I teach people, I teach them concepts within a structured ambiguity. And when I started doing that, my team grew faster. I gave them tools. I gave them things that replicate fast.
But I taught them in a way where they could go figure it out. That's why a lot of you say, how do I get leads? Figure it out. You know? What do you mean?
I mean, figure it out like I did. What do you think I did? Just went through a course, did that strategy, and got a bunch of leads, and it still works the exact same way five years later? I mean, come on. That's not how it works.
Right? Figure it out. Find a way. That's what I tell people. Now, some people have a problem with that, but they never have really big teams. People with big teams are never very specific. You go to an Amway conference with 15,000 people, what do they teach?
Nothing. Tell stories for three days. Right? Why? Because you get really pumped and you go figure it out when you leave.
The volume doubles every time. Okay? So I like utilizing ambiguity when I'm building my business because I can continue to build in the same way. Okay? When the market's changing and stuff,
okay, I allow other people to do the specific training in my organization. We just change it out when it gets out of date. But I'm never learning it and I'm never applying it and I don't even know what it is. Never.
Right? That's how I keep free. I don't want to sit in front of the computer every day and learn about what Google's doing. I don't care. You know what I mean?
Four years from now they'll be in AI and then all SEO is screwed. Right? So in any case, ambiguity. Right? And that's part of momentum, because I don't have to change things all the time.
Okay? It just needs to work, because people can adapt it within the strategy. And the next thing, though, is the synergy law. Right? This is how momentum is really created.
Right? But I had to talk about the other two things to get into this. Right? How momentum is really created is by alignment of several things over a long period of time. Okay?
Because if you're constantly stopping what you're doing and restarting, or you're jumping from deal to deal and restarting, or you're changing all the time and restarting, you'll never get momentum anywhere. Right? It's way easier to get momentum by being consistent in something that reasonably works sort of well than it is to get momentum in something that works really well but is changing constantly. Right? Because if everybody learns it and then you change it after they learn it, they start over again.
Okay? So here's what it is. Vision. Okay? You've got to have one vision.
One vision, one vision, one vision. Okay? One training system. One culture. One cultural system.
Okay? And you have to be speaking it and teaching it, speaking it and teaching it, speaking it and teaching it, over and over. It'll drive people crazy. Right? But you have to do that long enough for it to catch through your organization and through your culture.
And if you're changing it all the time, it won't work. Right? We've got AK here and I'm using him as an example because he's new. Right? I'm not going to be using anybody new as an example, but he's somebody new who is broke
three months ago. Cool. Right? Only 22 years old.
That's a good way to set up, you know, your 20s. Not bad. You know? I wish I'd run into this when I was 22. I would have saved myself like seven or eight years of like the worst torment ever.
You know what I mean? But I learned a lot from that torment. So it's okay. So he's starting and he's producing and producing and producing, and he has a message. So what happens if tomorrow he just changes his message, changes and makes his vision different, and then just changes companies and starts doing something else, and he says, now this is what we're doing?
Momentum's at zero. Right? And if he does that three times in a row, his life is gonna start getting hard, and then he'll have to work twice as hard just to maintain it. Right? Because people don't really trust what he's doing anymore.
You need to stay consistent in your messaging for a long time. You need to be consistent in what you're doing.
Long enough to create unity. Because never at any point when you start a message will the message have unity right away. It takes time, right? You have to repeat something long enough for people to believe that it'll actually work, right?
If you say get two people a day, and then next week you're like, get one person a day, and the next month it's like, well now we're doing this old school way, now we're doing home meetings, and the next month you're like, hand out two audio CDs a day, what happens? You restarted three or four times in a row, okay? And that will never grow beyond a very small circle of influence. Does that make sense? So momentum is created from unity, from following a process, from a large group of people all doing a few simple things every day over a consistent period of time.
That's how momentum is created. A large group of people all doing a few simple things over a consistent period of time. In order to create that you have to be consistent. Super easy to do, way easier than being inconsistent, to be honest with you. Being inconsistent is really difficult.
You've got to constantly be inventing things, you've got to constantly be looking on Google for things, you've got to be going to the Warrior Forum every day and hanging out with every other broke person, right, trying to figure out something that'll work all the time. It's really difficult to do that all the time. It's super easy to just repeat yourself all the time, and when somebody wants you to change it you just refuse, right? You say you're like an old man, you just keep repeating yourself.
I mean, Landon, I've been repeating myself. You were in, what, four years ago around me? You got in before Empower, right? And I've been repeating myself for four years straight.
Not even changing at all, have I? I refuse, right? Why? Because then I've got to go back to four years ago. I'm not going to do that.
I still have people in my organization from before I started my company, from years ago. They're still doing and learning the same things. Some of them took like three years to get it. Like three years, you know what I mean? How long did it take you to get it?
Three years? About three years before you finally started doing what I'm teaching. What if I restarted that? It'd be awful. And he's going to say,
either he's not going to listen to me, or he's going to keep doing what he's doing. Or if he does do the new thing that I'm doing, it's going to take him forever to catch on. So that's why my messaging has always been, right? Get two customers a day and follow these steps. Why do I do that?
Because I know if people do that, they'll make a full-time income without anybody else. And I know if they try to do that, they'll produce more than if I tell them something stupid, like talk to two people a day, right, which will never make them any money at all. So I'll just rather aim for something really high, and if only a few people hit it, when they hit it, they got a full-time income like that without their organization doing anything. Make sense? Okay, next one. What do you do when distractions pop up?
It's called the distraction principle. What do you do? Distractions. Anybody know? A promotion that's louder than the distraction.
The only way to deal with it. Something negative happens in your business, how do you solve it? Promotion, okay? Culture's distracted, how do you solve it? Promotion, right?
Some weird media comes out about your company, how do you solve it? Promotion, right? How do you solve the negative? Promotion. That's how.
People's attention will go wherever your energy is. So if something happens, negative, promotion. You get negativity in your organization, right,
and you just start talking about it, right? You're feeding into energy that is not making sales in your organization. Therefore, you're breaking all the other rules we were talking about. You're wasting your energy. You need to get rid of negativity and distraction as fast as possible.
And if you talk about it, you can't get rid of it, right? Like a lot of you have probably noticed when stuff happens that's either weird or negative here, I talk about it maybe once, and then it just never comes up again.
And even if people ask me about it in hallways and stuff, I just change the subject and talk about something else. I am like a distraction machine, right? I'm as good at distracting people as the distractions are. People come up and they ask me, you know, hey, what about this person? And you know what I say?
You know, say, three years ago, let me tell you a story about a new rep that just got started and decided to get to work. You know? You can't focus on this stuff. People will leave your organization. Something negative is going to happen.
You'll have conflict in your organization from time to time if you got a big team or even a little team, okay? That affects you, okay? And the way to counteract it, let me tell you a story. I was in a company, and Landon, you probably remember this, right? Coin deal, right?
And we're in the company, and the upline left, right? I didn't talk about it. He left, and he was being as loud as possible, recruiting everybody into some, I think, a vitamin thing. I can't remember, right? He's like, this is going to be the hottest thing ever, but it's my upline.
And he left. And you know what I did? I ran a promotion and recruited 200 people that week. People are like, how the hell did you do that? Well, I had a list and stuff, you know?
I mean, I could recruit people whenever I want. And that promotion was so loud that the upline leaving didn't affect me at all. So whenever something negative happens, run a promotion. Whenever you get distracted, run a promotion. Your team's distracted, run a promotion.
Something bad happens, run a promotion. Law of the promotion, right? So what do you do? You run a promotion. What do you do when something negative happens?
That's it. Make the promotion louder than the distraction. Easy. You go recruit a bunch of people and tell people about it and make a contest around it, and then they'll just go recruit a bunch of people, and people forget about the negative thing that happened, and pretty soon they can't even remember it happened. Okay?
And if something negative has happened, for heaven's sakes, don't run around talking about it to everybody, right? Because what does that do? It's not selling. It's not promoting. It's not upselling.
It's not making you money. It's not making your team money, right? It will stop your whole group from growing if you allow that to happen. That make sense? Okay.
Next one. We've got the lid on the growth of your organization. Law of the lid, right? I think I got this originally from Stephen Covey or something like that. But here's kind of the concept behind it: your team will only grow on the outside as big as they are on the inside, and your team will only grow as big as you are.
If your team grows bigger than you are, usually it'll fall back down to how big you are sometime in the future. Okay? What do I mean by that? It's the same thing as we've been talking about, dream-building, we've been talking about personal growth forever in our organization. If you want to keep people around, keep your team growing, you've got to grow, okay.
If you want your team to grow, you've got to help them grow on the inside, right, and that comes from culture and personal growth and development. If you're not growing as a person, as a human being, right, you will not keep good people around for very long. Because all of the good people that you're ever going to have in your team will grow all the time. And if they outgrow you, they're gone, okay?
That might sound like somewhat of a difficult task, but it's not. It's just that you've got to be dreaming bigger all the time. Now, this is one of the cool things, because I'm not talking about something tedious, I'm talking about fun stuff, you know? You dream about a Ferrari and you get a Ferrari, then you need to dream about, you know, a bigger Ferrari or something like that, or a private jet or something. You need to have something you're aiming at that's bigger and bigger and bigger all the time.
You hit a goal, you need a bigger goal, right? If you will just commit to involving yourself in learning and evolving yourself in things that will keep you going, keep you projected out into the future in a bigger and bigger future, right, and always be sharing that vision and always be talking about where you're going, and you're always aiming somewhere that's bigger than where you are now, you'll keep people around. Because people want to be around somebody that's moving on, right? Want to be around somebody that's moving on.
If you're not moving on, right, you'll get stuck. That sounds like one of those sayings, you know what I mean? If you're not moving on, you're stuck, right? It's true. That make sense?
Next one, we've got the taproot law. Now, this one's a little weird, okay? And nobody really understands this at the snatch, but this is one of the most useful things you will ever learn in your life, okay? The taproots, right? Who in here understands what taproots are, right?
Lawrence does, a few other people, there's like three or four people that understand what this is. And what is this? You can excite people in multiple ways, okay? You can get people pumped in multiple ways, and you're always going to be pumping people up for as long as you're alive, right? You're always going to be pumping yourself up, too.
When I get on something to sell, I'm always selling myself and my team and my prospects at the same time. When I get on a sales presentation, my main goal is to sell myself and get myself pumped up. My second goal is to sell the leaders in the team. My third goal is to sell the reps in the team. My fourth goal is to get the prospects in.
The key is, though, if I sell myself, everybody gets fired up, right? So I'm always trying to get myself excited. But taproots, what are taproots? Okay? If you excite a person, you excite a person.
But if you excite somebody below them in their organization, it excites everybody in the whole sponsorship tree, okay? A chain reaction. Therefore, what's the best place to focus your energy? You want to get a leader excited? You want the best way?
Find somebody down line, help that person shift. When that person breaks through, the person up line breaks through, okay? So let's go back to the Justin Berengi story I'm always telling because it's a weird story, right? So when I invited him out to my house the first time, one of the core reasons behind it was because his sponsor is Paul Hutchings, okay? And he's down line from Paul.
And Paul was not focused on building the business with me. He was focused on another deal, okay? So I invite his down line to my house, right? Why?
See what I'm saying? That's the taproot effect. But it is way beyond that, right? That's like a start of it. You want to get somebody excited?
Create a breakthrough underneath them. If somebody's got an organization, they have a breakthrough underneath them, they stick around all the time, they get excited all the time. A hundred percent of the time it works. There's nothing that works better than that, right? Lawrence Keala just started breaking through, making a bunch of money.
That pump you up? Yeah. So I pop on with Keala, right? Three or four weeks ago, five weeks ago. Have a conversation, his income triples, right?
Because that's really easy to do with leaders. When somebody's producing, you make a little adjustment, their income will triple or quadruple or something. I'll give you guys some examples of stuff like that a little bit later. But what happens?
Well, that creates a taproot effect. It's like lighting a fire at the bottom. You're holding the tree up like this. It's like you light the roots on fire. The fire burns up, right?
That make sense? So I go to Keala, because he's underneath Lawrence and, you know, I want to, number one, help Lawrence out, but I also got to pump Lawrence up, right? So what I do, I find a leader down the line underneath him in his organization, and I pump that guy up, right? Why? Because that is way easier and way more effective, right, than trying to actually pump Lawrence up, because if he's not pumped up or something like that, I got to change his mind. I don't have to change a new person's mind, right?
And the further someone is away from you, the more levels they are removed from you, the easier it is to pump them up, because the further removed you get from somebody, the more powerful you look to them, because there's multiple levels of edification working in your favor. So, in other words, if I go to somebody down the line in Justin's organization, it is easier for me to create a breakthrough in that person than it is to create a breakthrough in Justin, because the closer people get to you, right, a prophet is not a prophet in where? Their own hometown. However, they go to the town next door, and they are a prophet, right? Multiple levels down the line is like where you're a prophet, right?
And there's a psychological effect to that. I actually call it the prophet effect, because there's no better way to describe it, and the reason is I grew up Mormon. The Mormons say they got a prophet, right? So here's the thing, everybody thinks this guy's a prophet. Now, maybe he is or whatever, right?
I don't know, right? I'm not criticizing it. I'm just telling you the prophet effect, but I promise you if you're Mormon and you walk into the presence of the prophet, all the distractions in your mind shut off, and you go into trance. Why? Because you believe he's a prophet.
So, the further you get away from your sphere of influence, the more powerful you get with people. It's a prophet effect, right? So, when you go way down the line in somebody's organization, there's multiple levels of people edifying you. You can create breakthroughs like this in people. It's a hundred times easier than firing people up close to you.
It's really difficult to fire people up in your sphere of influence. So, what do you do? You go where you're removed, because even if the people you sponsor, the people close to you, right, they think that, like, you know, oh yeah, you know, he doesn't really know what he's talking about because I know him now, right? Because that's how people are. Guys, that's how people are.
You get close to somebody, and what do you immediately do, right? You immediately start shutting off the parts of your brain that thought they were godlike, you know, because you're like, oh, he picks his nose and stuff, like me. He scratches his butt sometimes, like me, you know what I mean? He smells a little funny sometimes, like, you know, like, well, not me, but like the person next to me, right? You know what I'm saying?
You immediately start shutting off that part of your brain, right, that filters, that before you had like no filters there, but now you know him a little bit, and you're like, oh, he's not perfect, right? And you start shutting off. But people down line, they don't have that problem, right? And guess what? When you fire up a leader down line, up line can't quit. You want to lock somebody in, how do you do it?
Get a producer down line, they can't quit. How do you keep teams together? Get a producer down line, they can't quit. Okay? Does that make sense to everybody in here?
Now, how do you keep an organization around? Build friendships down line. Somebody tries to leave and take their team, they can't. Their team sticks with whoever they're connected to the most, and it's easier to connect with people that are further removed away, because you don't have to go through any of the normal rapport steps, right? We have a hypnotist here, where's the hypnotist?
Yeah, this guy actually has to get rapport, right? Because he's working with clients and stuff, and helping them, you know, create belief changes and whatever, right? However, he's got to get rapport, right? This is also the prophet effect.
When people go to his office, right, where are they going? They're going to a hypnotist. What happens when people go to see a hypnotist? Their mind shuts off, and they start going into trance, just being around them. Okay?
That's what happens, right? You know what I'm saying? You go to fight a kung fu master, even if you're good, you can't fight as well. That's how your mind works.
So, when you get further away from your sphere of influence, right, you can create more powerful shifts in people, and when you tell people to do things, they actually will do it. It's amazing how that works. People won't do things who are close to you, but if you tell people to do things who are far enough removed from you, they actually do them. Like, almost every time. And the further they are away from you, the easier it is to get them to do stuff.
It gets easier and easier the further they get away from your sphere of influence, right? That's one of the reasons why I kind of am a little bit more aware of what's going on in my life, and I'm a little bit more careful about getting too close to people in my organization. Because if I'm too close to people, they stop listening to anything I say. Almost every time, right? Some of the oldest philosophers in the world talk about this.
You know, Confucius, right? People like that. Why? Because it's true. Jesus talked about it.
Prophets not profiting their own hometown, right? They're not. Because they're like, I went to school with you. You forgot your pants to wear. You're not going to school one time.
You know what I'm saying? I don't have a big organization in Fairbanks, Alaska. Why? I grew up there, and people saw me pick my nose and stuff. You know what I'm saying?
So I don't have a big organization in Costa Rica either. That's one of the reasons. So, taproot. So let's talk about, let's draw this out into like a little bit of a structure here, okay? And this comes from looking at the largest organizations in the world and how they're built.
Width is profitable, depth is stable, okay? Make sense, everybody? Width is profitable, depth is stable, okay. You want a leader to stay, get them leaders down the line, okay?
And leader staying is what sustains your income, okay? That's one of the reasons why we have the producer law, the producer leader, right? One of the reasons why you're always selling when you're working with people is because selling is what makes them money, okay? And what do you do with those people? You sell with them, because that's what makes them money.
And conveniently, it's what makes you money too. Okay, so where do you work and where do you want to work in an organization? Where you want to work if you can, and none of these are perfect, is: if you got like a hundred levels in the organization, and this is the most excited person, right, that exists in depth, and he's 40 levels down, that's who. Because that guy will keep everybody around up line, okay? Which is going to feed into something.
So, you know, Chris Rushlow, right? He's one of the people that's connected and sponsored, you know, by me, right? So, the other week, you know, he wasn't really down, but, you know, I could tell that there was a little funk in his energy. So, you know, Landon had, you know, stopped building the team, right?
So, what did I do? I called Landon. Well, Landon is far enough removed from me to where he thinks I'm like Jesus or something, right? And maybe I am, right? But no, he's far enough removed to where, you know, Chris knows me right now.
Chris is one of those guys, he can maintain that kind of respect for when he sees authority. Not everybody has the ability to do that. Most people's brains shut off when they get to know somebody, right? I mean, do you listen to your family, even if they're smart? No, you argue with them about everything.
You don't do that with authority figures, right? Your brain shuts off and you have no ability to do that. It's how the brain is wired, right? But Landon, he's like removed enough from me to where I can call him. And this is what the conversation was.
He's like, this is Dave Wood. Oh, my God. You called. I'm not even building in Empower. And it was like a two-minute conversation.
He's like, dude, I'm so fired up, I'm building in Empower again. I sent Chris Rush a text. Right? Yeah, I was like, dude, I'm so pumped up, I'm doing this again. That's it, period. I'm going to be rich, right?
Right? Then I send Chris a text message, right? And what do I say? I say, Landon's fired up a bit, and he's bad. And he's like, you're shitting me. I'm so pumped up, right?
That's how you fire people up. Taproots, right? They'll be fired up when they're new, right? You want to keep people excited, though. You get somebody excited underneath them, right?
When's an organization stable, right? When you've got a relationship underneath a leader with at least four leaders who are full-time. Upline candidates, right? You've got a relationship with at least four leaders who are full-time, impossible, right? Because if they quit, their leaders are staying. And I promise you, those will be that person's best leaders, whoever the upline is connected with, right? Why?
Because of the authority effect, right? There's an actual effect on the way people change their state when they walk into the presence of an authority. Commands are better received by people who people perceive as an authority, right? That make sense to you? Does it make sense, or are you just agreeing with me because I'm being a weirdo, right?
So I had this illustration drawn out a long time ago, right? And this is the way that you want to build a massive, massive organization. This is what you do. You get a person, and as fast as you can, you start getting people down line, right? You get a fired-up person, you get a fired-up person down line.
You get a fired-up person underneath them, you get another fired-up one underneath them. And how long do you keep doing that? You keep doing that until you get far enough down to where you've got four leaders on top of each other in a row, right, that are all making a full-time income that's more than they've ever made in their life. And you can drop dead, and it doesn't matter, okay? That's way easier than trying to convince somebody to change, okay?
Because they have no choice with that model. They don't have a choice. Because when somebody gets fired up and they start producing, right, the upline now must produce to keep up with them, or they look bad, okay? So they will produce to keep up with the leader underneath them.
That's how you build a stable organization with big, big income. But now here's the thing. The more times you do that, right, here's the interesting effect of this, is when you do this, usually - this isn't a hard rule, but this is what I've observed, okay - every time you get a full-time person, right, and you get a full-time person underneath them, the person above them, their income doubles, and the person above them, their income doubles, too. It's almost true, not 100% true, but in my experience, it's almost true 100% of the time in almost every organization.
Not every time, almost every time. So how do you grow people's incomes? You just get another producer down the line that you're connected to that you can make money with, and you just help them make more money, and the person above them just fights to keep up. That make sense, right? And then you're actually creating competition for people to be the best, right?
Then all of a sudden, the upline calls you one day, and they say, hey, I want some help. And you say, yeah, I'd be happy to help you, but I'm going to be down in Jim's webinar next week. He has 200 people, you know, attending. If you bring an extra 200 people there, I'd be happy to help you out, you know? Jim's four levels down, by the way, and he just out-earned you last month, you know? See, most people are trying to, like, manage people or whatever, and who do you always want?
You want the newest person as far down as you can, as far removed as you can, that's the best, newest story, right? That's who you want on stage, that's who you want to recognize, that's who you want to be working with, right? Because the prophet effect never lasts with people, right? Because people get closer to you, and they just, their brain just starts turning on, and they start questioning everything. Right?
And it's normal. Jesus had that happen to him, too, you know? So what did he do? He went to a different town. What did he do, right?
So what do you do? You do that with as many legs as you can at the same time, right? And every time you do that with a leg, your income is going to have another dramatic jump in it, in any comp plan. Doesn't matter. Anytime you get a stable leg with a whole bunch of leaders in it, your income jumps up.
Doesn't matter what comp plan you're in. That's what happens. How do you increase your income? Get a new leg with a bunch of leaders in it. Okay?
How do you do that? You recruit and sell all the time. And when somebody asks you questions, don't answer them, just go sell with them. And then, if you're answering the question, answer it and then sell something. Or make them buy a product to get the answer to it.
Right? You got a pass-up plan, you do that, right? What happens? Somebody down the line buys something, then everybody up line earns a commission. Right?
And that's a cool way to sell. You know what I'm saying? It's a taproot effect. That make sense to everybody in here? The fun part is, you don't have to fire lights from the bottom up all by yourself.
That's the way you build a team. So how do you apply that in reality? Because it's not going to be some perfect map in an organization. The way that you apply it in reality is when you're building, you're doing two things. You're bringing the numbers to find the man, or you're teaching the man to bring in the numbers. When you're teaching him, you're always doing it in the biggest groups you can, in front of people. You're always training, selling, upselling, right? Creating downline growth and culture at the same time, at an event where you're promoting the next event.
Right? So if I'm selling downline from somewhere, what am I going to be doing? I'm going to be promoting, every organization that I'm ever working with, all the time, into the next cultural event, whatever that is. Could be the conference call on Monday nights. At the conference call, I'm going to promote people to the next conference call.
At each conference call, I'm going to promote people to the next event. At each event, I'm going to build the next major event. And I do that all the time. So I don't have to restart my process all the time in my organization. That make sense?
It's super easy stuff to do. It's way easier than what everybody else is doing, because then you don't have to straggle around all the time motivating everybody, because everything just motivates. It's like a self-reinforcement cycle, like the person eating themselves and getting larger, like I was talking about earlier, which makes no sense at all. I just said that because I'm a weirdo.
Right? That make sense to you guys? You need a taproot. Folks, obviously the income examples discussed are extraordinary. The income claims presented are not intended to serve as a guarantee of income.
Instead, they're designed to give you an idea of what's possible. Success in this business requires leadership, hard work, and dedication. Since we want to help you make an informed decision, we've gone above and beyond with our income disclosure document. If you want to see the average earnings, please visit the page at www.empowernetwork.com forward slash income dot php.
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