The Team Activity System: Why Being Available to Everyone Keeps Your Team Small
You tell every new person who joins your team the same thing: call me anytime, day or night, I’ll help you with anything. It feels generous. It feels like leadership. Three weeks later your phone is booked solid from seven in the morning until almost midnight, every slot filled with someone who took you up on the offer, and you haven’t produced anything yourself in days because you’re too busy being available.
That’s not a boundaries problem you can fix by getting better at saying no. It’s a structural problem, because nobody built a system for the team to run on before the team started running on you personally. Growth without a schedule and a place to route people just grows straight at whoever’s easiest to reach, and that’s always the leader.
As someone building a team in this industry, you’ve probably already lived a version of this: a bonus you offered in good faith that quietly became a second full-time job, a team that can’t get anyone on the phone with a stranger’s belief change, a business that was supposed to buy you time and instead consumed all of it. Dave Wood built his own team straight into this wall early on, changed exactly one thing about how he offered himself to new recruits, and watched his phone go silent in three weeks without losing a single one of them.
Why does helping every person on your team personally guarantee you’ll stop producing?
Here’s the mechanic nobody explains to you when you join this business. If you’re good at recruiting, and you’re personally answering everything that comes at you, your organization will grow past your capacity to handle it within about three weeks. Not eventually. Three weeks. People will find you through every channel available, a text, a comment, a message from an account you forgot existed, and every one of them will have a real question that feels urgent to them.
Dave is blunt about the fix, and it isn’t willpower. It’s a place to route people that isn’t you. “Always work with the numbers in groups. Always, always, always,” he tells the room, because the moment you don’t have a weekly gathering to point people toward, you have nothing third party to hand anyone, and every question lands directly on your calendar. The second a weekly team gathering exists, you can fend off nearly everything that comes at you without ever being rude about it, because you’re not refusing to help. You’re pointing to where the help already happens.
Why did offering to help less grow this team faster than promising to help more?
Dave tells this one on himself, because he built exactly this trap before he found his way out of it. When he was new online, he told everyone who joined his team that as a bonus, they could call him anytime, any hour, whatever they needed.
People took him at his word. Within three weeks his schedule was full from morning to night, and it stopped being fun the way generosity is supposed to be. So he changed the bonus entirely: if you join my team, I won’t help you with anything. That was the pitch now, stated as a benefit, not an apology.
He told his new recruits exactly why every other team was throwing in unlimited access as a perk. “The reason they are is because what they are selling isn’t valuable and because, here’s the key, they don’t make any money, so they have time to be on the phone with you. They’re also slaves to their business. If you listen to them, you will be too.”
That’s the reframe that made the new bonus land. Every other team was offering unlimited access precisely because their leaders weren’t making money and had nothing better to do with their hours. Joining a team like that meant learning to be dependent the same way they were. Dave’s pitch flipped the story: join here, and you get to build something and still have a life, because the team solves problems together in groups instead of one leader personally absorbing everyone’s. His phone calls dropped to zero within three weeks. People who knew him well would look at the phone and decide not to call, because he’d told them exactly what kind of leader he’d become if they let him.
Why does a weekly team call matter before you have anyone to put on it?
The activity system underneath all of this runs on a simple rhythm: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly. Daily is production, selling and recruiting, nothing else. Weekly is the team gathering that makes everything above possible. Monthly is a more intensive training. Quarterly is a live event you actually attend.
The weekly piece is the one people delay the longest, usually because it feels premature. Dave called a friend early in his own career, once his list had grown to 84 people, to ask when he should start a weekly call. The answer surprised him. He should have started it back when he had exactly one person on his list.
His friend gave him four reasons, and every one of them still holds. “Because if you have a call then you’re on the line. Number one, you have to prepare content to teach them so you have to learn better. Number two, you’ll get a bigger list because you aren’t going to have a call with just one person. You’ll feel silly on it. Number three, you’re going to become an inspirational communicator if you do that every week. Number four, if anything ever goes wrong in your organization, in your business, the people who come on your call every week will be unbelievably loyal to you.”
That fourth reason paid off in a way Dave couldn’t have scripted. A few months later, he was the top producer in a company that abruptly shut down.
The CEO called me. He said, “We’ve decided to go out of business,” or whatever their excuse was that day. It went like this. I hung up the phone. I called a friend who was in another deal. I said, “Give me a link.” I joined. One hour later, I was on a webinar. That night, I recruited 67 people.
Sixty-seven people, the same night his old company folded, with no scrambling and no re-selling anyone on who he was. The loyalty his weekly call had built over months moved with him in an hour, because the people on that call had spent months learning to trust him directly, not a company logo. That’s not something you can build the week you need it. It’s something you build the week you have one person on your list.
Why can’t anything meaningful happen for your team without getting everyone in a room?
Daily and weekly rhythms carry the business. Quarterly events carry something the internet can’t replicate. Dave is direct about this, even as someone who’s built enormous organizations online: recruiting works fine on the internet, but changing what people believe about themselves happens in person, live, in a room, in a way it doesn’t any other way.
When people gather in the same physical space, they build relationships that a comment thread never produces. They watch someone they already know start to change, and it moves something in them that reading about the same person’s results never does. They make commitments out loud in front of other people, which carries a different weight than a private decision nobody else witnessed. None of that requires the event to be flashy or expensive. It requires people to physically be there.
- Someone who’s an engineer sees another engineer doing well and thinks, I can do that too.
- Someone who doesn’t fit the usual mold sees someone equally unconventional making real money and thinks, this door is actually open to me.
- Someone who’s spent months quietly unsure sees the shift in a dozen familiar faces over one weekend and decides to go full-time, not because of anything said from the stage, but because of what they watched happen to people they already knew.
Skip the quarterly event and you inherit all of that work yourself, one person at a time, which is exactly the trap the rest of the activity system exists to help you avoid. Promote the event relentlessly instead, and belief changes for you, in a room, without costing you a single one-on-one conversation.
Where this goes next
What’s above is the skeleton of the system. The full lesson goes much further into it: the complete daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly breakdown with what to actually do inside each layer, why every free training you give away without a call to action quietly trains your team to make no money, and how to build an inner circle that people have to earn their way into instead of one they simply show up and occupy. That full training, video plus the complete transcript, is part of the Team Building Formula course.
If you’re new to it, the entire course, all nine lessons and every transcript, is $99 at the Team Building Formula course. Go claim the full lesson, and before you answer the next stray question that lands in your messages, decide where it actually belongs instead.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
Let's talk about building an activity system out, right? And what I mean by a system is I mean your process you follow for the activities you do in your business. You need a schedule, okay? Because if you want to meet in groups, you need times where you get together, because if you don't, you can't get groups together. You can get one-on-one people together, kind of whenever you can connect, but any more than one other person, and now you've got to schedule it, right?
So if you're going to do things in teams, you need a schedule, and you need to decide what it is and stick to it, okay? Now, everybody in here, you either need to be doing a team gathering every week or be a part of one, okay? One or the other. You don't have to do it initially, but you've got to have one. You've got to have a team gathering every week, because if you don't have a team gathering every week, you don't have anything third-party or for people, too, and you're going to be stuck again.
And if you find too many people are hitting you up for stuff, then you start a team gathering, because you need to start one, right? The second you have a weekly team gathering, you can fend off every question that comes at you, okay? And here's why that's important to you, because you need to produce, okay? And if your time is consumed by stuff you can't produce, and if you are producing and helping people with everything, your entire day will be consumed if you're good. Your whole day, your whole night, if you're good, your organization will excel, and your organization will expand so fast, it will be beyond your capacity to handle in like three weeks.
When you know what you're doing, your organization will grow in three weeks larger than your capacity to handle if you're helping people and not fending stuff off to group gatherings. Always work with the numbers and groups, okay? Always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always. Because people will tell you all sorts of things to try to distract you from that, okay? And you'll start to see it, okay?
You've probably seen it already. People will tell you whatever they can come up with to get your attention, okay? And whenever you give it to them, and you don't follow your rules, right? You take your energy off of where you're headed, you take your energy off of what's going to grow the team, right? And you take your energy off of what's making everybody money.
So you've got to learn how to fend this stuff off. And it's not about ignoring people, it's about doing things in a way that's smart, because when you're in those growth phases initially, and you're building teams of people, you just get mauled, right? Right? People will come through back doors on Facebook, and they'll say, hey, I need coaching for this, you know? Hey, can you call me and help me with this?
Hey, my website isn't working, can you put a banner on it? You know, my WordPress isn't working, can you install it? You know, what exactly do I say to somebody when they ask this question? And people will just come out of the woodwork as you're building teams, but then you don't have time to help people that are actually doing something, right? So then you don't have any time anymore, and then you stop producing because you run around.
And I know because I've done all of this dumb stuff. All of it, right? When I was new on the internet, and I started marketing and recruiting like crazy, I told people, hey, you join my team, and I'm going to help you with everything. I'm going to show you how to set up your blog. You got a question, give me a call.
It's like a bonus for being a part of the team. You know, some people are like, as a bonus for being a part of my team, you can call me anytime you like, because I know these guys, they don't like to pick up the phone, but I'll pick up the phone, doesn't matter if it's 2 in the morning. It's a bonus. You know what I mean? Well, God forbid that works, you know, as a bonus, right?
Because people will take it seriously because you offered it. And then you got to deliver on it, which sucks, right? That's what I did. And it wasn't like that, but I was like, you know, you got to be a part of the inner circle, and I'll coach you. So I started, here's what happened.
I got so good at recruiting, right? At first, I was like, I'll coach a person, you know, maybe an hour a day I spend on the phone with people. And it was like in three weeks, it was like my schedule was booked from the morning till the night with people wanting to talk to me, because I was so good at recruiting. Right? That's not fun, right?
So I changed my bonus. And I said, if you join my team, I won't help you with anything. It's my bonus. And it worked just the same. And here's why it worked.
It's because when I did that bonus, instead of the first bonus, what I said is I said, here, look, here's the deal. You're joining all these teams and all these organizations, and everybody's offering you everything under the sun. The reason they are is because what they're selling isn't valuable, right? And because, here's the key, they don't make any money, so they got time to be on the phone, and they're slaves to their business. And if you listen to them, you will be too.
But if you join my team, it's different, and here's why. Because if you join my team, not only do I not have to help you with anything, you don't have to help your team run around, because we get together in gatherings, and we solve each other's problems in groups. And if you join my team, you get to build a business and have a life at the same time. That was a much better pitch. When I changed my pitch to that, my phone calls went down to zero in three weeks.
People were afraid to call. You know, because of what I said in the videos. They were like, I won't call. It's part of it. I can't.
I'll just go to work. You know what I mean? It went to zero, zero. Like, even people who knew me were like, you know, they look at the call on the phone, and they, like Rob Forey told me, he's like, I wanted to call you, but I was looking at the phone. I was like, I don't know, he might get mad.
You know what I'm saying? And I didn't even know who he was until I noticed him. I was like, who's that guy? That was cool. I met Chris Record.
You know, here's how I met Chris Record and my organization. Somebody was like, hey, Dave, do you know Chris Record? And he was like, no, who is he? And he was like, he's that guy. And he's at one of our events.
I said, oh, who's that? They said, oh, you sponsored him. And I said, I did? I was like, oh. I was like, hey, dude, how's it going?
I was like, I'm Dave. And he was like, yeah, yeah, how's it going? I was like, you want to speak in 10 minutes? Right? Right?
That's way cooler, you know what I mean? I like to have so many successful people, I can't talk to them all. You only do it when you pass things through these processes of doing things, right? If you're trying to control everybody, it keeps them locked around you. You know what I'm saying?
So if you're free to produce because you're not doing all this stuff, like if you're a normal person in this industry, I just free. I freed up your entire day. Right? Didn't I? Right?
How many hours a day did I just free up today in this training from what you're doing? Yeah. Many hours a day. Many hours of bullshit that doesn't pay. I'm trying to rhyme like a pile of hay.
Right? You know what I'm saying? It's like I just freed up her whole day in this day-long training. I just freed up probably five hours a day. Probably, right?
Maybe four or five hours a day, six hours sometimes of bullshit. We're talking straight bullshit that she didn't, nobody has ever told her she doesn't have to do. You know what I'm saying? I want to sell this to everybody. It's like cheat.
It's like having your cake and eating it too. Who says I can't? I don't even know what it's like to have a cake without eating it or vice versa. Seems like each way I have both, you know? So you got daily things you need to do, weekly things you need to do, monthly things you need to do, and you've got quarterly things you need to do.
And it's better to think of your business in chunks like that. Daily, right? Daily you need to be focused on when you're working, you're recruiting or producing, and you're always trying to hit width and depth at the same time whenever you're doing anything. Right? So you're always trying to recruit in a way, if you're recruiting, you're recruiting in a way that creates depth at the same time.
Always the best. Somebody said, should I go wider? Should I go deep? Yes, right? If you can, both at the same time.
Because if you can recruit in a way that doesn't involve you being on the phone all day and night, well then you have time to work with your team who's producing because you don't have to be on the phone with anybody, right? See, if you have to be on the phone with everybody, you don't have time to do any of this. But if you don't have to be on the phone with anybody and you don't get calls, you can actually look and see where your leaders are and hang out with them. But it might get difficult if you get too many of them. Then you still get overloaded and you've got to say, gosh, this is getting hard.
I've got too many of these guys, you know, and they need to come to a meeting, right? Then you've got to meet with everybody at events and stuff. And then you get more and more leaders and you have to get more and more selective. It just gets weird after a while, right, when you build like this, right? So you've got daily things.
Daily you should be focused on producing. Daily you should be focused on producing. What do we do in this business? I talked about in the top producer formula, right? What you need to be doing in this business is selling and recruiting all day long, that's it.
If you're working, you're aiming something at selling and recruiting. Selling products and recruiting new distributors, and that's it, okay? When you sell a product, you earn a commission. When you recruit a person, you get an evangelist, right? So that's what we do.
Weekly, what do you need, right? You need to have some kind of gathering, right? Some kind of a team gathering. If you guys don't have a team that you're part of, start one. It's really easy.
You know, one of the best piece of advice I ever had was when I was new online. I called one of my friends, and he had a weekly call going. And I said, when should I start one of those? And he said, how big is your list? I said, 84 people.
And he said, you should have started it when you had one person on your list, right? And I was like, why? And you know what he told me? He said, because if you have a call and you're on the line, it says, number one, you got to prepare content to teach them, so you got to learn better, right? Number two, you'll get a bigger list, because you ain't going to have a call with just one person.
You'll feel silly on it, right? Number three, you're going to become an inspirational communicator if you do that every week. Number four, if anything ever goes wrong, your organization, your business, the people who come on your call every week will be unbelievably loyal to you. Well, that came in real handy about four or five months later when I was the number one producer in a company that went out of business. Because I just did a call, and everybody came into my new company like that.
Didn't take any effort. The company went out of business, I was not even emotional about it. I was on the phone, the CEO called me, he said, we've decided to go out of business, or whatever their excuse was that day, right? And I went like this, hung up the phone, called a friend that was in another deal, said, give me a link, joined, right? One hour later was on a webinar, that night recruited 67 people.
Okay? I'm messing around. It's my team, not the company's, right? That's the way I look at things. Now, that's me.
I'd start a weekly team thing, because people get loyal to you when they come back every week. And you have to learn how to keep people around, or they won't come back. So it's like you've got to force yourself to learn. It's a good thing. You say, but I'm nervous to get in front of people.
Then invite some other people to be guests with you and just watch what they do or something, right? Or go plug in with somebody else and ask if you can come on and they can coach you. Something like that, you know? Participate in somebody else's organization is fine. You need something live every week.
I've been telling people it for years, and only a few people do it. And I've almost never ran into somebody ever that's had a live thing for their team every week that hasn't started making a full-time income. I've almost never ran into it. There's all kinds of people that avoid it. There's tons of people that avoid doing it.
There's tons of people that start doing it and quit doing it. But of the people that I know that have just kept doing it every week, Lawrence, have you met anybody? They do it for six months and they don't make a full-time income? Where they do something live and they force themselves to promote it? Never happens, you know?
Never happens. People who do that stuff start making money, okay? Make sense? It's like, what's the key to making money? Well, start doing live stuff, right?
Remember, everything you do with your organization, promote the next event, you're selling, you're upselling, right? You're teaching at the same time. You're doing everything at once at the same time, right? And every time you're doing a training, you want to turn that into a call to action to buy something to get to the next event, to buy the next training all the time, right? You just get used to it.
Because if you're not doing that, see, some people are like, I just want to record a training video. What, for free? Okay. You know what I mean? You're not even going to tell people to buy something in it?
You're just going to have a bunch of free training? Hey, look at me, I'm going to train you on how to give away free training. And be broke? Let's do a training on that together. How to do free training and make no money at all.
Video series by David Wood, right? Sounds really interesting, doesn't it? Let me teach you how to sit around making YouTube videos all day while you make no money at all. I've got this great training for you. I would charge you, but I'm not willing to charge something because I've got a poverty mindset.
So I'm going to give it to you for free because I'm not willing to sell because that's for evil people like Lex Luthor. The bullshit people come up with is unbelievable to me, right? And I've let myself do this too, right? But when you just give of yourself and you give of yourself and you give of yourself, it doesn't help anybody, it doesn't help you. So if you're going to do training for people, it's fine.
But sell something on it, you know? You like this training? Buy now, right? It's easy, you know? So you need something weekly.
Daily focus on production, right? Monthly, you do training for people in a group of some kind. Right? In offline network marketing, they do Super Saturdays online. You need to have at least something that's a little bit more intense going on every month, right?
And then quarterly, you need to attend a big event with your team. You need to, right? If you don't, it will be a hundred times harder to hold your team together. A hundred times. Because you are going to have to try to do the work of an event, okay?
You can't. Hopefully your company's got quarterly. Right? You can't do the work of an event. Nor would I want to.
See, I don't even plan my events. I just show up and I speak. I meet the speakers and stuff, right? We have event planners and things. I don't want to plan events.
I just want to do events. Because when people gather together, they build relationships. When people gather together, they change beliefs. When people gather together, they see other people that they knew before changing and feel compelled to change. When people gather together, they have breakthroughs that they don't have if they don't.
There is no getting around it. We can do recruiting meetings on the internet. They're more effective. But as far as cultural events, it is not more effective, right? People say, I don't need to go to those events because I can build on the internet.
That's true. That's true. But you're not going to build generational leadership, okay? In the Mass Influence Formula, which I'm teaching in Charlotte, I'm going to talk about influencing people in unbelievably massive numbers and how to walk people through changing and things like that, right? The reality is that you can't do this stuff that you can do live if you're not live.
You can't. You just can't, right? So some of you, you've been in this space where you're like, well, I'm not going to promote the events. Okay, have fun because you're going to do ten times the work if you don't. Right?
For me, I'm talking about the next event on everything I do. Why? Because I talk about everything I do and everybody starts repeating that behavior. I've got a whole organization of people that are always talking about how great the next event is and people show up without really doing anything, right? And if people show up, it's like this event.
Do you guys see the difference in people's faces right now versus when the event started? You see it? You look around the room in the breaks in this training today, you see people's faces, right? People don't have shifts like this if they don't go to the events, right? And they don't make commitments either.
How do you create organizations of people that go full-time? What are you looking for? You're looking for full-time people, right? They're the glue. You're looking for people that go full-time.
This is how they make their living. Full-time people, right? When you get a full-time person, okay, they're committed at a different level. This is how they make their living. They become professional.
They start to study. They start to learn. They start to teach. Right? They start to do team hangouts.
They start to do webinars. Full-time is what you're looking for. You're looking for how many people can I create to be full-time, right? People won't go full-time usually before events. It's super rare, okay?
AK is a weird one because he lives in like Germany or whatever, so it's harder. You know, he's going to fly like thousands of miles. But people generally won't do it. You need them to come together because here's what happens. At an event, you meet somebody like Lawrence Tam.
And people look at him who are engineers and they say, oh, shoot, I can do this. Lawrence Tam's making tons of money and I'm an engineer too. Or they're a hippie and they see Justin Marengi and they say, this is the first company I've ever been into where a hippie had money. This is amazing. I'm going to be rich too.
You know? Or they see Tony Rush and they say, I just like that guy because he thinks a lot. I can be rich too because I think about a lot of stuff and question everything too, just like Tony, right? You know? Or they see somebody who's some way related to them and they connect with it and they just kind of shift a little bit, you know?
And I got story after story after story of people. They come to an event, right? They have some shift and then they actually start making money because they actually start doing it, right? It's third party belief change. That's what events are for.
Third party belief change. Something that you don't have the ability to do on your own. I don't have the ability to do it on my own. And I'm really good at this stuff. And I can't do what an event can do.
So stop making excuses to promote your company events and stop trying to think it's the company trying to sell you tickets and stuff. It doesn't matter what company it is. Almost no network marketing company I know makes much money or any money on their events. Almost none of them. Why do they do them then?
Because when their reps change, they make money. Okay? That's why. Get to your company events and promote them and talk about them all the time. Quarterly, right?
And when you get at the events, when you're doing your team events, all of it, you're always building this inner circle of people and making them do something to be there. Right? Not just building an inner circle, but people have to do something to be in it. Why do they have to do something to be in it? Because if you don't have to do anything to be in it, you just got there one day and then you're there forever, what happens?
Well, people always feel like they're on the outside who are the new producers. Right? You always want to invite people into the circle and have them take action to get there. Right? Because if you do that, people will take action they otherwise wouldn't take so they can be close to you.
Okay? So the events, it's a great opportunity to have a meeting only for the people in the top package. Right? We're doing a meeting only for the people that are all in. Right?
At the event. Stuff like that. That make sense to you guys? So that's if you look at an activity system, that's what you need. As far as training your team, how should you train your team?
Third party only, in my opinion. Okay? If you want to build a big business quick, third party. Why? Because then you won't get trapped in anything.
Okay? What do I refer people to? These products. Why? Because if I send people here, I don't need to send them anything else.
Okay? Because I'm not going to send them to every little strategy on the planet. That's what I do. Right? Why?
Because then they're learning from something where I'm not sitting there and talking for eight hours. Or I'm not having to coach them on everything. Because people who aren't producing want to be coached. Leaders want to go hang out in exotic, fun places, spending lots of money on stuff. It's different.
Okay? I'd rather do the latter. You know, let's go to Cancun together or something. And we'll pop on a jet or something and go there. That's fun.
You know what I mean? That's what people are doing this for. Not just meetings. You know what I mean? So this is how you coach people, is third party tools, third party trainings, third party events.
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