Review of the Formulas: Why Redirecting Beats Solving Every Problem
You answer every question yourself. A leader calls upset about another leader, so you mediate. Someone stalls on a script, so you write it for them. A downline member gets discouraged, so you spend forty minutes talking them back off the ledge. You built a team, and somehow your calendar now looks like a help desk, and none of it compounds into anything bigger than the last favor you did.
As someone who has tried to hold a growing group together with your own two hands, you already know how this ends. It ends with you working harder every time the team gets bigger, until the size of your own organization becomes the thing punishing you instead of paying you.
Here’s the fix. Most people manage a growing team by getting better at solving problems. Producers get better at redirecting them, using a short list of response formulas Dave Wood reviewed at the end of the Team Building Formula course, because by that point in the training he’d already used most of them all day without stopping to name them. Team building, in his framing, means getting an entire group pointed at one direction, producing sales, and turning everything else that happens along the way into fuel for that instead of a distraction from it.
Why does answering every question yourself quietly cap the size of your team?
Every day, a growing team throws things at you: questions, demands, objections, requests to be personally coached. The instinct is to solve each one yourself. The formula is to redirect it instead.
- When someone asks a question, sell instead of answering it directly. Point them at a piece of third party training built to teach exactly what they’re asking about, so you earn a commission, they get taught by something built for the job, and you didn’t just burn twenty minutes explaining something they’ll forget by Friday.
- When someone doesn’t own the product that would actually solve their problem, upsell them into it. That isn’t a sales tactic bolted onto teaching, it is the teaching, because if they replicate the same move in their own team, they make more money doing exactly what you just did.
- When someone wants access to something bigger, mentoring, an inner circle, more of your direct time, make earning it require an action that leads to the next event.
None of that is stinginess. It’s duplication. Every time you answer a question by teaching, selling, or upselling instead of quietly fixing it for free, you’re modeling a behavior your team can actually copy. Modeling “I’ll fix it for you” only teaches people to keep bringing you their problems.
Why does giving a discouraged leader a challenge work better than talking them out of quitting?
Leaders quit. It happens constantly once a team has any size to it, and the natural response is to get them on the phone and talk them out of it. There’s a faster lever, and it doesn’t involve the discouraged leader at all.
As Dave Wood explains the move in the Team Building Formula, “Best way, if somebody doesn’t want to do it anymore, find somebody downline who does. Right? I promise you that motivates everyone. Everyone is motivated by that. Some leader has an organization. They’re just kind of discouraged or whatever. Find somebody downline. Pump them up. The leader gets pumped up. And they want to do it again. Every time. It works 100% of the time. It is the best way to keep leaders around.”
Instead of pouring energy into the one person who’s checked out, you find the person underneath them who’s still hungry, you build them up in front of the team, and the discouraged leader watches somebody in their own downline start producing again. Nobody wants to be the reason their own team outgrows them. That alone tends to pull them back in without a single conversation about quitting.
The same redirection shows up when someone asks how to reach their next level. Rather than answering the question directly, the move is to ask a string of questions that get them agreeing out loud (how serious are you, what are you actually willing to do, fast way or slow way), and then hand them a specific, measurable challenge tied to an event instead of a straight answer. Bring five hundred people to a hangout this week, and there’s another one next month (a number that sounds made up until you’ve watched a team actually pull it off). It answers the underlying request without spending an hour explaining strategy they’d forget by tomorrow, and it hands them something they can go do today.
Why does one success story do more selling than a month of pitching your own opportunity?
New blood is the lifeblood of a growing team, and the fastest way to waste it is to let a good result just sit there as a nice anecdote. The move is to take every single result and put it to work.
As it’s put in the Team Building Formula, “Because what do you want? You want to edify people that are doing the right behaviors. People that are getting in. People that are getting all in, right? People that are getting tickets to the next event is who you want to edify. People that are bringing people to the next event. People that are producing in your team. The behavior that you edify will be produced more often by the people who want to be around you.”
That’s the entire mechanism in one line: whatever you publicly praise, you get more of. Praise somebody for showing up to an event and more people show up. Praise somebody for bringing a guest and more guests appear. And because it’s always a new name and a new result, the story never goes stale the way a repeated pitch does. Next month there’s a new person, and the month after that another one, and each one becomes a fresh reason to sell without ever repeating yourself.
Why do most conflicts inside a growing team have nothing to do with what people are actually arguing about?
Conflict shows up the moment a team has any size to it. Two leaders stop liking each other, a downline pair starts sniping, somebody spreads a rumor that poisons a whole group’s mood. The mistake is treating every one of these as its own unique problem that needs its own unique solution.
There’s a simple distinction worth knowing here: any topic can be talked about at a more abstract level, call it the principle, or a more specific level, call it the strategy. A pen, viewed more abstractly, is just a tool for writing. Viewed more specifically, it’s a particular kind of ink. Almost every fight inside a team happens down at the specific, strategy level, two people disagreeing about how something should be done, while both of them actually agree on the bigger principle underneath it. Point the conversation back up at that shared principle instead of litigating the specific disagreement, and the fight usually just stops on its own.
That doesn’t mean every disagreement gets talked out in the open. Conflict resolution is one of the few things worth keeping out of view of the wider team until people already know about it. It’s not a reason to look away from real damage either. Gossip and chronic negativity spread through an organization if nobody addresses them directly, and ignoring a problem never makes it disappear. It just gives it more time to spread.
Why should your workload stay the same whether your team is 100 people or 100,000?
Every one of these formulas points at the same underlying claim, the one that actually gives you your calendar back, and it’s the reason the whole course exists: your workload as a team leader should not grow with your team.
And it doesn’t matter how many people are in your organization. It’s irrelevant whether it’s 100 or 100,000, it is the same workload if you’re doing it right. The same.
That’s only true if you’ve actually built the redirect into how you operate: selling instead of solving, challenging instead of rescuing, edifying instead of repeating yourself, pointing conflict back up at shared principles instead of refereeing every disagreement. Do that consistently and you’re never really managing your whole organization. You’re managing a small handful of people directly, the same handful whether your team is in the hundreds or the hundreds of thousands, and routing everything else back toward the next event and the next sale.
The full lesson walks through every formula in this review from start to finish, including several response patterns and story strategies this summary doesn’t have room for, plus the live coaching where Dave worked through team members’ actual situations in real time. You can get the entire course, including this lesson, for $99 at the Team Building Formula course.
Get the course, pick one conversation you’re dreading having with your team this week, and go redirect it instead of solving it for them.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
And what I'm going to do for the next bit is I'm going to run through a handful of ways just to review the principles and how to use them to respond to everything. And then I'm going to answer questions and coach you guys a bit. And that's how we're going to end the day. And I'm going to just show you how to respond to whatever's left in your mind, if there's anything left. So let's just review a few things and different formulas you can use to respond to things.
I'm going to go through these faster than I originally intended. But it's because I've covered almost all of them already. I just haven't really explained all of them. So some formulas you can use on how you can respond to different things that will come up as you're building your organization. Because everything you could imagine happening will come at you.
And then some. I've had the weirdest things happen to me you can imagine. Leaders will quit. You'll have somebody come at you and request a million things from you or demand it from you or things like that. You'll have people that have every issue imaginable that will want you to solve it.
And it's not just about somebody having a problem and not helping them, guys. It's about the science. The science of how to lead people to things as you're building your organization while you're keeping yourself free so you can focus on what really matters, which is producing. And that's it. So a couple of formulas you use.
Number one, you could always respond to something by selling, if nothing else. Easy response to things, isn't it? Somebody asks you a question, rather than answer it, sell. What do you sell them? Third party training that teaches them how to do it.
Easy way to make more money, an easy way to answer the question without doing anything while you get a commission. And they get trained better, and they get better results. And you're teaching them what to do. You could always respond by selling. You could always respond by upselling.
Somebody in my team calls me and they ask me a question. If they don't have a product, I upsell them. Why? Because that's teaching them what to do. Because if they replicate it, they make more money.
I make money while I'm doing it, and I'm teaching something that can replicate through the organization. Three, you could respond by promoting. Okay? You could respond by promoting. How do you do that?
Somebody comes and they throw something at you, even at an event, and you make them do something that leads to the next event in order to get access to whatever it is. Doesn't matter what it is. It could be how to do something. It could be a question. It could be, can you mentor me?
It could be, how do I get in the inner circle? I would love to answer that, but let's answer that on the Thursday webinar. In order to answer that question of how to get in the circle, you need to bring at least 10 people with you. Okay? Then you guys are like, that's ridiculous, David.
Yes, it is. I like it. Okay? So you could respond by promoting. Right?
Next thing, somebody has an objection, respond by selling and promoting. It's easy. Right? Doesn't matter what it is. You know?
Ah, you know, it's like, I don't know if I want to do this anymore. Right? Well, first of all, you might not even want to talk to somebody if they're doing that. Right? But stuff like this will come up.
It'll come up with your leaders. It'll come up with your downline. Right? You could respond to that in all sorts of ways.
You could try to overcome it. Best way, if somebody doesn't want to do it anymore, find somebody downline who does. Right? I promise you that motivates everyone. Everyone is motivated by that.
Some leader has an organization. They're just kind of discouraged or whatever. Find somebody downline. Pump them up. The leader gets pumped up.
And they want to do it again. Every time. It works 100% of the time. It is the best way to keep leaders around. Right?
That and culture. Okay? And it's easy. Because you get far removed. And you have superpowers.
Right? You're this person that everybody's been talking about. And you give them a call. And they're like, my god, what just happened? Really?
And you just call on the phone. You say, I will talk to you again if you recruit 100 people this week. You know? Right? He's like, what did you tell Justin Varengia, really?
Nothing. I think I played an Amway tape for him when he came to my house. You know what I mean? What did I tell him? Nothing.
Right? To me, at the time, that wasn't that big of a deal. He's like, he came to my house. You live in Costa Rica, too. To him, he was like, oh my gosh.
Oh my gosh. I'm at Dave Woods' house. You know what I mean? And part of it was, he saw what I do all day. Which is not really much.
You know? I got hundreds of stories like this. Right? Why? Because I know what I'm doing.
So when you go remove from yourself, the best way to pump people up, and it's so easy to do. Nobody does it. And tap roots, right?
So you can respond to things like that. What's another great way to respond to things? These are just little formulas you can use. When somebody asks you something, book an event with them. Right?
Respond by booking an event with them. Now, you can only do that with people with big lists. Because if they don't have a big list or something, or if they don't have a lot of influence, or they can't move people to an event, I'm going to have them promote my event. I'm not going to waste my time with that. But if somebody else can move people to it, somebody asks you to do something, and you just respond by booking something where you show up with them, and sell stuff, and you both make money.
Easiest way. Right? Okay? Well, what's the next level for you? By when?
Fast as I can. How serious are you about it? I'm serious. When you say you're serious, what are you willing to do? Oh, I'm willing to do whatever.
It's not as whatever as honest. I mean, let's keep in line with our values here. You know, I don't want you to go do something crazy here. Right? So you're serious about it.
If I tell you what to do, you're going to do it. You're going to do it. Right? People always agree to this stuff, especially the farther away removed you get. People never respond negatively to any questions you ask anymore.
It's hilarious. Right? It's because the way they react to you changes the farther removed you get. I remember how I used to act around my old up lines that were like 10 levels above me that were making millions of dollars a year. I would step around them and my brain would just shut off.
I'd be like, oh my gosh, it's that guy. You know what I mean? That's what people do. So you ask them things, they agree with everything. And you say, well, here's the deal.
Do you want to do it the fast way or do you want to do it the slow way? I want to do it the fast way. I'll tell you what I'll do for you then. Why don't we pop on? Why don't we do a hangout together with your team, but also invite everyone's list?
Now, here's the deal. I know you do team hangouts, but how many people do you have? Oh, I got, you know, 100 people a week on. Okay, I'm going to do one with you this week, but here's the deal. I'll do one with you again in the future, but I'll only do another one with you if you get 500 people there this week.
Okay? Now, you can coordinate with all your leaders. You can all slam together, but if you don't get 500 people there, I'll never do one with you again. Right? What did I just do?
Gave them a challenge, and I promise you they'll do it. I promise you they'll do it. Why will they do it? Because I'm the authority. If it's out of town, because I'm not in my hometown, so I'm a prophet.
Right? The prophet rule. Right? So, he'll do it just because I told him to do it. So, I just solved his problem without answering his question.
I challenged him. Way easier way. Right? It's another way to respond to things like that. Right?
Booking an event. Remember, any time you're training with somebody, you got to be selling. You got to be selling. Selling downline in their organization. Right?
Selling your team at the same time as you're training them. Upselling their organization. Everything that you do that you're training should sell, or you're not doing a good job. Okay? Not doing a good job.
Why do people promote our calls? Well, people promote calls I'm on, because when people get on the calls I'm on, they make money. Right? You want to know how to get big rooms? You get big rooms by the fact that when your team fills the rooms, they make money.
If your team makes money when they fill the rooms, they fill the rooms. If they don't make money from it, they stop filling the rooms. Right? That's why it's important to sell all the time.
Because if you do calls and you're not selling, the only person promoting those calls will be you. It's hard to keep good calls like that. It's hard to keep people there. It's hard to get numbers there. Does that make sense?
Okay? So you want to be selling every time you're training. Right? Part of the rules. Right?
What's another one? Right? Story patterns you can use. Right? Story patterns you can use.
Great story patterns you can use. Strategies you can use with stories to answer questions without answering them in the way that promotes things without people realizing what's going on. I'm going to talk about a lot of this actually at the Charlotte event in the influence formula. Right?
Mass influence formula. The reason I'm going to talk about it there is because I'm going to dedicate a whole day to that. Just on influence on how to do neat stuff with people. Right? There's all sorts of things you can do.
Like a lot of people, you know, last night we were sitting here and people just think I'm doing this on accident. But a lot of times people ask me stuff. Right? And then I just completely distract them with something ridiculous. Right?
And then I go on this pattern of telling stories about stuff then two minutes later come and hit them with something. Right? How many of you have seen me do that before and have actually noticed it? Right? You've seen it.
You've noticed me doing it. Right? I'll talk about that stuff next. The reality is though is you want to think like this. You want to think who are the best teachers in the world and who has the biggest groups of people around them in the world and how do they act and behave.
Right? And start acting like that. Right? Right now, everybody in this room needs to get to the next level. How do you do that?
Produce. That's how. You produce in width, you produce in depth, and do it in a way that will duplicate. Right? Do it in a way that will lead to the next event.
Because by getting people to the next event, you're building a wave of momentum of people that will have belief changes inside and will start acting differently. That's how you build organizations. You build from live event to live event all the time. Right? From personal conversation to live event, from live event to live event, from email to live event, from new member to live event, from buying a product to the live event, from buying the product to the live event to buying the next product, you're always promoting the next thing every time you're around people because if you do that, you have to be around people a lot less.
And maybe you're like, I don't want that. Yes, you do. Trust me. Right? Yeah.
You could be doing meetings four times a day for the rest of your life. It's not fun. You know? That's why you're always feeding every event into the next event. That is the most important thing you could do when you're building teams.
Right? If you're not doing it, you're not going to keep teams around. Does this make sense for everybody? Right? A couple more short things, right, just to go over with you.
Every time somebody gets a result, tell people about it and use it to sell. Okay? Remember we were talking about how the new blood is the life blood? When people get a result, use it to sell. Why do you want to use it to sell?
Because it's an excuse. Right? If you always go with like the same thing all the time to people, it's hard to sell stuff all the time. But if I always have a new reason, right, somebody new and exciting, right, some new success story, a new rep I just recruited, use every success story as an opportunity to sell. Right?
So if I'm on a hangout, I'm on a webinar, I'm on a live event or something, right, like the other day, we have AK up and he's a new story. So I keep using him and using him and using him and why am I using his story over and over and over again? Because he's the new one, right? And next event we'll want a new one. And next event we'll want a new one.
And what does he want to do in his team? He wants to find the new story. He wants to tell people about the person that just decided to get all in and edify him. Because what do you want? You want to edify people that are doing the right behaviors.
People that are getting in. People that are getting all in, right? People that are getting tickets to the next event is who you want to edify. People that are bringing people to the next event. People that are producing in your team.
The behavior that you edify will be produced more often by the people who want to be around you. Right? When you edify somebody's good behavior, they do more of it. That make sense to you guys? That make sense?
So turn every success story into an opportunity to sell in both width and in depth and always be looking for success stories. Doesn't take a lot of time out of your day. You just look at your genealogy and say who's selling stuff. Take that person and put them in front of everybody. You notice somebody on a conference call somewhere and they're getting good results, get them out on your call.
Invite them in. Why do they want to go? Viral sustainability. They get in front of other people's groups and more people are talking about them and it becomes easier to produce without doing anything. It's good for everybody.
Right? That make sense to you guys? One more thing I want to cover as a concept and then I'm going to go into some Q&A. And that's conflict resolution. As long as you are going to be bringing people in, you're going to have conflicts that pop up all the time.
Who in here has experienced conflict in teams and stuff? Team leaders fighting, somebody in your team fighting, two downline who don't like each other. Right? You have weird stuff pop up sometimes, a leader leaves or whatever. Right?
We're fighting with each other. You have weird stuff pop up as you're doing it. First thing is with conflict resolution, this is one of the only things that you really don't want to do in front of people. And the reason is because if people don't know about the conflict, you don't want to tell them about it unless they know about it. You want to kind of keep that in the back room or whatever.
But here's the only thing that I'm going to say about that because I think it's important for keeping people around is that people are going to be conflicted all the time. Especially as you move on and people make a lot of money and the reason is because as people make more money, they argue more about stuff generally. Just the way people are. Everybody. Right?
Right? It's just the way people are. Right? Here's what I'm going to say about it is that you guys are all familiar with the concept of chunking. I've talked about it in some videos, some of you are familiar with it, some of you aren't.
Okay? Chunking is this. It's just the simplest way to explain it. If you take anything, right, you can chunk up on it, which is taking a concept and going more abstract, or you can chunk down, which would be like going from a concept to a strategy. Okay?
An example of that would be like if you take a pen, okay? A chunk up on a pen would be a tool for writing, right? That's a concept of a pen. Right? A tool for writing is a concept of a higher chunk of communication, right?
Communication is a lower chunk of, you know, connecting. Right? This is different ways of describing things. A chunk down from a pen, right, would be different types of ink. It's like a smaller grouping of whatever it is.
Right? So principle is a higher chunk, a strategy is a lower chunk of information. With conflict, when people are fighting with each other, it's always on lower chunks. If you chunk up on something that people are fighting about, generally they stop disagreeing. Right?
Two people that disagree on strategies, and this is generally what fighting pops up about, is how people are doing things. Right? Both want, usually, the company to be unified.
Right? And even if you get around, you can talk about things that are on the higher chunk without directly talking to people, and they'll just stop fighting a lot of the time. They do it all the time. If I see behavior where I'm having conflicts in the organization, what I ask myself is, what's a higher chunk that they both agree on, and I just start talking about that a lot. And usually it just stops.
Great way to resolve conflicts, and you can do it indirectly. Right? But I want you to remember something, that as you're growing teams, there are certain things that will weed their way through your organization that will cause a lot of problems. Right? Gossiping causes massive problems.
Right? Somebody going around and spreading rumors about people, it's just really problematic. Right? Negative people that are just like, they're like Eeyore, you know, when they walk in the room. You know, stuff like that.
I want you guys to be willing to resolve problems. Ignoring problems does not make them go away. Okay? That make sense to you? Okay.
So I want to go back to, now what to do. Okay? And then answer some questions you guys got for like the next 30 minutes, and then we'll be done. Okay? What do you do?
If you take all the concepts that I taught today, right, what does it feed into? It feeds into one thing. I just taught you, and I want you to realize that this is what I just taught you how to do, how to only do one thing when you're building your team, which is produce, and how to take everything else and turn it into that. Right? Now, why did I spend the whole day on that?
It's because that's all team building is. Okay? Because what most people think that it is hand holding or solving everybody's problems or doing it for people, but no, it's not. It's just getting your whole group to operate in a way where everybody all works towards one direction, which is producing sales. Now, why did I teach you?
Now, why did I teach you to do that, and why is that the important thing? Because we're doing direct sales, right? Network marketing or whatever it is that you're doing, whatever name you give it. Oh, it's not network marketing. We get three, we get three, we get three.
Right? Sometimes people say things like that. Whatever. Okay. Right?
Why did I teach you to do that? Because everything else that you do is totally irrelevant to your business. Right? So, basically, if you take the whole day, I taught you how to take everything that will come your way when you're dealing with people and how to turn it back into more sales, which is all you should be thinking about when you're building your team, because if you're not doing that, you're not working. Does that make sense?
Because think about what we're doing. Right? What we're doing is producing lots of sales. That's it. Whether you're doing it, a team's doing it, a downline's doing it, you're producing lots of sales.
Discouraged people don't produce sales. Right? Discouraged people don't. People that are training people on the phone don't produce sales. People that are spending hours and hours and hours with every new member don't produce sales.
Right? People that are burned out don't produce sales. I just taught you how to produce sales at levels that are unimaginable as your team's growing, no matter how big it gets, without ever increasing the amount of time that you put into it. Ever. And it doesn't matter how many people are in your organization.
It's irrelevant whether it's 100 or 100,000, it is the same workload if you're doing it right. The same. Right? That's where people get flipped out about this niche, because they don't understand it. They're like, okay, so you've got 300,000 people, so how many people are you working with?
Five. You know what I'm saying? I called Jonathan and my gal and my mom every once in a while. Five. Okay?
Why is that significant? Because it doesn't matter how big your team gets, you work the same. And you're doing the same things at different levels. Right? Does that make sense to everybody in here?
If you'll do that, then what do you need to do? You need to go out there and start bringing people in and behaving like I talked about today. Today I was talking about how to behave with people as they're coming in. Okay? How to be patient.
Right? How to behave with them. Right? So from now on when you're bringing people in, you know what to do. They want help, you get them at the next team thing.
And then there you help them sell stuff. Right? You make them do things to even get on the phone if you want to help them at the next team thing. But you're doing it in front of people, and so even if you have to teach something, you're like, gosh, this is hard. You're teaching everybody at once, and you get people to buy something from it.
Right? You redirect everything back towards producing in larger and larger groups of people. No matter what the strategy is. No matter what it is. Right?
No matter what comes at you, you're just doing the same stuff. You know what that just made this? That made this the easiest business that you've ever learned in your entire life. Okay? Because there is no other business that you can do this.
There's nothing. My friend Eric says, well, you've got a better way. Well, not all of us do, but we do. You know?
We do if we do it right. See, most people, they don't build like that, and so they become increasingly competitive. Right? And so they become increasingly more enslaved as their organization gets bigger. And because of that, there's a capacity limit to the size of their organization.
Right? And you see people run around like dogs in this industry, don't you? It's not because they have to. It's because they don't got the team building formula. That's why.
That's it. They don't understand it. Now you got it. You guys like that? Folks, obviously the income examples discussed are extraordinary.
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