Conventional business vs Networking business.

Hello everyone,

I would like to invite you to read this carefully and compare which business style suits you and if you can see yourself in any of these circumstances.

This is an account of my own experience, which I think a lot of people may be able to relate to. I now have a more comfortable life, but it was a long struggle getting here. I wish now I had started and kept working a quality networking business a lot sooner than I have.

Have a look at my digital business card for more details of the on-line marketing training company I now represent.

Here is my story.

When my wife and I had our conventional business, we had a lot of stress caused by a number of reasons. First was worry over whether we were going to make the rent and rates each month, at least that was what it was like for the first five years.

Other factors of stress came in the form of employees and dealing with their moods and how much time they were going to take off for their holidays. Another stress come in the form of customers and just trying each day to keep them happy and deal with each one the same from the first customer that come through the door to the last one to leave each day. Then we would always be the last to leave and get home late and have dinner very late, which isn’t good on your system. The other form of stress that we had to deal with each day was in the form of yobish behaviour from the youth in the area that had behaviour problems. Sometimes we didn’t know what mess we were going to see at our door each morning. It was all in a days work dealing with this sort of stress.

Now that we both work a networking business, the stresses we experienced are gone. We now have our mortgage paid off, we work when we want to or have the need to. We go out bike riding on a more regular basis. We take days out when we want to. We get to spend more quality time together. This is what we have waited for, but was unable to achieve with our conventional business.

Now to start with I want to give you the story of how we built our conventional business and how our lives have changed after we made the change to a networking business.

Conventional business.

First of all, my wife and I some years ago now, bought a conventional service style business. I am calling it a service style business to generalise it so more people can relate to it.

My wife and I both had professional training and we wanted to work together so we purchased a business that suited our needs, after deliberation of a few different ones in different locations. We settled on this one because of not only price but how much rent and business rates we would have to pay.

We were told that the business was sound and that it was making money. We had employees that would be staying on to work with us and introduce us to the customers and help us integrate into the local area. Showing us the ropes so to speak.

At this point I would just like to illustrate how we started out.

Note: Each of these boxes after this will represent five new customers.

After taking over and just getting started learning how the business was working we found that after a while of reviewing the books that with the current income and the outgoings of the overheads, that being the usual utilities, the rent and business rates it was costing us each month we discovered that the good will we had bought into wasn’t really there. The business was loosing money big time. We had more going out in overheads, keeping stock in, and salaries to employees than we had coming in.

We then talked to the employees to see what they would say about ways of increasing the customer base according to the local area and that would be cost effective. Then a leaflet drop was suggested and carried out at a basic price of the printing. The leaflets were then put out in several of the houses in the local area as well as handing them out to people in the street of the local town. We and the employees when possible did this. It was an exhausting exercise walking round the various estates and putting the flyers into letterboxes. There were times when the letterboxes were so tight I managed to get my fingers snapped when it shut.

We then placed an advert in the local paper. The cost of this, considering our dwindling savings we had to start the business, was expensive in my view, because you never know if it is going to work and sometimes if felt like throwing money down a black hole. It is like fishing and hoping for a bite. We got a couple new customers this way, not very good for six months worth of advertising.

It was after this that we decided that the best form of advertising for us would be word of mouth. I know it takes longer, but it does work because your new customers come in with a certain amount of trust because they were recommended by someone else to come in and use the products and services we had to offer.

We then looked at ways in which the employees were doing their job and worked out ways in which they could do better job or make the customers feel better about the service and products we had to offer.

Now if you can imagine, we had a few customers and when we talked to them we suggested that they tell their friends about us if they liked coming into our establishment. It soon started to turn round and we were seeing new faces and also when we asked some of them how they found out about us, we were told that a friend had recommended that they stop buy so now our business was starting to grow. However the increase in income was still mostly going out in the form of rent, rates and salaries, but not our own. We were still dependant on our savings for our own living expenses and going out. This meant that we had to be careful with what we spent.

Now our business started to look a little bit healthier.  Here is a representation of how it started to grow. However, there was an increase in the outgoings with the increase in the number of customers. This cost was going out before we made it back because we had to stay ahead of the number of outgoing items.

If you now can imagine that through our efforts of getting our customers to tell their friends about us the word was growing our business. Still after four years working our business, we were able to start taking a bit more than minimum wage out for ourselves. There was a slight increase in our savings, and we started to have a bit more for ourselves in the bank. We thought we were starting to turn the business round by this time.

In the illustration below, each box represents 5 new customers brought in to our business by word of mouth from their friends recommending us.

Now I just wanted to ask you, what is this starting to look like?

After several years of employee management, customers, customer complaints,

Now this is how we built our conventional business, asking more of our customers to recommend some of their friends when it came up in conversation. It takes longer this way, but it is more effective.

It is more effective, because people sharing their own experience with their friends and people they know. Now, because it is coming from people they know they are more likely to trust what they tell them and are more likely to either purchase a product or use a particular service. That trust has begun.

Think about it for a moment. Have you ever recommended a restaurant, book, film or even a product to someone else? If you have then you are naturally doing networking.

Networking business.

This leads me to the process of building our networking business. Also, for those of you who still get pyramid schemes confused with networking. Pyramid schemes are illegal.  Legal pyramids are the structure of conventional business. Yes, that is right, conventional business. You try drawing it out. Who is at the top, meaning who owns the business, and who works under who? The ones at the bottom who do the most work will never get paid more than their superiors. Not true with networking. If you work harder than the person who brought you into the business, you will stand to make more than them. Can you see that happening in conventional business? You try it, if you work harder than your supervisor, are you going to get paid more? I would dought that very much.

Here is a funny video to explain networking. Networking Explained.

We started with a company that we thought at the time would have products that we could use ourselves. We felt that if you didn’t like the products yourself, it would be difficult to represent and recommend them to others later.

It is always good to get to know what you are representing, because things can change later.

We followed the usual advice about contacting people you know. This is all right if the people you know don’t judge you and want to knock you down and steal your dreams of bettering your circumstances. It is because they know you and they can only associate you with how they see you at the time.

It is worth looking at their lives then and asking yourself if you would take advice from them, given their own circumstances. Are they much better off than you? With some people it is almost like they don’t want you to do better than them because it shows them up.

Would you rather take advice from someone who is really on the right track and making it happen or someone who is in debt up to their ears and they have no time for their family because they are constantly out working for someone else making that person’s dreams come true?

Think about this for a moment. In a conventional business as well as a pyramid scheme, if the person below works harder and is more productive, they will never make more than the person that is above them, such as their supervisor.

The point I am making here is the fact that there are people who have in their own minds created a negative wall against any such thing as networking business. It is because they have been conditioned that way. Maybe it was because of someone else having a bad experience, or maybe they tried it and it didn’t work for them, so they just gave up. It isn’t going to work for you if you don’t keep trying. You have to stick at something long enough to make it happen and bring about success. Look at any musician who has made it big. Do you think they started at the top and earning lots of money? I don’t think so. They probably had a talent to start with and then worked hard for several years developing their skills and getting heard until someone with some clout managed to sign them up for a contract that locked their lives into making money for that record label and that company. Yes the artist made good money, but so did the contract holders.

We have built our networking business on referring people to the products our company has to offer. It is the company with the products that we are comfortable representing. They interest us and it makes things much easier to say to someone. “Have you tried this? I think it will be just what you need.”

This is network marketing. Then the people you bring into the business, you help them learn the ropes of how the business works and you help get the answers to their questions. You also speak to those whom are introduced by your own business partners, about your experience with the company to help instil the trust factor needed for them to make a decision to join your partner. Each member then becomes a customer of the company directly and the company pays the person who brought them in a percentage of the new members purchases as a reward or thank you for introducing them to the business. It makes for a better business model, because if you remember what I said about my own conventional business. People coming to us who had been introduced to us by someone they knew already had a certain amount of trust before they made any kind of purchase from our business.

My intention is to help others understand the opportunity and help them make their dreams come true. If you are in need of a serious income, then may I suggest that you take a good look at this opportunity. 

Send me an e-mail requesting more information about what I am doing. Connect with me on Facebook at  http://www.facebook.com/kevin4biz 

I want to be able to help as many people as I can to develop their own business and income to give them the freedom they are looking for and these days with the prices rising at every level, we all could use that extra bit of income.

Look forward to hearing from you and have a great day.

Regards

Kevin Green

kevingreen.info@gmail.com