MEET GRACE & JAMES
Looking from the outside, James and Grace as busy professionals might not appear to be candidates for the affiliate marketing and network marketing industries. When we met and married in China in 2013, both of us had been successful in our careers.
Grace is Chinese, working as a fashion designer, model trainer, image consultant, and as a businesswoman focusing upon import/export and e-commerce. She is also the founder and chair of an international women’s association focusing upon the holistic development of outstanding women.
James is American, working internationally in seven different countries over his career as an international lawyer and business executive.
Successful Professionals Doing Network Marketing?
So how did we end up in this industry?
When we married, things looked good financially from the outside, but the reality was different. James was several years out of an expensive divorce, and Grace had recently lost her first husband, who had died a long, painful and expensive death from cancer. When we married, Grace was in significant debt, still paying off huge hospital bills and also business losses from the business she and her first husband had built.
Both of us had some networking background. For Grace, as leader of a women’s association in China, and having given seminars and training on personal development and image building, she was often sought out by networking companies wanting to expand into China.
James’ legal work had covered corporate, high tech, trade, and related business law work, and included doing international legal work for a number of large direct selling companies. One large networking company had compensated him partially with a position in their company, so since 1997 he has been drawing passive MLM income.
Experiencing long term passive residual income (James still gets a monthly check from them) was one major draw for Grace and James.
So to dig out of our financial hole in 2013, we began to look around for a “side business” that we could do together.
Getting Started in Networking… Then Disappointment 1
In 2014 we found our way into a network marketing company. Our uplines were top industry leaders, and the advice was standard: Make a list, contact your warm market, and begin prospecting everyone around you. Being mentored by top earners, as well as learning from many mistakes first time network marketers make, we built the traditional or “old school” way, prospecting family and friends, cold contacting, and pretty much hounding anyone within three feet of us that would listen. We signed up family and friends (who did nothing in the business). We ended up doing weekly meetings in Starbucks and hotels in Hong Kong. We also bought lists of MLM prospects in the US, and cold called them.
It was humbling to be busy professionals and to be getting rejected cold-calling people. It seemed so unprofessional to us. But that is what our uplines said would work. Six months later, our “super-mega leader” had disappeared and the business was not making money. The people who joined us quit 1-3 months later, and there was no traction.
However, we learned from our mistakes. We had found out what did not work, and also started to get hints of what did work, such as providing valuable content, using online sales tools and systems, and automated emails.
In late 2014, we found another online business, and started to put our skills to use. By April 2015, we had recruited a good-sized team and advanced to the rank of Diamond. We were recognized on stage in London in June 2015 as the company’s first Diamonds in Asia. That was exciting. We were learning from some top-earners, and started to understand the value of having systems.
Around the same time, we became hungry to learn more and improve. We started absorbing network marketing training from leaders such as Eric Worre, Ray Higdon and Todd Falcone, and mindset training from classic trainers like Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, Les Brown, Jim Rohn, Tony Robbins and others.
Disappointment 2
Things were looking good in mid-2015: Diamond status, large and growing team, six-figure-a-year side income, and getting mentored by some top-earners in the industry. We followed Ray Higdon’s recommendation to get advanced lead generation training from a company called My Internet Traffic Systems (MITS), and our skill levels started to rise.
Then our primary company where we were Diamonds ran into trouble. They were cut off by their payment processor, and suddenly our six figure “side income” disappeared - the payment processor defrauded all of us.
Everything hit the skids by March 2016, and suddenly we were without a solid primary company, and we were failing to find a reliable replacement. We blew through several companies that were start-ups which did not succeed. We were losing more money than we were earning.
The silver lining was that MITS business that Ray Higdon had sponsored us into had merged with Elite Marketing Pro in winter 2016. We started to learn about something called “Attraction Marketing”. This concept of bringing value to the marketplace and having people actively seek us out in return made sense, because it is based on God’s law of sowing and reaping. We knew if we sowed value into the marketplace, the marketplace would return value to us.
We attended a big conference with EMP in April 2016 in San Diego, and learned so much from the trainers and top leaders there. So many leaders there affirmed what we already knew, that to become the best, you need to learn from the best. We started getting more mentoring. IT WORKED!
Finding Success
We still had not found a solid primary business home, but we had found a training and mentoring home. This fueled our hunger for more. We began becoming bigger students of the industry, getting advanced mentoring, learning the skills of paid advertising and leadership, attending workshops, reading, and listening/watching audios and videos. “Attraction Marketing” and the concept of bringing value to the marketplace and having people actively seek us out in return worked its way deeper into our belief system.
Both Grace and James also began sharing and teaching more, particularly with the video skills we had been taught, and we built large followings on Facebook and YouTube. Yes, this Attraction Marketing stuff worked!
Late in 2016, we took our newly developed skills into a new primary business in the financial world. We quickly rose to one of the top three recruiters in the company, and won a free Caribbean Cruise through a company recruiting contest. We took that week-long all expenses paid cruise in July 2017, and our son (then 12) joined us. It was great spending time with the owners and top earners on board the cruise ship and on excursions around the Caribbean.
And yet we could tell something was not right with the company, which had changed its comp plan three times in 8 months.
The company closed its doors about a month after the cruise. That was really sad, but we had proven to ourselves that Attraction Marketing really works in building a strong team in a network marketing business.
To keep ourselves safe from company failures, we have learned two things. One key is that we need to have multiple income streams, businesses that are synergistic with one another, and where if one part of it fails, we can replace it with another and yet not be left without an income. The second key is that our business is not one company – it is about us (“You Inc.”) and the value we bring to the marketplace. We learned to build our “brand”, and this is something that saved us from trouble, and built our incomes. If our teams believe in our value and integrity, our overall system is our success system.
In the spring of 2017 until early 2018, we exploded a new business, using attraction marketing. We did daily videos with valuable tips and industry insights, held twice weekly business presentations, had replicable lead capture pages and email training for team members, weekly team training seminars, and turnkey recorded onboarding processes. This business launch was wild, but we personally recruited over 1600 people and built a team of over 40,000 people worldwide in 8 months!
Freedom
Bear in mind that all of the experiences above were done while both of us had full time jobs, based in China. So these multiple streams of income, based outside of China and built from the Internet, all were “side incomes” for us still.
One of our big goals in starting these “side businesses” was TIME FREEDOM. Financial freedom is great, but time freedom is even greater. Grace has been entrepreneurial as a business owner since the mid-1990s, but James has been in big companies and firms most of his career, and he was eager to be more entrepreneurial and have his own businesses.
One advice we had received about leaving a job to work from home full time was to wait until your “side income” has equaled your regular job for a reasonable period of time. This was good advice, and even though we had six figure “side incomes” in 2015, 2016 and 2017, the year 2018 was the first time our side income exceeded our job income. Time to make the move to freedom?
In the spring of 2018, that huge business with a team of 40,000 people started having payment issues. Oh no, not again!
But… because we had been trained to build a BRAND, and based on what we have learned about attraction marketing, and the skills we have acquired, and the success we have had several times in utilizing those skills, we felt the time was ripe for a big move.
After much thought and prayer, we decided that James would resign from his corporate position, Grace would close or sell her businesses in China, and we would move with our son to the USA.
The timing was important for our family, particularly our son. At that time, he was 13 and finishing 7th grade in China. He had lost his birth father at a young age, and James wanted to stop traveling and be able to pour into him for his teenage years.
As we thought about his years ahead, we knew he would need time to adjust to life in America, and we felt that the timing was right to move from China to the US for him, because his first school year 2018/19 could be a time of learning and adjustment, and he would be better prepared for 9th grade and high school when his grades would count toward college. He would need a lot of time from a father, not a father who was constantly travelling and distracted by work. This was a big priority for us.
A New Life of Freedom
We moved from China during the summer of 2018 to the US, and have a new life, new businesses, and new-found freedom. Instead of travelling, James has been able to stay home and join in our son’s daily life, whether school or sports or other parts of teenage life. Grace is also able to explore her passions. We spend 24/7 together as a family, which is a great blessing. This was our goal, to be free to live life as we please, and pour ourselves into family and serving others.
Attraction Marketing has empowered us to leave our jobs and businesses, develop multiple streams of income, move to a new country, and enjoy an unparalleled life of freedom together. It has brought financial blessing, but the blessing of time freedom and being our own bosses is impossible to measure.
Building A Legacy
We decided on affiliate marketing and network marketing because of those amazing two words: Residual income.
What we did not know is that this industry really boils down to a process of personal development, for which we get paid along the way. As we develop personally, and as we develop skills to share with people, we sow value and we then receive value. To sow and receive great value, we need to first become more valuable ourselves.
So our passion is serving others and watching them find success. Increase your value, and become a professional within this industry. Commit to the process, and don’t give up. We believe that through this blog and our video training, through which we share what we’ve learned over recent years, as well as products and services we recommend, we can be a part of you finding success in your own journey.
Our Advice
If we can leave you with any advice, it is this – GET SERIOUS FASTER. DARE TO DREAM. ACT PROFESSIONALLY. NEVER STOP LEARNING. THINK BIG AND DREAM BIGGER!
The world of Network marketing is changing… We have seen Attraction Marketing transform the industry. But technology and economic transformations all around are mandating more change. Be creative. It IS possible to build online and it is completely duplicable!
We have done it. Working full time, in four years we entered a new life of time freedom and financial freedom. You can do it too. You could do it faster, or slower. That is up to you. Work smarter instead of harder, and nurture a burning desire to serve others. Sow integrity and value, and YOUR POTENTIAL IS UNLIMITED.
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