My Bio - This is just one guy's way out of the Rat Race

It was Spring 2008 when I first read Magnetic Sponsoring.

It came at a time when I was getting pretty frustrated with the MLM I had joined late 2007. Up until then I was taught such fallacies as “everyone is your prospect”, “anyone can do this”, and “we don’t do any selling, we just share a product (and people miraculously buy our over-priced crap)”.

In reality:
1. Not everyone is your prospect; don't sollicit to people who did not ask to be sollicited. (marketing 101). Many amateur marketers still don't get this.
2. Not everyone can do this; many people are just not qualified to be business owners based on their mindset and stamina. You don't want them to be part of your business, believe me.
3. We do definitely sell something; most people just don't understand what they are selling and how they should go about this.

I was really DONE with the whole thing, but Mike’s book struck a chord.
 
Soon an invitation to “Traffic Formula Live!” rolled in and I was on a plane to Austin. I don’t know why I made that decision so quickly, but it became apparent that a single decision can have untold consequences.
 
I actually invited my sponsor to come along but he bailed on me. He had little internet marketing knowledge and wasn’t really interested since the MLM Company did not allow us to market online until we reached the 7-figure income mark. (WHAT!?  -yes, a protectionist measure meant to keep the little distributor in his/her place!)
 
Well, I went anyway. I figured a guy like Mike D. had more to teach me and whatever I could take away from the event I could apply to other business opportunities, in- or outside of network marketing. As it turned out, not only was Mike a great teacher, he was a gracious host. One night he took all of us in attendance (there were about a 100 of us) over to his house for margaritas and Tex Mex. I thought he was nuts when two coaches showed up and hauled all of us off to his place, but it was a blast!

Aside from making some new friends, doing some great masterminding, and getting my money’s worth of learning from the Traffic Formula material, the follow resulted:
 
1-I was one of a select group of 10 to enter into the “Traffic Formula Mastermind” lead by Ferny Ceballos and Raymond Fong. Fernando spent 3 months with me working 1:1 on perfecting my business model and marketing strategy. Without this program I’d still be in the dark on effective online marketing.
 
2-I was introduced to a couple of associates of Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki. After some chatting they invited me to Rich Dad Headquarters which happened to be 20 minutes from my home (go figure!). To make a long story short, I met Robert and his team and I am now affiliated with the Rich Dad Franchise to spread the gospel of financial education to the masses. It has been unbelievable. On a personal note: Robert can teach me more about business during a 60 minute meeting at Rich Dad than I did in all four years of college.

Under the tutelage of Robert and his team I founded a Cashflow Club (the second such club ever officially sponsored by Rich Dad!) and conduct monthly meetings with fellow entrepreneurs and those interested in enhancing their financial intelligence.
 
3-Any hesitation to throw big money at quality education had been removed!
 
So how did I end up here?
 
Here’s my short bio:
 
Not too long ago, I found myself in a stereotypical corporate job at JP Morgan Chase & Co. I had been laid off twice before and thought I had finally found that stable job that my parents told me about. I was making a decent living, and we were able to afford a nice house, two nice cars, and take the kids on occasional trips. But there was never anything left to invest, and we couldn’t splurge on something we were passionate about.
 
As time passed and prices rose faster than my income, I felt I was in reverse while I should have been moving forward.
 
What was wrong with my parents’ advice?
 
My parents had been entrepreneurs. They never liked being on someone else’s payroll. In their early twenties they were already operating two hotels and afforded themselves a private wildlife preserve and a luxury yacht. They were hard workers and always full of ideas and ambition. Sadly my father’s success made him arrogant and reckless which eventually turned his business partners against him. My father’s businesses fell one by one and he never recovered.
 
He spent the rest of his life placing blame where it didn’t belong. He continuously warned me and my siblings of the perils of working for yourself.
 
Although I had my suspicions, I didn’t fully realize the potential of owning my own business until my wife began an eBay store in 2004. She had started a year earlier at a hobby level reselling our two boys’ used clothing. When we decided to purposely acquire products for resale, however, things started to gain momentum.
 
Soon, my wife’s hobby was bringing in more money than my corporate paycheck. I thought to myself, “Am I putting my hours where they count?”
 
I should have been minding my own business instead of someone else’s! So, after initially reducing my office hours, my job eventually became obsolete.
 
Within a matter of months, we became Silver Powersellers (eBay terminology – look it up, bookworm!) and a recognized retailer of luxury children’s apparel on eBay, a community of a few hundred million users worldwide and growing. In 2006 we incorporated, began producing some of our own products, and the business took on a life of its own.
 
Now that our eBay business was finally a working retail machine, I went looking for other opportunities to explore. It’s always smart to diversify your business activities and investments to a certain degree, so I didn’t want to leave all of our eggs in one basket.
 
Our splash into MLM
 
After several years of growing online retail success, a friend introduced us to a new nutritional product in 2007. After months of simply consuming this fancy juice, we found out that it was offered solely through a multilevel marketing (MLM) opportunity.
 
I didn’t even know what that meant.
 
I was a tad skeptical, but I figured it would be easy to promote a product we used and loved. Besides, I already worked from home, so what was the harm in taking on something else I could do from there? Another income stream never hurts, so I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. However, I found out that this kind of business isn’t as easily built as the “rah rah” MLM events make it seem.
 
I quickly learned that my success with the MLM business model would rely on my ability to recruit and lead other people interested in starting their own business with our product. Just selling expensive juice was not going to be worth the substantial effort. It takes a salesman to convince someone to keep buying $45 bottles of juice in a slow economy. No, it would be a matter of duplication – recruit other distributors, teach them what you do so that they can teach others, and so on.
 
Finding people able and willing to do so was not as easy as anticipated. Another factor I underestimated was the simple fact that not everyone is fit to be a business owner. I learned that the hard way and wasted a great deal of time with hobbyists and employee-minded cowards.
 
The $39 investment in Magnetic Sponsoring changed my thinking a great deal. Mike Dillard emphasized the importance of studying and self-development. He made it clear that people join people, not opportunities, and people only join those they perceive as having value to them as leaders.
 
Mike doesn’t tell you what to do. Rather, he shows you what you have to become in order to figure that part out for yourself.
 
It made sense to me.
 
The rest is history.
 
As I learned about coaching, Internet marketing, and copywriting, I was still steadily spending thousands on products and promotional materials but not bringing in nearly as much. I found out that I wasn’t alone. An estimated 97% of MLM-ers spend more than they make.
 
So what went wrong? I came in with top talent to support me, plenty of capital, and a determination to win. And still, I got spanked! Thank heavens our eBay business allowed us to absorb the financial blow.
 
I was trying to mix fruit juice with financial education. It just didn’t work.
 
So, what happened next?
 
Well, I ditched the juice business. But I wasn’t done with internet and network marketing.
 
There was some unfinished business to attend to.
 
I began to focus on what I enjoy doing, which is helping others. More specifically, I focused on helping others create businesses from scratch and educate themselves financially. In my humble opinion, a solid financial education is the only road to financial freedom. Sure, you can make some money – even a lot of money – but if you don’t understand money, you will never have it working for you.
 
You will always be working for it.
 
While working for JP Morgan, I served many clients who no longer needed to work for a living. I even had client that owned his own bank! As a banker I always wondered what it was my clients did that seperated them from the rest of society. How did they think? How did they handle setbacks? What got them excited and most importantly: what did they invest their time and money in?
 
It's very simple. The truly wealthy invest in assets and networking with the goal of enhancing their collective knowledge and prosperity.
 
So how do I help others further their understanding of money and how entrepreneurship can reverse their current position?
 
I set out to write a book. A crash course for the would-be entrepreneur if you will. It would not be a how-to book, there are already too many of those out there. No, it would serve to expand your context on the subject of entrepreneurship so all of those how-to books and courses would actually make sense to you.

Countless people have already purchased all sorts of miracle products that somehow didn’t deliver miracle results. Why? Because it didn’t make sense in their particular frame of reference, aka their context. Robert Kiyosaki intended the same for Rich Dad Poor Dad. He didn’t tell you how to become a millionaire. He told you why you might want to aspire to become one and why you haven’t been able to do so as of yet. He wants you to see that you need to change the mechanics of your thought process. Without this change, the content (the how to) is largely irrelevant.
 
Well, I had my work cut out for me and I didn’t want this to be all sizzle and no steak (heck, I didn’t want this to be my first and last book!). I spent the better part of 2008 on this little project. Yes, creating something halfway decent does require some time.
 
But now it’s done and ready for print, release is taking place in Spring/Summer 2009. Without Mike’s advice it would not even be here today. My book, my new business, my marketing system, the current state of the economy (yup)…. Everything is coming together. These are exciting times and believe it or not, the current economy is the biggest opportunity since the Great Depression.

Today’s entrepreneurs WILL shape tomorrow.
 
Play to win!
 
-Tiemen Staal
 
Check in with me on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/Tiemen