Puddle Jumpers

Here is a chapter in the book that I am writing about my experiences in mlm and home business. If you like it then please let me know what you liked.  And if you didin't then I would also like to hear why.

The chapter describes a person who jumps all over the place without ever settling down to make a buck in one opportunity. 

Ode to The Puddle Jumpers

Think with me about this cutesy play on reality…  How much success would it take for a person to stay with one business online?  

How much money per month would it take given the said person actually experience a bit of success?  From what I personally did until I finally chose a different path in business, I was all over the place.

Trying this business for a while and that business for a while.  Maybe I would make a little money with Diapers LLC. Co. LTD. And think there was something more lucrative and move on to the next business that I had been fed a huge dose of a little drink called urgency from some ecstatic person who I found through some website to which I don’t recall ever going.  

Yes, these are the wonderful attributes to what I call the “puddle-jumping syndrome”.  
The puddle jumper is the equivalent of a person on your basketball team deciding that in the middle of the game they want to play for the other team.  

They are still wearing your teams’ jersey, but they have decided they see something that they like more in the other team and is now playing for the other team and trying to get you to do the same!

I had been seeing some success with the online networking business that I was currently promoting and really enjoying it.  I was always excited and I could hardly ever sleep because I wanted to be online learning as much as I could or read up on my business as much as possible.  

I had a decent size downline… at least it was one that most people would not snub their nose at, and that is when it started happening!  I started getting the “emails” and the “calls”.

The calls would go something like this, “Hey uh Drew…  I just wanted to run something by you… uh… my buddy showed me this compensation plan that is just amazing.  Don’t worry though because I am still in the great business you got me in.  

So I thought since this other business has nothing to do with what we are already doing, it would be a great addition and plus Sammy Ding Dong Malinowski celebrity is promoting it!”

 Do you know who this guy was on my team?  Yep you guessed it. He is the puddle jumper!  The beauty, if you can call it that, of multi-level marketing is that after you recruit X amount of people, you will be making so much money that you don’t have to do anything anymore!

But if everyone that you are recruiting who is doing a poor job at recruiting, opposed to nothing, is on to the next business that they are presented with because they don’t stop looking around then these multi-levels of residual income that you are trying to make will never form and you will be left with a full-time recruiting gig that you had not originally signed up for.

I remember a specific guy in my downline once and he had been struggling.  He was all excited when he first had started, but after a couple weeks he had simply lost the fire of desire to become a home based business millionaire.  

He and his buddy had signed up for the business that I was in and he and his wife were all excited about getting started and making some real money from home.  

She was going to focus on what the business promoted and he was going to focus on getting people into the business.  They had this master plan and they were ready to take some serious action.  

So I met him and his buddy at a restaurant and went over a few more things about the business so they had a better understanding of it.  

They were even more excited about it and were more than eager to sign up.  
    
After signing up he then proceeded to tell me that he was going on a family vacation for two weeks.  

“When we get back we are going to go all out and really make this thing grow!” he assured me.  My being naïve to this whole game, in all reality, I said “Sure sure, sounds good.  

Have a wonderful vacation and when you get back I will be here to answer any questions that you have and help you promote!”  

So off they went and what do you think happened? Nothing, absolutely nothing happened.  I heard from him a couple times after I had signed him up in about three week increments.  

The first time he had some questions about booking some travel.  The second time he sounded worried about his decision to get involved.  The conversation went something like this:
    “Drew, I am not having any success getting anyone into the business”…  I say “Ok well how are you advertising and are you getting them on the conference calls?”  He says “Not exactly, I haven’t had time to get on the conference calls myself and don’t know when they are.  

I also forgot my login information… could you give it to me?  Yeah, also… I have just kinda been talking to people that I meet and told them to check it out” I would go on, but you probably get the idea of how this conversation was going.  

It is not that the guy tried really hard and nothing came from it.  He talked to a handful of people, which isn’t even close to what is needed to see success in this industry unless all your friends are already guru marketers and have a pulsating list of thousands and thousands of people they can contact immediately.  

What had happened with this particular individual is that he signed up due to the excitement and potential of making millions from home because of the lucrative possibilities in the compensation plan.  

When he went on vacation, he lost that burning desire and started doing his normal thing.  Without keeping his burning desire to succeed with the business, he was ultimately fizzling out before he even got started.

The second call was actually a voice message that went something like this, “Hey Drew this is Lonnie Crocket Vander-Smears’ wife Pearl.  

I have a question about the training and I also wanted to ask you if you think that we should stay in the business because we are not making any money.  I am thinking about spending more time with it, but I don’t know if I should.  

If we could sit down sometime and talk that would be great” This message pretty much answers itself, does it not?  She is asking me my opinion on whether or not they can be successful.  

They are asking me IF they should spend more time building their business because they currently have not spent time building their business and are not making any money.  

Therefore, not spending time building their business equals no cash flow.  They are thinking about making more money, but they haven’t decided to take more action in the direction of making it.

Now I am not picking on this particular couple specifically because that majority of people out there that get into this kind of business do the same thing that this couple did.  They are just an example of what goes on in the home-based get rich soon “or something” business.  

I got back to them and explained that if they wanted to make money they would need to spend a good deal of effort in investing time into their business and learning what they need to know to get to the level of success that they had envisioned.  

This was at the point in my experience with the whole home-based online business scene where I started becoming more interested in parts of business that did not have to do with recruiting and such, so my response to their concern was probably a bit short and very much to the point with a side of reality to top it off.

The last phone call that I had from the guy was of course at some random hour that is not normal to call someone.  It was early in the morning when I had not yet dragged myself out of bed.  

He calls and when I answer the phone my voice is about three times deeper that it usually is so he automatically says, “Oh, did I just wake you up?”  This is not the scenario he had imagined in his head I am sure, because he needed the situation to be just so so that I would want to hear what he had to say.  

Typically if I answer my phone if it wakes me up, I try and sound like I have been awake for a while… so I will clear my throat a little and answer the phone with a semi stern tone to wipe out any confusion of my not being anywhere close to having a coherent conversation.  

To this point in my life the morning voice always over rules and I am always found out so I am not sure why I still try to do it, but someday maybe I will perfect it.  Anyhow, he ends up calling me later in the day.  

Here I am thinking that he is about to tell me how he and his wife are still not having any success.  No, this was setting my expectations a bit high on this one.  Instead he called to tell me, of course, that he was still in the business that I was in and in addition he had found this other business that had to do with investing.  

All a person had to do was give someone else as much money as they wanted to and each month they would make X percent back on their investment… It was that easy!  He went on about some other stuff but I was not paying attention because I already new his pattern.  

Many people who think, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence”, adopt this pattern.  If it isn’t deal B it is deal C or deal D and so on.  

They are always chasing something until they had either run out of money or give up hope.  Though there are businesses, clearly, that are superior to others, it is usually how you promote the business and if you understand what running involves that determines success.

So after he talked for a while he asked if I wanted to get involved.  I said that I was not interested and that was that.  It was at this point that I wanted to tell him that what he was doing sounded like it was a scam, but I refrained.  

I also wanted to tell him that he was heading down a road that had no end and he may want to rethink how he was going about trying to make a living working from home.  

Realistically I probably could have said anything to him and he would have not believed me, hell I didn’t believe anyone when I was told that what I was doing was ineffective.  

It was due to the first hand experience that I finally learned the lesson that I needed to learn and experience overrules the hypothetical.