What's going on, everyone? This is Steve Larsen, and you are listening to Secret MLM Hacks Radio. So here's the real mystery: How do real MLMers like us, who didn't cheat and only bug family members and friends, who want to grow a profitable home business, how do we recruit A-players into our downlines and create extra incomes, yet still have plenty of time for the rest of our lives? That's the blaring question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Secret MLM Hacks Radio.

 

Now, I want to go ahead and start off this very first episode just kind of, you know, a little bit raw. I want to swear for the first time on ... ever. Okay, here it comes. First time swearing, here goes. All right, brace for impact, I'm a little sad I'm publishing this, here it comes. MLM. Oh man, there it was, holy cow. Plug the ears of all the kids around you. That was nuts. Hey, but I really want to welcome you to Secret MLM Hacks Radio. This is the first episode. This has actually been a long time in the making, and I'm excited to finally be doing it.

 

A lot of people get uncomfortable with MLM, and it's kind of funny to ask somebody, "Hey, why'd you get into an MLM?" Sometimes that's a really scary topic for people, especially if they still think it's a pyramid scheme, or if they still think that it's something that you go bug other people in the mall with, or you go to home meetings or hotel meetings. And I want you to know, I hate those tactics, I think they're stupid. I think they're tactics that are stuck in the '90s, and that's not what I'm about.

 

The whole reason why I think you should listen to this podcast is because I am a marketer first, by trade, and what's funny about the multi-level marketing industry is that stereotypically, a lot of people get into it as their very first business venture, but they don't really know how to market. They don't know how to actually go out and actually market the opportunity, and so they lean back on the tactics of the people who are in their upline, which is, "Hey, write a huge list of all your family members and friends, and go bug the crap out of them, and hopefully, some of them will join." And I'm not about that.

 

When I first got started in MLM, it was actually kind of a ... Honestly, by accident. My wife and I, we've been married five and a half years now, we're from Denver, Colorado, but we live in Boise, Idaho, now. It's kind of funny, we've been married, like I said, five and a half years, and about a year and a half in, we were like, "You know what, we'd love to have a kid, we'd love to be able to bring a child into the world and start growing our family," and we were really excited to do so.

 

And I remember my wife comes running out of the bathroom one day, she's got, like, the little pee stick, right, and she goes running up, and she goes, "Stephen, oh my gosh, I'm pregnant!" And I was so excited, and I'm jumping around, I'm super excited, I'm going, "Oh my gosh, we have a kid that's going to come into this world. Oh, this is so fun, this is so amazing." And I was really, really excited, and we were jumping around, and I remember just this moment of just pure glee. Super, super special moment, you know? And you can imagine being there, how fun and happy that was.

 

And then all of a sudden, it's like as soon as there was this happy, cool, joy moment that came in, there was also this incredible, real kind of dampering fear that just suck inside of me, and reminded me painfully, "Stephen, you're broke. How are you going to pay for this kid?" And immediately, it kind of dampered all the ... And I wish that that feeling wasn't there, but it was, and I was thinking, "Oh my gosh, how do I pay for this kid?" You know? And how do I ... You know, I'm really excited, but how do you look at this child with love as a parent rather than as a big receipt, you know what I mean? From a hospital, and all the bills that come along with that.

 

And shortly thereafter ... So I set off, and I started doing all these different things, and I was doing stocks, and I was doing options, and I was doing real estate, both commercial and residential. We were doing cool stuff with big investment firms, investment from other people in big commercial things, and I did eBooks, and I went and I did door-to-door sales for two summers, and I did all this stuff, kind of leading up to that point of the MLM itself that got tossed in there. And what ended up happening was my buddy ... Shortly after we found out we were pregnant, I had a buddy who reached out to me, and he and I continually were trying to do just money stuff. You know, we were trying to be successful. When we were in college, we were trying to be that college story. You know what I mean. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, right? Be that college story of success, right?

 

And so he reaches out to me shortly after we find out that my wife's pregnant, and he reaches out and he goes, "Dude, I got this ... I know this great guy, just met him. Dude, what he wants to do, he's going to help us make a lot of money, it's going to be awesome." And we had had that conversation before, but I trusted my friend. I was like, "All right, that sounds totally sketchy, dude." Like, "Well, who is he?" I can find a whole bunch of people who are going to sell me that kind of story, you know what I mean?

 

And what ended up happening was I get on the phone, and it's a three-way phone call. You guys know, it's a classic MLM three-way phone call, and he calls me, and he goes, "Dude, what's up, Steve, man, like, this is awesome. You're getting in, this is going to be great. It's just $500 to join, and you're going to be up in no time." And I was like, "500 bucks to join? Are you kidding me?" I'm trying to raise money so I can, like, eat and live, and let alone go have a kid, and pay for that, and all the costs involved there, and I was like, "No." And I was like, "This is one of those pyramid schemes," and that's totally what my belief was.

 

And he came back to me, and he asked again, and I was like, "No." And my buddy called, and he called and he was like, "Dude, you're going to really like this. This is going to be a good thing, it's going to be awesome for you. I see you succeeding. Of all the people I see succeeding in this kind of thing, it'd be you." And I was like, "You know what, dude, fine. For you, for what you're saying, I trust you, I'm going to believe you. Let's do it." And I dove headfirst in, and I was like, "If I'm going to do this MLM, and fight all the inner beliefs that I have about what MLM is, and how to do it, I'm going to do it as hard as I can." Right? And I set off to do it with the most ferocious pace that I possibly could, and I literally went door-to-door, down Main Street on businesses, and I recruited some businesses, and I recruited some family and friends, and I went person to person, and I got told "no" like crazy, and I got told "yes" a few times.

 

And in my first month, I recruited 13 people, and I was like, "This is awesome. That's not bad." Honestly, 13 people in my first month ever, that's not bad at all, right? I was like, "Oh, it's not amazing, but it's not terrible either," and I was feeling kind of excited about it, and I got this little cool little trophy award for how fast I was going from the MLM I was in. I'm not going to say the name of the MLM, because you guys will all definitely know it, and so ... Just to kind of keep it the third party there.

 

But I was super excited in month two that I was in this MLM, kind of started to turn the corner there, and I realized that nobody else was doing anything. Nobody else was doing anything at all. I would go and I would call these other people, and I would say, "Hey, you guys, hey, so are you going to go talk to this person? Hey, [inaudible 00:07:06] this person? Hey, are you going to do this?" And I realized that unless I literally drove ... Sometimes, in some cases, it was an hour and a half away round trip, and I would drive an hour and a half out of my time, out of my day, to go meet with somebody, and they wouldn't do anything. And I had to put this cattle prod behind their back to get them to do anything at all, and it started becoming really frustrating for me.

 

My guess is, if you're listening to this podcast, you've probably had that experience before, where you go and you recruit somebody, and you're like, "Man, you know what? That guy could've been great," or "That woman could've been great," or "It would've been awesome to have her do this," or "him do this," or "How come they can't just do these few things?" You know? You've probably been there before, and honestly, you may know that you are that person, and that's okay.

 

What I started realizing is that so many of these tactics that we were taught by the upline, and that I had, were very old. They were very, very, very old tactics. I almost think of this almost similar to, like, Civil War versus war right now, you know? I was in the Army, and our tactics are not that we stand in front of each other and shoot in a straight line at each other anymore. You know what I mean? Tactics have changed; we don't do that kind of thing anymore. It's the same thing with marketing, it's the exact same thing with MLM, with business in general, and how we interact with one another. Just, I mean, the iPhone alone, we all have that thing within our arm's reach as it currently is.

 

And so I started getting into how should I actually make this thing successful, and that's what this podcast is about, it's all about what ... That was four years ago, almost. Yeah, that was four years ago that I first joined it, and then it was three and a half years ago that I officially pretty much quit it, and I walked away. I was so fed up with all of the stuff that they were asking me to do, and I know that some of my relationships are still damaged from me joining that MLM.

 

And the reason why is because I walked in, and the tactic they were giving me at the time was "Hey, sit down, write a list of 15 to 20 people, and I need you to sit down, and what you're going to do is, before you can leave, you need to call every single one of them with me staring you straight in the face, and we're going to beg these people into the downline." And I was like, "Oh, okay," and I was just trying to be open, and I was like, "This is how you do it, I guess," and I didn't know any better, and so what I did is I pulled my phone out, and I made a big list of people, and right there, I started calling family members and friends, and I still have people that are, you know, not as open to me anymore in general, and that's painful.

 

And so this whole podcast is how to do MLM without going to family members and friends, without going and barfing all over people in the malls and making them feel swarmed, without ... This is all about how to create automated recruiting systems. What ended up happening is I ended up leaving MLM as a whole, and I started building what we call Internet sales funnels. It's basically the art of taking people who are prospective customers and turning them into customers, you know, paying customers. And so I started doing that for other companies for their big products, and I started doing that for ... Sometimes even billion-dollar companies, I would go do this for.

 

And the company I currently work for, I build a lot of sales funnels, and I started realizing, like, "Oh my gosh, what if I did this for MLM? What if there was a way I could build an automated funnel that would recruit people for me while I sleep?" And I always thought that was kind of a joke, any time anybody would say, like, "Yeah, I'm the laptop success guy, I go sit on the beach and I work from the beach," I'm like, "Buddy, if I'm on the freaking beach, I'm not going to have a laptop, be working, I'm going to be playing in the ocean." You know what I mean? I always thought, like, "Whatever, dude, that's a joke."

 

And what's been so funny is that's kind of becoming a reality. I have yet to sit on a beach and just watch people recruit, but I have had many times where I just wake up and I roll over, and I look at my phone, and it's like, "Ding, ding ding ding, ding ding, ding ding ding." It's like, "Wow, look at those people that joined my MLM, look at all the commissions I just got. Um, babe, this worked. You remember when I quit this thing? I tried it again, and it's totally different. I don't even know the people that I recruited, and they're super stoked, and totally ambassadors of me and what we're doing, and I don't even know their names yet."

 

It's not to say that you should take the person and the personal aspect out of this business; that's not at all what I'm saying. This is a relationship business, this is a personal development business. But what I have done is I've figured out how to actually go create automated funnels, automated recruiting funnels, and even right now, I'm testing cool ways to sell products, MLM products, using the Internet in a very automated way as well, because that's what I do for my actual job, and I thought, "My gosh, I might as well apply it here."

 

Well, that was about a year or two ago that I actually finished the funnel, and I didn't execute it right. You know, just like most things that launch right out of the gate, didn't do very well, and I had to tweak it and tweak it and tweak it and tweak it, and finally got to this point, and I was like, "Holy crap. Babe, there's 15 people begging to join this downline. I don't even know how to get them in yet." And that's been the story of it. So if that is interesting to you on how to do that, this is the podcast for you. What I would ask is, I would love to hear what you guys think about this and the idea of it. If you could go to iTunes, leave me a review, that would be fantastic. I'd love to hear some feedback on what it is. And yeah, I know sometimes it's a little unorthodox to ask for reviews, but it's mostly for feedback so I can see what's going on.

 

The other thing that you guys can go do is I've made a few resources for you for free, to help train your downlines. It's completely free. It's five videos that walk you through some really simple marketing tactics that are up to date, new ways to look at MLM, and a new framework to approach MLM as a whole. That's not stuff that your upline's going to teach you, and it's not that they won't teach you, it's that they probably don't know it, stereotypically. It's stuff that is very new-age, as far as how I've been doing all this and how I've been putting it all together.

 

And so it's free, if you just go to SecretMLMHacksRadio.com, SecretMLMHacksRadio.com. It will teach you ... There's basically five videos that you can watch with your downline. They're each about 15 to 20 minutes, and it will train you on how ... It's not like I teach you, "Hey, hey, here's the three lines you need to make anybody jump into your downline and be a success." It's like, it's not stuff like that. It's not tactics that blow away with the wind. These are true, tried things that we use, that I've build for multi-million-dollar companies, and even one or two billion-dollar. It's a lot of fun. I'm not saying they're mine, but I've built it for other people, and the funnels that I've built are used in many industries, and it's been very, very awesome.

 

So anyways, if that's interesting to you at all, you can go get your free resources. I call it my MLM Masters Pack. It's something that you guys can watch together with your downline, and there's even an option to download all the videos to your ... Or go get the big playlist of videos, if you just share it, which is awesome. So anyway, go to SecretMLMHacksRadio.com, and guys, I'm really excited for this podcast. I've felt this inner need to share the types of things that I've been learning, and ... Which feels a little bit weird, but it's been fun to do that, and more people I share with it, they're just going nuts. It's, you know, some of the top people in MLM period have been really excited about the systems that I've been building and putting together. So, guys, this is going to be a great ride and a great adventure. Excited to have you on it. Please subscribe, and I would love, like I said, to see you guys over at SecretMLMHacksRadio.com. See you guys. Bye.

 

Hey, thanks for listening. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Would you like me to teach your own downline five simple MLM recruiting tips for free? If so, go download your free MLM Masters Pack by subscribing to this podcast at SecretMLMHacksRadio.com.