Together

Just short of Taganrog, my Mercedes died in the middle of the highway.

Something was hissing under the hood, the temperature needle was pinned in the red. And in the trunk rode my entire office: boxes of juice, a color printer, my belongings.

To this day I've got a name for that story: how I paid for a million dollars with a Mercedes.

But I'll have to start with how I ended up alone.

2004. I join Morinda.

I come in completely alone. Not one person comes with me from Neways. No partner, no friend, no acquaintance.

I already told you, in Chapter 15, how I decided back then that I was too late. Now let me tell you what I was doing all that time.

I did the same thing I always did. Ran a newspaper ad, the old-fashioned way. Started inviting people, meeting them, running presentations.

And nobody signed up.

A week went by. Then another. Maybe a month. I'd figured that people would come flocking to me, Mr. Big Shot, with my experience and my million dollars. Nobody came flocking at all.

I slid into a real depression.

Some people were buying the juice, customers were showing up. But a business doesn't grow on customers. A business grows on leaders. And there weren't any.

So I went online. Built a website.

And it worked. People started coming to me through the site.

One of the first to call was Dima, from Novosibirsk.

"My mom needs some of that juice."

He ordered some. Dima, as it turned out, was actually a distributor for another network marketing company. And he was upfront about it right away: I'll see how the product works first.

The product worked. It really helped his mom.

And Dima called again:

"Come on, come out to Novosibirsk. Let's build a business."

Over the next six months, I took the train out to Novosibirsk three times. Ran sessions, helped build the team. And Dima wasn't alone. He'd brought his own team with him.

And the process started moving.

That's when I understood something simple. Find one leader, and a team starts growing around them.

From then on, every time someone new wrote to me through the site, I'd slap a label on them right away. The same one for everybody: "leader."

I'd work out the details with them, get on a train, and go. Whatever city they were calling me to.

Of course, not everyone I went to see actually turned out to be a leader. But I saw a leader in every one of them. That was my vision. And the leaders did come.

Once, a teacher slapped the label "black box" on me, and I sat locked inside it for years. A label can close a person off. Or it can open them up. I chose to hand out the kind that opens people up.

There's a line attributed to Theodore Roosevelt: "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."

For me, that's pure gold. That year, I lived by it exactly.

I knew how to run newspaper ads. I ran them. I knew how to build websites. I built them. I knew how to run presentations. I ran them. I knew how to teach the comp plan. I taught it.

I did everything I knew how to do, right where I was. Everything I could.

Because you can always start from zero. But if you already have experience and skills, put every single one of them to work.

Now let's get back to the highway.

By then I was at Morinda, and I decided to drive out to Taganrog to see Sasha, an old distributor of mine. A different Sasha — not the one I used to run cross-country with.

I was living in Petersburg back then, but I'd come to Moscow for about a month. And I had this old vintage Mercedes with a wimpy little engine. I'd found a shop in Moscow, had the engine rebuilt. A rebuilt engine is supposed to be broken in gently, without stress, for a while.

But I was in a hurry to get to Sasha's.

I loaded the car with juice, the color printer, my belongings. An office on wheels. And drove from Moscow to Taganrog.

Just short of Taganrog, the engine overheated. The Mercedes died.

I had it towed to the nearest town. Left it there. Loaded everything into a shuttle van and made it the rest of the way to Sasha's.

I stayed at Sasha's for one day. Spent the night.

Sasha talked about his new company. How great everything was there, what great leaders he had. How his whole team was planning a trip together. He was fired up.

And I realized: he wasn't going to come with me — not now.

So I didn't ask him. Left him a box of juice, said goodbye, and headed home to Petersburg.

I'd ditched the car, made it to Sasha's, and didn't even invite the guy. From the outside, the whole trip looked like a failure.

About a year went by.

Sasha calls:

"So how's your noni juice doing? Why haven't you called me?"

I hadn't bothered him. I understood he was busy with his own project.

And then Sasha says:

"My leaders are looking for someone to sign up under at your company. I sold them on you as an honest, decent guy."

He gave me his mentor's number. A top leader living in Moscow. We talked on the phone, and the next day I left Petersburg for Moscow.

His name was Mark. A different Mark — not the one who ran the training with Sofia, where my black box turned into a jewelry box. This was Mark, with Svetlana.

We met at a small café.

What happens when two self-sufficient leaders meet and neither one is out to grab anything for himself? All we had to do was look at each other. And everything was clear.

Mark said there were a few things that needed sorting out. Once they were sorted, his people would sign up under me.

I called my sponsor right away. We worked it all out.

"Good," Mark said. "Now we need to try your juice. Then we'll make a decision."

And I happened to have a ticket to Almaty — a meeting with a future partner was waiting for me there.

"I'll be back in three days," I said. "We'll meet then."

Three days later, I flew back. And Mark said:

"Everyone who tried it is getting amazing results. We're signing up."

I remember that day very well.

Mark and Svetlana's apartment. The three of us. Registering leaders from all over the country, the whole day long.

People sent their passport details by fax. The fax machine would beep, another page would crawl out, and the three of us would fill out a paper contract by hand. Then the next one. And the next. My writing hand was aching.

By evening, forty-seven leaders had signed up. All across Russia.

These were leaders from another company. That company had changed its comp plan, and the top leaders in that branch were looking for a new home. First they chose the company. Then they chose their mentor. Me.

In a single day, I had the entire leadership of a powerful new branch.

And that branch became famous all across Russia.

Now add it all up.

I left a Mercedes on the side of the road. And that trip, where I didn't invite a single person, led to forty-seven leaders finding me a year later. I made my second million dollars at Morinda.

That's why I call it "paying for a million with a Mercedes."

Though honestly, the Mercedes wasn't really the payment. What I paid with was not pushing Sasha. Letting him go his own way. And a year later, he's the one who sold me to his leaders as an honest, decent guy.

People don't come for the company, and they don't come for the product. People come for people.

This was a real team. Forty-seven people who'd known each other for years, who were friends, who'd been through their old company together and already proven themselves there. Tight-knit.

One person alone could never have pulled off results like that. Not me, not Mark.

Mark later became number one in Russia too. In Chapter 16, I told you about the strongest leader among the newcomers passing me in earnings, and how good that felt. Now you know who that was.

Look at that whole year, start to finish.

As long as I was alone, the business stood still. The newspaper ads, the presentations, my experience, my million dollars — none of it worked.

Then Dima showed up, and his team with him. The process started moving.

Then Mark and Svetlana showed up, and another team with them. The process took off.

Two "togethers." And both times, things shifted not because I got better at calling people or better at talking. But because I stopped being alone.

One soldier can't win a battle. Everybody knows that saying. But I only really felt it that year.

Remember the jewelry box of diamonds? One diamond, even a cut one, is beautiful. But scattered diamonds sparkle differently. The stones catch each other's light and pass it along.

A team is scattered diamonds.

Only the person themselves can cut their own diamond. Nobody can do that for them. But you can only truly sparkle together.

Twenty-some years have gone by. And I'm building a team again.

We call ourselves Happy People Network. A team of happy people. Our values: freedom, material well-being, and helping other people. And our mission is this: help one million people become just a little happier. Through our team, our company, our business, and our support.

There aren't many of us yet. Just a handful of like-minded people. We're only getting started.

Every morning, early, we have a team call. You already know one of these calls — the one where Larisa and I talked about the book, and the goosebumps came in waves. We share experience, grow together, learn together.

And we want to grow one big, strong family. Where everyone contributes and gives toward the common good. Where people help each other.

Remember the ending of LifeSpring? Thirty people hugging each other like one family. That's the feeling I want to build again. Only this time, I'm the one building it.

Back in 2004, I built a website for myself. And got on a train to meet every single person face to face.

Now I'm building a system for everyone.

I'm a tech guy — I love this stuff. Everyone on our team gets their own recruiting system: a personal landing page, a personal chatbot, a personal lessons page. Nobody needs to know how to build websites or bots. They just need to do one thing: run their social media. That's what we teach. We have tools that help grow Instagram and VK. We help each other put ourselves out there.

And we also teach people to write books.

Because our business is a relationship business. A people business. And when someone reads a book, they get to know its author personally. They spend evenings with him. By the end of the book, they know a great deal about him.

That's exactly what you're doing right now.

So our main goal is to help every leader on the team write their own book. And then run their social media and build a big international team together. All over the world.

This book is also part of our "together." The team is helping write it. Partners are the first ones to read it. And their reactions, like Larisa's, end up right inside it.

Here's what I understood: a business grows on leaders, not customers. And leaders come to a person, not a company. Together, you build what nobody can build alone. But everyone walks into that "together" by their own choice.

What does this mean for your business?

If you're alone right now and nothing's growing, that's not a life sentence. I went through it myself, with a million dollars and ten years of experience behind me. Don't wait for people to come flocking. Look for one leader. Just one. A team will grow up around them.

Slap the label "leader" on every new person you meet. Not all of them will turn out to be one. But the ones who can be will feel that you already see it in them. That pulls people in.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. Don't wait for the perfect company, the perfect website, the perfect time. Put every skill you've already got to work.

And don't push. If someone's fired up about a different project right now, let them go — no hard feelings. Leave the box of juice and drive away. People remember how you acted when they turned you down. A year from now, they might come back, and not alone.

If you're a leader, remember that you're being sold too. Every partner you have, past and present, is telling someone about you somewhere. What words do they use? I got sold as "honest and decent." I never got better advertising than that in my entire life.

And find your people. The ones you don't have to put on an act for in the mornings. One soldier can't win a battle.

In a single day, forty-seven people signed up under a man they'd never even met in person. Only Mark had seen him, and only twice. What held them together for years after that, when there was no contract between them, no shared payoff?

For a long time, I couldn't put it into one word. One day, that word just slipped out on its own, right on stage. More on that in the next chapter.