A Story About Business
Life has been pretty crazy lately.
Nearing the end of the summer of 2015 I was getting ready for my biggest move yet. In the third week of summer I came home to say bye to my friends and family as I was getting ready to move to Phoenix, AZ to build my network marketing business. Reason being, Phoenix is the homestead of Vemma Nutrition Company, and that’s why I was heading out there. On August 24th 2015 I got an alarming Facebook message at 5:45 pm. The message was from my old friend Kyle Roush. He said that Vemma was getting shut down by the Federal Trade Commission.
No way.
I immediately called Jamie and yep, it was true. The timing was impeccable – I was supposed to be leaving for Arizona at 6 am.
That night I drove up to East Lansing and found out that other companies wanted to partner up with the Young Pros. The first one up was a company called Jeunesse Global. We didn’t know much about Jeunesse other than the fact that they sold skin care. We knew this because Alex Morton, Young People Revolution (or YPR) creator and 25 year old network marketing millionaire, switched his organization from Vemma to Jeunesse just weeks prior. That switch made us bitter about Alex and that company but our good friend and upline leader Grady Paulson set up the meeting for us and we trusted Grady with our lives, so we decided to go. We were apprehensive but knew we needed to move fast to find a new company in case of a worst case scenario with Vemma’s FTC investigation. That night we decided to fly to Orlando to meet with Jeunesse’s leadership in the morning.
This was an emotional time for me because Vemma gave me the opportunity to live the life I had only dreamed of as a poor child growing up near southwest Detroit. No one in my community ever encouraged greatness or extraordinary goals and my opportunity to attend college was a hallmark of success in my community. After my college experience though, I still felt lost in my place in the world. I didn’t want to work a desk job, slaving away on a paycheck and taking orders from middle-management never sat well with me. I desired freedom. On September 27th of 2012 my life was changed when I was introduced to the power of network marketing (NWM). The idea of developing teams and utilizing organizational leadership to distribute products and create market share for companies made so much sense to me. I had leadership experience through JROTC and my fraternity and I had marketing experience through my degree program at Michigan State and my internship working for medical supply distribution in Las Vegas earlier that summer. I felt I could do this NWM thing. It was then that I started a journey that would take me all around the United States, living the life of those childhood dreams while having a positive impact in thousands of peoples’ lives as well. Vemma served as a vehicle for those experiences, and I was not quick to let it go, but I also knew I had to be willing to accept new opportunities.
So, we took a flight out to Orlando, FL on Tuesday morning of August 25th and were picked up from the airport via Cadillac Escalade by a well to do European chap in a Jeunesse Global polo. His name was Vitali and he had a good demeanor about him. I was liking this vibe already but I couldn’t tell anyone that, we had to stay “cold” and in demand. We drove a half hour out to a hotel where we met Lance Conrad and Rob Sperry, the creators of Mynt, a company within old network marketing giant, Monavie. It was only months prior that Jeunesse absorbed Monavie and Lance and Rob were legends in the industry. We didn’t know it at the time of this meeting but we were sitting down with some big players here. Still though, I was more determined than ever to stick by BK and Vemma throughout this unknowing time and was immediately disenchanted with the idea of leaving for a new company — but if there was one thing I learned in my three year experience in NWM is that an open mind is not only important but invaluable in the world of business, so I prayed to God to keep my mind and heart open to new ideas while guiding my emotions throughout this trip.
After getting cleaned up in our hotel rooms, ten of us Young Pros members met in a small hotel conference room with Lance and Rob. As they presented their backgrounds and introduced themselves I’d be lying if I didn’t say I liked what I was hearing. They were God fearing, family men with a genuine passion for helping people — these were things that they not only told us, but that we could feel were true. They were the kind of men I strived to be like, the kind of mentors I wanted to mold my behavior on. They used their money and resources to support their families and to reinvest back into their teams instead of spending their earnings on superficial things. I was not used to mentorship and support that came in the form of true support into my teams and leaders so this was a shock to me, but I had to remain cold. If they saw me cracking now how could I have any negotiation power while we were shopping around for new partnerships? Though I had to admit, everything was checking out and it was when we started to hear about the company that the conversation started to gain depth.
Scott Lewis, the Chief Visionary Officer of Jeunesse Global and son of the CEO and COO of the company, came to present us what he saw Jeunesse to be. The travel incentives, strong product brands and most importantly, the vision of how this business model, compensation plan, products and leadership could create a positive change in peoples’ lives had successfully gained our attention. It directly lined up with our purpose as the Young Pros:
“To Connect and Develop the Next Generation of Leaders Who Share a Desire of Leaving the World a Better Place.”
It seemed like everyone in the room were connecting the dots even though no one was talking about it — our poker faces remained resilient. It was when Scott left us that we really got down to business on the compensation plan. It turns out our COO, Wendy Lewis, is a Ivy League graduate of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and has a knack for mathematics. She spent her professional life developing compensation plans for NWM companies the world over. It is because this background that she set out to develop the best compensation plan in the industry. What Lance and Rob presented to us was the most aggressive model for compensation I have ever seen. In terms of international market potential, retail market potential, customer acquisition incentives, a binary system for team based compensation, and an impressive payout for individual leadership building with personally enrolled distributors, it was clear that the Young Pros had never seen anything like this. It was so clear, in fact, that some of us were smiling and laughing and already dreaming up the possibilities of what we could do with a system like this but I couldn’t be 100% just yet — I HAD to see the products. Luckily Lance and Rob knew that, so they pulled out sample bags with each one of Jeunesse’s products in them.
As someone who loves sales I knew that the biggest concern for me was going to be how I could market these products. I knew that the company dealt in skin care, fitness and energy but I was most interested in the skin care because the retail and market potential. I was excited to push product and get a customer base. Lance began to explain and demonstrate the products and I was liking what I heard, but when he explained our fastest acting, instant cosmetic I lost my cool. This was revolutionary. This was the future. This is what my entire organization needed to see. We all agreed on the move at this point, rolled up our sleeves and got to work in that meeting room as to how we were going to make our move.
The next day we met with Alex Morton. Hell bent on not being on his team, we had no desire to meet with the man. Personal development set in again and we decided to be open minded with what he had to say, so he came into the meeting to clear up the rumors on his switch and give us his vision of a future partnership. We liked what we heard from him and saw the power of consolidating the largest movement of young entrepreneurs within network marketing into one team in the fastest growing company in the industry. We would make history. So needless to say, we brokered the deal and set up a game plan to get our whole team to see the vision we just received. We prayed for God’s guidance when going into those meetings and we felt His presence there with us the entire time, it was liberating. The next day we were on a flight back to Michigan and set plans up to meet up with our top leaders and get our squad moved into a position of success.
We are still in our first month as a new organization and the playing field is still level. My team and I have never been so excited for an opportunity to grow and develop with such a strong team. We come into this new venture with years of experience, tens of thousands of miles of traveling under our belts and an international influence that spans worldwide — and we made this all as kids in their 20s with no prior training. We have built a culture of excellence. We have built ourselves for success. We have conditioned ourselves to win, and that’s exactly what we intend to do.
P.S. And congrats to Vemma on winning their FTC case and being allowed to distribute their amazing products worldwide. It was not only a great win for them, but for Network Marketing worldwide. Thank you for reading, God bless.
