Listen to the episode here:
Watch the episode here:
Do you feel like your money troubles are over? Are you able to live a life of financial freedom and ease? Is this the lifestyle you want for yourself and your family? Buckle up because today’s episode is for those who are ready to take their financial statuses to the next level! In this episode, Andrew Logan takes an honest technical look at network marketing and discusses how financial freedom can be achieved in this industry. Andrew also drops information bombs on entrepreneurship, sustainable wealth, financial literacy, and more. If you’re looking for ways to keep your business running smoothly so that you can focus on the more important things, then tune in now!
Andrew Logan: Is Real Financial Freedom Being Achieved In Network Marketing In MLM?
I’m excited to be with Andrew Logan. I was catching up pre-show some of your background and exciting stuff. You have been training in the industry for some time. You have built a great reputation. People get more information about how to find you, but it is great being with you, and I’m glad you could join us.
Thanks for having us. It is great to be here. Hopefully, we can share some value with your audience and help them along that pathway to financial freedom.
We would be a little remiss if we didn’t tell your story and background in the industry. I want to get into this hot topic of what you focus on. What do real financial freedom and network marketing mean, and how to get it? It is under-taught. Share with us how you learned of the industry and some background, Andrew, if you would.
It is not a typical story. I came from a university with a health science background. I was a physiotherapist and physical therapist. We had a good life. The enemy of a great life is a good life. We had this good life. I had a small business and a Physio degree. I was traveling the world with athletes. Everyone was like, “You are lucky.” I was run down and stressed. Financially, we were good, but we were never going to get ahead. You were like, “Is this the next several years of my life?” You have Groundhog Day for several years.
A friend had been nagging me about using these products. When you come from a university degree, unless the textbook says it, do it. It was calories in, calories out, and eating food. None of these potions and pills. I was getting married, and I wasn’t happy with how my body looked. I wanted to be happy with how my body looked for our wedding photos. I eventually said to my friend, “I will do it.”
We got results, and we started to think, “We do need to look at some other ways to make an income, especially when we want to expand the family and have more time together.” We started to scratch the surface. We were able to reach our financial goals. I had set the goal years earlier of being financially free at 33. Thanks to this network marketing industry, we are able to achieve that.
We do need to look at some other ways to make an income, especially when we want to expand the family and have more time together.
You told a little bit of a backstory there of your first training presentation to the network marketing audience. Share that because it brings us to the important part of your story that is valuable for every company leader, individual, and organization that is trying to build something great.
Leadership is an important topic in this industry. A lot of people have different opinions on exactly what leadership is, and they are all right. No one is right or wrong. To me, leadership means you have to teach. Our mantra in our team and business was to teach people how to teach people, and you can go off and lay on the beach.
I always put teaching and my own leadership development as far as being someone who can explain and train it. That was always a high priority for me. Not that I was better than anyone else, but it was something that I prioritized heavily in our team. Several years ago, my wife and I maxed out the comp plan. We were off having this great holiday with our family. This guy called Frazer Brookes came along. Everyone knows him now, but he was still living with his parents. He launched his ninja thing. It was my wife who saw one of his Facebook Ads and clicked through.
We were traveling through the UK at the time. We thought we should meet up and have a chat. He and I hit it off straight away. My wife was like, “I met this guy, and now you are his best friend.” We hit it off well, and we forged this great friendship. Several months later, he messaged and said, “I’m going to do an event in Australia.” I said, “I will support you. I will get a heap of people there.” It was this tiny little event. On the ground floor, there were about 80 people at this event, and 40 of them were our downline. We were like, “You got to see this guy. He is awesome.”
Two days before his event, he had this other speaker coming along to help him out because he was checking names at the door. He was giving people their wristbands and moving chairs around during the lunch break. It was him and Svetlana, his now wife doing everything. He said, “I had this other guy who was supposed to help out, and he pulled out. Can you help? What can you train that is generic, you got two days’ notice, but it would be valuable?”
I said, “We would have basic fundamental training of how to build your business, but we had this leadership higher level training that we did that was about how to take care of your money and how to make sure that the money you are making is going towards an investment goal and treat this a business. What does that mean to treat it like a business? We had this high-level training that I’d been training for years and was successful in our team.”
We did a version of that from the stage. He said to me afterward, “There is a message there that people need, and it is missing in this industry.” Unfortunately, we have spent years in the industry and see people directly within our own company and people we met from other companies make a lot of money but do not know what to do with it. They are saying fooling their money is easily parted stuff. Not that these people were fools. They didn’t know what to do. People are making bad decisions.
I remember a successful lady, a seven-figure earner. She had been a stay-at-home mom her whole life. She didn’t understand the tax. She didn’t realize she had to pay taxes on this seven-figure income she was making. She gets a tax bill backdated several years of tax. They had to sell the family home, the caravan, the cars, everything. They had to sell this dream home that they bought straight away. You are hearing all of these sad stories.
If we are going to sell freedom, we got to tell both sides of the story and teach people how to make money. That is what we do. We have this incredible way to create an extra income stream. We also got to teach them the second half of the story, which is how do you put that money to work because there is no financial freedom if you are making sales.
You are making sales and money, but there is no financial freedom if you are still there every day. If you love being at the coal face, you love connecting, it is automatic, and you love it, that is okay. How many people do we see who feel they have reached it, and they are probably told that they have reached a certain level and they switch off, the money drives up straight away, and they are in financial peril?
The reality is the industry drives a lot of this because it is built around creating a perception, or the optics. If I drive a nice car and I’m in a nice home, that must mean that I’m financially successful. The nature of it is to drive more perceptions of wealth, which are often what broke people do.
We are a recognition-based industry, which is awesome. Your biggest strength is also your biggest potential weakness. The recognition of walking across the stage with the check and this society as much as our own humans. “I got money now. I got to buy the car, upgrade the house, and take nice holidays to demonstrate on my social media that I am being successful.”
The underlying thing in my book is that if we are going to sell financial freedom, we can’t tell a lie. We can’t say you got residual income and financial freedom if all people are buying flashy things with their money. There are a few things that sometimes we are our own worst enemies, especially when it comes to the financial mindset of here it is. We got to give people all the information. They can get all the way down the path.
How do you balance that? You bring people in, and you got to get them to buy into the product, the people, the concept, and the system that is in place. They got to focus on the lead measure. They got to prospect and follow up. There is got to be this balance here. How do you bridge that and can you use that message as a tool to make the organization stickier?
You want people to be excited. You don’t want to sit there and say, “Patrick, this will be the hardest several years of your life. Buckle up.” We got to be honest with people. You can sell hope or hype. Hope is the best thing you can give to someone. Hype is the worst thing. Whatever you are selling, make sure you give them the roadmap to do it.
If you are selling hope and hope of a different life, make sure that you can provide them with the systems, the tools, the roadmap, the support, and the mentorship. Sometimes that is where I feel it is great to sell financial freedom but make sure you are financially free yourself. You know what you are doing, and you are on that path. You don’t have to be all the way down the path, but at least make sure you are walking the path.
We need to get people to believe. We need to give them the systems and tools to get started. This was my own personal mindset when I came in. I came from a university background. In physiotherapy, you got to train for four years before you are even allowed to touch a patient. You are not allowed to touch a patient without four years of training.
It took me seven years to become a six-figure earner in physiotherapy because, by the time I went through university and went through my prac place, you pay to go work for free on prac. I’m not saying it is right, but that was normal. If you want to be a six-figure earner, you make a commitment at the start and see it through.
When we started in network marketing, you got to make a commitment to learning. I remember the opening of GoPro. I understood that the experts made all the money. I was like, “I’m going to become an expert on this thing. If I can be like 1% as good as Eric, I can make 1% of what he makes. That is probably enough for my family and me at the moment.” It was about learning it, so I could teach it and set the right expectations of, “Here is how you launch, here is how you duplicate it, and here is how you put your money to work. “
That process will take a bit of time. We live in a YOLO world where it’s like, “Buy the car now. Have the holiday now.” I was like, “Let’s not settle for a good life. Let’s go for a great life.” It is not about being a wet blanket. It allows them to dream bigger. I can show you how to have a good life, or I can show you to have a great life.
Whose responsibility is this? Is this the responsibility of the leader who is building a team in the early stages? Is that fall on their shoulders? Anybody can take up that mantle, but where does that responsibility fall? Should the organizations, the enterprises, and network marketing be responsible for some of the education, or where does that fall?
The greatest strength of network marketing is that someone else takes care of products, development, research, government approval, and shipping compensation plan. I got to give up on all those things. I can’t sit there and be like, “If only we had this product and banana flavor instead of chocolate flavor, my business would blow up stuff.” You have to let go of those mindsets.
What is the company’s responsibility and my responsibility at the end of the day? Responsibility is something I take quite strongly. If I am saying to someone, “Come with me on this journey with this company to your physical or financial goals,” that is my responsibility to be there until they reach their goals. If they quit, whose responsibility is it? I can sit there and say, “I showed up for every Zoom call and training. I attended every event. I was always there.” I did what I said I would do.
People go into business, and there are no guarantees, but the company’s job is to put the products in a box, pay you on time, and do the big events. The whole point is that we do everything else. That is also the great thing that allows us to be entrepreneurial, to create our own tools and things within compliance, but that is the exciting thing.
The great thing that allows us to be entrepreneurial is to create our own tools, and create our own things within compliance.
Andrew, where is your focus? Is it primarily on the coaching side to help people, or are you still building in the field?
Our focus is helping people with this mindset create that. This is my thing. My wife still runs the day-to-day of taking care of the people we have. We are grateful and thankful that we created a great culture of leadership. Most of our people are independent. My wife runs that day-to-day management. We are not in the trenches, enrolling as we have been in the past because this is the primary focus. The key now is it is a bit of a division of labor, but she is ensuring the people who are still reaching out to her for help. She is there to help and support them.
On the coaching side, are you working with individuals or leaders? Do you host masterminds? What is your model on the coaching side?
I try and offer as I can for everyone. We got free tools and a book, which was cheap. We do free events, and we have paid online events. I haven’t done face-to-face because of the world at the moment as much as anything. That is starting to free up, and we are doing one in New Zealand. We do more one-on-one group paid training and one-on-one mentorship.
That is what I get excited by each day, and that is helping people take that next step. What I want to do is show them how to create that mindset that network marketing is the stepping stone in the middle of the past. We generally start here, and we want to get to this financial freedom journey. We need this little stepping stone because it is too hard to have a job and suddenly be financially free. We show them how to turn that middle step into the vehicle to get them to financial freedom.
In working with many different people, you get a great perspective. You get a bird’s eye view of what is going on for the average person. What do you find is the biggest surprise for people that you help? They are not getting to where they want. Maybe they have had some success, but what is the biggest gap for the average person? Is there anything that jumps out at you?
Coming back a little bit to my past, we had to do all this learning before we could earn ascent. Companies are in competition with each other. Companies need to offer great things to help people get started and great bonuses to help them realize that income as soon as possible. They start to believe as soon as possible.
What we earn at the start is a bit skewed. We are earning more at the start than what we produced. We always see that people can come out of the blocks with a warm network with excitement. They are following tools and systems. Their income will come up, and they are going to hit a little wall where they come back a little bit. There is a lack of stock market correction, a pause, and a gap where now we got to get in and learn cold marketing skills, social media skills, how to find people, talk to them and take them through that process, and how to coach people. We learn those as we are going.
The biggest gap for people is understanding that at the start, you are going to get overpaid a little bit. We always say in network marketing, “You get overpaid at the start, and then you get underpaid.” Like anything in society, if we are going to be professionals, we have to learn the skills of the profession, but we don’t start learning them until 6 to 12 months in. That is where we lose many people because, at the start, it is always, “Follow the system, the tools, and the duplication process.”
We can, but you can only follow. If you want to lead, you got to step up and start creating your own fundamentals, skills, and development to start leading. One of the biggest gaps for people understanding your business is going to go down. That is a good thing because that is where we learn and develop so we can teach.
You can only follow so long if you want to lead. You have to step up and start creating your own fundamentals, your own skills, and your own development to start leading.
They always talk about, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure. You have to inspect what you expect.” We see that even large leaders. They don’t know the activity metrics. They have no idea in reality how many exposures were made by their organization in this day and age of technology. My sponsor, several years ago, said, “Fax me your tracking.”
I told them I was working twenty hours a week. It is five minutes to make an exposure. I got 10 names on the sheet times 5 minutes. It is 50 minutes. I know he is going to ask me, “What did you do with the other 19 hours?” I see this repeatedly. Do you see a similar thing? How do you bridge that for people? What are you doing to try and get leaders to understand the numbers game that is truly involved, and sitting on social for two hours posting stuff isn’t the answer?
From a coaching side, we try and provide simple tools and systems for people. We got a DMO Tracker that they can download for free. DMO is the Daily Method of Operation. The tracker is only as good if you put the numbers in the thing. We also talk about BAM, but we don’t use DMO as much. I have one there for people who like it. I like to talk about BAM, which is your Bare Ask Minimum. Tell me the bare ask minimum that you can do consistently every day. For us, it was four things.
If you grow your network by 1 person, market to 1 person, make a business offer to 1 person, and invite 1 person to an event, if you do that as a minimum every single day on weekends or on days offer, whatever you do a little bit extra, you will expose to 500 people a year. Your business should grow if you are growing your network marketing offering and inviting 500 people a year. At a bare ask minimum, it should grow.
One opportunity, one product, what is the ratio?
Grow your network, add one more person to your Facebook friend list, to your phone list, like meeting one new person and market. In a social media world, that can be creating content that is valuable and can be helping answer someone’s questions, adding value, and building your brand awareness. Directly offer skinny. In the words of Zig Ziglar, “Timid salespeople have skinny children.” You have to go and make the offer to someone like, “I have something for you that could help with that problem you are talking about.” We need to invite one person to the event. We call that the Fortune Four.
When you talk about how we make sure we do that, that is an education thing again. We sell to be your own boss, which is awesome. When you are starting, you are a team of one. If you are the boss, you are also the only employee. That means you got to get up and kick yourself in the BAM every day. It is not your upline, company, or friend’s job. It is your job to get up and kick yourself in the BAM every day.
If you are the boss, you’re also the only employee. It means it’s your job to get up and kick yourself in the bum every day.
We can only do that through educating people. There is the time we spend in our business and how productive we are in our business. I don’t teach time management. I teach productivity because you can manage your twenty hours a week all day, but were you productive? What are the measurable results in that twenty hours?
Everybody is an expert nowadays. You get online, and you got every sales trainer who thinks they understand network marketing. You got influencers who think that is the same thing as network marketing, which it is not. How do you deal with all the noise? When I got started, I had a fax, phone, and VHS tape in a meeting. It was simple. There was nothing else. There was no email, which dates me, but people weren’t even using email to communicate.
The business, in many ways, was simple to create momentum and duplication. People were willing to pick up the phone and would come to a presentation or a meeting, especially if the skillset was there. Now everybody has become an expert. There is so much digital noise out there, with 5,000 impressions a day. How do you work with leaders to try and drive a duplicatable simple system? What do you coach them to do to offset that?
The strengths of social media are also the biggest challenges. Is it TikTok, Reels, Facebook Live, or back to face-to-face coffee meetings because people are finally out of the house after such a challenging few years? The base answer comes down to understanding tactics versus fundamentals. We need to understand it is a numbers game. When we say it is a numbers game, that doesn’t mean, “Patrick, you are just a number. I don’t care if you say yes or no. I need to get my numbers up.” Don’t treat people like a number but understand the numbers game.
About 95% of people are happy being told what to do. I’m going to have systems and tactics for them. The tactic is, “Here is a Facebook post. Add your stuff in. This is what is going to help you start to reach out to people.” That is a template that they can follow. The fundamental is to understand who you are, your marketing message, and what your people want because Reels are crazy hot now. In several months’ time, something else is going to come along.
Don’t treat people like numbers, but understand the numbers game and understand the numbers game is that generally, about 95% of people are very happy being told what to do.
First, it was Facebook, and it was a Facebook page. For five minutes, everyone was on Periscope and then Instagram. In five minutes, we are at Clubhouse. That was hot for a few weeks. Now it is Reels, then TikTok. The tactics are always going to change. Understand that, as a leader of a team, you provide systems for the people who are happy to be told what to do.
You do have to need to update them every 12 to 18 months as social media changes. You are going to have that 5%. It is even probably a little bit less who want to branch out on their own a little bit. That is when you teach them the fundamentals of who you are, what you offer, and what your market needs. You teach them, and they go off and create their own systems, tools, and tactics.
The most important system you need in your business is a system to identify who is happy to follow and who wants to find their own way. You have to understand that because if you are a follower, and I say, “Go out and figure it out,” you can be overwhelmed by the noise there. If you are a leader and I say, “You are a leader, but you got to follow me and do what I say,” that is not leading. You were like, “I’m out.”
Identify those people and make sure that you understand the difference between a tactic and a fundamental. Identify who needs leverage. I can do a Zoom call with 1,000 people and show them a tactic. I’m going to do one-on-one fundamentals with the leaders because they need one-on-one on what is the best.
There are so many old-school networkers. Not in a bad way, but they are trying to drive simplicity. They are trying to drive everybody to do the exact same thing when the nature of that isn’t going to work because there are too many options. I love that principle. If an average company understood it, they would commit to allowing some people to solve the problem their own way.
We talk about what is the company’s job, the challenges, getting to be behind the curtain a little bit, and more these days. For the company, their challenge is their voice got to be aware of the brand new person in the room and about the big events. You got to get brand new people in to see the vision and see that it is real. That is important.
I still remember our first event, seeing that it was real and seeing people walk across the stage. I was like, “This works.” That energy propelled us for several years, but they are also going to see there are people who have been sitting in that room for a few years, and they are bored. I’m like, “I have heard this message.” They need to be in a separate room. Have them there to clap and cheer at the start but go and put them in a separate room because they need different training.
We work with many large enterprises. We try to get them to understand that you can’t deliver technology to the whole field and say, “Here it is.” They will not use it. You have to co-create with the leaders in the organization who are trying to drive their own culture in their own way. Try and educate them on some of the fundamentals. That is even challenging.
Let me throw one more at you. I’m curious here. Facebook and YouTube are not free. People think they are. They don’t realize they are promoting their product or service. They are generating interest. They are communicating on Messenger, and Facebook is selling advertising to the competitor on the thing that they generated interest in the prospect. Facebook owns the contact more than you do. They know more. They have all the data. They have the analytics. How do you coach people on using those platforms but not being used by them?
My mindset on this is control versus ownership. This is a training that we do with our mastermind people. When you go into a network marketing company, you got to understand that you don’t own the company. That is a good thing, but you can still control their products and compensation plan to a point where you can earn an income. You have enough control over what is going on to earn an income.
My background is in investing. We love to invest in property. It is that same mindset that we don’t own. The bank owns pretty much all the properties, but we can control them enough to have tenants in them and understand how to create cash flow and gains from them. It is the same with social media. You don’t own that traffic, Facebook group, and friends list. Someone else owns it. What can you control in there? Can you own them by offering a lead magnet, a PDF that you are in skin care, a PDF like seven steps to better skin, or five foods to avoid cutting out breakouts?
You are saying that you get the contact information out of that.
You can move them from an area that you control to an area that you own. If you can offer them and you put them into a different platform or area, you own more of that contact details. Understanding education is key. If you want to win a game, you got to know its rules. I talk about this in investing. Learn the rules of social media.
When people talk about how you hack the algorithm and all that stuff, what does Facebook want you to do? Facebook wants you to keep people engaged on the platform. They can sell more airtime to their advertisers. Understand that rule of the game. How do I create content that will engage more people so they stay there longer and Facebook can have more air time?
The challenge for the average distributor is you say, “Create content.” It was like, “You want me to do what?”
It is easier said than done. This is the tactic’s first fundamental. We see people copying and pasting other people’s content. I did a post, and it worked well. Someone else copies and pastes it, but your audience is smarter than that. Your audience was like, “That is not how Andrew speaks.” They were like, “I saw John and Frazer do a good post song. I’m going to copy and paste it.” Frazer’s audience likes his voice. My audience knows my voice.
The tactic would be to here is a post. Copy and paste. The fundamental is, “Who am I? What do I do? What do I offer?” What I try and help people do and coach people on is understanding that your audience knows your message. You have a platform that you don’t own but you can control. Know those rules, and understand what is going on.
One of the things that we do in our platform is that we create a lot of personalized content. People have all their social feeds, picture, email, phone number, and all that. It would be easy to let them have even more personalization if they chose to. They could have a quote by their picture. To be able to personalize each and every one of those straight, if they have a number one company video and we house that, being able to personalize that automatically. It is their essence. That is interesting. I like that concept.
Andrew, for your target audience, how would people get in touch with you if they are interested in more training or they want to learn how to invest some of their money as they earn it? They got something to show for it potentially when their company turns corners, or there is the end of that road. I love your message because I had a good sponsor who, from the beginning, was financially prudent. He talked about it all the time, and it had an impact on my life. It gave me the freedom in the industry that industry promises because I was wise with the money, but I’m not sure I would have done it had it not been for my entry into the business.
It’s the power of a strong mentor and leadership from your sponsor. There are two easiest ways. If you go to my Instagram @AndrewJamesLogan, there is a Linktree on my bio there. There are lots of free stuff you can start with. I got a podcast and YouTube channel. There is Attraction Marketing, a DMO tracker, and Business Blueprint. There are things that you can download directly there for free.
If you go to AndrewLogan.net, there is access to the free tools and stuff on there. You can access the podcast and the YouTube channel. In the podcast, I love to talk about business skill sets and mindsets. I like YouTube because it is visual. A mentor of mine taught me a long time ago, “Low tech, high check.” It is a black pen and flip chart, but it is drawing it out. Visual learners can see it. These are some ways to get in touch and go from there.
Thank you so much. I imagine there are people who are interested in figuring out how to use that money wisely. There is a lot of content in there that you are sharing directly.
That is what drives me. Roughly, it can impact some people to avoid those common mistakes, if nothing else.
Andrew, thank you so much for being with us.
It is great to be here. Thanks for having us.
Important Links
- Andrew Logan
- DMO Tracker
- Fortune Four
- @AndrewJamesLogan – Instagram
- Linktree – Andrew James Logan
- Podcast – The Way Out Podcast
- YouTube – Leverage to Legacy
- Attraction Marketing
- Business Blueprint
About Andrew Logan
After graduating from University as a Physiotherapist in 2004, Andrew Logan was following the traditional path – get a good job, progress into small business, buy some investment properties, retire with a nice nest egg. But the further he was going down the path, the more he started to question its viability. The traditional path was a well-trodden path, but not one that would provide the lifestyle of financial freedom and travel that he wanted, in the timeframe that he wanted. This began a decade long search for a way out of the rat race.
After trying everything from currency options to online sales, Andrew discovered the Network Marketing industry through 2 close friends in 2013. Initially an enormous sceptic, he originally bought his starter pack in the hope they’d leave him alone.
When his wife Angie fell pregnant in 2014 they decided they needed to take a much closer look at Network Marketing – finally finding what he’d always been looking for – a way out of the traditional path. 2 years later, they had both ‘retired’ from the 9-5, with Angie leaving her job and Andrew selling his business.