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You reach a point in your career where your visions and dreams become bigger than the company you’re working in. You can either settle and stay or pursue them. Dino and Dani Nedelko did the latter and launched their own MLM. As entrepreneurs, international speakers, mentors, and success coaches to thousands of individuals worldwide, they are providing New Hope through mentorship, so people can live extraordinary lives. However, their journey is not one without bumps. In this episode, Dino and Dani join Patrick Shaw to share with us the ups and downs of starting their network marketing company. They also talk about the systems they have set up to continue their growth and how they are teaching their teams to leverage social media while maintaining authentic relationships. Full of wisdom, this conversation is sure to inspire you to keep growing in this space. Tune in to not miss out!
Dino And Dani Nedelko: Ups And Downs Of Launching Your Own MLM
I am excited to be with Dino and Dani Nedelko. They are not only Founders and co-CEO of New Hope Global, but they’re builders. They’re in the field, building and growing the business. They started in the middle of the pandemic in October 2021. There are lots of questions for you both. It’s great to have both of you on the show. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having us here.
Give us a little couple’s backstory. You’re building a business together. I’ve been married for 26 years. I have always worked from home and all the different businesses. It takes a special skill and talent. Tell us how long have you been married, and your children. What’s that situation?
It’s a great way to be able to come together that way and work on something together for a company like that. It makes a difference when you are focused on this part. You have the same vision and you are able to do that from morning until evening. Other than that, we are all coming from the network marketing space. I’ve been in this profession for the last eight years. Dani has been a little bit longer than me. We met at one of the events in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam a few years ago. That’s how it started. We are married for one year already. We have been together for three years or so. That’s what it is. It’s interesting and an amazing journey.
What inspired you to launch your own company? It’s a big endeavor. What inspired you to do that?
We both met in the network marketing arena. We both had different experiences with different companies. We saw that there were so many different aspects that we enjoyed. There were some of them that we didn’t like. We wanted to have some sort of change. We didn’t know how it was going to be because I was with my company. He was with his own company back when we were just distributors in different companies.
Those conversations started and then we looked into several opportunities. We co-founded another company, which is still going and successful. We decided that we wanted to go into another realm and area, which as an investor or as an entrepreneur, you always want to have something specifically tailored to your own dreams and ideas. We came up with this idea back in May 2021. We’ve been discussing it but we didn’t land the idea until that time, then we started looking into different projects and products. We then ended up designing seven different products.
We have already launched two of them, which are food supplements. Along the way, we had the vision to see many of the things we did not like. I’m going to let Dino discuss some of those things that we wanted to see change and give hope to some people in the industry. Not everybody because there are a lot of people that are very happy in their companies, but there are some people that go through bad experiences as we have been in the past.
This was the major thing on this journey so far. I started in this profession back in 2015 and had a huge learning curve and a lot of success in it. I was able to travel all around the world. I went to 50 different countries and had my teams. One of my biggest teams was in Africa, along with Europe and North America. I have seen a lot of things. What happened to me in my previous company and then once we co-founded the company together is the same way.
Sometimes people say that you are an asset to someone for some time, and then you become a liability. Once we saw this happen to us twice, we put all our time. As entrepreneurs, it doesn’t matter if it’s 3:00 or 5:00 in the morning. If the work needs to be done, it’s going to be done. When you get into this experience and then you see that someone else is trying to take advantage of you, you can’t do anything else and say, “It’s not just us. It’s all the people.”
We don’t want to focus on the negative, but what was the liability part? What did you see as you become a liability in the organization?
The most important thing is that when your vision, goals, and dreams are becoming bigger that might be a company by itself or a specific organization by itself, sometimes people say, “Settle on and just enjoy the ride.” I’m in my 30s. I wouldn’t retire right now and do nothing for the next whatever years. I would like to do more and see where my limits are.
To sum it up, he hit the top of the company. He maxed out the comp plan and couldn’t go further. In my case, it was more an issue of integrity and making people pay for working with a company like changing compensation plans, different things with some products, not delivering what was promised, and so on. It has a lot to do with the finance part, but also the integrity. There are some of the things that we did not like. We don’t want to focus on the negatives. We said, “What can we do?”
We met with a lot of companies with different people that said, “Come and work with us.” We even sat down with different business owners of very respectable big-network marketing companies. We told them, “We want this.” It is like a Santa Claus list. They’re like, “That’s good. We’re probably not going to have that very soon.” These are different aspects like focusing on the customers and giving a good experience for people that are struggling in different countries. We both work very heavily in the past and right now in Nigeria, Mexico, Latin America, Asia, and maybe some parts of Europe as well. For some people in Asia and some of the countries we have been working on like the Philippines and Vietnam, their income is $80. For me, it’s to bring forced auto-ship.
You wrote about that. They charge those people so much on a monthly basis. What has been the biggest surprise, positive and negative? What has been the most rewarding or maybe surprise-positive aspect that had come out of you two starting your own company and building it?
We all understand that you are always going to have problems and challenges. You just have to decide if you’re going to deal with your own problems and challenges, or the problems and challenges of someone else. At the end of the day, we say, “We’re going to at least be able to control these problems and challenges.”
You’re always going to have problems and challenges. You just have to decide if you’re going to deal with your own problems and challenges or the problems and challenges of someone else.
Being in control of your destiny has been the most rewarding. What has been the most surprising part from a negative? Is it managing all the different aspects of the business? What’s the most challenging aspect of it that surprised you a little?
I will tell you one thing that might not be normal for a lot of entrepreneurs or what some people are thinking about. We wanted to create a company that is going to be self-sustainable from the very first day. Many times people say, “When you create a company, you need to put in a lot of debts, loans, investors, and money if you want to go fast.” We always say, “We might not be the fastest growing companies in the world, but our main goal is to be the longest lasting.” If you want to do that, we need to create the proper foundation from the very first day. If the very first month or year is not the one that you would like to have when you do this times 10 or times 100, then you might have problems later on.
Those are wise words. People think they want to grow fast, and then they found out the very thing they wanted was the destruction of the company. Products don’t ship and checks don’t get paid. Growth can cause a lot of challenges.
I can tell you some challenges. There has been. Some of those challenges don’t have to do with the finances of the company, the people, or the compensation plan. Now it’s not only building a team that’s a challenge. We are both owners of different other things like real estate, restaurants, and stuff. It’s the combination of the traditional model when you’re a business owner of a networking marketing company, and you are trying to build your organization. You have to be very good at organizing your time. That’s the biggest challenge that I’ve seen.
There is a lot to manage. That’s exciting. Knowing that you want to build at a steady pace, has that met your expectations? Have you been able to manage that steady and consistent growth as an organization going into its second year?
We had our plans ready from the beginning. The first year is going to be pretty much trial and error, seeing what’s working for different cultures and organizations around the world. We’ve been able to do that. For example, we physically deliver products in over 45 countries. It’s not just from one warehouse or what kind of NFR shipping or something. We have over fifteen different facilities like warehouses in different continents and countries around the world.
The first year for us was building this foundation and the first expansion. This second year, what we have seen and what we planned for is to start creating stability, to be able to take all those things that have happened in the first year, and put them into place. It’s not that much shaky anymore. Even if some unexpected growth comes from somewhere, it’s not going to completely throw you under the bus or something like that. When it comes to growth and expectations, I believe it’s pretty much aligned with what we wanted.
When you guys started, you’re distributors out there building a business. You meet each other, and you’re only going back a couple of years here. You decide, “We’ve had these challenges. We want to do our own thing.” You’ve got to find a backend platform, genealogy, commission engine, structure, and marketing. You’ve got product and distribution. You have to manage all of that and the branding for that. You still got to recruit and build because it’s a brand-new company. You’ve got to identify leaders. What is the process of identifying the different resources? Did you go to any consulting agency? Did you start looking for backend commission engines? How did you begin that process?
It’s not our first company. For me, it’s probably the fourth network marketing company that I’ve founded, and for Dino as well.
It is to be prepared and to know what’s coming and what you can do in this specific part. We have some people that we work with from the media team, the design, and all those kinds of things. We use world-class things on that part. We don’t need to manage everything on our own or something like that. The biggest challenge for us is the IT part. This is something that is always growing and changing. It’s always something that can be better and made differently.
Network marketing is always growing, always changing, always something that can be better and made differently.
It got us the most time that we needed to invest on. What we decided to do as well is we said, “We’re going to start with our own system.” We did not contract anyone or do any kind of pre-made system or something. We pretty much developed our own system. One good thing about it is my background is in IT. I’ve been studying Computer Science, so it helped me to understand the idea and structure behind it. It was much easier to develop something to get started.
Dani, you’re on the fourth company. Did you have partners in the beginning? What is it that you learned or you didn’t do that caused you to have to move? I don’t know if you were in control of those multiple times. What was the move then if you were in control of your destiny?
Going back to the first question, I want to end up with this thought. We learned through all of these trials and errors. Some of those companies and entrepreneurs are doing well. It’s not that there was a tragedy or anything like that happened. We went our separate ways. I saw some things I did not like in some of the management.
You had partners. You’re saying you were a distributor in those companies, or you started those.
I was an investor in some other network marketing companies.
It’s very different though than being in control. At the end of the day, you’re an investor and they don’t have to use your ideas at all.
With the ones that I was hands-on like trying to get registrations, this and the other, I saw the other part of they’re trying to get this product into a country illegally. I don’t agree with that. This is not what I do, and many other things. Those things showed us and taught us a lot of connections because you need connections with people. If we were to start from scratch and we didn’t have those experiences, we probably would have had to consult with somebody.
Dino, I have to come back to the question about the development and the software. On one hand, I totally get it. It is frustrating when it starts to come to genealogy, commission engines, the complexity, and the disappointment that sometimes comes with all of that and the companies that are out there. On the other hand, the race car group in Indie 500 that’s raising their chickens to feed the crew. That’s a different business. You’re trying to build a business starting by being the manufacturer, opening the facility, buying your own shipping trucks globally, and doing the IT. It’s almost overwhelming. Why would you take on that task? Do you have any platform to solve it at all?
It comes down to what. For example, in one of the constant decisions we made when it comes to the platform, the IT, the original thing that we use for running the company, genealogy, the commission engine, and all those kinds of things, it comes down to collaborations. It comes down to extra tools that you can develop and use. It comes down even for the shipping. We do the PLs. It’s so much easier to do that than doing it on your own. As Dani said, you have to have this kind of connection and knowledge. What is something that you can have in collaboration, but something that might be easier for you to control?
Give us an idea, size, and scope. Where are you currently? Have you held your first international event? Are you trying to travel to these multiple countries? I imagine you predominantly have 3, 4, or 5 countries or whatever that you’re focused on. Are you traveling there? Have you held your first big event? Where are you in that process?
It has been challenging when it comes to traveling and all those things. Eighty percent of our business is it’s overseas, which makes it even a little bit different from many other companies based in the US and starting from the US or something like that. What we do pretty much is we learned already from before the combination between online, offline, and those next-generation things to be able to combine these things together.
Combining online and offline is the next generation for the network marketing space.
We have different events. Every 4 to 6 weeks, we hold an event where we have between 300 to 500 people. The last time, we even have 900-something people attend the event. It’s serving the market where they need extra help, and on the other side, doing some international things where everybody comes together.
We’ve held our very first company event in Europe already. We’ve traveled a couple of times to different markets. Where there’s the most growth, we have small meetings or mini-size meetings.
I love your product-first and customer-first approach, whether it’s the FTC, which doesn’t affect you guys nearly as much being overseas, but there is real value. I grew up in the industry that is sell to recruit. You certainly have that focus. Are you teaching your team those principles? How are you leveraging social media, which can be a slippery slope? You’ve got social media, but it’s about the relationship, authenticity, duplication, and these fundamentals that often fly in the face of what a digital marketer might do. How are you balancing that as you build a routine team and teach?
We do most of it on social media. Ninety percent of our teachings and strategies, and what we have both built are on social media. We mainly focus on creating communities and getting people to connect people with information, value, and understanding even before people purchase our products. Something that we heavily teach is to get people into a community.
When you say a community, you’re talking about once they join the business, you get them all involved as a group in a community, or from a marketing perspective, target specific communities that already exist.
First of all, we start with the customers. That’s our main goal.
No one can start in our company as a partner. Everybody needs to become a customer first.
If you go to our shop. It’s just a shop. It has nothing to do with network marketing. Although we are huge fans. We love network marketing and we teach those things. No one can join without being a customer first. We develop different groups. We have our customer group where we bring people who have never even purchased our product, and they see the experiences. Our customers go in there, and then they post about what they have experienced with our products in different aspects.
No one can join without being a customer first.
We also try to stay as much on top of compliance because we don’t want to get into the health claims and all those things. When people are sharing their experiences, they’re sleeping better, they’re feeling better in their health, or whatever that is, then different people see, “Where can I get it?”
They get their customers on social media. We teach many other strategies. This is one that we heavily teach because that’s the onboarding of our customers. We get them onboarded by posting their experiences, and then we guide them to some of them that want to be a distributor. It is a process. We don’t come in and say, “Join the business and you’re going to make a lot of money.” We don’t do that.
I’m on your site, as an example. I can go there and buy the product direct. How do you handle those customers? Assuming I went through, order the actual product, and filled out my name. I can see there’s a Buy Now button and there’s a credit card page. If I buy direct, how do you guys handle that in terms of trust and the relationship with the field?
No one can buy it straight. It’s the same thing. Everybody has their own link and webshop.
It says NewHopeGlobal.com/Checkout.
Before you do the checkout, you need to put in a referral. It’s going to ask you for someone who referred you like a sponsor.
I’m interested in this because, in this retail world, things are changing. Some companies are doing it horribly. Hopefully, you’re not doing this. They’re violating the relationship and trust that they have with the field by selling direct. In a couple of crazy situations, I’ve seen that there’s almost a benefit of buying direct, which is ludicrous. You’re saying if I go here and the payment process, what if I found out about the product and I don’t have a rep, will you appoint me one or does that block my purchase?
If you do not have it, we don’t even allow someone to search for it. That may even protect our distributors or partners. I know that some companies will give you a search engine. You can search by series, by names, or something like that. We have a unique username, and not even the full name. It’s very much harder for someone who doesn’t know anyone to even come and guess something. Why? Because we want to protect our community as much as we can. That’s a big part for us. That’s why 89% of people inside our company are pure customers through this point.
I’ve seen some companies even doing the ads, selling it straight, and doing all those different kinds of things. It’s like, “How do you do this?” What happens if someone comes to us and says, “I saw this. I’m interested in the product. I don’t know anyone. I need to have someone who referred me.” What we do is we have a pool of customers that don’t have any referrals. What we do with that, later on, is we do different promotions and different kinds of things. We give all these people. There’s not much of them, to be honest. I am talking about hundreds.
We give them to someone through different kinds of promotions, geographical parts, or languages because we are international. If someone comes to us and speaks Hungarian, we try to connect them with someone from Hungary because it’s going to be not just much easier, but also more beneficial for them or maybe sometimes even in the future, have more success in building a business if they want to do so.
This case is very rare because we hardly get people to ask these questions because we don’t do ads. As a company, we don’t do those things. We have a lot of respect for our field, and we don’t teach those things either. For anybody doing that, I’m not saying that it is wrong, but we are doing what is duplicatable, what anybody can do, and what works.
Dani and Dino, it has been awesome and inspirational. There are top leaders that we have that come to the call and enterprises as well, but for those people that say, “I want to steer my own ship. I want to build a business.” Some people are may be looking for a home as well. It sounds like you’ve done an incredible job with New Hope Global. I hope people find that inspiring. I certainly do. It’s very cool and it’s great being with you. Any last thoughts before we wrap up?
First of all, thank you for inviting and having us here. It’s always great to have a discussion and be able to share some things. When it comes to all things, we are living in beautiful times, even if some people say, “Things are like that.” I believe we have an amazing opportunity in many different ways. It’s about everybody. I hope your audience is tuning in to get some inspiration, motivation, knowledge, skills, and ideas to be able to go through and be better every single day. Our main purpose and why we are here is to be able to provide for and serve other people. I encourage everybody to keep following their dreams, keep growing, and keep getting better because our time in this world is very limited. We have to take the best and do the best we can.
Thank you for having us. For your audience, keep on going. This is a better way for sure. If you’re looking for a company or you’re a network marketing, if you don’t quit, if you follow the systems that they’re teaching you in your company with your uplines, you will succeed because there are proven records of success for those that are leading the way in our industry. This is a great way for you to maybe get out of a situation you are in or start a career.
If somebody wants to reach you directly, how do they do that?
Social media will be the best. @DaniNedelko is my handle on Facebook.
It’s been fantastic being with you. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
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About Dino And Dani Nedelko
Dino and Dani Nedelko are entrepreneurs, international speakers, mentors, and success coaches to thousands of individuals worldwide. When they first learned about Network Marketing, they saw a big opportunity to build a massive residual income for years and years to come. They have had the opportunity to teach thousands of people to generate a solid, consistent income, and they have been able to build teams of more than 150,000 people around the world.
They have been featured in internationally renowned magazines such as Business For Home, Direct Sales Diva Magazine, MLM Nation, and different world-known podcasts. They both have been inducted as Ambassadors in the Network Marketing Hall of Fame. In addition, they have participated as speakers in international events such as the Network Marketing Professionals Association Conference, The Asian Networkers Convention & Expo, the Direct Sales Congress in Europe, and the Elite Entrepreneur Summit.
They have created a Network Marketing company with the primary goal of providing New Hope to entrepreneurs and individuals worldwide. Their main goal is to inspire people through their personal stories of life and through their mentorship so that people can live extraordinary lives. One thing that moves them is to help many people to go from nowhere to somewhere while achieving their life goals.