Unlocking Business Potential with Tim Altvater: Strategies for the Modern Leader

Listen to the podcast here

Watch the episode here

Join Patrick Shaw as he delves into a compelling conversation with Tim Altvater, a seasoned expert in business development. In this episode, Tim shares invaluable insights from his decades of experience, focusing on the key challenges and strategies for growing businesses in today’s dynamic marketplace. Discover Tim’s unique perspective on implementing tools like RapidFunnel and his tips for modern-day leaders to navigate and succeed in the ever-evolving world of business.

---

Patrick Shaw:

Tim Altvater, my friend, how are you? It is great to be with you.

Tim Altvater:

Hey, thank you, Patrick Shaw. Great to see you, as always.

Patrick Shaw:

So listen, we are going to jump right into it. And why I’m excited to have you on the podcast today is because you’re an expert at helping companies grow their businesses. You’ve been a leader in the field over the decades, not to date you, Tim, but for decades, you have trained at a corporate level.

Tim Altvater:

Yes.

Patrick Shaw:

You’ve been on both sides of the fence. You see what the challenges are. And currently, you’re working with a lot of companies specifically to implement and execute RapidFunnel. So you’ve gotten to see how powerful the platform can be. And I thought the best place to start is maybe you just sharing your thoughts on what some of the challenges are in modern-day building. For leaders to be able to really grow their businesses, where are you seeing the biggest challenges?

Tim Altvater:

Hey, thank you, Patrick. Well, I think since day one, at least since I entered this industry, which was the late 90s now, so yes, it’s been a while, it’s been the same focus that all leaders really need to have accomplished and that’s that we’re inspired by our story, our company’s story, whether product, business, and we need to have that told ourselves, but then on a scalability so that we can create the massive groundswell of our story getting told.

Patrick Shaw:

Correct.

Tim Altvater:

And a couple of the challenges in today’s world is that a person, you know, joins a company and Patrick, whether they’re new to the industry or not, there’s 35 YouTube videos out there about a company and there’s 25 PDFs and there’s this, that and the other. And the brand new person just needs to have the very specific set of criteria, the income-producing activities laid out to them in a way that they can actually do it and create some wins out of the gate.

and technology as much as it’s transformed our industry to create this amazing possibility of scalability and growth, at the same time it’s created this almost overwhelming complexity of 5,000 platforms, 6,000 PDFs, and 9,000 YouTube videos. And in reality, the more simple we can make it, especially for the new person as they’re getting started, all of us know that have been in the industry.

the more effective it’s going to be, the more successful they’ll be, and the more successful both a company will be, because that focus, and certainly leaders will be.

Patrick Shaw:

Yeah, it is funny when we started. I mean, I know when you started, like, what were the tools you had in place to tell the story, like what, what did you use?

Tim Altvater:

You know, in the very beginning, Patrick, I joined a company and I happened to join with the number one income earner. And I was told the day that I joined to order 500 cassettes and get those out there. And it was the main lead talk that the company had. And I was handing those things out, shipping them out, mailing them out, trying to follow up, trying to figure out if the mail had been delivered because there wasn’t even tracking back at that time. Again, we’re talking late 90s. And I realized

there was a major issue. I was walking through a swap meet one day. This was probably three or four months after I had started my business. Walking through a swap meet, leaned over, looked at a box of cassette tapes and there was my tape with my sticker on it. I asked them how much it was and they wanted more than I had paid for it in the first place and I thought how did this get here and it certainly wasn’t effective.

And so before RapidFunnel even was created, and thank gosh, you know, you’ve had the ability and the foresight and the time to create this amazing tool, we and myself, I started creating systems and tools utilizing the internet early on, 2003, 2004, because I realized my leaders, people that had invested in the company, had spent more than a year or two and had a degree of success, Patrick, they still, it was like a car.

with the wheels running four different directions. And so I realized, boy, if I could help crack the code and create a tool that just had step one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, we could bring more people in, launch more people, create more leaders, identify more leaders. And Patrick, we created a tool back in the early days, I’m not gonna describe it because it’s so basic and elementary compared to what RapidFunnel has today, for example. But for…

48 consecutive months, our team brought in over a thousand people a month because of that tool that just was focusing people on the lead measure and the basic income-producing activities.

Patrick Shaw:

Well, in some ways, those were paydays for network marketing because, okay, we can complain about the cassette, but in reality, it was simple. There was only one cassette. There was one meeting. There was one flip book and there was a telephone and new person would join and say, well, what do you do? Well, you do one of these four things and it was simple.

Tim Altvater:

Yes.

Patrick Shaw:

Like, and there was a beauty in that. And as you said, you know, as you said, with all the different stuff today and all the technologies and YouTubers who are digital marketers, trying to teach network marketers, that’s a problem. But I, in many ways I miss those old days. I was kind of an old school builder.

Tim Altvater:

I do too, Patrick. But you know, because we get to work with companies today hands-on in this RapidFunnel environment. Patrick, you know, one thing that’s occurred to me over the past six months or so is the gig economy emerged. And all of a sudden, we had companies such as YouTube or I’m sorry, Uber that has no assets really as far as vehicles or anything. But they have a simple onboarding program and a simple app process.

Patrick Shaw:

So Tim, you mentioned the importance of prospecting and follow-up. How do you see that in coaching different organizations with so many distractions? How do you keep people focused on the prospecting and the follow-up activities, on the lead measure, on the KPI and all that?

Tim Altvater:

Well, I think frankly in today’s world, Patrick, because there are so many distractions, even outside of a person’s business, they’re inundated with thousands of marketing messages per day. They have to have, especially for your new person, they have to have the simple one, two, three system laid out for them. I believe it has to be taught where they see screen by screen, just do this. And then showing the reward that’s attached for that specific activity.

I think it’s the same as it was when you and I first started building. Not to date you very much Patrick, but back in the day we would start with a new person, launch them, help launch them and then right away they would see, oh my gosh I get it, if I do this, I receive that, I earn that. And when we can teach that and show it and a person achieves it, then they realize I can do it over and over again and I can teach someone else to do it. I believe that in today’s world a lot of times, in fact probably most times,

someone joins a company, they’re really excited. And that’s when they have the most enthusiasm, God within, you know, the enthose. They have the most enthusiasm to do something amazing, and yet they’re not shown the simple step one, two, three of how to achieve that first rung of success. And so they’re deflated and they may never come back to that company or even to our industry. But this is the solution, making sure that we have a way to show them right out of the gate, do this, achieve that.

Patrick Shaw:

Yeah.

Tim Altvater:

and then duplicate that, this is still something that can transform people’s lives very quickly with the right plan and certainly the right energy and the right excitement.

Patrick Shaw:

Well, and you’re touching now on onboarding too, Tim. It’s almost, you know, it’s kind of crazy that it’s easier to sign up and drive Uber than it is to join the average network marketing company. And what do you attribute that to? I mean, I personally think that’s one of the biggest problems in the space right now is what you just described. A new person comes on and it’s too complex. Why, what do you attribute that to? Why have we lost our way?

When it comes to the simplicity of onboarding.

Tim Altvater:

I think it’s because there’s so much available to us now. When I joined this industry, I didn’t have the option to go out and build a funnel and sign up for Infusionsoft, and certainly, I could not have afforded it. And today, no matter what company or opportunity or gig you join, there’s potentially thousands of options. The challenge is most people were not born as CEOs, and they weren’t born as entrepreneurs.

So when you give someone a plate of thousands of options, they don’t even know what to try. And a lot of times, the way the world is as well, Patrick, you know, I’m sure you see it every day, the attention span and the focus time is so short that a person jumps into something they’re excited about today. If they don’t have success by the end of this week, they’re on to something else. That’s why I believe it’s so critical when someone joins a new opportunity that can transform their life. Let’s make sure on day one, they know the steps.

But let’s help them do the steps on day one, because if they have a win on day one, day two, day three, they’re gonna be excited to continue forward and to duplicate that.

Patrick Shaw:

Sam, I’m sure you got stories of your own, you know, through working with our clients, but I’m on the phone yesterday with one of our account execs, Savannah, and we’re talking to a big-time leader, and she spent more than a hundred grand last year in building out funnels. I mean, she had, she’d written books, she’d created content, she had these landing pages that she was supposed to be driving pay click advertising to generate her own qualified leads. Now I’m seeing her go through all this and I’m thinking, first of all, your team can’t afford to do any of this. Second of all, you haven’t even got it working yet. You’ve built all this stuff, you signed up for a course by all the different names of people we know out there. She literally showed me one page that she had paid $5,000 to launch and she still didn’t have the first prospect go through that landing page because she hadn’t figured out how to run the pay click advertising to it.

Tim Altvater:

Yeah, you know, I think that’s quite typical for leaders, especially Patrick, I think for leaders in our space, those that have been around for a while, you’ve had some wins, you’ve had successes. It’s so easy to become attracted by the shiny, you know, silver wheel that’s over there. And you hear these crazy, amazing stories of what the internet will do to explode your business. The challenge is we still, we work with people. It’s a people business and every single person that’s part of our organization.

They have a network. But if we’re focusing on the shiny ball over there, we’re missing the opportunity of helping someone expose a business or a product that has great value to their network, and we’ve sort of missed the mark, haven’t we? Whereas, you know, the great thing about RapidFunnel is the focus is on, again, the income-producing activities of our space and our industry. It eliminates the need for a leader to go out and spend $5,000 to do something that can’t be done by anyone else.

And frankly, most likely the leader will not be as successful as they want to be either because they’re not an internet marketer. And a lot of times, even learning things such as traffic online, you know, that project, learning that type of skill, that is a costly skill because you’re spending as you go. Whereas, you know, when you… The great thing about this industry in space, Patrick, when I joined, I had to borrow the $100 to join.

And still was able to create a business that allowed my kids to go to Hawaii every year and allowed us to just enjoy this amazing life. My girls today, they grew up in this space so even my children have got these amazing careers because of this industry and because of the simplicity and the possibility of it. And that’s what RapidFunnel brings back. The possibility, the focus, the simplicity and the ability to show someone new.

Here’s what can happen for you, and it can happen soon.

Patrick Shaw:

You know, it’s such an important point. Like it’s, you know, when you think about network marketing versus internet marketing, it’s amazing to me. Why is it so hard for us to communicate sometimes to leaders who have built large businesses, they should know better, right? Like we’re talking to them and you’re like, how can you not see that what you’re doing is going to wreck?

The average new person that you start, get started. Do they just lose sight of what the drivers are in network marketing versus internet marketing or the shiny object as you call it? Yeah.

Tim Altvater:

Well, I think it’s both. Patrick, I’ll speak from experience. There was a point after about 12 years of building full time. And I had a beautiful business, partners in 30 countries, got to travel the world. But I still decided, oh, there’s an easy button somewhere. You know, you press that big, red easy button, and the floodgates are going to open up. And the easy button appears to be that shiny ball. But the challenge is, even if you

It’s only one button. You can’t hand it to everybody else. And so the great thing is the internet is here. Online marketing is available, but we, especially here at RapidFunnel, we can give leaders and their entire team the tool so that they don’t have to go find it on their own. Chase it down, learn it. We give them the resource. We give them the page. We give them the steps and they can plug in and still do the activity, but be able to do it in a way that we know can work for them.

Patrick Shaw:

Tim, I love that. So we’ve talked about two things. Let’s wrap up with the third. We have talked on this call about the importance of driving the lead measure, of being focused on the highest payoff activity to get the team to tell the company’s story. Number two, we’ve talked about some of the fundamentals of onboarding new recruits quickly and effectively. Let’s touch on the third, which is

The importance of leaders using their time wisely and helping other people to use their other leaders on their team to use their time wisely. Can you speak to sometimes the difficulty in knowing where to spend your time as a leader in the modern day networking business?

Tim Altvater:

Yeah, you know, I think Patrick, especially for leaders, you know, they have a team of people and you want everyone to succeed and you’re hopeful that everyone will. So I think step one, you have to take responsibilities as a leader and make sure there is a simple process to utilize. I mean, that’s common sense for those of us that have been in the industry. Number two, there has to be a way for you to not just look at your organization and say, you know what, that’s a handsome guy, all fater boy, I bet he could do well.

Of course yes of course I could but in any case it’s to identify what action steps are they taking is it someone that’s willing to invest some time and actually doing this and when the leader can see that you know for example we’ve got one of the things I love about RapidFunnel is we use things such as leaderboards contests but not in a way to recognize the top income owner of company XYZ it’s to recognize the lead measure

It’s to be able to say to someone that’s brand new, oh Tim, you’re brand new, but look, you’re on the leaderboard because you’re taking an action step that’s going to grow a business. And then I’ll share that on Facebook. Look, my brand new person that’s, they’ve never done this before in their life. They’re having wins. That is so critical. I think more critical today in our space than ever before because if a person has a team of 100 or 1000 people and everyone says they’re excited and doing, how would you know? And,

Unfortunately, most of that entire group, I believe they do have the intention and they have the desire, but if they don’t have that simple three, four step process, they could be spinning their wheels. And then unfortunately, we as leaders have let them down. And that’s heartbreaking.

Patrick Shaw:

That’s so true. And when I hear you describe that, Tim, I think about generally speaking, there’s two kinds of leaders, right? There’s the self-serving person that only wants to serve if they get paid. And that always sits the wrong way. You can see it. And then there’s the person that has the massive heart. They have a heart to serve. They’re a servant leader. But sometimes the problem with those people is they spend too much time…

With people that don’t deserve their time, but they need their time. And somehow you have to balance, if you can be the servant leader, but you can be wise about investing with the people your time into the people that deserve it. Talk about RapidFunnel specifically and some of the features that we have built in that allow leaders to identify where they can invest their time.

Tim Altvater:

You bet. Well, for one thing, I think the stats, you know, whenever I get to work with a leader and I show them, look at, let’s look at the stats of the organization. Let’s look at your personal stats and let’s show you how to help someone that’s brand new look at their stats. So there’s this, I know this tricky world and tricky word in today’s world, Patrick, I’m going to throw it out there, accountability, but not in a negative fashion, in a positive way.

Well, don’t get bragged on very often in today’s world, especially online or in social media. So to show someone, look at your stats, your stats are improving. Here’s your stats from day one, which we measure. And here’s your stats over the last 30 days. Look at that. You’re on your road to success. Very short conversation, massive payoff for the leader and for the new person. So I think that’s huge, Patrick. I think that, you know the concept of the lead measure and the focus of income producing activities is so critical. But the new person how would they know what those are? They enter a RapidFunnel team. Let’s say a leader has just set up their RapidFunnel account or a company has and it’s so simple they open up the app and it’s step one two three. Here’s a pre written message and best of all notifications and activity log.

You know, whether it’s a leader or it’s a person in their first day, and we are exposing and sharing the story of the company, if we don’t know who has opened it or who has even taken a peek, you know, that’s tough, especially for the new person. So to give someone the tools to say, Tim, here’s exactly who to follow up with next real time and based on what everyone in the system is doing on their own time and their own dime, that is huge.

So the way I like to look at it, Patrick, is this is a, it’s not an app per se. It’s a stack of technology for leverage. You know, we have some training workshops and as I go through the training workshops, I say, okay, week one, week two, week three, those concepts stack on top of each other, each one piling a bit more leverage for both the new person and the leader. After about eight or 10 weeks using the system, you realize, oh my gosh, I’m now a tech expert.

And you’re still just doing the same basic activity that you’re teaching, and that’s amazing.

Patrick Shaw:

The dream of a network marketer is to be able to look six levels deep in the organization and see somebody that’s made 50 exposures in their first few weeks and gotten no results because you can reach down and grab that person, but the problem is we don’t know that. And they’re one week from quitting and you never got to meet them because they didn’t rank advance one level.

And you can’t see that in your genealogy. You can’t see the activity. You know, they say that the shallow brook runs loud, right? That’s the big talker in network marketing. And the still river runs deep. You’ve got people that they run deep. They’re busting their butt. They’re quietly doing it. And they need you to reach out. They don’t know you.

Tim Altvater:

Yes.

Patrick Shaw:

But can you imagine being able to log in? I mean, we can imagine, of course, but being able to log into your back office and go, wow, who is this brand new person? They just downloaded the platform and they made 50 exposures. It’s kind of crazy.

Tim Altvater:

Yes.

Yeah, and Patrick, it’s crazy. And there are so many great coaches in our space. And when I say coach, I mean someone that’s been in the industry, they’ve done the activity and they enjoy helping others actually do it. But how do you know who to help do it unless you’ve got tools like that? So I think the tools are great for both coaching and accountability. And I think for scalability, without this today, I gotta tell you, being a new person coming into the industry in space,

I would not have had a fraction of the career that I had without systems and tools like this except today with RabbitFunnel, they’re just way better than they ever were before.

Patrick Shaw:

Yeah, well, Tim, it has been awesome, my friend. I love just jumping in here and spending some time with people so they can get a handle on it. And thank you for investing the time today.

Tim Altvater:

Hey, thank you, Patrick Shaw. We love RapidFunnel. We look forward to helping more people create more wins than ever before. Let’s go.

Important Links

• http://www.mlmprosperityproject.com/

About Tim