Why I Quit Network Marketing
Host: Isaac Mashman · February 12, 2021 · Episode 48 · 22 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited to read cleanly: names and terms corrected, grammar fixed, filler words and false starts removed, punctuation added. Words in [brackets] could not be made out with certainty. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
To Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman. What is going on everybody? Isaac Mashman here, welcome back to another episode of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman. Today it is not going to be a specific topic when it comes to sales or marketing or personal branding, rather this is another story-based episode. I think that you guys really enjoy hearing some of my journey, some of what made me into the man I am today. The last episode I did, which was why I hated the last name Mashman actually performed better than most of my other episodes. So I figured why not go ahead and share another story that I know many of you could probably relate to or you might be interested in. That is why I quit the industry of network marketing. Now I'm no longer in network marketing.
I'm not in an MLM and I'm not in any company. I'm not going to sell you anything. Not an affiliate for anything. But that is the industry that got me started in business. So let me take you back to my senior year of high school. I was going through family issues. I was going through a tough time. I've talked about this time before. I'm not going to go into any detail, but I first saw this 18-year-old entrepreneur. I'm not going to disclose his name, but I saw that he had a Shopify store, he had a lawn business and a few other things. He had a clothing line, and me being a 17-year-old kid in my senior year, I was like, man, I could totally do that. I could literally duplicate his success and do something similar.
That's why I got started with a clothing line. It was actually called Success Before Rest Apparel. God, I cringe so hard. It was SBR Apparel. That's what people started to know me as. I got t-shirts made. I had a logo designed by a friend. I wanted to do something and I ended up selling some clothes online. It didn't really get far. I made, I think, 50 bucks, and it was about 10 sales. One of my teachers bought a coffee mug. I was so crazy, crazy excited, man. It was a cool experience. I really had no direction with it except I wanted to do a clothing line. It was something that was my own. So I really appreciated it.
I really valued it. Then outside of that, I started connecting. As I was building up my personal brand, I was connecting with these other entrepreneurs, with these other like-minded individuals, these like-minded figures. That's when I came across this guy named Noah. I'm not going to say his last name, but Noah was a part of an MLM company. I didn't know what network marketing was. I'd never heard of it before. Nobody in my family was entrepreneurial. So it's not like my mom was involved with Mary Kay or some lotion potion company. But I got onto a bunch of his webinars. His upline was doing webinars pretty much every day, every other day. I started looking up to these people, because I'm like, man, this guy is 20 years old.
He's working for himself. He's making good money. So he claimed, and then there are other people. His upline, they're making five to $10,000 a month, 20-year-old kids in their 20s. I saw that. I will admit, the money is what really attracted me because money was the root of a lot of the issues that I had growing up. So I ended up getting involved with MLM a couple months later, and I ended up getting my first job, and it was working at a barbecue place. This was in 2018. I started working at Sonny's Barbecue and I was getting paid 8.50 an hour. I started working there and I would only get maybe 20 hours a week, but I was making a couple hundred dollars, and my first paycheck I took.
I cashed it and I used that to join the MLM company, and I joined Renner underneath the guy Noah. I started doing webinars. You know, up until that point I was studying, I was looking and doing research, you know, and I was really excited because I was getting involved with something. I was having this companionship with people who were supportive of my progress, and this is when I got involved in personal development. I started studying mentors, I started reading books. I started getting into podcasts to a degree that I've never gotten into podcasts before, studying from the people who have the results that I wanted in life.
So I took that money. I got started with the company. I lied about my age. I was 17 at the time. I was like, oh, no, I was born in 1999 instead of the year 2000, like I am young, like I'm 20 years old.
I'm taking it back. I'm being very authentic with you. I'm being very transparent. Like, I'm a young guy, I'm a young entrepreneur who's been able to come across as somebody who's much older because of how much work I've done on myself. That's why this podcast is all about improving yourself. At the center of all success, at the center of all achievement, is personal growth. So anyways, I don't want to get off topic. I got into this company and there was a business trip. I ended up recruiting a couple people, and one of the guys who I recruited was in New York. His name was Jared.
There was this event that was being hosted by my upline. There were a couple of ranks above me. There were a couple of people, a couple of placements above me.
This was an event in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I'm from Jacksonville, Florida. I was living in Jacksonville at the time, the 904. Everybody's like, you have to go to this event. This is a smaller event with only 100 people, and the vice president's going to be speaking. So I actually borrowed money from, he was another member of the team. He's like, here's 80 bucks, buy yourself a bus ticket. I took a bus from Jacksonville, Florida, all the way up to New York City. I stayed in New York City for four hours, got lost in Chinatown, and then my downline, which is kind of funny to say, my downline picked me up.
But you know, I'm still 17. Like my parents didn't want me to go. My grandparents were all in support of it, but I remember my mom was saying, you cannot go, you cannot go, but I wasn't living with her.
So out of an act of rebellion, saying, you know what, I don't care, I'm going to do it anyway. I went, and it was a huge risk, it was a huge leap. There are other details that I'm going to disclose in my book. I'm working on my autobiography right now that'll be published later on this year. I'll go into more detail, but this is a wild story. So long story short, I go up to Minneapolis. I end up sitting up in the front row close to the vice president of the company, who's under 30. He's made $30 million. I'm like, wow, he's a sharp dude.
Like, his shoes cost more than my entire wardrobe. That really impressed me. I will say that I was more interested in getting his knowledge than getting his jewelry.
Kids were taking pictures of his Rolex and acting like they're all this big shot thing. I'm like, I want to know how you did it. How did you become successful? I told him my story and he invited me out to dinner. He invited me and the rest of the team out to dinner. I probably racked up his sushi bill, but what was really cool is I was able to experience that amount of wealth. I was also able to get value. I was like, how do you get these people into the company? How do you recruit them? How do you really appeal to their pain points?
He's like, you start with their why. Why are they doing it? Is money the issue? Are they doing it because they want to retire their mom and dad?
I got some other pieces of value. The crazy thing is I came home and I ended up quitting the company two months later. It was very difficult because I was doing it by myself. I'm not saying this is an excuse, but out of an aura of honesty, I was lost, alone, confused. I had issues going on. It was a crazy difficult time in my life. So I left the company and then my downline stayed in the company and he continued building the business and he eventually left. Then I actually got connected with a guy in a different company, and it was a different MLM. I already recognized the power of residual income.
I got my first $150 check, residual, and I thought it was really cool. It was because I built something. It was a part of my business ventures, my business journey. I got connected with this guy. He was in a business [where] you basically send out letters to people, you send out cards.
It was a very unique business model. I don't know why I got started with it. I think it's honestly because I really liked the guy at the time. I got involved with that business, didn't go far with it, got out of that business because I was like, man, this is, I just, I'm not passionate about this. Like, I'm lacking the passion to sell what these companies offer. Like selling a $250 package is the most difficult thing on earth. It's crazy because now that I'm older and now that I'm doing my own business and I'm helping my clients get results and I'm seeing success, I'm able to charge $1,000, $2,500 for calls for my own services, piece of cake. It's easy. But I wasn't able to do that for a different company.
I'll go into detail a little bit more in a couple of minutes. So I get back involved with the company underneath my downline. So now I'm the downline of the person who I originally recruited. So I'm underneath Jared, and he's like, man, I'm underneath this new person, and I was in Miami and ended up meeting up with him again, went up to his mentor's place. It was a penthouse in Miami. Again, 21 years old, making 10 grand a month. My jaw dropped. I'm seeing this lifestyle. I'm seeing the success and I still like it. I love it. But at the same time, I just was like, I was making these emotional decisions.
I was making these decisions based off of pure emotion and not off logic, but I was taking risks and I was like, what's the worst that's going to happen? Maybe look like an idiot.
I don't have success. So fast forward to April, I get back involved with the company. I get a couple people underneath me. I go out to Las Vegas for a company convention. We have 10 guys in one room. I'm sleeping on the floor [between the beds]. Everybody is in Vegas. We're going to this convention. Man, that was an interesting couple of days. It was an interesting couple of weeks. I don't want to share too much of that experience, simply because, for the sake of time, out of respect for your time, I don't want to take up all of it and spend an hour giving you guys a story.
If this is something that you want to learn more about, you could either wait and get my book in the future, or you let me know, shoot me a message and let me know that you want to hear about the story, and maybe I'll do a story time series, maybe have a fireplace loaded up on the TV behind me and go into detail about some of these different experiences.
So I go to this convention. I see these top earners. I actually get the phone numbers of some of the people making $25,000, $50,000 a month, connecting with some new people. I'm 19. I'm not even 19. I'm 18 still. I'm just there. It still didn't feel right. It was emotional. It was something that I enjoyed at the moment because I had this companionship. But at the same time, I don't know why, it just never clicked with me. I wanted to be able to contribute to my mom's lifestyle, but it wasn't a powerful enough why. Ultimately, I got out of that company and I launched my own company, Mashman Media.
This was before I took it legal. This was before I did an LLC. It was also a sole proprietorship, doing freelance work. It was just a crazy summer, to fast-forward into the beginning of 2020. I had the opportunity to get involved with this new company, which was doing health and fitness products. So guys, I've been in a total of three different companies, four different times. With this, the business model made more sense. The products were consumable. It wasn't some course. So it really appealed to me. But at the same time, I started crunching numbers, and there is power in having numbers underneath you and having people sell it, selling it to their friends and recruiting their friends and having a whole organization structure.
But it's a huge time investment. I ultimately got out of the company after recognizing that I'm only getting, maybe, six percent profit off of a product that I'm selling. I was thinking, and I came to the understanding, the realization, that if I devote all of my time and effort to my own company.
I would see more success rather than diverting my attention to two different companies. Right now I'm not only trying to build up my own company, Mashman Ventures, but I'm also going to be building up my company for my MLM business. That means that I'm going to be managing people, I'm going to be teaching and training people, you know, and yes, I could leverage my upline, but at the same time it's going to be an investment. It's going to be something that's going to require a lot of time and effort in order to actually become successful. Now, network marketing and multi-level marketing and direct sales, it's a fantastic industry, it's a fantastic way to become successful and to make money. Now I personally did not see success because I did not stay with it and I did not stick with it.
But the one thing that I will tell you is, when you're early on, you have no guidance, you have no companionship, you have no support system with your family or friends, this is an opportunity for you to get support from your family and friends. They're not family and friends, but you build your own family and you associate yourself with new friends. That's what I'm trying to get at. You don't get support from your family and friends until you become successful. At least that's what I'm finding out. I absolutely loved it. I was able to study mentors. I got mentorship from people. I felt like I fit in.
There was this culture in the organization where everybody was fired up. It was very emotionally driven. But I didn't believe in it because it wasn't my own.
This, I think, really stems from me being, like, a pure-blooded entrepreneur and a leader, to where I want to be able to build up my own company. I want to be able to build up my own services. I want to be in control. I want to be able to sell my own service, my own thing. It's something that I can believe in 100%. With these three different companies, no matter what time I rejoined, I still didn't believe in it. I wasn't passionate about it because it's not something that I created. This might be based around ego. It might be based around just me being too arrogant.
But in all honesty, I want to be able to promote something that I built with my bare hands. That's why I decided to go all in with Mashman Ventures and go all in with this public relations firm working with people, because I'm in control.
There are some downsides to MLM. I'm not going to lie. There are a lot of upsides that are also downsides. You have to worry about people thinking that you're a pyramid scheme. There's this one kid who I went to high school with, and he still hits me up every couple of months, and he holds me being a part of this MLM company against me because I was a part of it. He's like, you're involved with a pyramid scheme. And it wasn't a pyramid scheme. It was a legitimate company with legitimate products and services, and it wasn't just recruitment based, like the products worked. If you made it work, my thing is I never made the products work. I was selling something that I didn't even know, that I didn't understand.
That was my own fault, being a young ignorant kid, and a lot can change in a couple of years. You have the downside that you're not in 100% control of your own back office. Your account can be suspended with a moment's notice. Some of the people who I used to work with, they've had their accounts suspended because of rumors, because of hearsay. Depending on the company, that can be a problem. Some companies are more transparent. Some are more closed off. I'm not saying because a company is closed off, it's a scheme or it's illegal. But at the same time, you have to worry about that.
You're not in full control. You also have to sacrifice your profit margins. Yes, you don't have to create the product. You don't have to do any of that.
If you're only getting paid 6% or 3% or even 10% of [the] products, I'm like, come on, really? I want to be able to make 80%. If I'm doing and spending my time on the sales call and edifying my mentor, edifying my people, I'm like, I want to make more than just 30 bucks off of a sale. I want to be able to make $200 off of a $250 offer. I want to be able to make $800 off of a $1,000 offer. I don't want to have to get 30 people paying $200 in order to get $1,000. It just didn't make sense for me. It's like, I don't want to invest all of this time and then also have the worry of something happening with the company. There are so many factors that are out of your control, and I recognize these things.
I'm like, even with the track record of 10 years, a company could still disappear overnight. Something happens with the founder. It doesn't have the transparency that I really desired. I decided to quit the industry and I decided to get out. Now, there are still, to this day, things that I miss. The companionship, the mentorship, the culture. I learned a lot of my business skills. I learned how to sell. I got comfortable speaking on stage. I got comfortable speaking in front of people because of network marketing. For that, I'm forever grateful. Some of my greatest friendships I made through MLM, trying to recruit other people. Some of those people who I recruited back then are still my closest friends. That's a phenomenal way to build up your network with like-minded people, but it wasn't for me.
It isn't for me. It's never going to be for me. It was a chapter in my life, and it is nothing more. Now if you're interested in getting involved with MLM, do your research. Do your due diligence to understand what you're getting involved with and understand that it's also going to take you time to get momentum. It's not like you can go to making $10,000 a month within 30 days. Now it's possible, it's been done, but the chances of doing that are so slim. I'm not trying to lower your belief in yourself or lower your belief in this company you're getting involved with, but go into it with aggressive patience, understanding that it will take time.
Understand that your profit margins will only start to really make sense once you get people underneath you, once you get your team underneath you.
You need to understand the compensation plan. You need to understand what you're doing. You need to understand what you're selling. Ask questions, leverage your upline. Make sure you're getting involved with a good team. But if you're anything like me and you want to be in full control, then MLM is not going to be for you, and you're going to want to put your focus on building up your own company. But building up your own company means that you're in control of product development. You're in control of branding and marketing. I say control, but I should also say you're in charge of [them]. You have to do these things, especially starting out, unless you have startup capital.
You have to do brand work, you have to do marketing, you have to do content creation, social media strategy, you have to develop your services or your product, you have to get patents if you're doing a product-based business, you have to worry about product development, market research, and all these different avenues, and it's a lot of work.
This is something that I had to realize with Mashman Ventures: I had to spend a lot of time developing the brand for that just so I could have a successful or a legitimate-based company. You have to file your taxes in a different way. It's not just being a sole proprietor now. You're doing an LLC, a limited liability company, or you're doing a C Corp or an S Corp. It's a transition from being a hobbyist to an actual business owner. I talk about this often because this is the one thing that will make you stand out from everybody, taking your shit serious. So I just wanted to share my story as to why I quit network marketing, very simply to give you insight into the past couple of years.
Like I said, there are a lot of stories, if you want to hear more about the stories, I need you to let me know.
I don't have any regrets about getting involved with it. I know that the companies I was involved with were legit. I don't have to worry and look back with regret thinking, oh, I was involved with a pyramid scheme. No, the people are legit. They have real results. They have real success. They have real businesses outside of MLM. But at the same time, for the factors that I mentioned, it wasn't for me. Now that I've put my full focus into my solo business, I'm able to get better results quicker and develop my momentum. I'm building up my own organization underneath me. Just today, I'm reaching out to people seeing if anybody would be interested in joining the team for the long-term vision of building up a public relations firm that is working with people to build up their personal brand and being able to increase my value proposition to the marketplace.
Ever since I got that clarity, my results have been so much better. A lot of times when I talk to somebody or talk to my clients, they lack clarity and they want to do a million different things. I want to do a million different things and I'm doing a million different things. But at the core, my business is my main focus and everything else comes second. My business is number one, my personal brand is number one. They go hand in hand with one another, and then any other thing that I want to do, I just published an audio course on an application called Listenable. The ironic thing, and I'm not wanting to promote this too much, but this opportunity came through this podcast.
I got an email saying, hey, I came across Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, and I think you'd be a fantastic fit to do an audio course.
That's a passive residual stream of income, and I don't have to worry about marketing it or promoting it. I'm doing it now, in the early days of me doing this course, to get a little bit of momentum to it and to bring awareness. But that opportunity came to my lap because I'm building up my solo company, because I'm building up my personal brand. I don't want to be known as the MLM guy. I don't want to be known as the network marketing guy. I want to be known as Isaac Mashman. I want to be known for what I do, for who I am to you, for what value I'm able to bring.
The beautiful thing with life is there are millions of different pathways. There are millions of different opportunities. The opportunities that you want to run with and go with, it's up to you.
There's no right or wrong answer. You could go into whatever direction you want. I could have gone down the path of network marketing. That could have been a fantastic way for me to become successful. But that's not the pathway that I chose. So my question to you to end this is, what pathway are you choosing? What direction are you going? What opportunities are you saying yes to? What opportunities are you saying no to? As you grow and as you progress, more and more opportunities will come to you and come and present themselves. It's up to you to determine where you're diverting and putting your focus.
So that being said, thank you for listening to this episode. It's been an absolute pleasure. If we're not connected already, make sure you're following me at Isaac Mashman on all social media channels.
If you would like to work with me and learn more about what I can do for your personal brand, let me know. Hit me up. I'd love to work with you. I'm easily found literally on all social media. Shoot me a message. Let's hop on a call as soon as possible and get you to where you're going.