Boy, mister, if you’re ever looking for an MLM (multi-level marketing) book with a Christian bent, have I got just the thing for you. This book, which I picked up at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale in May 2021 (that is, I just bought it recently), bears the subtitle / cover text of A 3-Step Plan for Filling Your Plate While Working from Home, so one might think it’s a broader business-building kind of thing, which it sort of is, but the author’s business is “network marketing”–that is, multi-level marketing–where you’re a representative of a product line but to really succeed you have to recruit other sellers so that you get a portion of their sales proceeds. Selling the product is not the point; recruiting is.
So the book has two parts: Right Thinking and Winning Habits, and each part has several short chapters in them showing various traps / “syndromes” which lead to failure, such as Impossible Dream Syndrome (keeps you from starting), Mañana Syndrome (procrastination), Superman Syndrome (trying to do it all on your own), and so on. Each chapter then has a set of three techniques to try to overcome it and a summary/bottom line.
And, yet: Although the book does focus on the “network marketing” business and recruiting other members of your video game clan down-line, a lot of the lessons can be applied more generically about growing your business network and, basically, just getting out and meeting people. The focus on sales is not so much pressure to close, but rather informing the mark person about the benefits and letting the other person decide. Which makes sense when you’re selling selling more than closing on a product–you can pressure someone to spend on something, you can close on that deal and book that revenue, but when you’re selling the person on selling the product (or, better yet, building his or her network of salespeople of whose sales you would also get a commission). If you pressure someone into a decision he regrets, he won’t perform for you in the future. Selling a product, that’s okay; the one-time revenue and commission are booked. However, if someone accidentally applies that lesson to actual sales and building relationships, all the better.
So if you read the book, you’ll learn some of the “network marketing” lingo: up-line, down-line, warm market/cold market/meet market, but you can also find some nuggets that apply elsewhere and in other businesses. As I mentioned, the book has a Christian slant (the publisher is Promise Books), so it has supportive biblical quotes and quotes from other sources, including literature (including the famous American [sic] poet John Donne), business books, and pop culture (although a bit trailing since this 2011 book refers to the film City Slickers and kinda misses the point of what Curly meant when he said there’s only one thing in life). The book also refers to eating the frog which refers to doing something that you’re likely to put off because of its difficulty or just its magnetic repulsion to your personality for some reason–my beautiful wife has often used this metaphor, so perhaps it’s common in books of this type. I wonder how much of the information is recycled and repackaged from other sources. But never mind–it’s packaged in a readable, chunkable, and interesting way to be an intro to business self-improvement if that’s not a genre you’re familiar with.
So: Better than I expected when I started it, and worth reading. Apparently, I have another book by the author, The Reluctant Bachelor, around here somewhere. I’ll keep an eye out for it.
