Wes Linden discusses his early business experience and how not to introduce the UW business
In this short video, UW National Network Leader, Wes Linden talks about his early business experience as a UW Partner and how prospecting for new customers and distributors was not his strength. He adopted his own special style of telling others about the benefits of joining the UW business. These involved arguing and begging. Whilst neither worked, Wes was not put off by his personal UW business experience and went on to become one of the company’s top earning distributors.
This video was filmed at a team training event in Cornwall. As follows is a partial transcript…
What I want to talk us through today is really a bit of a tail, a bit of a journey from 20 years, seven months, two weeks, and five days ago when I joined the business as a 20-year-old student. I just turned 20. I was like 20 and three weeks or something like that. And heard about this business and saw it as a great way to earn an extra 200 pound a month to help me through university. At the time I was studying to be a teacher. I saw this business as a good way to earn a bit of extra income.
And I assumed if I become a teacher and I earn a couple of grand a month, then if I can get 200 pounds from this business, that’s like a 10% salary increase. And that’s all I saw it as. So clearly I failed miserably to stop at 200. But once I realised the potential of it, I then suddenly perhaps with student naivety or youngster naivety, just turned away from teaching altogether. I didn’t complete my qualification, didn’t get the degree and concentrated on this business. Kind of got all right.
But what I want to share with you is some of the things that have made that possible, because when I was started, 20 years old, no business experience, no qualifications, no money. I had to borrow the money to join. I still haven’t paid it back. Don’t remind me of that. And no business experience, no network marketing experience, and not really a clue how on earth this thing would work. No personal development really, either, because you don’t get encouraged to read good books, particularly at school.
You get encouraged to read stuff, but it’s not always stuff that’s necessarily going to personally develop you in the way that this business can educate you to do so. In fact, without embarrassing the person, let’s just chat to someone who’s been a teacher for 23 years who’s in this room now who said that in that 23 years in teaching he doesn’t recall reading personal development books but recalls reading lots of assessments and guides on what you have to do and not do and stuff like that.
And so this has been a huge journey. So I want to share with you some of those things. And really, I think the people that do best in this business are the best thieves as such as in you steal the information that’s going to work best for you. Now, there’s going to be things that I say, and some of those things you’ll be like, “That’s just not going to work for me. It doesn’t fit my personality. It does not fit my demeanor. It doesn’t fit my lifestyle and I’m going to choose to ignore that, which is cool.
And we’re all in that place. Now, whether we verbalise that or we don’t is a different thing. I had someone ring me up a little while ago saying to me, “I don’t think I want to do the business anymore.” I wanted to say, “I didn’t think you could do it any less.” Anyway. We don’t always say those things, do we? But we can think them. But in my early days I was struggling a little bit because I thought it was amazing. And so I developed a very distinctive style of prospecting, arguing.
I’d tell them about the business. They wouldn’t see what I saw. So then we’d argue about it for a while. And at that point they were then definitely not joining now or at any point in the future. I was basically severing all my relationships. So I realised that that wasn’t working. So I adapted and tweaked that method slightly and developed a new style of prospecting, begging. I’d talk to them about the business. They wouldn’t see what I had saw. Rather than fighting I’d just plead with them for a while, which was really pathetic, generally.
No was becoming a regular thing. And I was getting to that point where people would say no. I’d be like, “I don’t blame you. I’d say no myself if I wasn’t already invested, you know, in.” And so I had to realise that actually there has to be another way. There has to be another way whereby I can share the business with people, they can take it or leave it. Now, if they take it, that’s great. If they don’t, that’s okay as well. But why not have it that if they don’t take it that we still remain friends. We still remain in touch and over a period of time we get to a place where the timing might be right for them and then they do join?
