Part of the guide: Personal Brand
So I’ve been thinking a lot about life lately, and I know I’ve been a bit on the lazier side with blogging…
(The ocean is just too much fun)
But the other day I started mulling over a couple of ideas, one thing led to another, and I put on a webinar I craftily titled ‘List Builder Bootcamp 4.0’ – really, it was an experiment.
If you didn’t see the experiment – click here
I wanted to see how easy it would be to leverage training, coaching, and mentorship to sponsor a lot of people fast in my business. I found it a bit fascinating that not only was it about 3 times easier to get people to the event, but I had about 20 people join my team in 12 hours or so afterward.
In fact, I had 10 people who specifically told me they didn’t want to join my company but decided they were better off after seeing the kind of value we offer to our members. And bam… it hit me:
Value-based sponsoring is the key that has driven all of my recruiting over the last 9 months or so…
Not bad.
But the real crazy thing I discovered is that there is a simple mindset shift that happens when you decide to step up and be a leader, and that mindset changes the game.
What mindset is it that allows you to sponsor heaps of people?
It’s the mindset of a warrior – a genius – a sage – a mentor. It’s the knowledge that deep down inside, you have all the abilities of your genetic history, billions of expressions of creativity bursting at the seams of every cell.
So my question is – what are you going to do about it?
Are you going to let life smack you down – or are you going to get up, face a dragon, and live to sponsor again?
I choose the latter – and you know what happened?
They called me an ‘Evil Genius’…
Your Fearless Visionary,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below.
Comments
Dale Horton
You hit the nail on the head…again. Developing a proper mindset should be first and foremost, in my opinion. Each time I enter the office, I take a few moments to ensure that I am in the proper mindset BEFORE I take action. Otherwise, I find I’m spinning wheels.
Thanks for your leadership, David.
Mike
It’s all about value and quality. People don’t join products, services, or network marketing companies. They join leaders!
Marketing Forums
I love your website! Did you create this yourself or did you outsource it? I’m looking for a blog design that’s similar so that’s the only reason I’m asking. Either way, keep up the nice work I was impressed 🙂
Patrick Fitz-Gibbon
Thanks David for making the concept so clear once again. Unfortunately, being in Australia, I am not able to join Numis because not only do I love the product, but I truly would like the opportunity to learn from you at a more in-depth level. I appreciate the way you do business and look forward to learning more from you.
Thanks.
Dave Steffensmeier
David, Great article once again. Now watch everyone do a keyword article about “evil genius”. lol. Always looking forward to your webinars.
Have a great day!
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
David Porter
The “Evil Genius” does it again! Leading the way with trend-setting thoughts and sharing the inspiration with us all. Truly a leader, bro, you are So There!!!! Thanks for keeping us all so pumped to do this business. Your energy is the “X” factor.
Brian Tomlinson
Great post David. Definitely enjoyed your webinar the other night as well. Good stuff. You are so correct that value-based sponsoring is the way to go. This will also help people stick around with you even longer as well.
Talk to you soon my friend.
Jeremy Reece
Value is exactly where it’s at! Face the Dragon, be yourself, and bring value to the marketplace. That’s it!
Awesome!
Andie Petoskey
David, This is the truth! I know that I am a leader and I am going to do this! With the right team, skill, and your mind in the right place, you can conquer the world!
Thanks for sharing this!
David Wood
You are AWESOME Andie 🙂 Trust me, you are going to have massive success in this…
-David Wood
Fernando Rivera
This post really resonates with me. The idea of value-based sponsoring is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and seeing it work so well for you gives me hope! Keep up the great work, David!
Lara Bennett
Honestly, I’m not sure if sponsoring 20 people in such a short time is realistic for everyone. Do you have any proof or examples we can check out? It sounds amazing, but I’m a bit skeptical.
Oliver Tan
I love the concept of focusing on value first! Quick question though, how do you decide what kind of value to offer? Is it always tied to your personal experience, or do you adapt it depending on the audience?
Emily Patterson
This was an interesting read, but I feel like it’s not quite that simple in practice. Building a team is hard work, and sometimes it feels like there’s more to it than just mindset and value. What’s your take?
Samir Patel
Hey David, it’s been a while! I’ve been following your blog for years now. This post brought back some good memories. Let’s catch up sometime soon. Hope all is well with you!
Rebecca Lee
I had a similar experience when I started focusing on value instead of just selling. My results have been steadily improving since then. Thanks for confirming that I’m on the right track!
Marcus Weller
I recently came across a tool called “SponsorBot” that helps automate some of the tasks around recruiting new members. Have you heard of it? It might complement your value-based approach well.
Gianna Russo
I learned so much from this post. The idea of leading with value has completely changed how I approach my business. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and inspiring me to take action!
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Get paid 100%, on-chain, the second the sale clears
Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Ran something close to this — a free training webinar as the front door instead of pitching straight away — for about four months last year. Sign-ups to the webinar itself were solid, easily the best-attended thing I’d hosted. Where it fell apart was follow-up: without a structured sequence afterward, most of that interest evaporated within about a week. The post credits ‘value-based sponsoring’ for the mindset shift, but the actual mechanism, if there was one, was probably just having a specific event with a specific date people had to show up for.
Kelsey’s right that the mechanism was probably the specific date, not the mindset shift. I’ll say this in the thing’s favor though, having built a team on exactly this kind of webinar cycle for years before I left it: value-based framing does change how the follow-up conversation feels, for the person doing the following up as much as for the prospect. Doesn’t make the recruiting math any different. Just makes the person doing it feel less like they’re selling something.
Kelsey’s account is useful precisely because it separates the claimed mechanism, a mindset shift, from a plausible alternative one, deadline-driven urgency plus a structured event. The post offers no way to distinguish between these — no comparison to a webinar run without the ‘warrior mindset’ framing, nothing controlled at all. Without that, ‘value-based sponsoring is the key that has driven all of my recruiting’ is a story, not a finding.
Kelsey’s experience maps onto what the post is actually describing, once you take the mindset language out: 1) free training as entry point, 2) a specific date creating urgency, 3) some kind of follow-up. The post spends four paragraphs on ‘warrior mindset’ and one sentence on the follow-up, which by Kelsey’s account is the part that actually determines whether anyone stays. That’s the gap — the mechanics that matter get a sentence, the mindset that doesn’t get a sermon.
’20 people in 12 hours’ depends entirely on how many saw it. In a town of four thousand, that pool doesn’t exist.
The ‘evil genius’ framing is doing more work in this post than the actual argument is, and it got me thinking about why every industry seems to need its own villain-as-hero archetype — the ‘ruthless’ negotiator, the ‘savage’ copywriter, the ‘evil genius’ sponsor. None of them are actually describing anything sinister, they’re borrowing the frisson of villainy to make ordinary competence sound more exciting than it is. Run a bike shop, and I promise you nobody has ever called me an evil genius for correctly torquing a headset, though by the internal logic of this post maybe they should have, since I did figure it out through trial and error and a fair amount of stubbornness. I don’t know what that says about the framing except that it travels a lot further than the substance underneath it does.
I think what’s being missed in some of the pushback here is that the post never claims the mindset alone did the sponsoring — Kelsey and Meera are right that the mechanics mattered, but genuinely believing you have something worth offering isn’t nothing either. I’ve watched people with a perfectly good structure fail because they approached every conversation apologetically. Mindset and mechanism aren’t competing explanations, they’re both required, and this post only really covers one of them well.
I am curious whether this value-based approach depends on a live webinar, or if it would translate equally well recorded, for those of us in a very different time zone.