How To Sell Your Network Marketing Company

I have seen the last 10 year a lot of mergers and acquisitions. Some because the company was almost bankrupt, some because it was a smart choice.

Industry icon Richard Bliss Brooke took the royal way to sell his MLM company – Life Matters to Young Living Essential Oils and I take my hat off (chapeau) the way he did it:

Richard commented as follow on the acquisition:

“How and why we made this move”:

Life Matters although profitable and growing was not growing fast enough. Our sales leaders were not achieving the success they deserved. It would have been a long haul to a Billion and although we were all up to the task we randomly discovered something that led to this Pivot.

Young Living Leaders have always been our number one clients in our generic coaching business….Bliss Business.

YL leaders grew more out of our coaching, built bigger businesses faster, sold more books, came to more retreats etc. We started looking at why that was. What was so growth oriented about YL. What we found in a word was Retention. Their retention rate…the percentage of members that stayed on auto ship long term was off the charts. I had never seen numbers like that in 40 years. So we looked at adding oils to Life Matters. Lots of other companies had wisely done the same. But in studying that move it did not seem to create the same movement that an entire oil culture creates.

So we asked “What If”. A bold What If Young Living would see in our unique training, recruiting and building philosophies what we saw in their product development, marketing and retention? What if they might want to marry us?

We approached Adam Green because he was our most successful Bliss Business Client. He had sold more Four Year Career books than any other client and had skyrocketed his Young Living business to $2,000,000 a month in sales, 55,000 members and over $1M a year in income. And he is only 28 years old! He took us to his Chief… Jared Turner of Young Living. Boom, Done Deal.

This unexpected Pivot I liken to an athlete with the ball looking only to score. Kimmy’s and my mission has only been to lead our team to win. We were running with reckless abandon…as hard as we could. And because our Vision was for our people to win, I believe we “saw” an opening we may have never seen. We saw vast daylight in a bizarre place and we dove into it.

Validation that it was going to be a good move was our taking 30 of our top sales leaders into a 3day orientation by Adam Green and company before we made it final. They fell in love right away and fell harder in love with every day since. They gave us the green light to pivot and they actually led the way.

Some people may say, how could you sell your company and become just a sales leader? For the ego is was hard. For the heart and spirit it was easy.

Sales leaders have the best gig ever imagined…the most lucrative profession, the most rewarding, the most fun and most importantly the most freedom. Company owners pay a huge price for the right to make all the decisions and be the creator of all of it.

Where else can one earn $1M a year in your underwear, from a boat, or bed, or your kitchen table or if you wish traveling the world with tens of thousands of very grateful business partners? All the while someone else handles the not so much fun stuff. I find not enough mutual gratitude and respect in our profession. Not enough for the owners that sacrifice and risk so much. And not enough for the bold and beautiful sales leaders that make it all pay off. Ours is a profound partnership that deserves mad mutual respect.

And speaking of owners here is some crazy irony for you. 30 years ago my top sales leader in Spokane, Washington asked me to visit with a friend of his about starting his own MLM company. I spent 3 hours listening to this very passionate guy talk about starting his own MLM selling oils. He did not seem equipped for the mission. Too much emotion, no experience…and no working captial. I suggested he pass. He did for a few years. Then Gary Young started Young Living Essential Oils. And 24 years later he and wife Mary have pioneered an entire multi billion dollar industry that is growing like wild fire. What do I know? Not enough.

And lastly to my most amazing wife, business partner and joined at the hip world venture Life Matters would have never become what it did without you and we would have never created this amazing partnership with Young Living without your vision, leadership and tireless efforts.

I love you. Onward!