The Greatest Networker Who Never Thought He Was

Tom Chenault Receives the ANMP Lifetime Achievement Award — and Still Doesn’t Believe It. 

By John Milton Fogg

On the last Saturday night this May, in a ballroom in Dallas, Tom Chenault stood at a microphone in a wrinkled shirt — tears falling. He’d been blindsided.

The Association of Network Marketing Professionals (ANMP) had just presented him with their Lifetime Achievement Award. His wife Denice wasn’t in the room. Neither were his sons Adrian and Dominic. The moment had been kept secret from everyone close to him.

Tom’s response, shared days later on Facebook, was pure Chenault:

“I still believe it might have been a mistake.”

That single sentence tells you everything you need to know about why Tom really did deserve it.

I’ve known Tom Chenault for close to 30 years. We met at Art Jonak’s first MasterMind Event in Orlando in 1996. And I’m not proud of this admission, but I didn’t give Tom the respect he deserved. My “I’m John Milton Fogg, who are you?” ego was firmly in the way. Mistake. Big Mistake.

I’ve had a long time to learn about how wrong I was.

Over the years that followed, Tom and I formed a genuine friendship. Beyond business. I’ll say something here I’m proud to say publicly: Tom Chenault was instrumental in getting me sober. He wasn’t my sponsor in AA. He didn’t take me through the Big Book chapter by page. What he did was something much harder — he listened. He encouraged. He was persistent without ever being pushy. He loved me into the rooms of recovery before I was ready to walk in on my own. Because of Tom I haven’t had a drink in 14 years.

That’s not a story about me. It’s a story about Tom.

Because that’s what Tom does. Quietly, consistently, without keeping score, he shows up for people.

There’s a well-known concept Tom the salesman knows: the USP — Unique Selling Proposition. Tom’s transformed that into the Unique Serving Proposition. He’s a master at it. And a master teacher of it.

I wrote a book called The Greatest Networkers in the World. Tom Chenault is not in it.

My second Big Mistake with Tom. I’m correcting it here:

Tom Chenault is one of the Greatest Networkers in the World.

Not simply because of the four decades he’s devoted to the profession. Not just because of his considerable financial success or the remarkable size of the organization he built. He belongs in that company because he has always been more committed to the success of his people than his own. That’s my definition of what it takes to become one of the Greatest.

And the Lifetime Achievement Award from the ANMP confirms it.

Tom’s story is not the most comfortable one, and he’s never tried to make it so. He grew up the invisible middle child — not poor exactly, but “plenty poor enough” — underperforming at most everything, getting kicked out of four of the five colleges he attended. He ran a restaurant with 103 employees and 75,000 customers a month, learning the lesson that would eventually save him:

Relationships rule — make everyone feel important.

Then he drank himself out of that business. Did the same in the aviation business. Then the financial services business.

In 1988, after two DUIs and two arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct, Tom walked into the rooms of 12-Step Recovery. He has gone back every day since — 38 years of daily re-choosing the best man he wants to be… the best man he is.

Network Marketing found Tom at his lowest. No resume. No credit. No prospects. Just a
slip of paper that fell out of a newspaper: Unlimited income opportunity. No background
check. Start today. Tom became an instant “heavy hitter” — because he has always known how to sell. People, he jokes, would buy just to get him to leave.

But early on something shifted. He went to a friend’s house a few days after selling him a skincare kit and found it in the trash. That was a pivotal moment. People didn’t need more products. They needed to be genuinely cared about. Tom’s job wasn’t to sell. It was to serve. And out of that realization came everything — Contact Mapping, the Legacy Leadership Show, a worldwide organization, and the life and work philosophy he’d eventually distill into five words:

Love Like Crazy… Then Love More.

Consider what Tom Chenault has actually built over four decades in this profession:

He pioneered internet radio for the Network Marketing industry, launching The Tom Chenault Show on the Genesis Communications Network in 1999 — still the longest running home-based business radio show in the world and a podcasting pioneer. Over those years the show became something beyond an interview program. Tom used it as a spotlight for the good people in the profession, not the needy-greedy ones — a consistent, generous platform for the kind of leadership the industry needed and too
rarely celebrated that Tom championed.

He was instrumental in establishing the ANMP itself, the organization that just honored him. He authored The Coffee Shop Interview, a masterclass in relationship-first prospecting. He developed Contact Mapping — a system that began with index cards and legal pads in the 1970s and eventually became an app through NowSite, now part of NowSite AI. He co-hosts the Legacy Leadership Show with his son Adrian.

And through all of it — the radio show, the book, the app, the organization — Tom applied Contact Mapping’s core principle to every corner of his life, not just business.

As Tom puts it:

“Everybody you meet is a candidate to be served, not sold.”

That philosophy extended to sobriety, to family, to the person at the bottom of the comp plan and the one at the top. It’s why, as Tom reflects, he hasn’t built many enemies in this profession. Hard to make enemies when your only agenda is to help everybody. And he has done most of this without ever positioning himself as the star of the story. His only claim is, He’s a talent scout and a tour guide.

The business has recognized him before — with Achievement honors from the MLMIA in 2010, from Youngevity, and from Eric Worre and GoPro. Each one, Tom reflects, “took all I had to get, but all I had was enough.” Meaning: he earned them the hard way, in years of service, not shortcuts.

What makes the ANMP award different — and what made it land so hard on Tom that Saturday night in Dallas — is the source. This is the professional association Tom helped get started, among his peers who know him best, in the community he has served the longest. There is no gaming that verdict. You cannot charm your way to a Lifetime Achievement Award from the people who have watched how you work for 40 years.

Garrett McGrath’s remarks were brief. They didn’t need to be long. When you’ve watched someone serve a profession for 40 years, the words almost don’t really matter — what matters is who’s saying them and why. Tom came to the stage with tears in his eyes anyway. That said everything Garrett’s introduction speech didn’t need to.

Tom wrote afterward:

“I am DAMN PROUD of this award. Because like the profession itself it rewards giving and being a good human being in all areas of life.”

That’s it. That’s all. The man who spent decades insisting he had nothing special to offer — no great skills, just a love for people and a commitment to remember them and connect them and serve them — finally said he was proud. That sentence alone was worth those 40 years.

“Lots of people are smarter than I am. Lots of people are richer than I am. Lots of people are lots of things more and better than I am. But you’ll have a heck of a time out-loving me.”

He’s right. I’ve tried to out-love Tom for years.

The ANMP got it right. Tom Chenault is exactly who a Lifetime Achievement Award was created for — a leader who spent a career lifting others and giving them the credit… who built an industry institution without ever demanding recognition… who turned his own train wreck into a roadmap that thousands of people have followed to lives they never thought possible.

And he still thinks it might have been a mistake.
No. It wasn’t, Tom. It really wasn’t.
__________

John Milton Fogg is the author of the industry classic The Greatest Networker in the World and has been writing about the Network Marketing profession for over 30 years.

Tom Chenault is the author of The Coffee Shop Interview, host of the Legacy Leadership Show, and cocreator of Contact Mapping. He can be reached at tomchenault.com.