Distributor Spotlight - Shannon Denniston

Well, hi everyone here. Kevin Thompson from vmlmaterney.com and I'm excited to have a new segment to the website. We're going to do some distributor interviews and we've got the great Shannon Deniston here. Shannon, I really appreciate you being the number one guinea pig for this particular segment. I really appreciate you being on this interview.

Well, thanks Kevin, for having me. It's a distinct honor to be here tonight. And it may look like I'm broadcasting from my sauna, but actually in my office. So I know I was talking with someone earlier on video on Skype. They said, are you in a sauna? I said, no, I wasn't in my office. But yeah, it's all natural European pine. So it does kind of look like a sauna.

Looks comfortable. Looks comfortable. Well, the purpose of this interview is as an attorney, I write a lot about the problems in the industry and we write about the FTC lawsuits and the companies that get shut down and we write about some of the issues that companies are experiencing. And you know what, there's a lot of good stories out there. So I want to reach out to distributors that have positive stories to share, that have had good experiences and get their perspective, kind of brighten the room a little bit. And so let's just jump right into it with you. How long have you been in network marketing?

That'd be 15 years coming up on my 15th year.

That's longer than I originally thought. Now you're a successful distributor and I consider you sort of a networker. With networkers you're pretty plugged into the scene, not just with your own particular company, but cross company. You have a lot of relationships. And some distributors, the old school I would call them, they want to network with just people in their base. And you have relationships with a lot of people such as the Randy Gages and the Artjonaks. And you guys don't cross promote, you don't cross solicit, but you have good relationships. What's the value in that? And can you explain, do you find it beneficial for your individual business?

Absolutely. I look at myself as a continual student of the profession. I don't feel like I know everything. I certainly don't. I know very little. But I know that a year from now, hopefully I'll know a little bit more than what I know right now. By maintaining good relations with other networkers, I'm able to share ideas and concepts. A lot of times at industry wide events. We'll share information that goes well into the late hours of the night, into the early morning hours. We share that information openly with each other. That's something that in some other career paths I was a part of before finding this profession, that it seemed like people would withhold information and they kind of wanted to keep their foot on your head and make sure that you didn't surpass them. Right. Whereas in our profession, it seems like information, the support infrastructure, is in place where people want to empower one another. For the most part. It's almost like we're not just coaches, but we're cheerleaders for each other. A lot of times I'll see some positive information maybe on Art or Randy's page or Jordan or one of the many other leaders in our profession. I'll come in and I'll post something below it just to congratulate and welcome a new team member, maybe that they brought into their business or someone that's asking questions. Maybe one of those guys are out on a yacht somewhere in the middle of the ocean, and I'll try to come in and try to help the people that are asking questions on their wall. I just try to keep things very positive, upbe inspirational and let people know that we have something here that is very real. And if you'll plug into it and you'll do the things that are asked of you, you'll have success here.

Another thing that I've noticed with you in particular is that you don't really talk about your company that you're promoting. This is probably a rookie mistake, and so I don't really hold it against people. But a lot of times I see people posting links to their particular business or a link to the replicated website, and they just spam. They'll get a network marketing group, they'll identify one and they'll just blast links on it. Or they'll put links on my fan page, for example. I hate seeing that. Can you talk about those are the two extremes, in your opinion, what works?

I think that the best approach is an approach where we don't talk about what company we're affiliated with and instead work towards piquing the curiosity of people that are maybe looking. Looking at our page on. I guess you're talking about Facebook in particular. I have a very generic strategy there where I don't discuss the company that I'm affiliated with. And I do that. That's intentional. The reason I do that is I like to be asked the question, what is it that you do for a living? Actually, Kevin, I build my business through that. That's the single most asked Question that leads to a new business builder joining my organization. What is it that you do for a living? When I get asked that question, the reason first that I get asked that is because I'm not telling you what it is that I do. So you may come to my. You may read something that's inspirational or thought provoking or something that maybe just rubs you the wrong way. In some cases, I tend to dabble in a little bit of controversial stuff that's controversial to the mainstream, not controversial to the space that we're in. But when people ask me that, it's an open door for me to ask them if they're in front of their computer and say, come here, I want to show you something. What I would do then is take them to a website with a video presentation on it, obviously a short video, and show them what it is that I do for a living. So at that point I rely on the tools that my business provides instead of trying to be the tool to use. The tools that I found duplicates very well. Back to the link posting strategy. I think that's a bad strategy to post your link. We call it link blasting, just like what you referred to earlier. The people that do that typically are newbies. They're people that are brand new to the space. It just doesn't work. That's why you don't see any of the leaders in our space doing that. And if they're doing that, I would really question whether or not they're a leader. Most of the leaders, I think you'll find, are very generic in the sense that they don't talk very much about their own company. They certainly don't put down other companies unless it's a scam or something that we need to put the spotlight on. Myself included. I've done that you can count on one hand, but it's very rare. And it's only if I see a lot of people being taken advantage of in a way that I think maybe is not healthy for our profession, I'll stand up for something.

That's one thing I've noticed about you is that you're not afraid to throw a punch. And you do it very rarely, which is encouraging to see. As an advocate for myself, I think it's important for the space to sort of police itself as opposed to someone else policing it for us. And so there has been some behavior in the past that raised a flag with you and you drew attention to it and started a conversation. You know, two questions. Number one, when a new distributor joins a company what questions should they ask themselves and the sponsor? And also, what are some red flags that in your mind exist with problematic companies?

The company that their products are competitively priced understand that network marketing and traditional companies, the main thing that's different here is, and there's several things that are different, but the main difference is in how the company pays to attract their consumers. So in our space in the profession of network marketing, the companies, they pay us, the distributors to distribute the product and to bring them consumers, end users of the product who aren't involved in the compensation structure. In traditional companies, they pay advertisers. So our product should be priced the same or maybe even hopefully less than our competitors who are traditional companies. Our competitors are not each other in our space, they're actually outside of our space. For instance, the company I'm involved with, we sell a product that is cheaper than the big box retailers. I'm not going to mention any of them by name, but we actually have a product that comes in at a lower price point and it's a higher quality product. That's something that is rare in this space. Typically companies will inflate the price of their products so they can pay out higher commissions and, and it makes them less competitive. So I would put the spotlight on trying to find a company and they do exist that has a high quality product that is competitively priced and one that someone can't run out to their local store and buy for less. Because if they can, they probably will. Some other things are some companies, they'll pay out a different bv, which is business volume or cv. They may call it commission volume. They may pay that out differently for the product. For instance, it may be a product that cost $100, but they may only give you 80 bv business volume for it. So if they say they're paying out say 50% commission and they have assigned an 80BV, then 50% of that would be $40, when in reality that's only 40%. I like to find companies that give us dollar for dollar on the commissions. If it's priced at $100 and they say they pay out 50%, then I like to see them pay out $50 on that $100 item. So typically companies, 30% is usually you want to look for a company that's going to pay between 30 and 50%. I think companies that tend to operate a little bit leaner than others that pay around 30, 35%. I think they're going to last a little bit longer, maybe a lot longer than companies that pay out maximum commissions. We don't want our company to overpay commissions. We want it to be around here long term. And I think that 30 to 35% is a very healthy payout. So that's something that I like to look for. Some other things that come to mind, I like to see that they have customer support available. I like to see them really big on customer support. I don't like to see long wait times. I like to be able to pick up a phone and call them. I like the companies that offer live chat for their distributors. I also like companies that offer email support. I'm just really big in the support field. I think that if someone has a question they need to be able to get through to someone quickly. Certainly Monday through Friday, but also weekend support is something to look at. Some other things that I would research when you're looking for a company is I would look for companies that I like privately owned companies versus publicly held companies. Privately owned companies tend to put the distributors first, whereas publicly held companies tend to value their shareholders over distributors. Or at least that's been my experience. So I like privately held companies. I'd recommend that you research the board of directors and also the owner of the company. Certainly just to see their past. Have they been in the field as a distributor and then something else. This is a big one. And I know that some people will probably disagree on this, certainly a lot of company owners. But I like to see the policies and procedures state that we are independent sales professionals and that we're free to participate in as many multi level marketing programs as we prefer. Some companies, they tend to limit their distributors to only their opportunity. They tend to treat their distributors like employees instead of independent consultants. And, and that's not why we joined this profession. You know, we joined this profession on a pursuit for liberty, freedom and happiness and you know, those things. We don't want to see our freedoms limited by joining a company that says we can only be with that company. Now a side note here, I wouldn't recommend that we build more than one company, more than one network marketing company at the same time. But I certainly like to see the policies and procedures give us that right, you know, that freedom that if we wanted to, that we could be in say 10 different deals if we wanted to. Now is that good? No, that wouldn't be a good approach. I'm only with one company. I only build one company. Right.

I'm going to rehash these. That's a lot of great reasons. I'm actually going to put these in the body of the article beneath this video, what I've got jotted down here, and I took notes without trying to look away, is that you got to have a product that's fairly priced and that's a fantastic one. And that's actually, in my opinion, one of the biggest ones because a lot of companies, they sell the pay plan first, product second. And usually the product is just not competitive with what's out there in the marketplace. And so it's gratuitously inflated in price to support the commissions. And so in that scenario, you can't sell product because it's not a competitive offering. You've got to sell the lifestyle, you've got to sell the money and that leads to serious trouble. So that's a big first factor that you mentioned. You also mentioned strong customer support. You mentioned a one to one commission payout, for example. You pay a dollar, you get a dollar in business volume, 30 to 50% payout. Those are good requests. Privately owned companies versus publicly owned companies. That's a subjective thing. That's your opinion and it's a good opinion. And I certainly understand the pros and cons of both sides. You want to investigate the board of directors, make sure they have field experience, which that's always a plus. And I've got some. Oh, policies and procedures. You actually read the policies and procedures?

Yeah, I do, yeah.

Good for you. Because I write them. It's always good to have people read the P and P's. You know, the thing about the non compete is that companies draft those agreements in a way that's favorable to them in most cases and the law allows them to have a restrictive covenant like that. And so in a lot of cases that's what they put in there. There's not a lot of guys like you that are demanding open doors. Now if the day comes when more and more distributors read these things and that's what they want, companies will start providing that type of provision. But until that happens, I don't think you're going to see it anytime soon. That's my opinion.

Shannon.

I think we've covered a lot. I have one more question for you. You've been doing it 15 years and you're not the average participant. One of the best things in this space is a low cost of entry. One of the worst things in the space is a low cost of entry. Anybody can join. A lot of people join with these big expectations. They don't do much and they fizzle out. What led you to commit more than the average participant. When did it really sink in that you know what, this is what I want to do. This is how I'm going to. I'm going to make a living for myself and my family. When did that sink in?

Well, day one, to some extent. I had to make things happen. I pushed all in very early on. My parents were recently divorced. My father just got killed tragically in a construction accident. I needed to go to college or so I thought. It was something that I did to put myself through college. And I just really didn't like being told what to do even at a very early age. I just like kind of doing my own thing. With that comes responsibility. I saw it as a vehicle right from the very get go. I pushed all in early on. I think it took about probably a third or half of my savings to get started, which tells you how much savings I had. Almost nothing. I think my first company was around $600 to join. It was June 30th of 1997. I remember the date. I just found the check actually the other day. It was about $600, which was almost everything I had to my name at that point. It was just a very tough time. I had to. I had no other option. I made it for the most part my only option. And I think that's why I took it and ran. Did I get rich in the first company? No, I didn't. I learned a whole lot though. And the other companies that I joined after that, I learned a little bit each time and tend to get better. That's the cool thing about life is whether we're recently married or we're a new parent or we start a new job or build a new business, we're as bad as we'll ever be right now. And next week will be a little bit better. Next year we'll probably be a little bit better than we are this year. As long as we persist at something, we're naturally going to get better at it. Over the past 15 years, multiple times I've laid in bed at night or sat at my desk and just kind of pondered, meditated if you will. What is the perfect business or perfect profession? And I keep coming back to network marketing time and time again. In my opinion, it's the best thing that we can do, not just for ourselves, but to be good role models as parents and role models to others. I believe in my heart that it's the best profession. It's full of good people, positive people that really want to see each other succeed. All the principles that have made our profession what it is are good, solid, strong principles, the life skills that we learn. It's the person that you'll become is far more important than the money that you'll make. I believe that if you do what you love, the money will show up. Without a doubt, it'll come if you love what you do.

That's neat. Well, Shannon, I really appreciate you taking the time to do this interview. I think we've got some fantastic content for the viewers. You gave a great list of things that they should look for with their companies, and that's a really powerful testimony. You've been doing this for 15 years. You still love it, and I really, really appreciate you. Thanks so much.

Well, thanks a lot, Kevin.