Larry Weidel describes how Art Williams challenged him to get money-motivated at Big Canoe. After shifting his focus to numbers and organization, Weidel's monthly income jumped from $3-4k to $11k, then $22k after becoming Regional Vice President in 1980.
This is part two of art @ Big Canoe. Art sat down and started talking. He had stopped at a drugstore on the way up there and he had himself a big poster board. This was really important, Art. He was going to make a big impression. He got a marker and a felt marker and he got a 30 cent poster board, white poster board. And he wrote on here, this was his message. This is what he wanted me to get. And you know, sometimes the simpler the message, the more powerful the leadership position in our company at that time. And today the main leadership development position, office running position is called RVP Regional Vice President. Okay, so Art said he had written on here. He wrote, to be a good rvp, you need. I wish I'd kept this. Somebody asked me for it. About five years later, I gave it to him. You need number one to be a good person. Well, I was feeling pretty good about that. I'm a good person. I'm a good person. I don't have to worry about a good person. He said, now what is a good person? A good person is someone who makes commitments and lives up to them. You can trust what they say, okay, I'm doing good. Then he said the other side of the coin. He said, you have to be a good producer. Now this is starting to get uncomfortable. He said, you got to be a good producer. Because unless you're a good producer, there's no way to separate. Separate you from all the people who just talk a good game. That was all he had on the board on his poster. He had the big poster. That's all it was on it. I guess he wanted to get the point across. And he did. Good person, good producer if you want to be a good rvp. Now I was beaming. I thought, you know, I'm pretty good producer most of the time and great person. But then he turned and he looked me dead in the eye and he said, larry, you are not money motivated. And I'm feeling pretty good about that too. You are not money motivated. Well, I felt pretty good about that because I was on the impression that you go through life, you do good things, and eventually you're not money motivated, you're not greedy, you don't use people, you help people. And if you do enough good, eventually goodness and mercy will follow you all the days of your life. And eventually, somehow, dollar bills will start falling out of the sky into your pocket. You know, you hear this advice all the time from idiots who don't know anything. They'll say, you know, just follow your passion. Just focus on what you want to do well, you better follow your passion and focus on what you can do that actually makes money. You better find something that you're passionate about that you can turn into a skill that's a money making. You can great to be an artist or a music or this, that and the other and do your thing. But you better hope somebody will listen to it or buy it or otherwise you're going broke, folks. And it's great to be Van Gogh, but you know, he died penniless and so sure, now he's world famous selling millions, multi millions first paintings. But you better be money motivated to some degree because what it does when you're not money motivated. All of a sudden Art was listening to me and I was saying, you know, I had a smile on my face, I was confident. And he basically said, no, Wydell, not good, not good. You got to be money motivated. You're in the business of making money when you're in business. Businesses are foreign. To make money when, when you people follow you, they need to make money. When they're getting trained by you, they need to make money. If you're not using your time to make money, you can't train them how to use their time to make money. That means you're just wasting your time. It's so easy to waste time. It's so easy to kid yourself that you're doing the right things. It's so easy to get sidetracked when you're not money motivated. Then bam. At that moment, the light bulb went onto my head. I was wrong. I was doing lots of the right things, but I was not focused. I was not focused on making the things happen. Because in our business, you know, we're a service oriented company. And unless you get out there and actually help someone make a change in the products and programs they have, you were out there talking, you hadn't really helped them. And the only way to make money was to actually help people get that transaction done. So I went back, I made some three or four changes in the way we got. We all got organized. Now here's what happened to me just from that. We were doing many of the right things, but we weren't focused. We got money motivated, we got the money motivated thing going. So here's what happened to me. We got numbers oriented, we got focused on doing what we got paid to do. And here's what happened. I'd had a career of making three to four thousand dollars per month. Okay, that was up through April. In May, I got paid 11,000 in June. And this is 1980, by the way. There's $1980. You can triple it if you want to know what they are in today's dollars. In June I got my income. No, it went to 6,000. That was wrong. Went to six. It went three to six in June. So is it in essence about doubling then? It about doubled again. It went to 11. And then in July, I got actually promoted to regional vice president and it went to $22,000. And in all the years ever since, it's. It was only dipped underneath 20,000 three months. And that was on a fluke, you know, it was like 19,000 or something in a December month. And, you know, it went up from there. But folks, all of this happened because Art took the time out. Art and Angela took their Sunday one extra thing to go up, spend the time. They didn't know what I was missing, but they got around. They looked in the eye, looked me in the eye, and pretty much came clear what I needed to hear. Wasn't just me, it was the other guys too. Because I think maybe you need to hear that. Maybe you need to get money motivated, maybe you need to get focused. Maybe that could change your life. I know it did for me. Art Williams at Big Canoe changed my life, Showed me I had to turn into a good producer, had to put points on the board, had to get money motivated. Folks, if you're going to be in business, if you're going to be in charge of your life, and even if you're on a salary working for somebody else, you're in business for yourself, whether you know it or not or like it or not. You need to be motor motivated. Hope that helps. If it does, go ahead and put a comment on there, what you got out of it. And that may help those who come behind you listening to the video and might help them learn and know what they need to look out for as they're listening.
