In this presentation Sally Curtis explains how to transform an unfocused, "accidental" network into a purposeful, strategic wealth network by identifying leverage points and focusing on true participants rather than mere spectators. She distinguishes between spectators (people who merely observe) and participants (people who actively play the game alongside you) and argues that a wealth network should be small, high‑quality, and built on shared core values. Using a chaotic‑theory visual of a cluttered network, she illustrates the inefficiencies of an undefined network and contrasts it with a well‑designed, managed network that exponentially creates value. Curtis introduces a three‑tier cluster model—Poverty Network (doubters, takers), Supportive Network (supporters, connectors, peers), and Strategic Wealth Network (elders, high‑level connectors, scouts, opportunists, managers, leaders)—detailing the roles and purposes of each. A real‑world anecdote about a ski‑resort joint‑venture opportunity demonstrates how leveraging connections across continents can quickly surface the right partner. She emphasizes that recognizing who in your network can fill specific gaps (leverage points) makes opportunity execution faster and easier. The talk concludes that a strategic wealth network is defined by people who know, like, trust, and respect you, and who you can consistently add value to, rather than a large pool of clients or customers.
Chapters
So the next section is leverage points. And leverage points are one of the accelerators. And it relates to how we interact within our network and how our network is formed. So what we're going to be talking about is finding the undiscovered strategic wealth network and defining your participants. So let me explain. There is always lots of people within a network, which we discovered through these spheres of influence. What we're actually talking about here is participants. People that participate alongside you are playing the game with you. They're participants. What we generally have when we've got multitudes of people within our network and our spheres of influence is we have spectators, people that are generally just watching what you're doing and are just there watching what everyone else is doing. So there's spectators and participants. And what we're looking at doing is finding the strategic wealth network that we have and then finding the key players that are playing alongside or with us. And Robert Kiyosaki tells us that the richest people in the world look for and build networks. Everyone else looks for work. But a question to ask is, what sort of network, what sort of network do we build? Well, for a start, we're talking about a wealth network tonight. Is it lots and lots of people? Is a wealth network lots and lots of people? No, it is absolutely not. It is absolutely not lots and lots of people. How hard is it to build true solid relationships where you understand what makes them tick and they understand what makes you tick and they know what sort of opportunities to bring to you? How hard is it to build real quality relationships relationships with thousands of people. You can have lots of participants that you know a little bit about— sorry, lots of spectators that you know a little bit about, but a true participant is somebody that you know lots of information about and they do also. When you look at a wealth network, it is no longer hard work because it is a small group of key people that you share core values with, core interests, commonalities. Okay, and as we said before, it's not spectators, it's participants. So this is what, generally speaking, most people's networks look like or start like. It's effectively chaos theory. We have yourself in the middle here, which is your sphere of influence. You're the centre of your sphere of influence, and these black dots represent people or spectators within your network. But as you can see here, there's absolutely no definition, there's no strategy. You can't see who leads to who, so you can't work out who you need to connect with if you're trying to source someone or help somebody out. You can't determine who the key people of influence are, and it is Absolute clutter. Now I'm sure all of us have at some point in our life had an extremely messy desk and we can't find anything and it's frustrating and we spend half the day tidying that desk up so we can actually get back into proper activity. This is exactly the same as what an accidental network does. It's time-consuming, it's hard work And you really have no great opportunity of being able to work with and find the right people. So just another quote from Robert Kiyosaki. A well-designed and well-managed network will exponentially earn more, create more, than a hardworking individual. What I'll do next is just give you a very quick snippet of a 5-minute conversation. and come back because it'll relate to this. This was an opportunity that came across our desk about, well, just over 12 months ago. I actually got an email from friends of ours, well, we got an email from friends of ours, Martin in South America. He was looking for a joint venture partner that had experience in putting in ski resorts. They had 5 ski resorts in Russia and they were looking for a foreign partner that would be able to help with the property development of that. Knew how to put in road infrastructure, knew how to deal with the ice and snow, knew how to put in or take out Alps. The email in length was like this, and the criteria that they were looking for was very, very specific, even down to the fact that they needed to be able to draw, speak, and write all of the plans for this project in Russian. OK, so it was a very, very specific email. I did get it and had a little bit of a chuckle because it was so outside of the box. However, I did flick it out to a couple of people I knew that may be able to connect me to an appropriate person. But the key of this story is I was on the phone to Phil, who's a previous student of ours in Sydney. And he always asks, what are you guys up to now? Because you're always up to no good. Because he knows I'm always up to mischief. and having fun doing something. So I told him about this email and I actually emailed it across to him so he could have a bit of a look at it because of it being so specific in what they were looking for. And Phil chuckled and he said in his Irish accent, which I'm not going to try and take off, you're going to be proud of me, I can help with that. Now the point here too, Phil had only been in Australia around 6 months. He had nothing to do with property development. He was a risk and expense analyst, so he was an analyst, and he had nothing to do with property, as I said, and he definitely didn't speak Russian. But he had been through our training, so he did have an indication of who could lead to who. And what effectively happened, Phil actually got in contact with Andrew, who was in the UK, in London, And Andrew connected us to Efendi, who ended up being the ideal joint venture partner for Martin's client in North America. Now, it was a massive opportunity that we just took advantage of by connecting some dots. And what happened in this scenario within a week and within 4 connections, we did managed to track down Efendi, who was the ideal joint venture partner. He was, however, the second— sorry, the second choice, so he didn't actually get the gig. But it was potentially a phenomenal opportunity for Phil, just by simply connecting some dots. And they're the sorts of things that when you're aware of who you've got around you, of the sorts of opportunities— admittedly, this one's very outside of the box of what can be available to you within a 5-minute conversation. And connecting a few dots, even if it does take you all across the world to do so, but in very short time. Now this is what a strategic wealth network— so this is the formula that we're looking at for a strategic wealth network, which is actually this top half. This to me is what a network is actually made up of. You've got the 3, what I'll call clusters. You've got the poverty network, which generally has distractors, doubters, people that doubt what you're doing, passengers that tend to come on board and ride your coattails, takers, you know, those phone calls that you get and you go, oh my God, what do they want now, et cetera. So your poverty network is generally people that are slightly lower from the emotional strength and clarity perspective. Or they're very, very happy where they are. I will point out we all move in and out of these clusters or levels depending on whose network is looking in on us or where we are within our development. So we do tend to move through these. The second level is the supportive network where you've got your supporters, people that love what you do and they support you. You've got your connectors, that's suggest you connect with other people. You've got peers, people that are just like you. They're growing. They're wanting to develop. They know where they're going. They've got a little bit more specific with their purpose. And they're happily learning and educating themselves. In the strategic wealth network, you're getting— and you've got your elders around you. Elders are anybody that's got specialized or specific knowledge. You've got your connectors, generally higher level than these ones here, so they'll connect with a purpose as opposed just to connecting. You've got your scouts and opportunists, which will bring opportunities that relate to you, to you. And then you've got your managers and your leaders and your wheelers and dealers. People in a strategic wealth network tend to understand their purpose in a greater way. They know why they're here on the planet and what they want to do to help other people. They are very strategic with who they connect with, and they are in flow with what they are doing, and they understand bringing people together and the right teams to make things effective. So that's why they understand that they can work with less people, because they understand putting the right teams together, the right people in the right places. And when you look at your network in a layered perspective and you start to look more at a strategic wealth network and understanding who are the key people to be connecting with and who to invest the time with, it becomes a lot less hard work. In fact, it becomes a lot easier and becomes more of a playground where people with common interests and commonalities and core values are actually playing together with a common purpose. And when you look at the strategic wealth network and you look at the roles that were within a strategic wealth network, you actually can identify your leverage points much better. So if somebody comes to you with an opportunity, whether it's something like the ski resort or some type of other opportunity that relates more closely to you, you know who you can go to within your network to help you fill gaps. Or provide a referral or introduce you to somebody else. It makes it much simpler, faster, and more effective to get things done. So what we're really looking at doing is going from an accidental network where we've got that clutter and chaos theory to something that's much more specific and strategic. Okay, so going from an accidental network to something very specific, very strategic. a lot less painful. What if you look at the difference from going from cluster to something that's much more strategic? You're actually getting into what Robert Kiyosaki suggested, which was a well-designed and well-managed network. Because you can add value to smaller numbers of people, and you can do it in an appropriate manner that serves them. Makes it much, much easier. So if I use myself as an example, because of the types of people in the business that I do, most of my network is entrepreneurs-based. People. They're people that run their own businesses. Tyson's, because his focus is investing, most of his network are investment-related or opportunity-related. So depending on who you are and what it is that you actually do will determine the types of people that you actually have within your wealth network. And it's those key people that you can actually play with and participate and work together and build teams and do things strategically together, which is what we're actually looking for. People that you can play alongside and add value and grow. So the true definition of a network— I think a few of you have actually heard me when I've had little soapbox moments over this— a network is not clients or customers. It's a network of people who know, like, trust, and respect you. They may never buy from you, but you are always in the back of their mind. Because they are people that want you to succeed. They are that small group of people that you play with regularly, that you support always. They are your participants, the people that you can run hard with and make a dent in the world.
