About Tony Kent
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I have written the following story to share with you some of the ideas and principles that have allowed me to attain success in the network-marketing arena. The length is because I wanted you to know that I have experienced the same challenges and shared the same heartbreak as many of you, and it is my hope that by sharing my story you will understand that you are not alone, and that if I can do it, you can to.
I have been involved in MLM for quite a while now. I was born in the States but spent a major part of my life living in Paris and working as a fashion photographer. I married while living over there and have four children, two of them having been born in France, and two of them here in the States.
At the end of this story I will share a link with you where you can learn about an exciting new team I am just starting to build (in November of 2005) and how you can get an early position which could benefit you enormously.
After spending about 25 years there, and having traveled the world extensively while working with the top magazines such as Vogue, Elle and Marie Claire, I relocated back to the U.S. about fifteen years ago. I had always appreciated residual income, as a lot of my friends were very successful singers and artists, and so I understood the concept quite well. I had never heard of MLM while living in France, but I remember the first MLM meeting I went to. It was in Southern California and it was for a company called Network 2000, which was a marketing arm for U.S.Sprint. I must have sponsored 200 people into that but no one taught me about duplication. I do recall sitting in the meeting and being dazzled by the numbers. They drew the circles and talked about 2 who get 2 who get 2 etc., until eventually you sat on the beach in Tahiti drinking Pina Coladas while you made millions from all the people working. I must admit, when I went home I couldn't sleep. The mathematics of what happens with leverage blew my mind. I loved the concept of being able to tap into the profit that could be made by building an organization of people in which everyone worked just one hour a day, but you were paid on the efforts of 10,000 hours of work every day.
Nothing much developed from that because I did not know how to teach duplication, but I did invest 10,000 dollars with the two people that put on that meeting in the cellular lottery business and made a small fortune. Shows you the value of networking.
I must have tried 3 or 4 other MLM's, making a few bucks but never really understanding how to build an organization. But then I ran into a person, who I think is one of the people who changed the face of our industry in a really significant manner. He was a master of direct marketing, and one day he heard a tape about blue green algae by Ray Cassano, and he started the first mass tape mailings in the MLM world. This was before the legendary Dead Doctors Don't Lie tape. But he had built a number of large downlines in other companies as well, so he knew cold market, warm market and every other kind of market there was. But not only did he really understand MLM, he knew how to teach it, so I owe a lot of what I have accomplished in this industry to him and his wife. Between them, they really covered a lot of bases and I learned about prospecting, recruiting, perseverance, sponsoring, follow-up, customer service, building relationships, duplication, and a lot of other nuances about how to be successful in this business.
I clearly remember conversations with the leaders in my group, who were astounded with the success of the tape system, in which I said I felt that the best ways to build a downline were yet to be discovered. At that time, I had no idea that the Internet was going to be one of those new ways. In addition, I believe that we have yet to see the best ways. There are constantly new technologies being developed that we can not even imagine now, and I am totally convinced that the biggest MLM in the world has probably not even been founded at this moment in time.
I built some real momentum working with this person, and became a trainer for the company because I realized how valuable all the information I now had was to other people. He could predict within a few hundred dollars what kind of growth I would have each month, and as some times my check jumped to over five figures a month, this always astounded me. He also predicted that the company was going to crash because of inept management and an unwillingness to listen to the field, and the figures he predicted and the alarming decline rate were never far off. I was too proud, too stubborn and too attached emotionally to the company to get out when he did, and he had already built a strong check in another company by the time mine had declined almost 75%. I had some personality conflicts with him at times, and let my ego affect my decision.
One of the things that I had loved about this company was their charitable division, and I was blessed to be chairman of this field driven group for over two years. So when it came time to look for another company, I wanted to find something that touched my heart and got me really excited. I am absolutely passionate about personal growth and even wrote a book entitled "Walking in Awareness" with the subtitle "Personal growth through Network Marketing." You can read a few chapters of this book and download it for FREE at my web site http://www.tonykent.com. Simply fill out the survey and the book is sent to you immediately.
I had worked with a man whose name is Paul J. Meyers in a company called Success Motivation Institute for a while, selling and teaching personal growth problems, so I briefly got involved in TPN because he was a part of it and I had always admired him. I thought that taking something like a TV and turning it into something really positive by using it for teaching people about personal growth was an awesome idea. Before I ever really got going they joined with Pre-Paid Legal, and I just couldn't get passionate about promoting that. I have always believed that conflict should be resolved through spiritual mediation, so I went looking again.
My next stop was with a company promoting a homeopathic weight loss patch, and I loved the concept of homeopathy because I had been exposed to it a lot while living in Europe. I had terrific momentum going there, but once again company management was not on top of things and the FDA shut them down. I was experiencing very fast growth and earning a very significant income at the time, so it was very challenging time for everyone involved.
So out I went again looking for something that had substance and value, but this time I said to myself I am going to go with a company that is well run and well established. By that time the Internet was a pretty big buzz word, and when AOL announced that they were going to go MLM I arrived at their pre-launch having built a group in the thousands in just a few weeks. It was amazing how fast something could grow over the Internet, and coupled with the name of AOL it was growing almost out of control. Just an email to friends in the business saying "AOL goes MLM" and people were signing up by the hundreds every day. Can you imagine what a change this was to having 10 people sign up with a mailing of a thousand tapes that cost almost $2000 dollars?
When AOL pulled the plug I went looking for a company that was going to do MLM using the Internet and discovered a company called Oneworld Online. This was just in the beginning stages but Paul Taylor, someone I liked whom I met during the AOL experience, connected me with the people putting this project together. So I flew into Utah and fell completely in love....with the people, the project, the vision. It was everything I was hoping to find. The corporate side were the most impressive people I had ever met in the industry, and the master distributors were two awesome network marketers with world wide experience, one of whom had consistently earned six figure monthly checks, so I really felt I had found a home and was thrilled to be able to learn and work with the best people I had met in the industry. The main founder of the company was a financial investment banker who had helped take 60 companies public, and he was as passionate about helping others as anyone I had ever met. The master distributor position was a non-profit and forty percent of the shares were held by non-profits. The quest was to build an Internet community dedicated to the love of truth and impelled to work for the benefit of present and future generations. I resonated completely with everything.
While with Oneworld I met a number of remarkable people. Wayne Hollbrook, the president, had been hugely successful in the field. Wayne was a man of principle and a great work ethic (with a lovely wife who worked with him) and I felt Wayne was as passionate as I was about dealing with the problem of attrition facing our industry. People leave as fast as they come in, and it really bothers me that so many people don't experience the benefits of a business model that I feel is totally awesome. What was interesting was that they had not really formulated their plan. I truly felt that I was positioned in front of the greatest trend to ever happen in the business world, the Internet, and that OWOL was going to create the largest checks ever seen in the industry because of the Internet. I felt that it was a great platform through which I could use my talents and abilities towards helping others achieve a better life.
As you all are probably aware, not many MLM companies have yet figured out the Internet and used it for the type of growth that we envisioned. Database information does not have the same market value it did a few years ago unless you have a truly massive one, and OWOL had struggled for two years trying to define its customer offer and build momentum. One of the major flaws was the lack of residual income, and a lot of the income was based on quick start bonuses. They had a revolutionary idea of rewarding customers with shopping dollars, but the company was looking for a business model that worked, just like Big Planet, Quixtar and a host of others were still struggling to find. But, OWOL has closed their doors now, as have a lot of the Internet start-ups.
Even so, o ne thing that I really loved about OWOL was that they introduced a program called the Science to Success. This was created by Rick Tonita and his team at Global Partners. One of the two top distributors, Garrett McGrath had worked with Rick for years and was instrumental in bringing Rick and this program to OWOL. As the program went through its evolution, I learned a lot about structural tension and the creation of high performance teams. Based largely on the work of Robert Fritz, this program teaches the difference between a conflicting/oscillating structure and a creative/advancing structure. We act in accordance with underlying structures in our life, similar in nature to the way a river will flow along the structure of its riverbed. To change the flow of the water, one must change the structure of the riverbed.
Because energy flows along the path of least resistance, we must learn to look at the structures in our lives and change them if we want to change the flow of energy. By looking at, and honestly facing our current reality, we can then create structures that will advance us towards our desired outcomes. I have always felt that the real richness of network marketing lies in personal growth. We can not build and contain an organization bigger than we are.
Even though I did not have a lot of material gain in my years with OWOL, I had a phenomenal amount of personal growth. There were a lot of leaders who made a lot more money than I did in Skybiz, Bigsmart, and a host of other companies. I know that some made many millions, but I would not trade my experience for theirs, even though I ended up close to facing bankruptcy. I lost a six figure check which I had built in one company that terminated me very unfairly. I built a large group and another six figure check in another company that lost it's product to the FDA, and I went two years without any income to speak of with OWOL. I have a number of friends who also paid dearly when they wanted to be a part of OWOL, and my credibility, which is one of a networker's greatest assets, got severely damaged. But I learned about myself, I learned what I am made of. Most importantly, I learned what is important to me.
My spiritual teacher taught me that I should never be a slave to the material world, but that I should let the material world be a slave for me.
I got to take a long hard look at my current reality and find out if I had the guts to stay with what I believed I wanted in my life.
I got to feel love and support from my children that was and is like a life jacket in the turbulent waters of life. I have never felt I have ever sacrificed anything for my kids. They have been nothing but an asset in my life. I learned who my real friends were who stood by me.
When I was a photographer and was always around really successful people I saw clearly that when you are rich and famous everyone seems to love you and everyone seems to be your friend. What a gift it is to have a chance to see everything from the other side!
I learned about accountability, my own and others. I have been taught that God sees the black ant on the black rock in the dark, moonless night, and that nothing escapes His eye. At a certain level of consciousness, certain responsibilities can not be taken lightly. The higher the station of consciousness, the deeper the level of awareness, and the more we must hold ourselves accountable. Another way to look at it is, if you put one small, unseen hole in a water can full of liquid (integrity), when you come back the next day the can (our being) will be empty.
What I learned in working with Rick and Garrett and some of the others, was that in a safe learning environment when you work with consciously selected partners, and you put personality aside, you can learn to hold yourself accountable and work on living in the truth. If we want to be at peace with ourselves and be happy, we have to live as extensions of our creator, who loves us unconditionally. So if we love others unconditionally, without judgement, and if we love ourselves the same way, we can create in a powerful way. God created out of a desire to see things born, and he built the universe as an expression of His desire to manifest. When I took my best photos, it was out of a desire to manifest beauty, not from a structure of trying to fix a problem (like how to sell something). Great teams come together because of a group of people that want to create something beautiful.
What had happened in OWOL was that I got completely caught up in trying to fix problems and lost the sense of creation. Just like in theother companies, I eventually spent more time focusing on the problem rather than advancing towards my dream. So just before Christmas I started looking around again for something I could be inspired to be a part of. I was really beginning to feel like an MLM junkie. I sympathize with everyone who bounces around from MLM to MLM, because I realize that a lot of you are just looking for a home. I am much kinder towards others who have not yet found the company that they can feel at home with, because as I went looking I realized that there are not that many to choose from. One thing I did know about myself was that if charity was not involved, I was not too attracted, because it's not the money I want, it is what I can do with the money.
Up until the writing of this article, I still had an eye on many opportunities. I got involved with a number of different companies, such as Bizadigm, Payline, Daily Gold, Lexxus International, Halo, Do It All Travel, Travel Legacy, Sizzling Minerals, etc. I simply felt lost, confused and more than a bit confused as to what I really wanted to do with my life in MLM.
I know that deep in my heart I want to be a part of something that is a community of people interested in the creation of a high performance team that wants more than anything to give something back to those that are struggling and those that are less fortunate. God has blessed me with a roof over my head, food on my table, four of the most divine children any man could ever want, a spiritual teacher whom I love completely, and a host of other friends and relationships that add value to my life.
I want to help others live a life of freedom and help them to help themselves so they can live their dreams.
The single biggest problem in building an MLM business is the inability of people to recruit customers on an ongoing basis. Two years ago, I found a company that had solved this problem. They were spending over $500,000 a month on infomercials that attract over 1000 customers a day. I joined this company in November of 2001, started to build in early December, and two years later, by November 2003, I have an organization of over 160,000 people and a solid six-figure income. Every single person that joins has the possibility to purchase as many as 1000 customers a month, and the cost is just $40 a customer. This is the most exciting and revolutionary company I had seen in a while. They had solved the recruiting problem and created a business model in which many people could find success. I love their mission and still do.
I plan to continue working with this company and am excited by their future and being a part of their future. I have some really great team leaders who are doing a great job using the customer acquisition program.
After spending a few months bouncing around in what felt like the wasteland of MLM, I feel as if I might have finally come to a greater understanding of what I want out of life and the companies I work with. I love the principles and the vision of this company. This year I think they will reach 50 million in sales, and most likely more than double the following year. They send out spectacular back end mailers to all the customers, teach really awesome health and lifestyle info. They have a non-profit charity, a great corporate team, and truly wonderful staff.
If you would like to have a free consultation and learn more about this company, please fill out the survey at my web site (www.tonykent.com)and enjoy the free copy of my book, WALKING IN AWARENESS.
I would be happy to help you in any way I can, whether it is to answer questions about my business or to give you guidance in how to build yours. I am available at 415 258 9920 or send me an email at tony@tonykent.com.
NEWS FLASH
I have been tested the waters with a company that a friend introduced to me. I was open to this because I really wanted to have a simple business with an exciting product that I could do with my four children. Something that was unique, and which did not cost a lot to get started, with which the part-timer could earn good money. If you would like to read about this and see how you could work ONE ON ONE with me on my first level, then click on the link below.
CLICK HERE FOR NEW OPPORTUNITY
You can also contact me through email at tony@tonykent.com. Thank you for sharing this time with me.
Many Blessings
