How do you Eat an Elephant?

I wasn’t looking to get into another MLM. If you’ve read my previous blogs, you’ll know that I was kind of over the whole industry. I’d joined and quit several ranging from sports drinks to Amway to the ‘web only’ MLM types and so on.

Happy to live my life doing what I love, and that is create properties and illustrate, after all, there’s a famous quote "Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” ~Albert Schweitzer

So bottom line, I really was not looking for an MLM business to build. At all. Really.

But then I rekindled a friendship with an old buddy from high school who had gone on to become fantastically successful in business on his own. His name is Derek Wall. Not too long after high school, he founded Ezekiel clothing with some friends, eventually sold that off to a larger company, started, built, sold other huge companies, and eventually found himself as the president of buynow.com, a subsidiary of buy.com. Do an Alexa search if you don’t know how big that company is.

Suffice it to say, Derek is my most successful friend from high school, in the realm of business and finances. (Owing to Dr. Schweitzer’s quote above, I won’t qualify him as my most successful friend outright. J )

At any rate, Derek and I had been tossing ideas around, trying to find some way to put our talents together and build a new business. And one day out of the blue, I get a call from him about something I never thought I’d hear out of his mouth… ‘MLM’.

Derek had never been in an MLM before in his LIFE, he’s just always had an amazing work ethic and the sense it takes to see a business opportunity when it presents itself. And here he is, telling me about this ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’. Yeah, like I’d never heard that before. But, since it’s Derek, I’m more that willing to listen to what he’s telling me.

Derek tells me about a room-mate he had like 15 years ago who spent all day on the phone because he met this guy from Herbalife who was starting another MLM called ‘NuSkin’. Derek thought he was wasting his time, and even told him to get a ‘real job’, you know, like Derek, who was paying the rent. Well, in about 9 months, his friend was making $400,000.00 a month, and Derek made a mental note about this crazy thing called MLM… If he were ever in the ‘perfect storm’, where there was an amazing product, where he knew the founder personally, and where he could get in at the very beginning… he would jump on the opportunity (of a lifetime) with both feet.

Derek then began to tell me about another friend of his he’s known for 17 years, named Trey White. Trey, it seems, makes Derek’s financial success look impoverished. Trey, you see, is a billionaire. Founder and Chairman of Homestore.com, he merged that venture with Realtor.com which had a $10BILLION market cap. He took that fortune and started other companies like White Ventures and White Energy, investing in other companies and building the 4^th largest ethanol refining company in the country. All this to say, Trey is no dope. And as I look to Derek for business prowess, he looks to Trey.

Trey found himself investing in a group of scientists who had created something they called ‘Archaea Active’. This formula was initially created for bioremediation, that is for the environmentally friendly acceleration of clean up of oil spills. The formula basically told cells to ‘get busy’ doing what they do. One of the scientists, Dr. Gene Kaiser, found himself diagnosed with bone cancer from his exposure to radiation in WW2, and was given 6 months to live. He decided that since the formula was designed to be environmentally friendly, and since it told cells to ‘get busy doing what they do’, that drinking this formula might help his cells to fight off the cancer that was killing him.

SEVEN YEARS LATER, the scientists had tailored the formula for human consumption, and Gene Kaiser was telling this story to Trey White. Through other evidence, Trey was convinced to invest the money required to get this stuff tested at MD Anderson and Futureceuticals, so that they could have documented proof of the formula’s efficacy. They did so. http://archaeaactive.com

To make an already very long story a little shorter, Trey was convinced to take this unique product to market through direct marketing. He called upon Derek, Derek called upon me.

The perfect storm, that ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’ had arrived, and both of us jumped on it together.

That was then. This is now.

I ordered a ton of the stuff, now called ‘Evolv’ http://startevolvingnow.com . I was hoping that every single person I gave it to would have an incredible reaction, and that they would all want to sign up as a customer or in the business…

But hope and reality are almost never congruent.

The reality is that many people felt no effect from the ‘water’. In fact, on the first day of my drinking it, I struggled to notice any real change. I thought I felt a little more clear-headed and alert… but admittedly that could just be psychosomatic.

I started giving sample 4-packs to everyone who asked, and some who didn’t… lol.

Again, I got people saying they noticed nothing. To tell the truth, it was becoming disheartening.

But then there were others. Others who had vastly different reactions to the product. My manager said it gave her that clarity and alertness that I had considered only in my own mind. My friend said he was climbing the walls (but he drank it after a cup of ‘joe’). His mother didn’t even know it wasn’t just plain ol’ bottled water, and it kept her up all night after making ‘sleepytime’ tea with it. Lol.

I met a man who was so debilitated from disease that he had to have his legs amputated to keep him alive… this man basically said Evolv gave him his life back. I met another guy who was an athlete who said it gave him incredible stamina during and after his soccer matches.

I started hearing testimonials that frankly I just couldn’t post because the FDA has ridiculous rules about saying anything ‘helps’ with certain inflammatory diseases that start with a ‘C’.

Most recently, I gave Evolv to a friend with Renal Kidney failure, she said "Well I sleep a lot! I'll get up do my dialysis in the morning and go back to bed and sleep til noon.....after getting up I still feel sluggish. Drinking the Evolv I just felt more "normal" back to having the energy and motivation to want to do something. So I'd say yes I noticed a difference ..."

I’ve heard such a variety of responses to Evolv, that it boggles the mind. Clearly it can’t be psychosomatic, since even my own unborn baby boy was reacting so much to my wife drinking it, that she had to quit, because she couldn’t sleep with all the summersaults he was doing in her belly…

One of the master distributors, Jim Lutes, likes to talk about one guy who was the biggest Amway distributor ever. I forget his name… but he had over 200K people in his downline, and when asked, he said that he had only ever personally sponsored 33 people. 11 died on the vine. 11 stayed in, but never did anything more than buy product. And 11… 11 thought just like he did. That they had the opportunity of a lifetime, and that if they could just find enough people who thought like they did, they could change their lives forever.

It’s inspiring to know that you can change your life by just finding the right handful of people who think like you do about a product as amazing as this is. I’ve already found one for sure. If it takes me another 10 years to find 10 more, it’ll be worth it, but for some reason, I don’t think it’ll take me that long.

The reason people fail at any MLM is because they quit before they find enough of these like-minded people to make their business successful. They think it’s impossible to ever get to the top of the hill, and quit, sometimes just before they reach the summit…

But I always like to remind people about making the impossible possible with an old African proverb: ‘How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.’