My ambition to be an entrepreneur left little doubt about my decision to turn down a $16,000 reenlistment bonus from the Marine Corps. Short a college degree but long on determination, I figured financial planning was an appropriate field for an aspiring millionaire. I attended a civilian career day shortly before my discharge and took a psychological profile administered by Northwestern Mutual. Since my father was a career insurance agent for John Hancock, I was familiar with the business and attracted to the idea of residual income. At that time, A.L. Williams was turning the permanent life insurance industry on its ear with their, “Buy term and invest the difference” philosophy. The grass roots word-of-mouth marketing platform Art Williams employed was steamrolling across the country. Regular folks were making big bucks and I was heavily courted to join their direct sales force. Upon closer examination however, I realized that little money was being made from the sale of term insurance, but a lot more was being made from selling front-end loaded mutual funds. The biggest money however, came from override commissions on the sales of recruits in their down line organization. Having been exposed to companies like Amway and Shaklee prior to, and during my stint in the Marine Corps, I understood the principle of word-of-mouth advertising and the leverage one could gain in a multi-level-marketing (MLM) compensation model. It offered an exponential income element that you couldn’t get with a one-dimensional or linear income occupation. When I accounted for the compounding factor of three-dimensional income (i.e., income from your own sales, override income from the sales of your personal recruits, and even income from the sales of their recruits), the potential for generating colossal amounts of money was staggering!

           Theoretically, I saw the upside potential in MLM as unlimited. Practically speaking however, it was far from bulletproof. The human dynamics—individual strengths and weaknesses—are likewise unlimited. Short of cloning the right mental and emotional attributes, a human network is only as strong as its weakest link. Like in casino gambling, a lack of essential traits such as knowledge of the business, discipline, and persistence to name a few, posed the greatest challenges to succeeding long term. Never the less, A.L. Williams (which eventually sold out to Primerica) along with companies like Amway, Avon, and Mary Kay were proof-positive that ordinary people could indeed generate extraordinary incomes. Although I saw the potential for making beaucoup bucks with A.L. Williams—provided I focused my efforts on building a sales organization—I was at odds with their micro-philosophical approach to financial planning. Dogmatic and one-dimensional, “Buy term life insurance and invest the difference” was their only sales pitch, regardless of one’s financial picture. It was akin to walking into Baskin Robbins and being forced to choose chocolate among its thirty-one flavors of ice cream. Besides, I figured that if I could break into the financial planning arena and sell big-ticket, permanent life insurance, with the two-dimensional aspect of residual income from renewal commissions, I wouldn’t have to depend on others for my livelihood.

            With an ardent interest in the broader scope of financial planning, my sights were still set on Northwestern Mutual. The results of their test, however, indicated that I was not cut out for a career in sales and marketing. Granted, I would pose a challenge to even Sigmund Freud himself, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that I had the entrepreneurial bug with a latent talent for sales and marketing. Since they offered paid training, and specialized in high-end estate planning, I was disappointed but not deterred. That is why I chose, instead, to join Jefferson-Pilot Life Insurance Company that had a local office in New Bern, North Carolina.

           Little did I know that it would be a throwback to the stone ages. They were still a debit agency—meaning you were assigned a territory and physically collected life insurance premiums from policyholders every month. I was reminded of the times when, as a young child, I sometimes rode with my father as he drove around collecting premiums from his clients early in his career.

            As the new kid on the block, I was given a territory that no one else wanted, predominantly older, fixed-income African Americans—the majority of whom lived in the projects. In some cases the face values of their policies were as little as $1,000 and their premiums were just a couple of bucks. Living in a singlewide trailer with my girlfriend—the same one I met the night before my near-fatal car accident—I was painfully aware that I was just as broke as they were. I had no suits, and the only sport coat I owned was a custom-made, maroon, leather jacket I bought while deployed in South Korea. My only dress shoes were the government-issued, black leather pair I wore for graduation from boot camp that still reflected the same spit shine I had put on them for final inspection. I put the money received from selling my unused leave towards a down payment on a Ford Escort.

            Most of the people on my debit lived in hand-me-down, third and fourth generation wooden shacks with tarpaper roofs, no air-conditioning, and in a lot of cases, no mode of transportation. Although the majority of them were always short on food stamps and prescription drugs, they were never short on love and hospitality as they constantly offered me the classic southern staples: collard greens, fried okra and fresh-baked corn bread every time I came collecting. I was awestruck at not just their generosity, but by their sheer joy and undeniable love for the Lord. The one thing however, that was more important than food, medicine, and paying up their life insurance was sending the bulk of their social security check to “telemanipulators” like Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggert, and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. The fact that they would rather starve, and lapse a fifty-year-old life insurance policy, than miss a monthly covenant payment to their favorite TV evangelist was a testament to the bondage and legalism of organized religion and the persuasive power of what I refer to as Commercial Christianity.

           But at the time, I bit my lip and kept my opinion to myself. Who was I—a twenty-two year old—to tell a seventy-five year old, church-going Christian that they were being duped and manipulated into believing that a supernatural treasure chest was due to show up at their doorstep at any moment, provided they planted a big enough seed and had enough faith. Knowing those people were in the twilight of their lives, I didn’t have the heart to stick a dagger in their ill-fated belief that the more of their fixed income they sent to those spiritual spin-doctors, the more God would bless them. With so many of my clients in arrears because of financial hardships, I often paid their two and three dollar premiums out of my own pocket. Don’t get me wrong—my motive was as selfish as it was altruistic. The less time I spent collecting nickel-and-dime premiums all over town, the more time I had to prospect for bigger cases and bigger premiums.

           Not long after I started, my sales to military families began to take off and I found myself being courted by a couple of independent brokers that offered higher commissions from a potpourri of companies with a plethora of products to choose from. Giving up a guaranteed salary, a full benefits package, and personal accolades from Jefferson Pilot for straight commission contracts with multiple companies that offered better products and double commissions paid a year in advance of premiums collected, was a no-brainer. I saw it as leverage, a two-dimensional income opportunity—first year commissions and renewal commissions—in a one-man business. Sell enough permanent life insurance every year and one day I would wake up to a six-figure, residual income before I even got out of bed in the morning. That, combined with some wise investments, and I figured I would be a millionaire by the time I was forty!

           My burning ambition to hobnob with business behemoths, however, clashed with my cultural climate of living in a trailer park and having blue-collar, beer-drinking friends that lived from paycheck to paycheck. At best, they were aiming for a rosy retirement, and at worst, they were always a paycheck away from bankruptcy—not exactly an environment conducive to an aspiring millionaire. After being dumped by my girlfriend for one of those, paycheck-to-paycheck, beer-drinking types—a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush she figured—I remained in North Carolina for two years before moving back to Northern Virginia for a transient stay with my sister and her family. While waiting for North Carolina to transfer my insurance licenses to Virginia I temporarily sold home water filtration systems.

           During that time, my sister and her husband were relentlessly bombarded by Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs) who said the battle of Armageddon and the end of the world was imminent, and that the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society—their corporate headquarters located in Brooklyn, NY—was the “faithful and wise servant” mentioned in Matthew 24:45, and that they alone were the world’s sole source of God’s progressive revelation. The JWs left copies of the “Awake” and “Watchtower” magazines and then followed up with hand-written letters that were full of doom and gloom language. The letters reiterated an imminent worldwide conflagration, as well as the destruction of the earth and a majority of its population. Although I had already begun adopting a New Age, polytheistic view of a supernatural, omniscient deity while in high school and the Marine Corps, I wasn’t completely devoid of what bible knowledge I had accumulated (primarily through osmosis) while at the Christian academy and Miller School. According to the JWs, if I died right then, I wouldn’t go to Heaven or Hell. Instead, both my body and soul would be destroyed, and my spirit would return to God. I would simply go into “soul sleep”—a state of nothingness—until I was resurrected with a new body at the beginning of a utopian, millennial, earthly kingdom. Moreover, during that utopian period—according to their exegesis—cows and bears would graze together, wolves and lambs would dwell together, and children could play with Cobras and Vipers.  I would then pay obeisance to Jehovah and have eternal life beyond that millennial period or get cast into a literal lake of fire and be mercifully annihilated forever at the end of it. According to the Watchtower Society, only a select group of 144,000 JWs (anointed class), chosen before 1935 would live in Heaven and rule with Christ. The remaining population, or earthly class, would live on earth forever without ever seeing God or Christ.

            I remember thinking that these people’s elevators didn’t go all the way to the top. According to the Christian academy where I had recited the so-called, “sinners prayer” and proclaimed Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, we were saved by grace through faith in Christ alone, and not by works. Moreover, the doctrine of “eternal security,” also known as, “once saved, always saved,” meant that I had the seal of salvation, a direct pass to Heaven at the moment I took my last breath here on earth. The way I saw it, the odds were in my favor either way.

            If the Baptists were right, I was a heartbeat away from strumming my harp in Heaven until Christ corralled me for the battle of Armageddon to usher in the utopian, millennial kingdom on earth. A dispensational, premillenial view of biblical eschatology (the doctrine of end times), it was similar to the Jehovah’s Witnesses insofar as the Baptists too, postulate a future thousand-year period of a regenerated, utopian earth. Only instead of a dual class of heavenly citizenship of 144,000 spirits (“anointed class” or “little flock”) ruling with Christ in Heaven over a multitude of “human sheep” on the earth as the Watchtower Society teaches its rank-and-file followers, Christ, upon his physical and final return, would rule from a newly rebuilt temple atop Mt. Zion in Jerusalem over raised believers of all dispensations from Adam and Eve on.

           If the JW’s were right and I didn’t get baptized into their organization during this lifetime, if and when I was resurrected at the end of my period of soul sleep, I would get a second chance at eternal life. Although I might have preferred the celestial gift of a martyred Jihad terrorist—seventy-five virgins in Heaven according to Islamic extremism—an eternal, ethereal existence would have suited me just fine. Besides, as far as I can remember, I didn’t feel cold, lonely, hungry, unloved, or discontented in any way prior to my corporeal appointment on the earth. In fact, if the JWs cosmically-interpreted, apocalyptic interpretation of the book of Revelation was proven correct, and I was raised with a new body and given a second chance at eternal life on earth via a trial run before possibly being cast into a literal lake of fire, I would just as soon take a flying leap into that fire right from the beginning of my trial run before my pride would ever admit that they were right. Of course, a proper understanding of biblical hermeneutics and exegesis—discerning between literal, figurative, historical-grammatical, allegorical, metaphorical, contextual, parabolic, cultural, linguistic, symbolic, and hieroglyphic language—is always prudent.

           As is typical of all cults, including pseudo-Christian cults, the Watchtower Society shuns independent, Berean-like, critical thought and analysis of the deeper doctrines of scripture. Sadly, as it turns out, less than a year later, my sister, her husband, and their children (by default) bought into the heretical dogma . . . hook, line, and sinker. The whole family was baptized into the Watchtower Society, and became full-fledged Jehovah’s Witnesses.

            In time I learned that presiding with an iron grip over seemingly innocuous, friendly, well-groomed people who periodically show up at your door unexpectedly, was a dark, detestable, and manipulative headquarters that, comparatively speaking, made Jim Jones and David Koresh look like Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II. At least the poor people associated with Jones and Koresh mercifully died before their posterity could be born into slavery and legalism.

           Let me pontificate. Sucked into the Watchtower Society’s tangled web of deceit and deception are usually innocent and naïve people that are biblically illiterate, intellectually lazy, theologically clueless, and devoid of knowledge of ancient world history, including that of the early ecclesia (church) and the progressive discovery of ancient manuscripts resulting in more than thirty English translations of the Bible. Moreover, the majority of JWs are woefully under-educated and deterred by the Watchtower Society’s blinding propaganda from pursuing a college degree, politics, and even voting for political office. They are forbidden to join the military and do not pay homage to our country’s fallen soldiers who make it possible for them to practice their tyrannical and fallacious religion in a free society. Sadly, the majority of new converts are most likely to have recently experienced a personal crisis of some sort—making them emotionally and spiritually ripe for the picking. Not unlike the majority of Christendom, including Catholicism, Protestantism, and the Eastern Orthodox, Jehovah’s Witnesses too limit the scope of what Christ accomplished at the cross: the consummation of the new covenant with the destruction of the temple, and the end of the old covenant, Mosaic economy, and the Levitical priesthood forty years after his resurrection. The knowledge that millions of people who fell for numerous, end-of-the-world prophecy dates since the birth and inception of the radical regime started by Charles Taze Russell (which adopted the name “Jehovah’s Witnesses” in 1931), and the fact that countless, innocent children have needlessly suffered and died for being refused a desperately needed blood transfusion, makes my transfused blood boil! I may be a progressive sinner, but unlike the Watchtower Society, I am not a mass-murderer, nor an accomplice to murder by letting children needlessly die because of one organization’s erroneous interpretation of certain biblical passages. I won’t be eternally tortured, nor will I be annihilated in any physical fire for having had a blood transfusion at the time of my near-fatal car accident. If Orthodox Jews, who not only know the Pentateuch inside and out, but have lived by and adhered to all 613 mitzvahs of the Torah for over 3,500 years accept blood transfusions (Thank Yahweh) what, pray tell, does that say about the Watchtower Society leaders’ biblical hermeneutics and exegetical interpretation of the rest of scripture?

           The JWs heretical and dogmatic doctrine is furtively masked by the overtly friendly and family-like tactics it employs to lure its newest converts into its dangerous, deceitful, and all but inescapable, tangled web of deception. Friendly and family-like that is, until one discovers the real truth and leaves the cult, only to be shunned, disfellowshipped, disgraced, disowned, isolated, and made a mockery of—often to the point of committing suicide—by the very people that claimed to be their new and loving family. The Mafia is more merciful to dissenters than the JWs. At least they’ll give you a Columbian necktie or an execution-style bullet to the back of the head and put you out of your misery quickly. The JWs—ruled by a hyper-Presbyterian form of dictatorship—put you out to pasture until you repent of your God-given intellectual and reasoning skills, beg for mercy, and satisfy the punishment doled out by the governing body of elders before you can be accepted back into the sheepfold. If dissenters are not immediately embraced by either their blood family or non-judgmental people that love them unconditionally, they usually turn to drugs, alcohol, or suicide, or they go back to the sheepfold for fear of living in isolation for the rest of their lives.

           Had I only been more biblically adept at the time, perhaps I could have saved my only sibling and her family from their brainwashing bondage to corporate legalism and salvation by enslavement to the Watchtower Society. Moreover, I could have staved off the ensuing heartache and pain that was inflicted on my parents in the wake of their grandchildren’s forced adherence to a flamboyantly fallible religion and its blatant ignorance of scholarly biblical hermeneutics and sound exegesis. As it were though, what limited bible knowledge I had at that time was trumped by my ardent interest in New Age gnosticism, and of course, sexual alchemy and the correlation between sex and success. I was on a single-purpose mission to make some serious moolah, and at the time, I saw God as a supreme being, that through transcendental meditation and the manipulation of the universal laws of intention and attraction—could be turned into my very own cosmic bellboy to deliver anything I conceived and believed.

           Nine months later, I moved to Leesburg, Virginia and shared an apartment with my buddy Patrick, a friend since we were young teenagers. Still unable to start my insurance business (awaiting the transfer of my licenses), I got into new car sales. It didn’t take long before I hated selling cars with a passion. I was all for making a buck, but not at the expense of someone else’s sheer naivety and lack of knowledge. After feeling like a pawn between the customer and the real decision-maker (the manager who sat in the back) and seeing how badly people were being ripped off, I began to despise the business. The whole pitch was centered on what monthly payment they could afford: “Credit sucks, no problem. You can only afford $250 a month? We can work with that. When I’m done sticking it to you, I’ll send you over to our friendly Business Manager who will sell you paint sealant, fabric protection, and undercoating—all of which cost us a mere $60.00—for a whopping $900.00. She’ll just roll that right into the 30% interest rate she’s going to hit you with and stretch those payments out for so long, it’ll feel like a second home on wheels. Not a bad deal, huh Mr. Jones? Yes sir, by the time she gets through with you, it will make the shaft I gave you feel like little more than a slight prick.”

           After taking part in several of those deals, I snapped one day and said, “Screw this.” At $5 a pop, homeowners were getting some value for their money when I painted their address number on their curb in my high school days. But this thing about selling a car to one customer for $30,000 and the exact same car to the next customer for $25,000, just because she was a little sharper upstairs, didn’t sit right with me. My sense of morality, albeit selective, wasn’t completely bankrupt, at least not yet. So, instead of jamming the phones for new prospects and competing in the mad dash for window shoppers, I chose to outwit the dealership and my fellow salesmen by thinking my way to more sales. Since I knew the bottom line on most cars, and because of rebates and other perks the dealership received directly from the manufacturer, it made out like a fat cat regardless. The salesman’s commission however, was directly proportionate to how badly he screwed his customer.

            So, in a Robin Hood moment, I told my prospective customers right up front that if they promised to refer their family and friends to me, I would tell them what the bottom line was on any model they were interested in and which cars could literally be had for wholesale prices. At first they were a little skeptical thinking I had come up with a new and improved sales pitch until they heard me say, “I hate this job; I hate selling cars, and I’m only biding my time until I can open my insurance and securities firm. I don’t want to see you get screwed on the price, the financing, or the aftermarket package. Sure, you may walk out of here with the car you want, but the novelty of that new car smell will quickly be replaced by the reality that you’ve just been taken for a ride, and I’m not talking about a test drive.” My car sales career came to a screeching halt when a human resources manager from another location—disguised as a mystery shopper—came waltzing in one day to look at a minivan. Shocked upon hearing my verbal diatribe on how much I hated my job, she was surprisingly sympathetic. Rather than turn in a scathing report that teetered on the edge of criminal, she graciously offered me the opportunity to turn in my resignation on the spot, which I was only too happy to do.

           Once my insurance licenses were transferred, I began soliciting small businesses in Leesburg by day and prospected families by night. Trying to build an insurance and securities business in a town where you knew no one was tough going, but at least these people were far more educated and affluent than the environment I’d left in North Carolina. I reasoned that if I wanted to be a millionaire, it would help to surround myself with more affluent clientele. I also joined the Rotary Club and began playing basketball with a few of the local businessmen and attorneys in an attempt to become a part of their inner circle. Because I lacked a college education and wasn’t the progeny of a local, big-shot businessman, they had as much interest in doing business with a twenty-five year old jackstraw as they did in having an IRS tax audit. Although I appreciated what the Rotary Club stood for and their contribution to various social causes, I saw it as a tinhorn organization to which you had to conform, comply, pander, and placate before you could monetize the business connections you made through them. Their smug and pretentious attitudes didn’t bode well with my rebellious and maverick demeanor.

           Meanwhile, Patrick’s father, who owned an aircraft brokerage business where he listed and sold corporate jets, offered me a sales job. As teenagers, we thought it was cool that his dad got to fly with corporate CEOs and celebrities on private jets like Gulfstreams and Challengers. At the time, he was at the vanguard of an up-and-coming industry (private jet brokerage) when there wasn’t much competition and he was raking in the dough . . . big time! Similar to real estate, you made money on both listings and sales. On the right jet, it wasn’t unusual to make a million bucks if you had both sides of a deal or owned the aircraft outright. Since I couldn’t bring myself to kiss up to the Leesburg elite, the lure of flying around the country rubbing elbows with corporate bigwigs while sitting on lambskin leather seats and a decked out cabin certainly had its appeal. Although jet sales offered no residual income component, the possibility of five and six figure commissions on one deal was a satisfactory compromise. Besides, I wouldn’t be bombarded with the same old cliché, “I’m insurance poor and can’t afford anything.” When someone test flies a private jet, financially qualifying them is a moot point.

           One day as I was attempting to get a listing on an old Hawker 600, I found myself on a business trip to Las Vegas. Financially destitute, I barely had enough cash to cover my expenses, much less gamble. Never the less, the call of the casinos was too strong to ignore. Even though this was my first encounter since the Marine Corps, the same feeling of euphoria that overwhelmed me in the Bahamas, overwhelmed me in Vegas too, as I was once again united with a temple of temptation. Only instead of playing roulette or black jack, I was captivated by the fast-moving action of the craps table. After a brief observation of the game, I was immediately drawn to the one distinct, but superior advantage it appeared to have over every other game in the house . . . leverage.

           For example, at a $10,000 maximum-bet black jack or baccarat table, the most I could keep doubling a winning hand with a starting bankroll of $100 was seven times before I would exceed the table maximum. Assuming a streak of eight or more winning hands, I would be at the maximum bet limit. At a $10,000 maximum-bet craps table, assuming a long roll before the seven appeared, I could theoretically parlay a $100 bankroll into over $150,000—fifteen times the leverage of black jack or baccarat. After I observed the game for a while, I pulled out two hundred bucks and began playing. Sticking to the pass line with occasional place bets on the six and eight, I parlayed my two hundred bucks into two grand in just a few hours. Like love at first sight, I fell for the game—hook, line, and sinker. Although I was still ten years away from making it a multi-million dollar habit, I became obsessed with craps from that point on.

           Atlantic City, only a five-hour drive from Leesburg, was where I began to study the game more intensely, including the odds and probabilities of each number and the various betting strategies I could employ depending on my win goals. I drove there on several occasions, often with just a hundred dollar bankroll and easily parlayed it into a thousand bucks. Developing a magnetic-like affinity for craps was easy when I was accustomed to winning far more times than losing, especially five to ten baggers on a regular basis.

           I was in the private jet business for a year before a combination of factors led to a mutual parting of the ways e.g., my disdain for the way my boss treated his own son, the power he wielded over every deal, and a deep desire to regain my sovereignty. Similar to the car business, if there wasn’t enough fat in it for the firm, he nixed the deal no matter how much work and effort you put into it. That kind of latitude is great when you’re already sitting on a pile of money, but, when your salesman doesn’t have a pot to pee in, a hundred thousand dollar deal for the firm and fifteen grand for the salesman, I saw as a win win. Even more frustrating was putting together a deal that would take months to culminate, only to have it rejected for a potentially higher offer down the road. When a lesser offer by a different salesman on the same plane was accepted six months later, that just added insult to injury. The mounting tension came to a boiling point one day when he openly vilified his son during a staff meeting. In a Hitler-like moment, the half German in me unleashed a fury of anger and I told him what I thought about him and the way he’s treated his son ever since we were kids. Needless to say, I was out of a job. But it was worth every expletive that spewed out of my mouth. Besides, I believe it served as a catalyst for Patrick to stand up to his father once and for all and start his own firm several years later.

           I flirted with the idea of staying in the private jet brokerage business and was courted by firms in Chicago and Raleigh. Although they were both phenomenal opportunities with a realistic shot at earning multiple six figures a year, not to mention the prestige that came with the territory, I opted for autonomy and sovereignty over opportunity and conformity. It took a lot of guts, but that was the point in my life at which I made a covenant agreement with myself that come hell or high water, for richer or for poorer, no matter the circumstances, I would never make a career out of working for someone else for the rest of my life. Sink or swim, there would be nobody to blame but me. My abusive early childhood and subsequent repressive upbringing caused the virtue of freedom to transform from an American ideal to a personal principle for the rest of my life. So, I went back to financial planning.

           I rented an office from a local attorney in Old Town Leesburg and called my firm Lehmann & Associates. However, there were no associates until my wife, an Ohioan who I met while working in the jet brokerage business, quit her job and joined me full time. I was back to cold calling on businesses by day, and canvassing families by night. Struggling to survive, I delivered Domino’s pizzas part time to bring in some desperately needed cash. The fear of delivering a pizza to one of my own clients constantly plagued me. Here I was playing financial planner by day and Dominos Pizza deliveryman by night. Unfortunately, that fear was finally realized when I had a delivery to an upper class house that was owned by a local businessman to whom I had sold a group health insurance plan. Talk about embarrassing, when he opened the door and saw me his comment was, “Wow, you’re quite the entrepreneur, financial planning by day and pizza delivery by night. Just a few months earlier and he could have thrown in private jet sales, too.

           “Well, not exactly,” I hesitated, as I conjured up a cockamamie story. “You see a friend of mine owns it and he had a slew of drivers call in sick. You know how it is on Friday nights; people get home from a hard week’s work and they just wanna kick back, relax, and order a pizza for dinner. So, he asked me if I could help him out in a pinch since he was low on drivers tonight.”

           “Oh, I see,” he said, with a curious look on his face.

           I was living by the proverbial motto, “Fake it till you make it!” the whole while thinking, Please don’t stiff me man . . . if you only knew how broke I really am.

           That was the most embarrassing moment of my professional career until I topped it with a near tragic disaster only three days later. I handed a customer his pizza when he abruptly asked, “How did you get here?”

           Puzzled, I said, “What do you mean?”

           “How did you get to my house without a car?”

           I turned around and sure enough, it was gone. My first thought was, who in the hell would want to steal a beat up Ford Escort, especially with a Dominos sign strapped across the roof? Just then, we both looked down the street and there it was picking up steam as it rolled toward the end of the cul-de-sac.

           “Oh Shit!” I yelled, as my eyeballs popped out of their sockets. The handbrake had failed from being overused, and the street had a slight grade. I envisioned the next day’s Loudon Times headline: Run Away Pizza Car Mows Down Child! Subtitle: “Local Insurance Broker Moonlighting for Domino’s Pizza was Uninsured!” I watched it roll all the way down the cul-de-sac, jump the curb, and come to a stop right in front of a bay window where a family of four was eating dinner.

            “Damn, you are one lucky guy,” my customer said as he stood there clutching his pizza. I couldn’t believe it; here I was in the insurance business with a car that had no insurance on it, yet I miraculously avoided a career-ending disaster.

            After that incident, I gave up delivering pizzas to focus solely on my firm. Because estate planning usually involved retired, affluent prospects with big assets that required various trusts, annuities, and high-premium survivorship life insurance, it was a tough market for a young gun to break into. The generation gap left little commonality on which to build rapport and gain their trust. Besides, at that age, they were already inclined to have a bundle of good-ole-boy financial advisors that they had developed relationships with over the years. So, I chose to hone in on the family market instead, with an emphasis on life insurance and disability protection in the event of an untimely death or accident of the breadwinner. Most working families around the beltway had two incomes with both husband and wife holding down good paying jobs. The only problem was that regardless of how much income they earned they were always strapped. The more they made the more expenses they incurred and the less disposable income they had to put towards a long-term financial plan. It was a catch-22. In addition to advising them on their insurance and investment needs, I often found myself encouraging prospects and clients to turn their various hobbies and latent talents into a home-based business to generate the added income they needed to adequately fund their insurance and retirement needs. If they had a propensity toward entrepreneurship but lacked an inherent talent or skill of their own, I suggested Multi-Level / Network Marketing since the startup costs were negligible and they could generate passive, residual income.

            Since the big money was in permanent life insurance, I was pushing: Whole life, Universal, and Variable Life. The antithesis to permanent life insurance was of course to buy term and invest the difference, a philosophy that catapulted Art Williams to the Billionaire Club. Although I agreed in principle with his philosophy, I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Because my income was dependent on my own sales, and the fact that I had commission contracts that required a certain amount of production to maintain, I had no choice but to sell permanent life insurance. I was now confronted with two major hurdles:

           1. Regardless of how much money two-income families were making, because they were always overextended, they couldn’t afford much premium.

            2. Because of the blitzkrieg of A.L. Williams’ foot soldiers that had people replacing their existing permanent life insurance for term and self-allocated investments, permanent life insurance was rapidly falling out of vogue.

            Although I was working towards my CFP (Certified Financial Planner) and CHFC (Chartered Financial Consultant) designations and had completed several financial planning courses that emphasized the importance of permanent life insurance, I disagreed in principle with many of their mathematical theorems. Antiquated and ambiguous, their long-term projection models were as bullet proof as Saran Wrap. Too many variables like inflation, life expectancy, lost opportunity costs, and future tax law changes made them dubious in my book. However, having the “CFP” and “CHFC” designations were akin to accountants having the “CPA” designation. It delineated you from the run-of-the-mill financial advisor and garnered more respect from attorneys and CPA’s. So, staring me right in the face was a financial, philosophical, and moral conflict. If I was going to continue to sell high premium, high commission, permanent life insurance, I needed to be driven by more than just commissions. My passion, zeal, and enthusiasm for pushing big commission life insurance was fading in the wake of my own analysis and increasing moral dilemma. At the same token, my office overhead was about $5,000 a month. To add insult to injury, my only source of transportation, my Ford Escort, was finally laid to rest. Like the little engine that could, he pulled his weight and then some. The stop and go of collecting insurance premiums in New Bern, NC, and the long distance treks between Virginia and Ohio to see my future wife really put a stress on him. The final dagger though was pizza delivery duty. God rest your soul little fella.

            Since my apartment was close to my office, I hoofed it for a couple of weeks until I picked up a Plymouth Volare.  Except this thing was a far cry from the new Volare’s Ricardo Montalban of Fantasy Island used to sing about on TV. Oh no, this was more like something Redd Foxx of, “Sanford and Son” would drive. It was a 1972 and belonged to a client who lived close by. I happened to be at his house when he asked his wife what day the junkyard was coming to pick it up. With a blown head gasket, bad piston rings, bald tires, and a cracked windshield that leaked every time it rained, the car couldn’t come anywhere close to passing Virginia inspection. Moreover, the paint had literally evaporated and the entire body was covered in rust. What was left of the red vinyl roof was dry-rotted and dilapidated. Unaware of the fact that my Escort had died and that I couldn’t change a light bulb, much less change an oil filter, I said, “You know Roger, I’ve had a hankering to get my hands on an old clunker that I could just tinker with from time to time—maybe use it as a second vehicle down the road. Why don’t you let me take it off of your hands?”

            “Oh trust me Kevin, you don’t want this car,” he said, as if to save me from a major headache. “The junkyard is paying me $50.00 to scrap it.”

            “Let me pay you,” I told him. “It’ll be good to get greasy for a change.”

            “Alright, if you really want it, but I’m warning you, it’s a real piece of shit. I wouldn’t put another dime in it if I were you.”

            Little did he know . . . neither would I.

            The Volare reminded me of my very first car in the Marine Corps, a black 1968 Dodge Coronet with a 440 magnum, two big rebel stickers, and a riveted hood scoop. Everything about that car was a piece of junk, everything that is but the sound of the engine. Two weeks after I bought it, my buddy Bob and I drove it home to Alexandria, Virginia from Cherry Point, North Carolina on a 96 hour pass. On the way back, we were going through Goldsboro, North Carolina when we pulled over to pick up a hitchhiker. When Bob asked him where he was headed, he hesitated for a second, took a panoramic view of the car, and asked, “What is this thing?”

            “Well considering what you were driving, it’s a fucking limousine,” Bob replied.

            Wearing tennis shoes with black polyester pants and a bright yellow shirt, the hitchhiker was a spitting image of Pee Wee Herman.

            “I don’t want any trouble guys,” he said in a squeaky voice.

            Being two young jarheads with high and tight haircuts wearing civilian clothes and driving a black car with rebel stickers, he thought we were local rednecks. “We won’t give you any trouble; we’re Marines headed for Cherry Point,” I told him.

            “How far you going Pee Wee,” Bob asked him,

            “Morehead City.”

            “Well, this is your lucky day. Hop in; we’ll get you all the way to Havelock.”

            About twenty minutes later the engine started knocking and smoke began coming through the ventilation system. Knowing the car was on its last leg, Bob and I ignored it for as long as we could. But, when the smoke turned dark grey, things started deteriorating in a hurry. Looking in the rearview mirror, I saw Pee Wee trying hard not to say anything as he pulled his shirt over his face to keep from inhaling the smoke. His eyes turned bloodshot red from all the soot, and tears started flowing down his cheeks.

            “Guys I think the car is on fire,” he said in a panic.

            Bob, who was fanning the smoke out of his window said, “Chill out Pee Wee, we’re just leaking some oil, we’ll be fine.”

            Just a few miles later, hot oil started shooting out of the dash. When I looked in the rearview mirror again, there was Pee Wee hunched over with his head between his legs like he was assuming the crash position on a commercial jet.

            “Guys, can you just drop me off,” he pleaded, as he hacked and gagged from all the smoke.

            “Oh suck it up Pee Wee,” Bob—whose face was splattered with motor oil—told him.

            “It’s a free ride, what did you expect?”

            Just then, Pee Wee sat up and screamed, “Let me out of this car, right now!”

            “You fucking pussy; you get a free ride and this is how you thank us,” Bob yelled, as Pee Wee got out of the car.

            “Look at me!” Pee Wee snapped back in a high-pitched frenzy. “My clothes are ruined, I can’t breathe, and I’m drenched in motor oil!”

            “Yeah, but look at how much closer you are to Morehead City; later Pee Wee,” Bob quipped.

            We got a few more miles before I couldn’t see a thing and was forced to hit a service station. The mechanic told me the head was cracked and that the engine didn’t have a lick of oil in it. “Damn, we need to get to Cherry Point by tonight, is there anything you can do?” I asked.

            “I can silicone the crack, fill her up with oil, and see how far you can get. I don’t think you boys can make it to Cherry Point, but it might get you another fifty miles.”

            “How much?” I inquired.

            “Well, it’s about two hours of labor plus the oil; let’s call it a hundred bucks.”

            “Deal.”

            Two hours later we were on the road again. About ten miles down, we came up on another hitchhiker and pulled over to give him a ride. When Bob rolled down his window, I heard, “Pee Wee, what’s up my man…long time no see. Hop in buddy, we got her fixed up about ten miles back.”

            “No thanks, I think I’ll pass.”

            “Did you walk all this way Pee Wee?”

            “My name’s not Pee Wee!” he shouted, “and yes, I did walk all this way.”

            “Well what is your name?” Bob inquired.

            “Aaron.”

            “Aaron! Damn, if I were you, I would stick to Pee Wee. Hop in Aaron…we don’t have all day.”

            “No, really, I’ll catch the next ride.” he insisted.

            “Suit yourself,” Bob said, as I punched the gas and sprayed Pee Wee with a little roadside gravel.

            The next thirty miles were pretty smooth sailing, not even a whiff of oil or smoke. That was until mile thirty-one. From that point on, it was hell on wheels. Not only was smoke filling up the cabin faster than we could fan it out; it got so hot the dashboard was literally melting and the entire car felt like a raging inferno.  Then right at fifty miles, as if the mechanic was psychic…Ka-Boom! That was all she wrote. The engine exploded and blew the hood right off its hinges. Abandoning ship, we grabbed our duffle bags and started walking down the highway. Thumbing ourselves, we heard a voice from a passing car shout, “Assholes!” We turned around and there was an El Camino flying down the highway and Pee Wee was sitting with his back against the cab flipping us not just one, but a two-fisted birdie.

            Dumbfounded, Bob said, “I think Pee Wee turned into a man today.”

            “Yep . . . ” I sighed, “I think you’re right.”

            Compared to the junkyard Volare I was about to buy, Bob was right, that rebel-stickered Coronet was a limousine. But, with no other options I gave Roger the $50.00 and drove it for a whole year.

            My car dilemma resolved; it did nothing for my financial and philosophical conflict. The average monthly premium on the family life insurance plans I was selling was about $100. With a 100% commission on the first year’s premium—paid in advance—trading a $100 first month’s premium for a $1,200 commission check from the insurance company was a good deal, provided the policy didn’t lapse in the next twelve months. Insurance company actuaries are the real “Brainiacs” of numbers crunching. They’re the mathematicians who calculate insurance risks and premiums, and how much commission a company can shell out to the agent up front and long term and still stay in business. I needed one sale a week just to meet my overhead. To meet my short-term goal of earning $240,000 a year, I had to either increase my sales four-fold, or increase my average premium four-fold. Preferring to work four times smarter than harder, I opted for the latter. Only, in figuring out how to quadruple my average sale, I was having a crisis of conscience over my philosophical beliefs, and whether selling life insurance and investments was what I even wanted to do for a career. After all, on the totem pole of public opinion, life insurance salesmen ranked about as high as used car salesmen. No matter the credentials or specialized knowledge, I didn’t know if I could overcome the stigma of a “snake oil salesman.” Not to mention, $400 a month was a lot of money for a working family to put into life insurance whether you made $50,000 a year or $500,000 a year. Moreover, if I wanted to become a millionaire, even with renewal commissions, I was going to have to sell a hell of a lot of life insurance, or recruit a lot of agents and build a big agency.

            During that same time, I was being inundated with various MLM opportunities—Direct sales people are always at the top of an MLM distributors’ prospecting list. Ironically, I had found myself recommending MLM as a viable and cost effective way to start a home-based business to many of my prospects and clients, just so they could generate the extra income needed to fund their insurance and investments. In addition, I found myself explaining the finer points of the various compensation plans to the very people that were pitching me with those opportunities. I thought it strange that they could make a life changing decision to represent a company and its products with such zeal and passion, yet not thoroughly understand the most critical component . . . how you got paid. Direct marketing companies that employ multi-level pay plans often shroud them in baffling and tenebrous language. The product, they hope, will generate enough emotional fervor to overcome a less than brilliant compensation plan.

            One company, NSA, was going gangbusters selling their sink-top charcoal water filters all over the country. At the insistence of someone that was trying to recruit me, my friend Patrick and I attended a business opportunity meeting in Tysons Corner, Virginia. Since I previously sold water filtration systems for entire homes, I was curious to see what all the hype was about. Beyond the emotionally charged atmosphere with testimony after testimony of people whose lives were changed as a result of getting involved in the business, I saw it as nothing but a cumbersome direct sales business that required a lot of hands-on demonstrations. Even so, people were plopping down ten thousand dollars or more to qualify at the upper echelon of the compensation plan, and stuffing their garages with cases of water filters that they hoped to sell at some point in the future. Although a lot of sizzle was created at the meeting, after a cursory review of the distributors’ pay plan, I saw that it was the corporate coffers, not the distributors’ pockets that stood to make the greatest windfall. However, their claim to steal the lion’s share of the up and coming bottled water industry, coupled with the emotionally charged atmosphere, had people lining up in droves to get started in their new water filter business.

            Heading back to Leesburg that same night, I was riding shotgun in Patrick’s Mustang when we came to a stoplight on Route 7. Other than the ambient light from surrounding businesses, it was dark outside. When the traffic light turned green, the car stalled as Patrick accelerated. He tried cranking the ignition several times, but to no avail. The lanes on either side of us were free of any traffic with only one set of headlights a good distance back. I unlatched my seatbelt, and just as I was about to get out of the car, I looked back a second time and that same set of headlights was barreling down on us like a speeding freight train. Before I could even turn around . . . Bam! We were hit so hard, the impact knocked us about forty feet forward and we turned around. Patrick was knocked unconscious and I was pinned between the seat and the dash. The back half of the car was smashed all the way to the front seats, and all the glass shattered into tiny chards. As I tried in vain to pry my door open, fluids were spraying everywhere. Thinking the car could blow at any moment, I was in a hurry to get the hell out of it. “Stay cool Kevin,” I kept telling myself, as I tried in vain to open the doors. After freeing my legs, which were winched between the seat and the dash, I kicked the driver’s door open and dragged Patrick—unconscious and hunched over the steering wheel—out of the car. Before I knew it, an ambulance arrived and took us to the hospital. After x-rays from the chest up, Patrick was diagnosed with a concussion, and other than whiplash and a bump on my forehead from smacking the dashboard, I was given a clean bill of health.

            When I woke up the next day, my forehead was black and blue and I couldn’t move my neck. At the insistence of my wife and friends, I was immediately taken to an orthopedic surgeon. “Your neck is fractured,” he declared, before he even ordered x-rays. “Do you know how perilously close you are to being paralyzed,” he asked me after analyzing the MRI. “No sir, I don’t.” I replied. “One quick jerk or twist of your neck is all it would take. Your C-4 and C-5 vertebra are fractured. They’re non displaced fractures, but one sudden move could change that in a heartbeat.” When I asked him about the negative hospital x-rays from the night before, he said severe swelling of the neck muscles can obstruct the view of fractures. I wore a neck brace for two months and went through physical therapy, but that was a cakewalk compared to what I had gone through in my first car accident. Although I made a conscious decision at that point to stay clear of Mustangs for the rest of my life, it didn’t deter me from driving my convertible Porsche 911 twin turbo, Vector M-12, and modified Ferrari Modena at pardon the pun, “breakneck” speeds in the future.

            Before confronting my financial crisis and the philosophical conflict I was having over pushing permanent life insurance, just like I had done after my car accident in the Marine Corps, I used my convalescent time to delve further into my books and audios on New Age thought. I had also studied Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and was intrigued by the almost hypnotic methods it employed, and its application to the direct sales profession. Repudiated by standard psychology as pseudoscientific, Tony Robbins succeeded at bringing the relatively obscure New Age psychotherapy to the business arena. Coupled with my profound interest in the ancient eastern practice of sex transmutation, NLP was the perfect complement to my pluralistic spiritual view. I saw it as a psychological language that, if applied with subtlety, could transcend verbal communication and consummate the sale in speedier fashion. From a business point of view, it was all about efficiency. Intellectually or spiritually, I looked for any advantage I could get.

            Lying in bed one day, I strummed through trade publications and came across an unusual advertisement. It was an out of the box financial planning philosophy that showcased permanent life insurance as the “be all/end all” of a long-term, comprehensive financial strategy. Moreover, it slammed term insurance, and in a head to head comparison (incorporating one’s other savings and investments) it claimed that permanent life insurance was not only superior to term, but far more lucrative in the long run. Furthermore, as a result of applying this revolutionary theory to financial planning, it stated that the average insurance agent’s premium and income would increase fourfold. “Bull’s-eye!” That was just the statement I needed to read. Two months later I attended his seminar. A macroeconomic philosophy that defied linear thinking, this guy wasn’t just blowing holes in the “buy term and invest the difference” movement, he was flat out obliterating it. When it came to investment portfolio management, asset allocation, and tax planning, his theory required more than just thinking outside the box; it required a complete paradigm shift in ones microeconomic view, particularly of compounded interest and the implications of its arch nemesis, compounded tax. In short, using permanent life insurance at its core, the theory integrated certain financial vehicles that kept your money in motion, simultaneously maximizing tax deferred products while minimizing longterm, compounded tax liability. Dissenting from typical financial philosophers who were still stuck in the antiquated “needs analysis” approach his macroeconomic philosophy was not only ahead of its time, it was sheer genius. Although I really couldn’t afford it, I paid the exorbitant license fee and brought home a box full of manuals and videotapes to learn his anomalous, but bulletproof blueprint to sell a lot more life insurance and earn a lot more money. Motivated by profit over prestige, I quit my CFP and CHFC courses cold turkey and wholeheartedly engrossed myself in studying his controversial, macroeconomic financial planning theory.

            As I studied and assimilated all the material, I continued prospecting young families and made little bread and butter sales to keep cash flow coming in until I mastered my new strategy to make the big sales. During that time however, a gentleman who had pitched me on MLM opportunities in the past stopped by my office again. I had told him previously that if he ever presented me with a product and opportunity that

            1. I could seamlessly integrate into my existing financial planning business and

            2. I could present to clients where we both benefited, I would seriously consider it.

            When he presented me with a low-cost, discount buying club called Consumers Buyline, or CBI for short, where you were guaranteed to save money on almost any consumer purchase by simply calling 800#’s and having the product shipped to your door, I joined. I saw it as a logical adjunct that I could weave right into my wealth accumulation philosophy. Making money showing people how to save money that freed up money to invest money was a no-brainer. At only $19.00 a month, with a portion of that fee paid out in the form of commissions on the third, sixth, and ninth levels of a 2×9 matrix (you enroll two, who in turn enroll two, to the ninth power), it was the perfect fit for my prospects that needed to generate more income to fund an insurance and retirement plan, and for existing clients that could use the tax deductions that came with owning a home based business. On the totem pole of public opinion the MLM/Network Marketing profession didn’t rank any higher than insurance and car salesmen, but that didn’t deter me from recognizing its intrinsic value. Besides, most of the critics and pundits who publish scathing reports about the profession lack the balls to debate their spurious arguments in a public forum. They’re usually book smart but clueless corporate bureaucrats or former MLM failures that blame everything and everyone but the person in the mirror. They then write bogus diatribes that denigrate the profession and the hard working entrepreneurs striving to achieve their dreams through a legitimate network marketing company.

            CBI was an anomaly in that, unlike most MLM companies that are driven by the latest juice, potion, lotion, or fad product, the hyperbole and excitement surrounding CBI was over its founder’s alleged genius I.Q. Immediately exulted as a messiah of sorts, I was amazed at the hypnotic-like influence he had on people and their blinding willingness to follow him off a cliff. Knowing it was just a matter of time before reality set in, as an opportunist, I rode that psychological tsunami for all its worth and began enrolling a lot of people into the program. Since you could only enroll a maximum of two customers on your first level, any additional people you enrolled spilled over to your subsequent levels, which helped the two customers immediately below you. I figured if everyone just enrolled their two customers in a week; in nine weeks my 2×9 matrix would be filled with just over a thousand customers in my organization. Based on the pay plan, at that point I would be earning an extra $5,000 a month. If anyone enrolled more than two, including myself, that would just speed up the process. Over the next few months, I struggled to focus on Lehmann & Associates as the momentum was clearly on the side of my CBI business. Before I knew it, I was holding small meetings right in my office that quickly mushroomed into large-scale business opportunity meetings in hotels just like the NSA meeting I had attended with my buddy Patrick. Embarrassed at the sight of my junkyard Volare, I always parked it a block away so nobody could see how broke I really was.

            Major hurdles arose however, as my organization grew into hundreds and then thousands of people. If not for consistently being one of the top five distributors that shared in a (top recruiters) monthly bonus pool, at only $19.00 a month, I would have starved to death waiting for my pay levels i.e., 3, 6, and 9 to fill in. Although I was personally able to enroll ten to twenty new members a month, I was frustrated at the lack of desire and duplication on the part of my organization. Training sessions quickly turned into handholding, babysitting, and motivational pep talks. Compounding the problem was the fact that I had plenty of sales skills, but little marketing or management experience, and the majority of people I was enrolling had even less.

            CBI, challenged by growing pains, inept management, and legal issues from regulatory agencies and various Attorneys General, exacerbated the problem even further by constantly being late on commission checks and grossly underpaying people. Before I knew it, my 2×9 matrix looked like a pyramid of Swiss cheese as I tried in vain to plug the holes created by previous members dropping out faster than new members were coming in. I found myself on the proverbial treadmill to nowhere. Frustrated, I threatened the home office to get their act together and start paying distributors accurately and on time, or I was dropping out and recommending a competing company to my organization.

            The founder, Keith Raniere, a self-proclaimed, child prodigy and member of the Mensa Society, who claimed to have one of the highest IQs in the world, got on the phone and assured me that they were correcting the bottleneck at the home office. “Sit tight Kevin,” he told me. “We’re working out logistical problems and transferring everything to our Vax computers. We’ll correct all the pay discrepancies and cut additional checks for the imbalances in the next couple of weeks.”

            “For a guy that understood quantum physics by the age of 4, has an IQ that rivals Marilyn Vos Savant (the columnist for Parade magazine) and learned four years of college mathematics as a 13 year old in just a few weeks,” I said to him, “You of all people should know how to accurately calculate commissions.”

            “It will all get sorted out,” he assured me.

            I continued in good faith after that conversation, and held more business opportunity meetings, but the only new faces showing up were those that I personally invited. Others in my organization complained that they didn’t know how to prospect and couldn’t get their inner circle of contacts to come to the meetings.

            Then, while reading the USA Today one morning, I responded to an ad that read, “Free Brochure, how to generate passive income from your own home based, MLM/Network Marketing business.” Intrigued, I called and left my address and phone number, and received the brochure in a few days. A week later, I got a phone call.

            “Hello, this is Bernie calling from Colorado, did you receive your free brochure?” He then went on to explain that he was in Watkins, a 140-year-old company that sold gourmet spices and personal care products.

            When I told him I wasn’t interested since I was already in CBI, he asked, “What are you doing to generate leads?”

            “Oh, that’s not a problem for me. I have a financial planning business with plenty of clients and prospects to call on. Besides, I’m used to cold calling on strangers if I have to. The problem is, I’ve got hundreds of people in my organization belly aching and whining about not having enough prospects, and they’re blowing sales presentations on the few that they do have. I feel like a babysitter, schoolteacher, drill instructor, and personal coach wrapped up in one. By the way, how did you get my name and number?”

            “I subscribe to a lead company called Ad-Net that sends out the brochure you received to people that respond to their local radio advertising and USA Today ads.”

            “Yeah, that’s what I responded to,” I told him.

            “It’s only $39.00 a month and you get thirty names of people like yourself that ordered the brochure which, as you see, extols the benefits of owning a home based, multilevel marketing business. The best part is that Ad-Net too is multilevel and pays commissions through five levels with a $15.00 commission on your third level subscribers.”

            Bingo! Just like the cash for cleavage shops in Korea where my mind calculated the numbers faster than a Casio calculator, I could see the compounded, trickledown effect this could have by integrating it into my CBI organization. Ad-Net could keep people from chasing their friends and family and focus on legitimate prospects that have a sincere interest in looking at home based business opportunities. My organization could then focus their energy on presentation skills—albeit on the telephone to strangers located all across the country—and practice their closing techniques. I on the other hand could seamlessly integrate another income source as a result of helping my organization build their respective downlines by enrolling them into Ad-Net, which should theoretically increase my CBI income.

            Similar to the new macroeconomic, financial planning philosophy I was still studying, the synergistic effect of integrating a complimentary program that also paid multilevel commissions gave me more leverage and compounded my income. “I’m signing up right now,” I told him.

            “Oh great, I’ll put you on my third level,” he quickly stated.

            Ad-Net too, incorporated a simple matrix pay plan, only instead of a 2×9 like CBI, it was a 7×5 that paid a commission on all five levels; the bulk of it, $15.00, on the third level.

            “Are you sure you want to put me on your third level?” I asked him.

            “It’ll help a guy I have on my second level, and with the added $15.00 I make from your $39.00 monthly fee, I’ll break even,” he replied.

            “Yeah, but if I go crazy enrolling people into this thing your fourth and fifth level won’t pay you that much. If I were you, I would put me on your first level. Exponentially, you have a far greater chance at making a lot more money,” I told him.

            “I only have one spot left on my first level,” he replied, “and I’m saving it for a heavy hitter.”

            “How many people do you have in your group,” I asked him.

            “I have six members in Ad-Net and thirty customers in Watkins so far.”

            “Bernie, if you put me on your third level, because this thing is a closed matrix and the commission on the fourth and fifth level is a pittance, the highest number of people in my group that you could benefit by is 56; 7 on my first level, a part of your fourth level, and 49 on my second level, a part of your fifth level. The most you could ever earn off of my group is about $200.00 a month. Put me on your first level and at least you have the potential to generate a couple of thousand bucks a month in the long run.”

            “Yeah, but I could really use the $15.00 right now to break even on the $39.00 it’s costing me.

            “I understand, but trust me; put me on your first level. If you’re not breaking even by next month, I’ll pay you the difference. I just don’t want to see you short change yourself by a potential couple of thousand dollars in monthly commissions just to pocket a measly $15.00 right now in order to break even. A few months from now you could be kicking yourself in the ass when the guy you stick me under is making a couple of grand, and you’re making less than $200.00 because you went for the quick $15.00.”

            “Do you think you can enroll that many,” he asked enthusiastically. “I’m not making any promises, but I am definitely going to push it through my organization.”

            “Okay, I’ll take your word for it.”

            “By the way, how many people are in Ad-Net?” I inquired.

            “About two hundred,” he replied.

            “Not for long,” I told him, before I hung up the phone.

           Meanwhile, after a year of intensive study and working through hypothetical, makeshift cases, I was ready to put my newly acquired, macroeconomic financial planning theory into real life practice.

            In preparation for my first appointment with a real prospect, I listened to “Lead the Field” by Earl Nightingale, a former Marine turned legendary motivational speaker. A few weeks earlier I had read, “How to be a No Limit Person,” my second book by Dr Wayne Dyer. He seemed to have a knack for simplifying the fusion of ancient Eastern mysticism with Western thought. Co-creating my internal thoughts and beliefs in unison with universal laws to manifest my physical and material desires had continued to be an obsession ever since I had studied Emanuel Swedenborg, H.P. Blavatsky, P.P. Quimby, Wallace Wattles, Mary Baker Eddy, Charles Fillmore, Norman Vincent Peale and Napoleon Hill in my high school and Marine Corps days.

            My first prospect was a man that only earned $45,000 a year, had both tax-deferred and taxable savings and investment accounts and term life insurance that cost him around $20.00 a month. After a series of appointments, including one with his accountant, the final outcome resulted in his shifting some money out of compounded interest accounts into flat interest vehicles to avoid the long term compounded tax liability, which when adjusted for inflation and the lost opportunity cost on the tax he was throwing away each year that could have been growing in a tax-deferred, compounded interest vehicle, literally eroded the hypothetical nest egg he anticipated at the age of 65. The complexity of the plan, for the sake of brevity, I will refrain from getting into other than to say that it included borrowing interest free, tax-deferred cash accumulation from a lump sum, participating whole life policy with a mutual company to pump money into other debt and equity instruments, and constantly keep your money in motion. That was the long and the short of it. Most importantly, it resulted in the sale of a whole life policy with a $420.00 monthly premium. When I received a $5,000 commission check two weeks later, it felt like hitting the lottery—just in the nick of time. I was behind in the rent on both the office and the apartment, and what money I was making from CBI went towards taking care of the bare essentials to support my wife and son.

            For the next six months, I performed a delicate balancing act between growing my CBI organization, and building my financial planning business. Although my cases had increased in size, they were fewer in number and took longer to close. Moreover, I found myself defending my comprehensive, macroeconomic, financial planning strategies from attacks by my client’s CPA’s, and other financial advisors. Incapable of refuting a financial model based on sound mathematical principles, they would usually resort to their social status as a CPA, CFA, or CFP to justify their inferior, counter strategy. And to the detriment of my clients’ longterm financial security—more times than not, it worked. Critical thought I had discovered at an early age often requires a fundamental shift in one’s wrongly held but deeply rooted beliefs and convictions, and it is usually overridden by the emotional stranglehold those beliefs and convictions have on a person. Tradition, I witnessed was more palpable than truth, and feelings more favorable than facts. Nowhere, though, did I find that to be more evident and more damaging than in the ruse of religion. In addition to the pure pandemonium that would consume my social life in the near future, the impending spiritual, philosophical, and theological journey would prove just as bizarre. Lest I should get the cart before the horse, we’ll open that Pandora’s Box soon enough.

            Building CBI and Lehmann & Associates concurrently, I knew I couldn’t serve two masters and expect to reach the pinnacle of success at either one. An imminent decision between the two had to be made. Although joining Ad-Net and infusing my CBI organization with a steady stream of leads helped, it was far from the panacea I needed to get my organization and income to the highest level. Plagued by a multitude of issues, including a lack of direct marketing experience, I intuitively knew my CBI business would require a full-time, hands-on, systemic solution if I was to make a multiple six figure a year income through it. Insurance and financial planning—while not as exciting as empowering ordinary people to achieve extraordinary success through a home based business—were, nonetheless, my bread and butter. The lure of a three dimensional, exponential income opportunity and the leverage I could get with Network Marketing was more than I could ignore. Unlike the two dimensional aspects of first year commissions, and subsequent renewal commissions in the financial planning profession, Network Marketing—in addition to the three dimensional income component—offered two very distinct wealth building characteristics that were typically limited to social movements and fad products, namely: a tipping point and critical mass. If I could recruit, galvanize, and empower like-minded people to embark on a life of financial freedom and flexibility, then pushed hard enough to reach a tipping point—like a speeding locomotive—once critical mass kicked in, there would be no stopping the momentum. However, as I would soon learn, that was easier said than done. Like I said, the social stigma attached to both life insurance salesmen and MLMers wasn’t particularly exulting. Vexed between the two, family and friends encouraged me to stick with financial planning. “You’re already invested in Lehmann & Associates; Stick with it!” they would tell me.

           My gut on the other hand was screaming, “Go for Broke!” Do you want to spend your life helping breadwinners protect their families, invest their nest eggs and shoot for a rosy retirement, or, do you want to help them burn their security blanket, harness their entrepreneurial spirit, grab the bull by the horns, and make some serious moolah!”

            After a few weeks of self-evaluation, I had discovered that fear was fueling my procrastination. When I did, it was straight to the mirror I went. “Fear? Are you kidding me? Fuck fear! Since when have you been fearful of anything? Let me get this straight, now that you have a wife and a little boy, you’re gonna play it safe?  I don’t think so. You’re a Marine, not a Sailor. Fuck fear and embrace your faith!”

            The next day I walked into my office and screamed, “I quit! No more insurance and financial planning for me.” “What are you going to do?” my wife inquired. “CBI and Ad-Net.” “That’s great, but other than those ‘spectrum bonuses’ (additional bonus checks paid to CBI’s top five personal recruiters every month) we’re only making about five hundred bucks a month in residual income and our expenses are five thousand bucks. Not to mention, the time you’ve been spending on CBI would have yielded more money had you worked at McDonald’s. Plus, we have a two-year-old son to take care of. Have you considered that?” She had a valid point. Unlike most ordinary men with entrepreneurial aspirations who—when confronted with the reality of providing for their family—surrender those dreams for what often results in a mundane life of regrets and what-if’s, I didn’t consider myself an ordinary man. My ambition to become a millionaire was surpassed only by my Pit Bull-like tenacity to figure out how.

            Unlike a lot of budding entrepreneurs who view a spouse and child as an impediment to achieving their dreams, I saw them as a catalyst to make the motivational leap from “desire for gain” to “avoidance of pain.” Let me explain. I categorize motivation into three types: desire for gain, avoidance of pain, and fear of loss. Avoidance of pain has the highest level of octane, followed by fear of loss, then desire for gain. When a man hurts badly enough, be it physically, emotionally, mentally, or financially, he’ll do whatever it takes to avoid that pain. The intensity of the motivation that’s birthed from “avoidance of pain” is much stronger because the pain is having an immediate and adverse effect, whereas “desire for gain”—while still a motivating force—is not nearly as strong because it has no bearing on one’s immediate circumstances. By quitting financial planning cold turkey and allowing no retreat whatsoever, including pizza delivery or any other means of immediate income, psychologically, I was cutting my lifelines. To use a metaphor, I was throwing myself into the deep end of the pool before I knew how to swim. Faced with a sink or swim dilemma, I had made the motivational leap from “desire for gain” to “avoidance of pain,” bypassing “fear of loss” altogether since, other than my wife and son’s well being, I had nothing to fear losing. “Visualize and Materialize” became my daily mantra as I spent a good amount of time in transcendental meditation allegedly tapped into the Law of Intention and the Law of Attraction. I believed that if I visualized and focused strongly enough on the end result I wanted to achieve, my intention would send my thought vibrations into the cosmos—and like a spiritual magnet—attract my heart’s desires. In reality, I was deifying my own consciousness and putting faith in the ethereal realm of creation and not in a specific creator. I reinforced my theosophical beliefs at the time by immersing myself in the principles of “Autosuggestion,” and “The Sixth Sense,” two of the more mystical chapters in “Think and Grow Rich.” Although I believed in Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, I viewed New Age Thought and Theosophy as a kind of appendage to the Judeo-Christian Constitution—the Bible.

            Upon cutting my lifelines and going full bore with CBI and Ad-Net, I would use visualization techniques and repeated affirmations, and declare to the universe my intention to be rich. Surely, I thought, if I could become one with the universal mind and apply the Laws of Intention and Attraction, I could in effect, bend the cosmos, make God my cosmic bellboy and achieve anything I wanted. After all, according to Napoleon Hill’s research, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.” There was only one problem . . . it wasn’t working. In fact, the more I meditated, visualized, and called on the Law of Attraction, the worst things got. I was working my ass off, praying my ass off, meditating my ass off, and visualizing my ass off to no avail.

            CBI was crumbling under the weight of its own growth; commissions never got corrected; various Attorneys General had them under a microscope, and they were on the brink of collapse. Moreover, my opportunity meetings were decreasing in size, and my organization’s morale was plummeting. In an effort to get more people to attend the meetings, I made thousands of cheesy door hangers and recruited my sister and my father to help me hang them in surrounding neighborhoods. Expecting complete strangers to show up at an opportunity meeting on the very evening they found the flyer on their door was more a testament to my motivation than my marketing savvy. The one bright spot was Ad-Net. I had enrolled a lot of my CBI organization into Ad-Net and as predicted, I began to generate an additional income stream. Only the income between it and CBI wasn’t nearly enough to fill the contemporaneous hole that was getting deeper by the month. Sitting in my office one morning, I had just finished meditating when I suddenly opened my eyes and said, “This just isn’t working.” I was putting in eighteen-hour days and following every “success principle” I had ever learned, yet my cosmic bellboy seemed to be shunning me big time. Since my regular routine of meditation, positive affirmations, and visualization was yielding me zip . . . zilch . . . nada . . . nothing, I was growing more and more weary of the pseudoscience behind the spiritual theories that Dyer, Robbins, and their New Age predecessors had been trumpeting for decades.

            I intuitively knew that it was time to ratchet down the spiritual spin, and crank up the old cranium. Assessing my tactical strengths and weaknesses, my strengths were prospecting, communicating, giving presentations, closing, and training. My weaknesses were direct marketing, procrastination and organization. If I was to implement a systemic solution to building the business, I would first need to learn everything I could about copy writing, direct advertising, and direct mail, and become a direct marketing maven. And that’s exactly what I did. I immersed myself in an avalanche of books on copy writing and direct marketing and through trial and error, gradually improved my marketing acumen. In the meantime CBI went tits up, and although I had joined other companies like Quorum—an alarm company, and Envirotech—which sold a waterless car wash and polish, like most MLM companies, their compensation plans stunk. Ad-Net on the other hand was chugging right along but my commission checks were lagging behind my $5000 monthly overhead. Never the less, I jumped on that horse exclusively and never looked back. I saw Ad-Net as a diamond in the rough that—with a little bit of polishing—had the potential to reach a tipping point and experience critical mass within the MLM profession itself. A lack of prequalified prospects, I quickly surmised, was the number one culprit for the demise of the overwhelming majority of people who tried MLM and failed. Jim Wingo, the founder of Ad-Net was at the vanguard of the MLM lead generation movement that would eventually consume the entire MLM industry, and I was only too willing to make Ad-Net the “IBM” of the movement. Only instead of continuing opportunity meetings, I chose instead to smile, dial, and in the words of AT&T, reach out and touch people.

            At first I would go to Wal-Mart and pick up every income opportunity magazine and business publication that had classified and display ads and I would contact those advertisers about Ad-Net. In addition, I picked up newspapers like USA Today, and other regional papers, as well as publications like Thrifty Nickel and Penny Saver and contacted their MLM advertisers to pitch them on Ad-Net. In addition, I was holding weekly training conference calls for my organization and teaching them the full gamut, everything from how to master the telephone to overcoming objections, closing your prospects, and getting them started. Since I was smiling and dialing all day long, my phone bills shot through the roof and I couldn’t afford to pay them. When I was eventually cut off, I switched from AT&T to MCI. When MCI cut me off, I would switch to Sprint, and repeat the cycle with the secondary carriers. It was a pain in the ass, but at least I was making headway. After crunching the numbers, and dividing my commissions by the number of calls I was making, I was putting around 46 cents in my pocket every time I picked up the phone regardless of whether someone even answered. At sixty dials an hour, ten hours a day, the telephone had quickly become my life blood. When I had an interested prospect, I sent him a cover letter and the Ad-Net enrollment form and usually followed up the day he received it.

            Although I was closing a fair percentage of prospects, it wasn’t high enough for my standards and the cost of postage and paper, in addition to my phone bill, was killing me. Not unlike the curb painting business in high school, I found myself in a quandary over how my team and I could reach and close more prospects. Up to that point, I had taken a shotgun hunterman’s approach to building the business—like a pit bull; I attacked every Tom, Dick, and Harry I could find. Then I inundated them with information, and dared them to raise an objection I hadn’t heard a thousand times before. I became so efficient that I began conducting live prospecting and closing calls to real prospects during my training conference calls. In those days I had an average of a hundred people dialed in from all over the country, and I would simply mute them as they eavesdropped on my prospecting calls. Afterwards, we would critique the call and break it down step by step—everything from my posture and controlling the conversation to building rapport, qualifying the prospect and directing the next action step. Many of the comments I received were statements like: “I’m not a Kevin Lehmann; I don’t have that confidence; I’m just a housewife; I don’t sound like you; I can’t close prospects, etc., etc.” They were coming up with every excuse in the book as to why they couldn’t succeed.

            It wasn’t talent or skill that they were lacking; it was true grit, the intangible attributes and characteristics that separate the run-of-the-mill entrepreneur from the Extreme Entrepreneur. “Come on people!” I would tell them. “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog! Make the motivational move, cut your lifelines, and get in the game! Natural born salesmen and marketers are no more natural than a natural born brain surgeon. You have to develop your skills and practice until you’re efficient enough to make a living. Then hone those skills all the way to the bank. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the most important financial advisor your prospect will ever speak to, and that’s coming from someone who used to be in the financial planning business. You don’t beg them to join your business, you get them to beg you to join your business!” “But how?” They would always ask? It’s all about your posture, position, and confidence. Backbone baby, people want to do business with a leader, not a milquetoast. “How do I develop that posture?” they would ask. Belief, conviction, passion, and vision; half the battle is showing people you’re going somewhere; the other half is convincing them to get onboard. Not only do you need to think of yourself as the most important advisor in your prospect’s life, you need to prove it to them. Take attorneys and CPA’ s for example, why do they garner so much respect? They are perceived as professionals who can add value to the quality of ones life. A CPA for example might help reduce one’s taxes, and a probate attorney might protect one’s wealthy estate, but your job is more important than the two of those put together because you hold the key to help them generate the income and accumulate the wealth. Without you and your business opportunity, they may never need a CPA or probate attorney. In my mind that makes you pretty valuable, but my mind doesn’t matter, yours does.” In an ego driven and narcissistic society, one would think having posture and confidence as an entrepreneur were foregone conclusions. Not, so. I spent more time teaching on mental and emotional preparedness than I did on dissecting the anatomy of the sales and marketing process.

            Since I was spending an inordinate amount of time conducting three way calls and helping people close their prospects, short of cloning myself, I needed to figure out a way to duplicate that skill. Not only that, but instead of donning my shotgun gear every morning and firing at everyone that appeared in my scope, it was time to don my fisherman’s outfit, put my ad copy skills and direct marketing acumen to the test, and attract prospective customers, not repel them. I had an idea, and it was crazy, but I’d never been accused of being too sane.

            Only before I could try it, I would have to swallow my pride and borrow some desperately needed money from of all people, my father. I was now behind in my apartment rent by three months and had just received an Eviction Notice—not a good thing with a young wife and a two and a half year old toddler. Moreover, I was behind by six months on my office rent, and my lifeline—the telephone, was finally cut off as I ran out of long distance carriers to switch to. “My life blows,” I remember telling myself as I had a mental meltdown in the middle of our cockroach infested apartment one night. “What a bunch of bullshit!” I hollered at the top of my lungs as I ripped my copy of “Think and Grow Rich” to shreds and dared Napoleon Hill to reincarnate himself just so I could personally kick his ass and send him to his death a second time. I took my various audio programs from Nightingale Conant and ripped the tape right out of them as I stomped on the binders and cassettes. “You lying pack of piranhas,” I kept shouting as I tattooed the faces of Dennis Waitley, Brian Tracy, Wayne Dyer, Jim Rohn, and Tony Robbins with the soles of my twelve and a half inch shoes, sparing Earl Nightingale—a fellow Marine and the Godfather of motivational speakers—the shame of being stomped on by the soles of a fellow Marine.

            The next day I decided to blow off some steam and take a day trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Skyline Drive. Nervous over plunging to my death from the top of the mountains in my junkyard Volare, if it did happen, I figured it would spare me the agony of having to ask my father for a loan. Still reeling from my mental meltdown the night before, I stopped at a Stuckey’s—hoping to find the near extinct “Sugar Daddy”—as I weaved my way up Skyline Drive. Perusing the candy isle, I came across a wall plaque with a poem inscribed:

            The Man Who Dares

           “The man who decides what he wants to achieve and works until his dreams all come true. The man who will alter his course when he must and bravely begin something new. The man who’s determined to make his world better, who’s willing to learn and to lead. The man who keeps trying and doing his best is the man who knows how to succeed”

            I saw that as confirmation that, even though I was broke as a convict, I needed to stay on course, swallow my pride, and hit my father up for that desperately needed loan. “I know you said to never come to you if I ever needed to borrow money, but I need $2500 and I can pay you back in ninety days,” I told my father while sitting at Shoney’s in Leesburg three days later. “We’re about to evicted from the apartment; I’m six months behind on my office rent, and my telephone has been cut off.” “That sounds like more than $2500 to me,” he said in his Henry Kissinger persona. “It is, but with my increasing commission checks, that should be enough to get me through.” After incurring a long-winded diatribe over the fact that my wife was working with me instead of bringing in a separate income, he then read me the riot act over choosing of all things . . . the Network Marketing profession. “Why don’t you stick with financial planning; you have a brain for it Kevin,” he said in his thick German accent. “But, I don’t have a heart for it Dad” I retorted. “Instead of teaching the “well-to-do” how to preserve their capital and make it grow for the future, I’d rather teach the strapped and the struggling how to create capital through their own home based business. “But MLM, Kevin? It doesn’t work,” he yammered, as he became more agitated by the minute. “On the contrary,” I quickly rebutted. “MLM works just fine, it’s people who don’t work! If your car doesn’t drive because you have the wrong key, would you blame it on the car? Look at the impact A.L. Williams has had on your company, John Hancock, and the rest of the life insurance industry. Can you argue the effectiveness of their sales and marketing model? How about Shaklee, Mary Kay, and Amway? There are common people making pretty uncommon money in those companies.”

            “But you’re not!” he abruptly cut me off. “What about the problems you’re having with CBI?” He had a salient point. “An incompetent commander,” I told him, doesn’t necessarily denote a flawed battle plan. Sure, there are some bad apples out there, but you have that in every profession. Given the right product or service, the right compensation plan, the right people at the helm, and the right character traits, there is not a franchise or a home based business in the world that can come close to giving one the leverage or the income potential that a good MLM opportunity can.” “Of course not,” he said sarcastically, “that’s why you have to borrow $2500 from your father.” “It’s only temporary, Dad. Mark my words; I’ll be a millionaire by the time I’m forty.” “My son, the big dreamer,” he said condescendingly, as he patted me on the back. “He needs to borrow $2500 so that his wife and my grandson don’t wind up in the street, but he’s going to be a millionaire by the time he’s forty.”

            Patronizing me like that only served to fan the flame that was already burning in my belly and turn it into a white fire of desire. He lent me the money, but not without thoroughly humiliating me in the process. He and my mother literally walked me hand-in-hand to meet the rental agent, who my wife and I were personal friends with, to write her a check. “I can’t believe this is happening,” I muttered, as my mother announced that she was here to pay up her son’s rent. When my parents insisted on paying my commerical landlord in person as well, I blew my top. “Keep your fucking money, Dad. I don’t want it at the cost of embarrassing me in front of friends and business acquaintances.” “Your mother and I just want to make sure it gets paid. “So, what you’re saying is that you don’t trust me to spend the money on my bills? What am I going to spend it on cocaine, alcohol, gambling? You need to decide—right now—whether or not to give me the money, because, I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you humiliate me in front of anyone else.” He gave me the rest of the money, and I had him paid back sixty days later. That was one time in my life when I probably would of robbed an old lady for $2500 if that’s what it took to pay him back.

           Growing up in war-torn Germany, my father learned frugality at an early age, and became a parsimonious adult—a character trait that, at times, I wish I had inherited. Ironically, it was my own family and friends that underestimated my drive and my resolve to succeed. Jerry, my commercial landlord to whom I owed six months of back rent, did believe in me. Guilty over the fact that I couldn’t give him one month’s rent since I had to get my long distance reconnected, I offered to move out. “Kevin,” he said with a confident smile, “you’re going to be rich one day. You can pay me when you get there.” “Thanks Jerry, I told him, “you have no idea what that vote of confidence means to me.”

            With my wife and son housed for another three months and my telephone reconnected, I was back in the saddle. After a critical analysis of my overall business plan, I realized that to compound my productivity I needed to compound my marketing. Complacency was breeding stagnation and I instinctively knew it was time to rock the boat. Since closing was the only true barometer of success in direct sales and marketing . . . that was the activity in which I needed to spend more time. To do so, I would ditch the one dimensional shotgun prospecting approach where it was: one shot, one kill, and don my commercial fisherman’s approach where it would become: one cast, and hundreds of kills. Only my cast net was an automated communications system that consisted of a combination of ads, voice mail and fax-on-demand.

            Long before the internet, I saw those two technologies as a way to not only leverage my productivity, but also make my personal talents available to my organization 24/7. My first idea was to write a short ad and place it in a publication that would compel a person to call a toll free number, hear a ten minute presentation on Ad-Net, and at my direction, drive to the closest Kinko’s or Office Depot. There they would pay about a buck a page to download a five page document that included the enrollment form. In a gutsy but strategic move, I announced my intended marketing ploy on a training conference call and received negative reaction. My reason for doing so was threefold:

            1. To show my organization that there are no rules and boundaries when it comes to creative marketing.

            2. By cooping and managing an ad campaign, I could share in the leads it generated without having to shell out any of my personal money.

            3. If my strategy worked, it would give me increased credibility and more influence over my organization in the future. My aim was not only to create a high tech/high touch systemic solution to building my Ad-Net business, but to automate the process as much as possible.

            Since Ad-Net paid for itself by enrolling just a couple of people, I created a simple ad that read, “FREE MLM LEADS . . . Stop chasing your friends and family and start receiving prequalified prospects every month.” Call 1-800-xxx-xxxx. Not only did the ad pull like crazy, my ten minute voice mail message actually had strangers driving to office supply stores and paying the $5 to download the brochure and enrollment form from a fax machine. In a few instances, people joined without my even talking to them. Within a couple of months I had the largest and fastest growing group in Ad-Net and Bernie was happy that he had placed me on his first level. Several months later, I became the National Training Director for Ad-Net and made the platform available to all members.

            When my monthly income surpassed ten grand a short time later, it was time to relocate. A myriad of reasons, not the least of which was getting away from my father’s influence and his negative outlook on Network Marketing, factored into my decision. Although I loved him to death, the older I got, the more at odds our worldviews became. That, and the fact that my relationship with my sister, her husband, and my young nieces and nephews had begun to fade as they delved deeper and deeper into Watchtower Witchcraft.

           Relocating, I intuitively knew, was tantamount to shifting motivational gears and creating a climate conducive to success. Besides, my son was now three and I wanted to raise him in a beachfront community in a tax friendly state. Only, Destin, Florida—Paradise to some, Sodom & South Beach to others—would prove to be a culture of corruption and a real life Wisteria Lane. There, I would eventually become the quintessential high rolling “Drama King,” as I would find myself entrenched in a kaleidoscope of calamities—one right after another.