Teri Williams

Teri, you've been involved with network marketing for nine years, what did you do in your former life? I was a stay-at-home mom with three young children and zero income.

Three young kids and zero income, how did you get started with Young Living? I got started because of a very profound experience with the product, and as a result of that, I began talking to people about these miraculous products. I didn't realize at the time that it was a network marketing company. I didn't even know what networking was!

So, for two years, I actually sent people somewhere else to get their products. Once I realized the profound effects this had on people I made a conscious choice to become a student of network marketing. I began to study everything I could and talk to as many people as I could. What I decided to do was to teach myself how to work a cold market, because I wasn't in a position to do home parties and things like that to work with a warm market.

My goal was to figure out how to get my phones ringing. I discovered there are a million and one different ways to do that and which one is best depends on your own personality.

I started working the cold market my first year and that was wonderful because you never run out of people. I think it's one of the reasons my organization grew so quickly. Now, back nine years ago, we had no computer and no land line telephone. I was doing business for four years with one cellular telephone and a fax machine. Just working with that and a cold market— generating leads through advertisements in local media— I was able to build a six-figure income within 18 months.

What I discovered is that there was consistent daily activity I did, day in and day out, but there was also massive action that I took on projects that took longer to come to fruition, but the results were huge. So, this is how I train my downline today— I train them to always be doing consistent daily activity in addition to having one or two massive action projects that they're working on at all times.

We start with a written business plan the very first week in business. From my own experience of realizing the things I needed to learn in order to be good in this industry, I created a business plan. When our distributors fill out their plan, we sit down with them for about two hours. If they live out of state, of course we do this over the phone. We do a very in-depth planning session with each new distributor at which time we get everything written down on paper along with their action plan.

Then we have them get out their calendar and actually put down what they are going to be doing every day of the week.

After that, we have a 20 minute telephone meeting each week for as long as it takes until that distributor is independent.

Teri, what were the consistent daily actions that you began doing? What I began doing in the very first week of my business was I determined what my personal strengths were. I realized I love public speaking, so I created a press release for myself on everything I had done in the last 20 years that had anything to do with health or business. I began to distribute that press release to all of the local businesses, such as the Rotary Club, Lions Club, etc. letting them know that I would love to speak to their group. That was a very successful endeavor.

I also went through my address book. My desire was to determine who I knew that knew thousands of people, so I started at A and went through to Z. By the time I finished, I had found five people that were very high profile. These were people that were business owners, people that had mailing lists and one of them even had a newsletter that went out to 18,000 people. So, I contacted those five people and shared products with them. I sent them three products if they were willing to take a look. One by one all five of them became distributors in my company and gave me a tremendous amount of publicity. This is a very, very fast way to create success.

So what did you do with these people to have them become interested? I contacted them and let them know about the very profound experience that I had had with these health products and I asked if they were open to trying a sample.

Can you describe what that "profound experience" was? Oh yes, definitely. I was pregnant with our third child, little Joseph, in 1995. When I was seven months pregnant my husband and I took an airplane flight during which I became very ill when the airplane went up to altitude.

There was a pressure on my stomach and by the time the plane landed I was into very heavy, full labor… at seven and a half months!

We had been into natural food and natural herbs for 20 years, so I had what I had planned to use and had every reason to believe they would work. Well, they didn't work; they were not strong enough to stop this heavy labor. We were going to have a home birth and our mid-wife was racing down the highway, timing my contractions on her cell phone, and she suddenly screamed at me that I was going to deliver this baby in five to 10 minutes and she absolutely needed to fly me to the nearest hospital. I was very frightened and because I was in so much pain I didn't want anyone to touch me or move me. I asked if she would wait just one more minute before she called in the helicopter.

At that time I actually got on my knees and prayed and asked God if there was anything in our home that was strong enough to stop labor— please, show me what it was. I was immediately given the understanding of the essential oil of lavender. I couldn't figure out why lavender would work, because the only thing I'd used it for was sunburns, cuts and bruises. That's the reason I had a bottle of Young Living's lavender.

So, we marinated my stomach, my shaking legs and the bottom of my feet with the lavender oil and within 60 seconds the heavy labor completely stopped.

Wow! Yes! It was exciting. When the midwife examined me, she said that the baby was so low down I absolutely had to stay on bed rest until the baby's due date. That was fine, yet every time I got up, even to use the bathroom, I would go into labor again and this went on daily for five weeks. So, every day we used the lavender and the labor stopped immediately.

I came to understand that the reason it was so powerful is that lavender contains a group of chemical constituents called esters. Esters are fantastic for muscle spasms, migraine headaches, and insomnia. Lavender is one of those universal oils that 'when in doubt, grab your lavender'.

Let me tell you what happened on the due date. This is so beautiful. I put the lavender away and got out of bed and said to my daughter, "Let's go for a walk". I couldn't even go down the street before I went into labor, and that beautiful baby boy was born within 30 minutes. Nobody made it to the birth he came so fast.

So, even though I wasn't earning any income, I had enough money to buy four bottles of lavender oil and I gave them away to the pregnant women I knew. That really was the seed of my business, those four bottles of oil.

That's extraordinary! So this was one of the stories that you shared with people? Yes, this one and there are so many more! Because after that we purchased enough oils to keep our children completely healthy and doctor free.

One of the main oils was frankincense, which almost everybody has heard of including me, but I never knew it had any healing properties. That oil became the most important thing in our medicine cabinet. Anytime a child came to us and complained of cold symptoms, I would rub frankincense all over their chest and back as well as their feet and the next morning they would wake up completely symptom free.

It's interesting as we move into the Christmas season where we hear talk of frankincense and myrrh. People wonder what these 'gifts' are and it turns out frankincense is the most powerful substance on the planet today for your immune system. And myrrh is the most powerful thing you can use inside of your mouth for your teeth and gums. It's great!

So, here you were, telling influential people about your products and beginning to do public speaking— on health issues predominantly? In the beginning it was. Remember, back then I didn't even understand the model of network marketing. Now today, nine years later, my passion is speaking on family financial freedom. That's what my website: MarketingScents.net focuses on and my advertising, as well.

This is what I talk on now, though I will always bring the products into it, but I love to teach people family financial freedom.

Another way I began growing my business very quickly was the power of radio.

I understood the power of radio, because I enjoyed listening to talk shows and people that listen to the radio are activists. When they listen to something they believe in they'll pick up the telephone and take action as opposed to the majority of television watchers who are kind of like a sponge, they'll take it all in but they don't necessarily take action on it. So, I learned to reach out to talk show hosts that were looking for really important information.

One of the reasons we were able to get on the air is because there is nothing in the traditional medical world that will touch a virus. You know how you can take an antibiotic for bacteria? Well that's great, but there's nothing there to touch a virus and yet the simple oils of oregano, thyme, and mountain savory are deadly against viruses. With that message we were able to get on the radio.

Anyone with a product of interest to the general public could do very well getting on radio talk shows.

Did you have any concerns or difficulties in terms of medical claims, Teri? No, because we never make medical claims. We talk about the systems of the human body and the fact that certain substances will nourish, support and strengthen those systems. When you're talking about viruses, what you're really talking about is the body's immune system and building up the immune system. So, I'm very, very careful never to prescribe or diagnose. And the funny thing is, let's say five years ago, I don't think I got a single telephone call from a medical doctor. This year we're getting numerous calls from medical doctors. Frankly, I ask why they are calling the help line and they're willing to admit it's because they don't have anything that's working against viruses and they want to know about the oils.

Talk with me about how you go about working with people coming into the business today. Great question John. As I mentioned we start out with the written business plan. What I want to share with networkers is that this is a great way to know how serious someone is and how much time you want to spend with them.

We all have a lot of people that say, "I want to do this business. I desire to be really successful." and then we can invest a lot of time, money and energy in them only to discover they don't do anything.

With the business plan, once it's emailed to someone I don't do one more thing until I get it back from them. If they're not ready or serious about doing the business they'll procrastinate for a week or two or three. That's fine. I just don't take another step until they fill out the business plan and get it back. It's really a good filter to know who's serious and who's not.

The second thing, after we sit down and have this two hour meeting where we write up their business plan while keeping the focus on one or two goals— keeping the phone ringing and/or your inbox full, I teach people to take time every week to do marketing brainstorming.

The mistake a lot of people make is they believe their company should do the marketing for them. I teach people absolutely not! The only thing I care about is that my company continues to produce the best product on the market and that they consistently send me my checks on time. That's all I care about.

We are the marketers. We own the franchise, so to speak, and our goal is to figure out how we are going to get traffic to our store.

So, that's the kind of weekly brainstorming I teach people to do. We need to consistently give time to some creative thinking about how we are going to spread the word and get people into our 'store'.

The third thing I teach is to always remember to recruit. What often happens is that the bigger you get you can find yourself spending more and more time training and you tend to forget to recruit. I have people draw a big circle, like a pie, and then quarter it and I say, "Look, three pieces of that pie is the time you want to spend recruiting every week, one-fourth is the time you want to spend training. That was much more challenging before we created our duplicatable online training system, because training took so much more time. This success system has probably cut down on our training time by about 75 percent.

All of the training that I used to do one-by-one over the telephone with my distributors can now be found in their back office on the Internet.

For instance, one of the documents is called "The 10 Steps to Success". That is an assignment for the new distributor and once they complete these 10 steps they email it back to me.

Teri, what's the nature of that assignment? Assignment number one is to get to know your upline. It tells you who to call for guidance and support, how to set up your website, why autoship is important and then you move into creating your warm list. After that we talk about where and how you get cold market leads.

We have autoresponders that train people on both our products and our marketing. If you were a brand new distributor with me today, I would put you into my contact manager and click one button. Now you, as my new distributor, would receive little bits of training every day.

We don't want to overwhelm you, so we just send you, one by one, the little steps that you can do. This has totally changed the face of network marketing for me.

In what ways? Before, I had to spend five hours a day training people, individually, at whatever level they happened to be at in their business. Now, they automatically receive the training at the level they're at. When they complete that step they email it back to me and we're on to the next step. It's all automated; not to say you ever, ever want to take away the personal relationship, because that's the key to all success in this business. But now I don't have to sit on the telephone saying the same thing over and over and over for five hours a day.

The fourth thing I teach is to develop yourself as a person. What I mean by that is to become an impeccable listener.

I really believe if you have no other skills you can become a successful networker is you have honed the skill of listening.

The formula we have used, and I'm pretty sure it came from a training that Bob Proctor did, is the three things, ask, listen, ask, listen, ask, listen, speak.

Then the fifth thing I teach people is that they need to learn to celebrate every single victory. We pat people on the back, we email everybody, and we share all their accomplishments. We even send gifts, because we truly believe in acknowledging our gratitude when a distributor does something great.

Number six is to keep priorities in order. That means that when we establish business hours and are clear about our business hours, we turn the ringer off our business phone when it is no longer business hours. If we don't do that the phones will continually ring and cut into our family time, which can be very negative so it's important to keep our priorities in order.

Then we come to number seven, and I always feel it's important to share this with people. If someone is stingy when they come into this business, guess what, they are going to be stingy even when they have money.

So, live to give right now, no matter how little you think you have. Expressing gratitude daily and living to give are two very important things.

I think my biggest secret to success is I learned how to tithe and it's been a huge, amazing thing to watch my business soar.

We have an awesome opportunity as parents, to become the wise leaders for the next generation. But in order for that to happen, at least one parent needs to be home full time. This is the beauty of network marketing; it allows one parent to be at home full time and dedicated to those children and raising the next generation, This morning I had an amazing thing happen. My children had just driven off to school. The phone rang and it was the high school principal and I thought, "Oh my goodness, is something wrong?" and he said, "Teri, I'm just calling to tell you that your daughter Elizabeth is going to be given a very, very special award today, and she doesn't know a thing about it." I said, "What are you talking about?" And he replied, "She has been voted for the Soaring Eagle Award, it's for her character, and the entire school voted for your daughter!" I just can't tell you how grateful I felt in that moment, John, I was just in tears and glad I was home to get that phone call.

Last, but not least, about having a parent home and having the family financial freedom in this business; I feel like a lot of people these days are stuck in a cycle of what I call 'survival thinking'. Survival thinking is when you're continually worried about the finances for the next month and when your children ask to do or have something they're continually told no, we can't afford it. We are now being able to create a wonderful opportunity with this business model to live in what I call creative thinking.

My son Joseph, who is nine years old, had started his own Lego club in Fountain Hills, Arizona, that became very, very well known throughout the whole area, and now he is starting one here in Colorado Springs. He lives in creative thinking. My daughter, Elizabeth, is at a very high level of horse jumping and a very high level of classical piano, singing and opera and this is because she is able to think creatively. I think this is a gift of family financial freedom.

Teri Williams has been sharing Young Living from her home for nine years. Since July of 2005 she and her children, Elizabeth, 16, Daniel, 11 and Joseph, 9 are enjoying the mountains and oxygen living in beautiful Colorado Springs, CO after 14 years in Arizona.

AUDIO INDUSTRY | FINANCES | TRAINING Business essentials Why a home based business? Why network marketing? by Teri Williams and Janet McBride approximately one hour downloadable MP3 This training was delivered to beginning and intermediate networkers at the Young Living Convention 2005 by Teri and one of her key leaders, Janet McBride. Teri and Janet explore the paradigm shift taking place in America today that's causing us to rethink how we do business... Robert Kiyosaki's Cash Flow Quadrant... and why money in the hands of good people is a very good thing.

ATTACHMENT GETTING STARTED | GOALS | TRAINING Business plan Teri starts each of her new people off with a written business plan they complete and return the very first week in business. by Teri Williams Teri said, "From my own experience of realizing the things I needed to learn in order to be good in this industry, I created a business plan. When our distributors fill out their plan, we sit down with them for about two hours. If they live out of state, of course we do this over the phone. We do a very in-depth planning session with each new distributor at which time we get everything written down on paper along with their action plan." The business plan has people "Share Your Goals, Dreams and Ideas about Building a Business" and then details what actions each new person will take "In order to fulfill your dreams..."