Susan Walsh

Susan, I come across many entrepreneurs in this industry but you have really got a unique story around this. Would you tell us about that? That is correct! Actually I had two businesses as a child. I always loved to do hair and so at age 11 I actually went door-to-door doing hair. It was 50 cents a head, a dollar if I cut it and you had to pay whether you liked it or not!

And then my Dad, who was jeweler, a watchmaker who worked with diamonds, decided to make a major career change and started an insulation company. He had me, an old pickup truck and some fiberglass insulation. I would lay insulation before and after school. Crawling through attics and under floors wasn’t fun but I’ll tell you what it taught me.

It taught me that I really was not interested in having a boss from that point forward. I was clear I wanted to have my own business but certainly didn’t want to head in the same direction as my Dad with insulation!

From there I took cosmetology in high school and started my own salon at age 19. I graduated from high school and worked in another salon for about six months and knew that wasn’t for me so I took a leap of faith and opened my own salon. It was a lot of work but I did very, very well and worked it successfully for 27 years. Although I had created a six-figure income I couldn’t see myself doing that for another 27 years. Then I was introduced to this amazing industry of network marketing. That was 15 years ago and I fell in love with it right away.

How did you get introduced to it? Was it brought to you through one of your clients? Actually, that’s interesting because when you’re in a salon you’re constantly in front of people. And no one had ever introduced me to network marketing! What happened was that 15 years ago I started playing tennis because my boys were playing it. I got pretty good at it and my tennis pro introduced me to a product that her tennis pro had introduced to her.

I quickly realized that I could sell this product in the salon. My son was going to med school and I couldn’t find the extra hours in a day that was already devoted to my business and my clientele.

So I thought the next best thing would be to use these hours smarter so I started selling that product.

My goal was $5000 a month and I did that within the first six weeks. That’s when Brad Hager, who has since then become my mentor, called me and asked how long I had been with the company. He named the company and I said, “That’s a strange question. I’m just buying wholesale and selling retail.” He said, “No, how long have you been in network marketing?”

Well, I told him he had me confused with someone else because I would never do one of those! Of course, he came down a few days later and literally, in a two hour period, my whole life changed. A world opened up to me about leverage. And doing the thing that I loved to do most and that is helping people feel great about who they are and what they do. It was just a perfect fit. Like when you find that perfect pair of shoes and your foot just slides in.

Now my husband on the other hand, mister conservative banker, did not come willingly. He said to me, “I know you’re going to do this. I see it in your eyes. But promise me you won’t tell the neighbors.”

I assured him I wouldn’t and told him I was going to venture beyond our town and that Brad Hager had said I can.

So I just committed to the process and was very open to possibility.

I had always been like that, my Dad taught me that, but from there I’ve progressed and learned so much. I’ve been able to help other people realize there are unlimited possibilities and that we live in the most amazing country in the world. We have freedom, we really do.

Would you say more about committing to the process? Sure, what I told Brad was that all I was bringing to the table was people skills. I have people skills because standing behind the chair talking with people for years had taught me a lot. What he asked me to do was trust him about the business until I could trust myself.

Now, as a southern woman I probably could trust to a fault, but I knew, that day, that I really could trust him. So when he told me that if I would trust him and commit to following his lead that he would help me achieve success, I believed him. And I’m sure glad I did! He has helped me achieve my goals.

I never in a million years thought I would quit my salon.

And what I’ve realized is that simple, duplicatable practice and committing to a daily routine will get you there.

It requires you to literally commit to changing a few habits, and there were some things I had to change in my daily routine, but that soon became a habit.

I cut my hours at the salon back a bit and sat down with my family to explain exactly what I was going to do and how they would be included. I let them know that I was committed to building a ‘plan B’. So I committed to working the process with Brad and that included opening the doors to my new business everyday.

What do you mean by that, Susan, ‘Opening the doors to your new business every day’? Well this is the number one thing I would like everyone in network marketing to understand…

You can not be an undercover agent in this business. You must let people know that you have a business. And that you’re excited about it.

You want to let people know that you will share it with anyone who wants to listen and that you’re open to that.

That’s what I did. A lot of my clients became customers and a few of them became distributors but that was not where I focused. I actually focused on an advertising program that Brad Hager had put together. And I really got great at follow up. I am tremendous at follow up, I’m a ‘follow up queen’ and I know that’s another key.

Susan, you have mentioned, several times, the mentoring you have received from Brad Hager. Please tell us how important you think having a mentor and being a mentor, is to success in network marketing. And if you would, include exactly what Brad brought to the table of the obviously already very diligent, hard-working Susan Walsh. There are a lot of components there. To answer your first question of how important mentoring is I’ll say that I don’t think you can do it without one. What I learned very quickly was that while I was a professional in my cosmetology industry, I had no knowledge of the network marketing industry and how it works.

If you want what they have you do what they do and you find the person who is doing it well and duplicate that.

When you do that there’s a partnership formed, there’s a real alliance and allegiance that happens and that’s what Brad and I formed right away. I knew that this was a person that I could follow because he walked his talk. That was very important to me. What he has taught me is simple daily diligence and committing number one to personal growth and development.

We believe totally that if you focus on the people the profits will follow. That’s what I’ve always been committed to and that’s what Brad has continued to teach me. This is what I’ll say today, if my network marketing were to end today, which I can’t imagine happening, but it would be okay because my life has been so enhanced because Brad Hager is in it. I have learned so much over the years, not only about how to be a great networker, but how to be a better friend, how to be a better mom, how to be a better spouse, how to be a better sibling, because of the very simple but powerful lessons you learn in building a business like this. Every day is a new dawning because there are people involved.

Brad Hager has led me to the information that has fulfilled some of the gaps that I’ve needed to learn; including how to duplicate myself. I’m a ‘doer’, and like many other women, some men too, I call us the swans… we can look wonderful and calm on the surface but we’re paddling like heck underneath. What Brad taught me was how to create a healthy imbalance. To me, there is really no such thing as true imbalance, yet an unhealthy imbalance can be really dangerous.

A healthy imbalance, an almost ‘on purpose’ imbalance, has worked very well for me.

Basically, I just sat my family down and shared with them how I was going to do that. I didn’t want any animosity to grow from them if I put more on my plate. Brad taught me a lot about those things and if he didn’t know it he led me to sources that did.

I am a voracious reader with an audio library worth over $60,000. And to me that’s what a mentor does. They can lead you to a place where you know you can learn it, you can hear it. And of course, most things you learn by doing and a good mentor leads you to the doing.

There are so many stages of growth in this industry. The first stage is when you know you don’t know anything and you’re scared to death. Then you make your first $10,000 check and you start to admit that you must know something. And then you start doubting again as several things happen to throw you off course. We have a saying, “When you’re green you’re growing and when you’re ripe you’re rotten” and Brad has led me to stay green and growing. I’m so blessed and thankful for that!

In every industry there’s a ‘uniform’, a certain behavior. If you want to know about that you have to put yourself out there. If you continue to do the same things you’ll get the same results. And I’ve never been satisfied with my results, I probably never will be but I use that to propel me forward. My next goal with my company is to create 50 millionaires. It’s taken five years for the four I now have, which doesn’t sound like very much but they are turning around and creating the same thing. That’s what I get excited about.

They are as committed to personal growth and helping their people realize their own unlimited potential as I am, and that just thrills me.

Susan, you talked about people with a full plate. It occurs to me that most people have a full plate and I’m wondering, how do you approach others in a way that gets you onto that plate? If I were talking to you as a prospect I would start asking you questions.

I’ve become masterful at asking questions because I’ve learned if you ask the right questions you get the answers.

This business is 90% emotion and 10% ‘how to’ so if you had just joined the business I would share my excitement for you about that and I would also ask you if the past year had been everything you had hoped it would be. If you respond by telling me it wasn’t, I’ll ask you if you’d be willing to change a few things if that would mean attaining the goal you choose and doubling or tripling your income.

And I would double check with you to give you time to check your commitment level. If you are sure you’re willing to make some changes I would sit down with you to explore where you could chisel out an hour a day to work your new business. And this hour has to be used productively, this is not about paper shuffling. If it’s not productive it can be destructive. That’s what I’m here to mentor you through, to keep you productive so that you see results. Because that’s how you’re going to serve other people.

That’s what we do in this business, we learn to be productive and teach others to do likewise. I know, as a busy woman myself, that you can sometimes get overwhelmed but you can always take a little time each day.

I use a simple formula. I take the number of hours in a week and ask people to share exactly how they use each one. How many hours do you sleep? How many hours do you work? How many hours do you play? How many hours are spent in other, outside curricular activities like clubs, sports or church? I ask them to fill in their week so that we can take that and I can show them where they can fit in growing their business without entirely disrupting the rest of their lives.

If you really lay it out that way, first getting the commitment from them that they’re willing to make a few changes, then you’ll find it can always be done.

I’ve learned that it’s not about what I want for them, it’s always about what THEY want for themselves and what THEY are willing to commit to.

It doesn’t matter how committed to them I am if they are not committed to it themselves. If they are not willing to commit I can’t change a thing.

Would you give us an example of what you consider a ‘productive’ activity? Oh sure, it’s very simple.

If you’re not sharing the product, sharing the plan or building for an event you’re in paper shuffle mode.

It really comes down to just those three things. What I see is a couple of things that can happen. People either go into an “I know it all” mode or they sponsor a few people, maybe five or six, and then they go into management mode with their people. Well, numbers don’t lie. And behaviors don’t lie. So when people tell me they aren’t getting the results they want I start asking them questions.

“Let me see your calendar and I’ll tell you if you’re going to reach your goal.” Because if they’re not sharing the product, sharing the plan or building for events, then they’re in management/paper shuffling mode. Their calendar will reveal that.

And here’s something else. If someone calls me and tells me they are at a standstill I’ll say, “If you’re team did what you did, how much money would they have made yesterday?” And when they realize the answer is “nothing” then I invite them to start today and make things different by getting into action. Then I tell them to call me back when they’ve sold a product, shared the plan or got five registrations for the next event.

That whole attitude is different. People will do that.

Many of the people who hit a standstill are people who come with a job mentality. They don’t yet know how to discipline themselves to stay in production.

They’ll do it for a little while but not long enough. It takes 21 days to create a new habit and if they are not consistent for 21 days they drop the ball.

What I’m real sure of is that what I telegraph to them is what I usually get. But if I’m not consistent enough with my message, then they are inconsistent and don’t see the results. So number one… I lead by example. I am always sharing the products, sharing the plan and building for events and they know it well.

So I’m consistent with the message and I keep it simple. I say it often and firmly from an emotional standpoint as a leader.

And how do you make it burn? Bring out the emotion in people; do the ‘what if’ questions. Reminding them and getting them imagining what their life experience would be IF…

It really is about painting the picture. You must be a visionary and you have to be a dreamer. If you’re not a dreamer you won’t be a leader. And you have to help others become dreamers.

People have dreams but they are so shut tight and we can serve by helping them break out of that to realize that dreams really do come true.

And the way to do that is to support people. Praise their efforts and catch them doing things right! Anyone I mentor has a journal. We find journaling very valuable. We document our journey and one of the journals I highly recommend to everybody is a “What I did right” journal. This needs to be dated daily and your goal is to enter a list of what you did right during the day.

Most people are inclined to view the day from the perspective of what they did wrong. And then what do you get? Of course you attract more of what’s wrong because thoughts are things.

Instead, we want people to make the shift and start looking at what worked well, what was right about the day, so that they can go out the next day and do that again.

My major statement is around watching what you affirm. When I catch people focused on what’s wrong or what’s not working I say, “Don’t affirm that”.

You expressed earlier that your husband wasn’t initially onboard with you in the business. That’s changed and now you work together. How did that come about? That’s a story you’ll enjoy. Gary and I have been married for many years, and he’s my best friend on the planet, but sometimes our antennas don’t quite touch. He thinks differently than I do and I’m the ultimate entrepreneur.

I guess my first company was kind of a practice experience. My second month with my second company I received a check for $16,236.37 and I’ll never forget that number. Here’s why – My husband has never been unsupportive, he’s always been a great support to me but what I did was make copies of that check. I plastered them all over the house and I posted a note on the refrigerator that said, “Gone shopping, love ya!” Well, he just about broke his neck looking for me because he knew, that to prove a point, I was going to spend it all!

When he found me he said, “Okay, my hands are in the air. I’m a believer!” You see, I had been working 80 hours a week in the salon and I still produced that because of the leveraging in my network marketing business. So he became a believer that day. I replaced his income and he quit the bank seven years ago and now, everybody wants Gary Walsh’s life!

That’s wonderful! I noticed you referred to earlier companies. Can you describe for us the journey to finding the company that is the right fit for you? You know, I look at the process. When you think about network marketing in the 21st Century it’s very different than what was going on in the 50’s and 60’s. The companies that exist now are Internet based. And one thing we were looking for today was an Internet based company that offered diversity. We didn’t want to pigeon hole ourselves into one specific product. We went on a true search, for seven months, to find a company that we wanted to represent.

Understand this, this is my fifth company. Out of the previous four, three of them left us and one of them we walked away from because of integrity issues; so with three of them, we didn’t have a choice and with the other we made our choice, and very wisely. So in those seven months of searching, we explored over 300 companies. Some only for five minutes and we knew it wasn’t what we were looking for and some we researched for weeks, and then some for months.

The company we finally chose had all of the components - products and services that people wanted, needed, and could afford, and Internet base so that it was accessible and able to expand.

An owner with a business building philosophy that aligned with ours, and that is that people come first, profits come second. If you have an owner that doesn’t have that philosophy you’re not in a good space.

And of course a compensation plan that absolutely paid what it said it would. And finally, an owner with a vision. Ultimately, we are the builders but they make the final decision that impacts us.

Now that’s what we looked for but the years I spent early on in the industry I wouldn’t trade for anything. Those learning experiences showed me what I really do want and they showed me what it really takes to be totally sold on representing a company well. And they really allowed the development of my belief.

That was a tough seven months, with no income, but our group stayed intact and we continued training around what it takes to lead people.

It sounds like you had a team and system in place and you just needed to find the company to grow with, yes? That’s exactly right. We needed to find the company that worked in all aspects for us because I’ve learned that you really have to be sold on what you’re involved with.

People don’t buy your words, they buy your music… and if you’re not sold on your company and your products and your leadership, it’s revealed in your music.

So we had to be personally sold and totally focused. We’re a team of leaders and we know that everything rises and falls on leadership.

That’s why we have the multiple tiers of leadership that we have. And to have that we’ve learned you must have a system dependent business, not a personality dependent business because personality can’t be duplicated. But you must have leadership otherwise there is no one around to spread the word about the system and the systematic approach to the business.

We’ve stayed focused on leading leaders to leadership and helping people become all that they can be. We have a very tight group and we foster that so you can count on someone having your back covered. That creates tremendous loyalty. Brad Hager is the only sponsor I’ve ever had in this industry… or will ever have. I don’t get calls from people about joining their program because people know I’m unapproachable. And we don’t jump around from company to company, nor do we in anyway support that.

Tell us more about belief… belief in your company and products as well as belief in the self. Well, I simply don’t think you’ll find true success without belief. If there is success without belief it’s always shallow and temporary. It’s always been about belief for me. When people listen to me speak, I’m clear that there is not a shadow of doubt in their minds that I believe 1000% in what I do and what I’m presenting. And again, I’m convinced that people feel it when you lack belief and they feel it when you have conviction.

Okay, I’m going to switch gears here a bit. As a natural born entrepreneur, what do you think it is about network marketing that makes it work? In other words, what’s the best thing about network marketing in terms of being able to serve others? Oh, I have chills just hearing you ask that question. One thing is truly, the freedom.

It is the freedom of unleashing the unlimited possibilities of humans becoming more than they ever dreamed.

You know, I watched my husband be a corporate puppet for 29 years, knowing, knowing that he could be so much more, that he could be anything he wanted. But he chose a path that put him in a box with a very low ceiling.

When I look around and see that, and I see it all the time, I just wish that all those people could understand that there is another choice. They could have the kind of freedom that I describe as ‘freedom is sleeping ‘til you’re done!’

It’s the freedom to raise your own children and order anything you want off the menu. It’s also the freedom to give more. Today we give away more each year than Gary earned in a whole year at his 29th year at the bank. That’s freedom to me.

We’ve been able to touch so many lives, even lives of people who don’t know us, because of the money we’ve been able to give away. Gary and I started a foundation here in South Carolina as a result of what we’ve learned since having our two grandchildren born deaf.

It’s the total freedom that gives you so many choices… and the freedom to make them! That’s ultimately what I sell. I sell hope and freedom! And the gold is the look in people’s eyes as they ponder the possibilities. It’s wonderful! We’re growing people!

Tell us a bit about the foundation you’re working to start. We are still in the process and filing the 501C but this foundation is going to help fund for cochlear children to get the verbal skills and training that they need after a cochlear implant. My grandsons were very young when they started getting audio/verbal speech therapy but that’s a very expensive thing and Gary and I have learned so much about what these children need. So we saw a solution, at least in our area, where we could contribute in a small way to children who are growing up without sound. It’s our way of giving back for the many gifts we’ve received.

Thank you, Susan, and we will be happy to let people know where they can make contributions as they are prompted.

Susan Walsh has always been blessed with an entrepreneurial spirit. She and her husband, Gary, researched more than 300 companies before meeting with Mark and Jeanine McCool – and eventually, with her mentor, Double Diamond Executive Brad Hager and deciding the perfect home for them was with CyberWize. Today, Diamond Executives Susan and Gary are not only making a difference in their own lives, they are helping others as well. After their two grandsons were born deaf they became aware that South Carolina lacked viable resources that provided therapies and services their grandchildren desperately needed. They started the process of creating a foundation dedicated to providing resources to these families. They continue to donate a sizable chunk of their earnings toward the foundation.