Project work is the process of taking a specific target or goal and creating a plan for its attainment. This plan will boil down into either a daily action or a weekly action.

Accountability circles are small groups (3-12 people) that are each committed to their own project and their own single daily/weekly actions. The circle comes together daily or weekly to support each other’s commitments and to hold each other accountable for maintaining the actions that lead to the finished project.

This work will increase your capacity for accomplishment by a least tenfold.

The Project

Projects can be created for any goal. You will be the most productive if your goals are aligned with your vision and your values. For purposes of this training we will use the building of an organization that sustains a residual income in Network Marketing. As with any project, it is necessary to know what the finished project looks like and what components are required to create it. For example the following components are required to build a residual income in Network Marketing:

1. A successful host supplier company.
2. A viable product line that you love to use and recommend.
3. A proven compensation plan.
4. A network of distributors and customers large enough to produce the volume and income you desire.
5. A team of organizational leaders sufficient in numbers and power to hold the organization together and grow it.

There is not a lot you can do to create items, 1,2 and 3 other than choose the right Network Marketing company and unconditionally support its leaders. Assuming you have that in place, you can create your residual income out of items 4 and 5. These two items are interconnected and dependent…meaning that the number of leaders you will have is partially dependent on how many distributors you have enrolled. And the number of distributors you will maintain or grow into in your total organization will depend on how many leaders you have.

Leaders Equal Income

Looking at volume or even the number of active distributors does not create a successful Established Leg. An organizational leader best defines it. Once you have a leader in the Leg, the leader will establish the Leg and grow it from there.

What Defines an Organizational Leader?

1. They have a clear vision of what they intend to accomplish.
2. They have created a project and a plan for its attainment.
3. They are self-motivated by their vision, maintaining their enthusiasm, their persistence, their attitude and most important, their actions.
4. They are producing their intended results.

Until you have someone that meets all four of these criteria, you do not have a leader. You may have a nice person that works hard and wants very much to be successful. You may even have someone who will do everything you ask and go everywhere there is to go. But until they produce consistently from their own motivation, they cannot be counted on for leadership.

State the Goal as Leadership

It will serve you well to always express you organizational and compensation goals in terms of leaders. Focusing on Compensation Plan titles and income levels creates a shallow and often misguided approach to achieving the goal. Compensation Plan titles are often achievable, even though you don’t have the organization and leaders to sustain the title. You can temporarily stretch for a title whereby you get the title, but the way you went about it left you with an empty shell of an organization. You have the title but not the substance. You create an out-of-integrity situation for yourself. When you are out of integrity, you lose your power and your energy. You become angry and frustrated. It’s downhill from there.

Make titles and income take a backseat to leadership. Have them be by-products of achieving your goal. Make your goal to develop yourself as a powerful leader and to attract other powerful leaders to your game.

Leaders – Born or Made?

Both. Every distributor comes to your organization with a pre-existing degree of leadership capacity. It usually takes a high degree of capacity for a leader to build a successful Established Leg. About 10 percent, or one out of ten people you enroll, will have enough pre-existing capacity to build a Leg. Sometimes this percentage is lower – down to 5 percent or one out of twenty. This depends on whom you are prospecting and how you are presenting the opportunity.

New distributors will quickly rise to their level of leadership by building whatever they can. This usually happens within their first six months. Once they hit their ceiling imposed by their leadership limits, you can grow them and it takes time, commitment, partnership and a lot of developmental work. The way to build a successful organization is to do both, enroll enough new distributors to find high-level leaders plus grow yours as they limit out.

"On Fire" Enrollment Equals Leaders

Since one out of ten of your new distributors could be a high performance leader, the first facet of your plan is to determine how many leaders you need and then how many new distributors you must enroll to find the leaders. Enrolling for leaders is not an exact science. It’s a lot like dealing cards and looking for aces. You know there are four in every deck but you don’t know where they are. They may be the first four or even the last four, in which case you would have to enroll forty-nine distributors before you ever found a leader. It takes a lot of vision and motivation to move through that much struggle without exciting results. You must not only keep the faith, but you must "keep faith on fire".

Leaders are not attracted to mediocre, apathetic, low-energy or depressing opportunities. They are attracted by the fire, by your faith, by your crystal-clear vision and the motivation that it produces for you and them.

Sponsor "A" may enroll twenty distributors "because they are supposed to" and because "they hope it will work" and because they want to "stay in the game." However, the truth is they don’t believe great things are inevitable and probably the twenty people they’ve enrolled will be doomed to the same struggle of which they are a victim.

And it’s not that none of the twenty are leaders. They are. It’s just that their leadership hasn’t been inspired to wake up and perform. They were there and Sponsor "A" missed them.

Sponsor "B" enrolls twenty people on fire about the opportunity they have. He/she paints a brilliant, powerful "picture of probabilities" based on the new distributors values and vision. He/she uses the "Leapfrog" approach to show them what a great organization they should have. Their leadership is awakened and out springs five leaders who are off to the races.

On-Fire Prospecting Equals Enrollments

Your next step is to figure out how many prospecting conversations you must have in order to create one enrollment. The range can be from one to one, up to ten to one. Everyone’s ratio is different and everyone improves with experience and elevated belief. If you follow the proven plan laid out in Prospecting With Integrity and Listening Through Objections and you use the art of Leapfrogging you can consistently enroll one out of five prospects. As a reminder, here are the steps to follow for powerful prospecting:

1. When you identify a prospect, make up in your mind and heart that they will either respond positively or refer you to someone who will. Just make it up.
2. Become the most interesting person they have ever met or talked to. To the degree the context allows, find out what makes them tick, for example, what’s important and what’s missing. Listen, listen, listen.
3. Be perfectly fine with the possibility that they don’t see it for themselves right now. Don’t be a addicted to getting people involved.
4. Tell them you know this opportunity can provide results for them and give them the company materials to review.
5. Follow up. Follow up. Follow up.

Accomplishing steps 1-5 constitutes a "sort". Sort through people looking for those who can see it now and are ready to move on it. NOW.
How many people do you need to sort to sponsor one?

Creating a Plan

Creating your plan is as simple as deciding either when you want to achieve your goals and working the actions out backwards, or deciding what the maximum number of sorts you can commit to daily or weekly and calculating the achievement date working forward.

For example, if you want to hit $3,000 per month within six months (using these ratios) you would need to commit to sorting 150 people within the next four months…not six, as you must allow time for your last sorts to develop into leaders and volume. Two months is the minimum you should allow for this. Therefore you are looking at 37.5 sorts per month or 8.7 per week. You should end up sponsoring 1.7 people per week.

If you can’t commit to that level of activity, determine what you can commit to and work forward from there.

Remember, your plan is just a plan. You must evaluate your progress and check your ratios at least monthly. If you are off track revise your plan.

Accountability Circles

These are small groups of like-minded people that are each committed to either their own project or the same project. The group gives each other permission to hold each other accountable for their "by when" commitments. In addition, the group is a resource for solving problems.

Accountability Circles can be created out of any group whether within a specific organization/company or not. Any person can serve in this capacity regardless of their expertise or experience. All you need is your own project; your own willingness to be held accountable and your willingness to hold others accountable. What does being held accountable look, sound and feel like? In trouble…being held accountable is NOT getting in trouble, being criticized, scolded or made wrong.

Being held accountable is simply a "listening"… A place to report whether you did or you didn’t, and a place to report on whether you will tomorrow.

Identify and Solve the Problems

The only thing that stands between where we are now and where we want to be are a series of problems. Consistently solve the problems and you will progress through success.

As part of your plan, list the problems you see on separate sheets of paper. Throughout your project process think of solutions, brainstorm with others for solutions and study success models for solutions. As you create solutions, write them down next to the problem. Your solutions are now part of your plan.

You must make commitments to activate your solutions.

Your success will depend on your willingness to commit to these "by when" actions.

A commitment is a decision to do something no matter what. Most decisions are made as a matter of convenience. Meaning it seems like a good idea at the time. The challenge with these types of decisions is they do not give you any capacity to act powerfully when adversity strikes or you just aren’t in the mood. A commitment supports you in acting, regardless of circumstances. This ability actually recreates circumstances from negative to positive. If you’re in a funk the only immediate way out is action.