Matt: We always talked about our marketing system was not just a marketing system but it was a marketing and training system so we were in a lot of training calls on teaching people how to build rapport over the phone, you know, and calling your prospects back, getting them into your business. Once they’re in their business and training them and getting them kind of locked into the culture and building their belief system. And so what I’ve discovered and kind of my secret, if you will, in network marketing is one of the reasons why I built a couple of very, very large organizations and became a top earner was because I did a tremendous amount of training on belief systems, personal development training and was always telling people to read books like Think and Grow Rich and John Maxwell’s book on leadership and books on network marketing and so on and so forth and coming to seminars and personal growth, personal development seminars and so forth, listening to audio programs, listening to training calls because the philosophy is if you build the mind then your people will build the business.

Michael: Did you see that work for you?

Matt: Oh, big time, big time. And I think if you look at the history of network marketing, if you look at Amway which is, you know, the largest network marketing company in the world, all of the top leaders in Amway they’ve really built their business based on a personal development model. They talk about the system and everyone gets on a tape of the week, a book of the month and they all go to a big seminar once a quarter, and actually it’s a tremendous amount of loyalty and builds people’s belief system and gets them to build the business. So I think, you know, it’s no secret that they’ve become the largest network marketing company over the years because they’ve had probably the greatest commitment to developing their people. I always say network marketing over the last 60 years has been built on the shoulders of personal development. That’s what I was always motivated to sell. I was always selling the personal development side and I was more motivated to sell that than I was the products of the company, whether it was travel services or nutritional services or nutritional products I was always more excited about the personal development side.

Michael: Just for yourself right.

Matt: For myself and selling it to the people in our organization because I saw what a difference it made in their lives. After someone would read a book like Think and Grow Rich or come to a Tony Robbins event or something like that, you know, people’s lives were getting changed, not necessarily because of the network marketing company but because of the personal growth that they had gone through. And so I just got very motivated and I said what do I want to spend my life doing? And it was not marketing nutritional products, even though I believed in them, and it was not marketing travel products and all that even though I was passionate about that at the time I was most passionate about developing people. Many, many years I’ve been selling personal development and referring people to buy all these books and to listen to these CDs and tapes and go to seminars but I haven’t been paid for it and a lot of the people I work with they’re doing the same thing and not getting paid for it. So I thought in my mind which really builds the network marketing industry over the last 60 years has been the personal growth component of it then I’d like to have a network marketing company and create a company where that was the product.

Michael: That’s nice because the powders and the potions and the nutritional stuff it’s a turnoff to a lot of people, so it’s nice having something that is intangible product which is hard to put a value on to market.

Matt: Yeah absolutely. In putting Success University together was kind of an exciting time going to all the top speakers, trainers and kind of sharing our vision.

Michael: When did you start?

Matt: In January of 2005.

Michael: Was there anyone else doing multi-level marketing in this realm?

Matt: There was a company back in the ‘90s called TPN, The People’s Network.

Michael: Yeah I’ve heard of that.

Matt: So they actually enrolled about 100,000 people in their company over about a five year timeframe.

Michael: Are they still around?

Matt: No, they ended up selling to Prepaid Legal kind of got rid of the personal development model.

Michael: Oh really.

Matt: What they were trying to do at the time was deliver the personal development to television through satellite network. So when you enrolled in the company you had to have a satellite installed in your home in order to get the content and, you know, they had a model that they weren’t able to kind of scale proper land so it wasn’t working out well, they ended up selling to Prepaid Legal, but I saw they really created kind of a movement, you know, 100,000 people from all over America got involved in the company and, you know, very motivated to do so. And I was inspired seeing what they did and I think if they had the power of the internet to deliver a content of stream online versus having to stream instead of these satellites then they’d probably still be around today but back in the ‘90s when they did that the technology wasn’t available. And so I looked at their model and I said, you know, again model genius and so I said well, we can really do the same thing but create a delivery mechanism that’s not going to fail it’s going to work every time anywhere in the world where someone has access to the internet they can access this amazing content. So put that together and sure enough it worked.

Michael: Why would Prepaid Legal buy them out and then close that whole section down? Was their other aspects at TPN that were profitable?

Matt: They pretty much scraped everything within TPN but what they had is an amazing amount of leadership. This guy named Jeff Olson, Jeff’s an incredible leader in network marketing and they had a lot of amazing leaders, and so amazing that the two totally separate companies I can’t imagine a personal development company selling to a prepaid legal company and people are getting inspired to now suddenly market prepaid legal services but they did and that’s really, I think, a testament to the leadership of Jeff Olson in really enrolling people and continuing to build their dreams but in a different way. So right now in prepaid legal the latest numbers that I’ve heard is that 70% of the distributor base in prepaid legal came through the distributors that they acquired from Prepaid Legal.

Michael: I got you. So they had all the distributors too.

Matt: Yeah.

Michael: That’s interesting. So that was the only form of completion the MLM world around at the time.

Matt: It really was. I had seen a couple of other companies that had tried to launch a personal development network marketing company and not had a lot of success, but very few, very few. And so, you know, it’s one of those things where you can look at other companies and see where they failed and why they failed and figure out how to not make the same mistakes and create a successful company out of it and that’s pretty much what we did.

Michael: So what was the first thing you did to get your company going? How long did it take to get the infrastructure setup and to get all your content together or is that still a never ending process?

Matt: You know it’s a never ending process where we’re always getting new content and always improving upon the company and so forth, but it took us almost a year of preparation so building the Web site. Network marketing there’s a lot of programming that goes into commissioning and accounting and all of those things and then there’s compliance issues getting legal and, you know, registering with different states and so forth and so there’s a tremendous amount of compliance work that goes into it. So it took us, you know, nine to twelve months to kind of work all that out and, you know, we launched. And one of the things is even when we launched we didn’t have everything in place but we had a working model and so continued to build on and improve upon and improve upon and improve upon the model every month we’re adding more and more. In fact over the last 60 days we’ve just rolled out a new learning center technology that’s got everyone very, very excited.

Michael: So these people out there who think they can just start their own network marketing company what kind of money do you need to start up, you know, realistic multi-level marketing company? It takes some pretty serious backing, doesn’t it?

Matt: Yeah, well the owner of the company you need to have a mindset that you have to be able to live with zero profits for at least two years, so if you don’t have a couple of years nest egg then I would discourage someone from starting a company because it just takes a good amount. So I would say that would be Number 1 don’t expect to take any profits out or even any money to live for about two years and then in addition to that you need to have a bit of a nest egg for the company, so a couple of hundred thousand dollars to have at a minimum. If you look at most successful network marketing companies a lot of time they launch with a million or a couple of million dollars in funding. Now, we didn’t launch with that we had a few hundred thousand dollars.

Michael: You had no product inventory which was real nice so…

Matt: Yeah that helped a lot because we were licensing content and so forth but when we launched we weren’t actually producing physical content and mailing that out we are now, we now mail out every student who pays their $49.95 monthly tuition they receive three CDs and one DVD sent in the mail every month but when we launched we didn’t have that so that helped a lot not having a physical product a mail out, that helped a lot.

Michael: Tell me why you decided to do that when someone comes in to get something physical was that in an effort to maintain within the MLM laws that no ones accusing you of pushing opportunity over product or was that because distributors really wanted physical.

Matt: It was not really having to do with compliance issues because even without our physical product mailings we’ve got an amazing product just with the learning center, but it was one was to add more value to our students. We realize that a lot of people enjoy listening to products in their car or sitting at home and watching their television and watching a DVD and so the mission of our company is to transform lives through education and so we’re constantly thinking of ways that we can help to transform lives. And so we just said to ourselves if we can deliver physical products in the mail then that’ll make a greater impact in the lives of our students. One of the other factors was that we do a lot of business overseas. About 70% of our business comes from outside the US and one of our big markets is the African market and so we have a lot of people in Kenya, in Nigeria and South Africa and Botswana and all these other countries. And so a lot of the people there their internet connection is very, very slow and so it was taking them a long time to watch courses on the internet and so forth and so we thought by delivering physical products then that’s going to allow them to overcome that obstacle of learning.

Michael: Is everything mailed all from the US?

Matt: It is. You’re listening to an exclusive interview found on Michael Senoff’s

Michael: How is it that 70% of your distributors are outside of the US? Did you have large distributor networks or leaders that you had contact with to help bring other people into your company or was that the way you built it?

Matt: We ended up finding them so it’s an interesting turn of events. When we launched we were 90% US and not having to get government approval for nutritional supplements in all the different markets allowed us to open up all these other countries fairly quickly so that helped a lot. So the power of the internet – Kenya is a good example. I just got back from a five country tour on Sunday a couple of days ago and within Kenya now we had a gentlemen who found us over the internet, he saw a banner advertised on email or something like that, and got excited. He was a business leader in Nairobi, had never done network marketing before but just got excited about our business model and about developing people through personal development. And so he got involved and started doing meetings and started learning about network marketing and has now built an organization of hundreds and hundreds of people in Kenya, that’s an example of just the power of the internet. London is one of our biggest markets I was just there on the tour and in London we have one of our speakers who’s also a consultant within Success University. He went to London to speak at an event and when he was there he met a gentlemen who was into personal development and had done a good bit of network marketing and he knew someone who knew someone who was a leader in network marketing who saw our business model, got excited and within about a years timeframe had built an organization of several thousand people and that gentlemen led us to South Africa where we now have several thousand people, but interesting how it’s built.

Michael: Yeah you never know where your business is going to come from.

Matt: Yeah.

Michael: How many distributors – what do you call them distributors?

Matt: We call them consultants.

Michael: Consultants. How many consultants do you have?

Matt: We’ve enrolled almost 100,000 consultants now in about a four year timeframe. It’s been amazing.

Michael: So someone who has that typical, I don’t want to say typical but you know there’s a negative stereotype towards MLM, how are you different and how do you counteract that negative image about multi-level marketing whether it’s pyramid schemes or potions and lotions.

Matt: One of the major things, you know, people look at the network marketing industry and they see a company that’s marketing, whatever it is if it’s nutritional products or soap or homecare products. And the thing that I hear more often than not is that, you know, they have a product that people are only buying because of the opportunity because in many cases the price of the product is so over inflated and to tell you the truth if you look at most nutrition companies and companies selling products that they mail out, homecare products and so forth. They are having to market up dramatically in order to pay for the commission and typically it’s about a ten times markup. And so if they have to markup the product ten times then, you know, a lot of times people look at that and think well, you know, I can buy vitamins at the grocery store for a fraction of the cost why would I do it through a network marketing and on many cases it’s because there’s an opportunity attached to it, that’s one of the reason why there’s been such a negative stigma. And so one of the things about Success University is, you know, it’s the power of education and just about everyone understands why education is so important. You look at your company, for instance, and the products that you sell it’ll be hard for someone to say well, it doesn’t make sense to learn from people who are more successful than me, that just doesn’t make sense. Hard to find people that would say education is not something that has a tremendous amount of value. And so our whole philosophy is really based on modeling, if you want to have success in your life you go and find someone else who have achieved massive success you learn from them, do the things that they did and you end up having the same results. So that’s what our model is all about it’s education, it is completely different than the pills, potions and lotions and things that a lot of people feel funny about talking to their friends about saying “Hey, I want you to try this new juice or this amazing vitamin that’s going to change your life” people kind of have a hesitancy to go out and talk about that. And so what we found one of the reasons why we’ve been able to enroll almost 100,000 people in the last four years is because the conversation of education is in many cases an easier conversation to have than saying, you know, change your homecare products. And so that’s one and the other thing is just the opportunity of network marketing in general. You know, I look at me being a young guy growing up for most of my life after about the age of six or seven growing up being very poor and not having the greatest patience so on and so forth to be able to find an industry to get involved in and within a matter of years create a six figure residual income that’s coming in allowing me to be my own boss and, you know, many, many other people have had the same thing happen. It’s an amazing industry that really levels the playing field. And so for anyone in the world who is teachable, coachable, has a tremendous amount of desire they really can achieve an amazing amount of success in their lives and I never say it’s easy. That’s one of the reasons why I think network marketing has gotten a bad stigma because so many leaders in network marketing or company owners or the company would say you can get involved it’s going to be easy and you’re going to make all this money and people get misled. And so one of the things that we really stand for in our company is not telling people it’s going to be easy or they’re going to get rich over money but it’s a Get Rich Slow philosophy of if you really work your butt and you’re teachable, you’re coachable, you have desire and you put in a tremendous amount of work you can have an amazing level of success. And so I think the whole idea of people being misled for so many years has created a very negative stigma. I know when I got involved in Amway, for instance, I think Amway is a great, great company but the whole system with Amway is don’t tell them it’s Amway tell them it’s something different and then in the meeting once you go through the opportunity presentation at the very end of the meeting after they’ve gotten everyone excited then they tell them it’s Amway and so people feel misled and so I think that’s created a huge negative stigma. I mean that alone has been one of the reasons why the network marketing industry has gotten such a bad rap.

Michael: Tell me about some of the trainers you have at Success University, who are you hearing rave reviews from your distributor base? What are they saying that they really liking?

Matt: Gosh, there’s so many. We just implemented a new commenting system where students can rate the course and over the last six weeks or so we’ve gotten an amazing amount of content coming in. In fact, I read one when I was in London one that came through the night before it was a speaker Toni and Nikki V out of the UK they have a relationship coaching company and the testimony that came in, I don’t have it handy right now, but basically it was a husband who took the course and he realized the pain that he had been causing in his family for years and how he always had to be right and, you know, it was making his wife wrong and on and on and on just heartbreaking story and how he went through this course and realized what he had been doing. And so had a meeting with his wife, did a candlelight dinner and apologized for the way he’s been over the last two years and ended up just really enhancing their relationship. And so there’s so many examples…

Michael: Changed his life, yeah.

Matt: Yeah just changed their lives, so that’s been an example of many. But speakers like Jim Rohn when students enroll they receive a DVD from Jim Rohn, a CD from Jim Rohn a DVD from Zig Ziglar and we have Les Brown as a faculty member. Les is just incredibly motivational and people love his stuff…

Michael: Well, let me ask you this the content like from Jim Rohn and Les Brown and Zig Ziglar is this original content produced for you guys or is it content that they’ve produced that isn’t on the market place anymore. What kind of content are we talking about?

Matt: A combination of both. With Zig Ziglar we found a CD of his that we just though was fantastic and it’s a product of his, you know, you could actually go buy a CD product or it’s actually a DVD set and you could go buy that for $199 dollars, but we throw that in along with all of our other products.

Michael: You set up a license with the…

Matt: We setup a licensing agreement so that’s one of the ways we get content, we license the content and in many cases it’s content that’s available that you’d end up paying a lot more than you would through Success University. So that’s one of the ways we also produce a good amount of content. So we’ll do teleseminars once a week, we do calls with our speakers and trainers that we produce content that way. We just setup a video studio in our office so while I was on my tour last week we had a speaker from the UK who is in town and we sell him three financial products talking about what is money, the values of money, wealth generation principles, things like that. So we produce content and we license content. The thing about us is we want content that’s really going to make a difference in people’s lives and so that’s our criteria.

Michael: The areas that you’re covering you’re covering relationships, financial success, health and physical well-beings, spiritual growths, sales and marketing, where are you seeing the largest demand for new distributor base? What areas or is it all across the board?

Matt: Really all across the board because we have such a variety of different people who are involved. So we have housewives who are looking for a content that’s going to make them a better mother or, you know, husbands that are going to make them a better father or a better husband. We have corporate executives, in fact I was just trading emails with one of our speakers out of Singapore he’s a corporate turnaround expert. And so we’re going to be rolling out a couple of extra products from him because of the economic crisis that we’re in right now, people are looking for ways to really turn their corporation around to thrive in a depressed economy, so we have an incredible variety of courses.

Michael: How has business been over the last six months for you? Are you down or up?

Matt: We’re way up. In fact last month was a record month in sales for us. Well, actually we’re in November now we haven’t looked at the final numbers for October but September was a record month in revenue a record month in new enrollments a record number in commissions, payouts. The month before in August was a record month in sales was at the time the biggest month we’d ever had, so the thing about network marketing is…

Michael: Recession proof.

Matt: Yes. In fact we’re doing a seminar with Les Brown on December 13th in Atlanta, the title of that is Recession Proof Your Income and people are looking for a Plan B, you know, as corporations lay off tens of thousands of people all across America and millions of people all across the world people are looking for another opportunity and those who have not been laid off they’re looking for ways to increase their value and one of the greatest ways to increase your value for your corporation or if you’re a company owner is education, learning the things that other people don’t know and developing a skill set that other people don’t have and that makes you incredibly valuable in the market place. And so the market place is getting, especially now, it’s more competitive than ever. Right now only the strong are going to survive and so what are you doing to become part of the strong. What are you doing that’s going to set you apart from the competition? And in my mind that really all boils down to education and learning what others don’t know.

Michael: I’ve got some stuff on my site on licensing. And you mentioned your business model it’s impressive because you’re taking content and you’re licensing it from other experts, can you just for the licensing nuts who listen to interviews on my site can you explain how this licensing concept has benefited you for this company? Explain what a license is just for the newbie.

Matt: Licensing is basically going to someone who has content that you desire to market and sell in our case it’s going to a speaker, going to a trainer and saying we want to license your content and working out something that works for them, so whether it’s financially, which in many cases we pay for content in many cases we don’t even have to pay for content because we’ve become, you know, a large personal development company we’re generating millions and millions and millions of dollars a year. We have students all over the word almost 100,000 students in 180 countries and so many speakers are looking for exposure. In starting the company that was the biggest challenge for me was mentally getting over the hurdle that I had the ability to license content from people like Zig Ziglar’s organization or Jim Rohn’s organization or any number of many of these speakers.

Michael: You in your mind didn’t think they’d do it, right.

Matt: You know I thought they would otherwise I wouldn’t have started the company but I wasn’t sure. And it was funny when I first started the company I hired someone that I thought was going to be able to go out and license all this content and what happened is before we started the company he ended up leaving and he didn’t have the relationships that I thought he had and so it was like wow I spent the last six months putting this company together and now the person who I thought was going to go license the content is gone and I had to take it upon myself to go write them the content. It was a bit stressful and it was a mental hurdle to overcome but what I found was people are people and a lot of times we have it in our mind that somehow people are not like us they’re on a different level, you know, we all put our pants on one leg at a time. So it wasn’t that difficult the main thing that I had to figure out was many of the speakers financial compensation wasn’t their thing. For many of them they had all the exposure they wanted. So whosever content you want to license finding out what’s in it for them and so don’t just approach someone and say “Here’s what I’ll do for you” you want to ask “What can I do for you, what is it you’re really looking for?” And when you come at it from that angle of what’s in it for them not what’s in it for me then you can have a lot of success licensing content. For more exclusive interviews on business, marketing, advertising and copy writing go to Michael Senoff’s HardToFindSeminars.com

Michael: Yeah I appreciate you talking about that. You have a multi-level marketing opportunity if I’m going to go out there and promote Success University to my contacts and try and build a down line and build a business and a distributorship, looking at the model, the model is basically an online membership also some physical products and I understand you’re promoting offline seminars as well, what’s statistically the potential rate of a distributor in Success University? How long are they staying?

Matt: They’ll typically stay for four, five, six months on average, so you have people who obviously will stand for a month and then they’ll leave because they don’t take the time to go through the content and there are people who get excited about learning and I’m sure you probably seen these yourself, I’m trying to remember what the numbers, people who actually purchase personal development home study courses I think it’s, you know, 5% or 10% who actually go through the course. And so a lot of times people will get excited about the content they’ll enroll and then after a month suddenly they’re not quite as excited, so you certainly have that. And on the other hand we have people who we enrolled in January of 2005 and they’re still with us four years later so cross the board I’d say on average four to six months. But what we find is it’s that referral rate, you know, the average person is getting involved and they’re enrolling a couple of people and so, you know, they may only be involved for, you now, four or five months and maybe they refer one person in that four or five months and then that person stays involved for two months but in that two months they refer one other person and then that person is involved for two years and they refer 50 people, so it’s interesting how it builds. The people who really stick with it long-term who make a commitment to developing themselves long-term and then just spreading the word and what happens is I always say it’s a marathon not a spring and so many people get involved and they think well, I’m going to make a ton a money over the next six months and when that doesn’t happen then suddenly they’re not as excited about the opportunity. You know we have so many people who now they’re earning a full-time income or maybe they’re only earning a couple of thousand dollars a month but it took them, you know, a year and a half to get there or it took them two years to get there. And so I look at the people earning even only $2000 dollars and it took them two years to get to that kind of income level on a part-time basis but, you know, that’s an extra $24,000 a year that they were able to generate residually in a two year timeframe.

Michael: Okay, let’s say that you and I just met at a cocktail party and you’re an active distributor for your own company. So let’s say you’re prospecting me for your opportunity or for Success University so in your training you teach your distributors how to approach people in what to say I’m sure there’s some training involved. What are you going to say to me to introduce now what’s worked best for an average distributor, they’ve just signed, they have contacts, they have family and friends, how do you approach them in the simplest way to introduce them to Success University?

Matt: Here’s my training I tend to stay away from canned approaches, you know, learn how to say this and say it every time because that’s not real for many people so for me it’s all about authenticity. So I can’t give someone a script because that may not be authentic for them. What we found that’s really worked is for someone just to share with what they’ve received out of it. And so it’s getting to know the other person not just approaching them with a business opportunity or approaching them with a product but getting to know them, getting to know what interest them, what they’re looking for in life, what their goals are in life, things like that, and then presenting and say well, I’m a student, I’m a member of a company called Success University. Success University has a 150 of the top speakers trainers, authors in the world and figure out, you know, whatever it is for them here’s how it might be able to help you and sharing your story, you know. So if I’m a salesperson I may say something like I went to Success University they have a course its 20 Secrets to Becoming a Sales Superstar and I went through that course and I learned more in that course than I learned in the last three years of being a salesperson and so it’s allowed me to become much, much, more effective chances are you’ll have the same benefits, and then just exposing them that way versus trying to come up with a canned failed speech.

Michael: Okay, that’s good. So let’s say I say that sounds good but how can I get involved? What do I do?

Matt: Simply referring them to one of our presentation tools so referring them to the Web site. We have a video on the Success University Web site having them watch that video. We do conference calls here nights a week so having someone listen in on one of the conference calls to get more information. And that’s one of the things is letting something else do the full presentation. So what we teach people is invite. I just did a network marketing training when I was doing my tour I said there’s really only four things you’re ever doing here, inviting, you’re presenting, you’re enrolling and you’re training, so it’s inviting someone to look at a presentation. The presenting you’re actually not doing you’re letting a tool do the presentation for you. We have a magazine called Empower Magazine and it’s a full newsstand quality magazine that really talks about all the benefits of getting involved in Success University. So you can hand them a magazine and in that magazine there’s a DVD, a dual-disc DVD CD so they can listen to that CD in their car, they can watch the DVD when they get home and so that’s presenting. Enrolling is asking them if they want to enroll. In many cases, we had a gentlemen’s who’s a trainer for Tim Lancer’s company out of Nairobi and he’s enrolled 10 people all through emails, he’s just emailed out a lot of his coaching clients and so forth and say “Hey, I’ve found a resource that I think would add a lot of value to you and your organization Success University, click here.” And so in many cases they’ll go to the Web site they’ll watch the presentations read through the Web site and enroll on their own. And then for the people who want to become independent consultants and earn income by referring others then it’s just a matter of training them, you know, we have a number of different videos once you become a consultant that trained you on building the business.

Michael: To get started I believe its $149.95 plus about $49.95 a month, is that correct?

Matt: That’s right you got it.

Michael: And what does the $149.95 cover?

Matt: The $149.95 is what we call our premium product package and that’s a collection of a lot of the best material that we have. So Zig Ziglar on DVD, Jim Rohn on DVD, Jim Rohn on CD as well, we have Les Brown DVD, we have a Dennis Whatley CD…

Michael: All that’s mailed to me in my initial pick.

Matt: Yes, all that’s mailed to you. There’s CDs that I recorded Seven Strategies to Seven Figures kind of my personal story of how I was able to generate seven figures in revenue six separate times before the age of 30, so they receive that as well. So they get several hundred dollars of content delivered in the mail.

Michael: Okay, what else besides the DVDs?

Matt: So I think I’ve named everything, there’s Jim Rohn on DVD, Zig Ziglar on DVD and then a distributor pack that’s got all the details and training materials, frequently asked questions, there’s a magazine in there…

Michael: How about the compensation plan, how does that work? Its $49.95 a month, let’s say you’re my first distributor, you pay the $149.95 do I make anything on that…

Matt: Yeah.

Michael: …and what do I make on the monthly?

Matt: So you’d make $20 dollars direct commission from the $149.95 and then we also have what we call a binary compensation plan, so the way that works is every group of six students who enroll you make a one-time commission of $40 in addition to your fast start commission…

Michael: The fast start commission is the $20 dollars on the $149.

Matt: That’s right. That’s actually $20 to $40 depending on, you know, we have different ranks you can earn more than $20 but it starts at $20, and then for every group of six students that pay their monthly tuition you earn another up to $40 dollars for every group of six. So you have a group of 60 students that would be about $400 dollars a month, you have a group of 600 students that’ll be about $4000 dollars a month.

Michael: Alright, 60 students’ 60 active members paying $49.95 and you have different levels. What’s the highest level you can get to?

Matt: Our top income earner is earning oh gosh, you know, $50,000, $60,000 a month in income.

Michael: They keep all that or do they have to pay anything out.

Matt: No, they just…

Michael: See that’s nice, you know, the other multi-levels think about this the ones selling the products and when they hold up those big checks and they said I made $20,000 this month but what a lot of people didn’t realize is that $10,000 or even more of that had to go to pay their down line…

Matt: Oh, yeah.

Michael: …and for product and stuff.

Matt: Yeah.

Michael: That wasn’t net…

Matt: I was having dinner with one of our leaders in South Africa him and his wife and they were talking about – I won’t name the company they were in – but they were with, you know, a huge billion dollar network marketing company and, you know, about half of their income every month went to paying for products because they had to be qualified and so they had a house full of product that they were always trying to sell to other people that are, you know, retail and things like that, so yeah there’s no requirements for us if you’re paying your monthly tuition or you’ve retailed one then that’s the only requirement to earn income.

Michael: Yeah and so when you say you got someone earning $60,000 a month they are earning $60,000 a month…

Matt: Oh, yeah.

Michael: …other than their computer cost and any marketing cost they have.

Matt: Yeah, exactly.

Michael: So when I get inside to Success University and I’ve paid my $149.95, first let me ask you this do you have to pay the $149.95 to become a member?

Matt: No, you don’t have to pay that to become a member. We actually have a free trial program someone could actually enroll, they could pay a $2 processing fee, we actually donate that processing fee to Feed the Children which is enough to feed and educate a child for a week and so actually every student who enrolls, whether they do the free trial or they pay the $149.95 then we donate money to Feed the Children a percentage of that. So no, they can actually enroll on a free trial basis.

Michael: Okay, so $2 bucks it’s donated and how long for your trial will be good?

Matt: Fourteen days.

Michael: Fourteen days and do that give you access to premium content or what?

Matt: It does, in fact they have access to the same amount of content. We don’t ship out the premium product package.

Michael: But it’s all online.

Matt: Yes, so they have access to everything online.

Michael: How does that work for you? How does it convert?

Matt: Very, very well, I just looked up yesterday 27% of the people who come on and do the free trial within one month they’ll upgrade to purchase the premium product package.

Michael: The $149.

Matt: And then we’ll have another 25% or so that we’ll upgrade and basically be a member and, you know, pay their monthly tuition.

Michael: Oh, so if I came in as a free I’ve got two choices I could upgrade to the premium get the physical CDs and stuff you mentioned or just sign up and go $49.95 a month without any physical stuff.

Matt: Exactly. So we have about half of the people who do the free trial end up becoming students.

Michael: That’s pretty good. So when I’m there in I’m in the University how is the content presented? Am I able to download it and listen to it on MP3 or is it all just play only?

Matt: You can download one course per week we don’t allow people to download everything because they’d have no incentive to remain a student long-term. So they can download one course per week to their computer and load it to their iPod, burn it to their CD, whatever they want to do, and then they have unlimited access to the rest of the content of the audio, video. We have a reading library and a lot of people prefer to download reading material print that out and read it on the go, read it before they go to bed.

Michael: So the reading library you can print that stuff out…

Matt: Yeah.

Michael: …but you can only download one program per week everything else though you can listen or play only online.

Matt: Yeah, you got it.

Michael: And a lot of our students are studying membership sites and from a membership site point of view that’s a pretty smart business model, otherwise, what do you think would happen?

Matt: What, if you allowed everyone to download?

Michael: Yep.

Matt: In my opinion if you allow everyone to download then they have no incentive to keep paying the monthly tuition. Now, they get involved for one month, they download all their content and then you get nothing else.

Michael: When you say program some of the content is longer and beefier than others. Like what if there’s just like a one hour program that would constitute one program right.

Matt: Yes, correct.

Michael: And then your system automatically knows if someone’s downloaded one thing.

Matt: Yeah, exactly. And then we also have an exam process so after someone who’s taken a course gone through the video or listened t the audio or read the material then they can take a quick online exam if they get 80% or better they can print out a Certificate of Achievement. It’s funny we have people who hang these Certificate of Achievement all over their wall and, you know, put those on resumes saying they’ve completed this course and that course and found that it really does help that someone is applying for a sales job and they take in five or six courses within Success University then, you know, any sales manager is going to look at that and say “Wow, this person’s done something to make themselves a better salesperson.”

Michael: That’s great. So your staff at Success University has gone through each one of these programs and created a test. So specifically how many people have gone through that is it something you can track?

Matt: I have 10%, 15% of the people who go through the exams. Many people they don’t care about the certificate they’re learning for themselves, but a certain percentage of people who want those exams, you know, want the certificates.

Michael: Your experts and trainers, you know, you stated 70% of your distributors from outside of the US, maybe I’m wrong, but probably most of your trainers are here from the US. How has America perceived when it comes to sales and marketing training the material you have, how does the other parts of the world perceive it really high?

Matt: In most cases very high. What we find is they love the content but they want content of their own and so one of the things we’ve done in launching our new learning center, for instance, we just added about 100 new faculty members – 75 – and over half of those are from outside the US. So we go into each of our major markets and we find speakers and trainers in those markets. In many cases it’s just more relatable, so we’re doing that and, you know, in the UK and Singapore and Australia and Kenya and south Africa, so we go and we find speakers who have a great message in those markets. And a lot of time that’s very relatable so they may like the American content but they also want to see some of their own content.

Michael: I see. What challenges would you tell someone who’s thinking about becoming a consultant at Success University who wants to build the distributorship in a business? If you were to talk to me in real honest terms what could you tell me to expect if I’m new to this type of business?

Matt: I would say the overall writing principle is having a commitment to personal development yourself. From what I’ve seen a lot of the greatest, the most successful consultants that we have are some of the biggest learners, you know, they’re going through the content, they’re constantly building their mind, they’re building their skill set, so that’s very, very important is becoming the product of the product. And so I talked earlier about authenticity and it’s very difficult to share something authentically if you’re not a product of the product yourself. So Step Number 1 is be a product of the product and then Step 2 is persistence and determination, so I never want to mislead anyone and tell them, you know, you’re going to have a huge success overnight. I never want to tell anyone it’s going to be easy but it’s all about just consistently referring others and sharing the message and if you’ll just consistently share the message over the long term you end up having success. So, you know, we have so many people who had really no success their first year, even no success their second year, some people no success their third year and then they got and then all of a sudden now they’re earning a huge income. Now, do we have people who have success overnight, yes we did, but that’s not the norm? We have a lot of people who within six months they’re generating a $1000 a month in income and so that certainly can happen but I would just say stick with it, be persistent, be determined, learn from the other people who have had a lot of success and then that’s going to allow you to have success in turn.

Michael: You brought up that you’re having a physical seminar in Atlanta, is that something that a distributor can promote and earn commissions on.

Matt: Not earn commissions on the seminar because the seminar is very inexpensive it’s going to be basically $50 for members to come so we charge enough to pay for the cost of the room. And so what we do at that event is Les Brown will give about a 90 minute keynote speech, he’ll talk about Success University and we’ll have one of our top money earners give a presentation on Success University on what’s in it for them, why they should become a student. We’ll talk about the Independent Consultant opportunity and how they can earn income and so here’s how our consultants would earn income on that is inviting others to the event. And so having people come to that event they see Success University, they really catch our vision and get involved themselves as a student that would be how they’d earn commission on that. That’s what we did on this five country tour so they would promote me as the speaker and we’d do a presentation on Success University. I’d share our mission, our vision, and a great way to enroll additional students is through those physical seminars.

Michael: Absolutely. Do you have a Board of Directors?

Matt: We have our top consultants, kind of an advisory board that we meet about once a month.

Michael: Is Les Brown one of your like figureheads.

Matt: He’s a faculty member of Success University.

Michael: I got you. How many faculty members? Anyone who’s in there teaching is a faculty member?

Matt: Yes, that’s correct, so about 150.

Michael: One hundred and fifty, very interesting. I’ve got a couple of interviews on my site you would probably be very interested in listening to. One is I’ve got an interview with Glen Turner.

Matt: Really.

Michael: Yeah, you know who Glen Turner is right.

Matt: Yeah I do. In fact I have a couple of his CDs.

Michael: Well, I’ve interviewed him a couple of years ago but it’s his whole story, okay.

Matt: Okay.

Michael: And then I’ve got an interview with Ben Gay III, have you heard of him?

Matt: No.

Michael: Okay, have you ever heard of The Closers the book called The Closers, it’s a sales training book.

Matt: I have heard that name.

Michael: Okay, well it’s the largest selling series book ever in history and there was a company called Holiday Magic. Holiday Magic they were a multi-level marketing company and Ben Gay started as a distributor in Holiday Magic the same day as Zig Ziglar and then Glen Turner was also a distributor in Holiday Magic.

Matt: He was.

Michael: And so there was all kinds of problems with Glen Turner then he went out on his own to build COSTCOT and then…

Matt: Dare to Be Great.

Michael: Yeah Dare to Be Great, that’s right. And then you have Ben Gay who became the CEO of Holiday Magic worldwide and so I’ve go the whole history…

Matt: Wow.

Michael: …of how that started. He talks about all the great sales trainers, Jay Edward Douglas how it all came to be. It’s a fascinating…

Matt: Wow.

Michael: …historical event of some of the real early days and some of the best speaker trainers ever in the MLM industry.

Matt: Have you ever met, oh he had a company called Bestline Products Bill Bailey, William E. Bailey.

Michael: I haven’t met him but I remember Ben Gay talks about him. Yeah Bestline we talked about Best Line in the interview. He also talks about Jim Rohn was a main guy – was Jim Rohn with Bestline?

Matt: Yes.

Michael: Best Line was selling chemicals and Jim Rohn was I think either the President or the top distributor or the figure head for Bestline.

Matt: Yeah Jim Rohn came out of Nutri-Bio with Earl Shoaf. Earl died I think and then they went over to Bestline Products.

Michael: Yeah, that’s right.

Matt: It’s an amazing history. In fact, wow I have it sitting right on my desk here where Holiday Magic ran from ’64 to ’74 and they had a training division called Mind Dynamics and Mind Dynamics that’s where Life Spring and Est developed.

Michael: Oh really.

Matt: Yeah. So Ask came out of Holiday Magic Training Mind Dynamics which is landmarked today and then Life Spring was another huge company that came out. Werner Erhard and John Hanley were trainers in Mind Dynamics and so John Hanley a group of people started Life Spring and Werner Erhard started Est. So it’s fascinating how much came out of Holiday Magic.

Michael: You’re right. Well, I’ll send you to these interviews, especially the Ben Gay because I’ve got the whole history in there, and then also with Glen Turner it’s good stuff.

Matt: That’ll be awesome I can’t wait to listen.

Michael: And I’ve got a 20 minute clip with Glen Turner it was from one of his speeches, I think it was A Challenge to America, he did Challenge to America, Better Your Best and there’s one other. Actually, I have a product that I sell on my site called Confidence and it’s a compilation of his three best speeches and then some other audio stuff, but this one speech, it was the Red Coat Speech and this is the one that he would do over and over again in town halls and meetings and stuff and he was saying people would literally just come up and throw money at him, I mean he talks about this in the interview. But it’s a nine minute clip that I put together it is just so powerful. Glen Turner I mean that guy, they call him like one of the most amazing pitchman…

Matt: Yeah.

Michael: …with the passion and the way he spoke.

Matt: Yeah I have a CD of his and its A Challenge to America, it is amazing.

Michael: But the way he sells the opportunity it’s emotional, it’s powerful. This has been great, you know, you think multi-level and there’s a lot of negative images built around it but it looks like you seem to really avoid a lot of that negative stereotype because you’ve got a product that is just invaluable, you know, I’m sold on personal development and one idea for a guy’s business whether it’s coming from any one of your 150 or more trainers for a little more than $600 bucks a year that’s nothing; you can’t put a value on education.

Matt: Yeah, that’s why I’m so passionate about it is how it turned my life around. When I was 21-years-old I found myself about $30,000 in debt, I was living out of my car, I was selling swimming pools door- to-door in Southern Louisiana and just miserable, could afford to stay in a hotel one maybe two nights a week and I listened to a Tony Robbins cassette and that cassette he talked about the concept of modeling and finding other people who achieve success figuring out how they did it and doing the same thing to get the same results. And he talked about his story of reading over 700 books and just having a huge commitment to developing themselves and so went on to become, you know, one of the greatest speakers in the world and going from being broke to earning over a $1 million dollars a year in personal income, he did that within about a one year timeframe. And I saw that and I said “Wow, I can follow that” and so I started, you know, I’d read one or two books every week and I’d turn my car into, you know, what I called Drive Time University and I just started masterfully studying successful people. And what happened is my life started to change, you know, the next year I was more successful, the next year I was more successful, the next year I was earning a six figure income and a few years after that I was a self-made millionaire and its all because I just continually study successful people. And so you look at the most successful people in the world and in many cases that’s what they do they study others who have massive success, it’s a formula that works.

Michael: Absolutely. There’s one other interview I meant to tell you about it’s with Melvin Powers. Melvin Powers was Wilshire Book Company out of Los Angeles, he was an old time mail order man and book publisher, still alive he’s 86, I just interviewed him about three months ago, and he sold 7 million of the Think and Grow Rich books in paperback…

Matt: Wow.

Michael: and three million of them were sold to the multi-level marketing industry.

Matt: Yeah I believe it.

Michael: Three million. He has had the paperback book rights for Psycho- Cybernetics I think he did about four or five million of those books, you know, a good percentage of those books were sold through multi-level marketing. Really good stuff good history there.