About Gavin

This was me about 8 years ago

I was 23 years old and lived with my partner in a 3 bedroom Semi detached house which we were renting and sharing with 3 other people. There were 5 of us living there in total. I really enjoyed my time at that house, it was great spending time with people I got on with and was friends with but I really want to get on the property ladder for myself.

Unfortunately there was no way I was going to be able to afford a mortgage and the money we were paying the landlord was just dead money. It was going into lining his pocket and making him wealthy rather than us!

One of my house mates at the time introduced me to a network marketing company and we started going to all the house meetings and hotel meetings. I'd got a full time job during the day and had to do this in the evening and in my spare time.

My relationship with my partner suffered because of this, but that was because I wasn’t able to separate my work from my life and everything merged into one and became a big mess. This is one of the things you need to learn to do because taking your work life into your relationship and vice versa is a bad thing to do. It can really cloud your thoughts, stop you from being productive and creative and give you a big headache.

Myself and my friend would go along to the local hotel and sit down to chat with our upline. He'd explain how it all worked, build the dream, give us advice and information about the business and compensation plan etc and lay it all out for us. I made a list of everyone I knew, including my family, friends, colleagues, and old acquaintances and I contacted as many of them as I felt comfortable contacting. There were other people on my list, whom I didn’t want to contact about my business opportunity just in case they laughed at me, rejected me or turned me down.

In order to contact some of my friends and family to tell them about this new business, I had to overcome a few hurdles. I wasn’t very good at talking on the phone and found it uncomfortable basically begging people to join my business. I hadn't got much posture on the phone at the time.

I sponsored a few friends and family members into the business, but like me, they struggled to sponsor anyone else. They were paying money out each month for their autoship and I wasn’t sure how much longer myself or my friends could afford to stay in the business whilst we weren't earning any money. We were spending more money than we were making because we had to buy the products each month and pay the membership fees etc.

I was dedicated to the business but unfortunately the friends I sponsored weren’t as dedicated and committed as I was, and I was finding it very difficult to motivate them.

I was working a full time 9-5 job which I desperately wanted to quit so I could spend more time with my family, friends and Internet business. Initially, I just wanted to earn a bit more cash from the network marketing business so I could afford to take my family on a few nice holidays, and have more money for food, petrol and the general household bills.

My expenses seemed to be increasing each month, and the cost of petrol, food, bills and property seemed to be skyrocketing. All I wanted to do was to earn a little more money to enjoy life a bit more!

I started reading books and training materials which the company told me to read and I started to listen to the motivational CD’s they’d given me. I also started reading books and learning from people like Anthony Robbins, Brian Tracey and other motivational self help guru’s. I loved this side of it!

I figured that if I was going to be successful in this business, I’d have to increase my knowledge and learn as much as I could about motivation, persuasion, offering value to others and much much more.

I put some adverts in local shop windows and in the newspapers and had a few people contact me, but no one actually joined my business from this activity. Maybe I didn’t do it for long enough, but it was taking me a lot of time to do and wasn’t really paying off.

I was running out of time each day and wasn’t able to achieve as much as I'd have liked. It was a juggling act trying to spend time with my family, work my day job, cook, do the house work, go to the meetings, learn, and then try to build my network marketing business. It was a headache

I realised that before I could build my network marketing business, I also needed to learn about the company, understand it’s structure and how it worked, understand the concepts, learn how to sponsor new people and learn what to say to them. There was a lot of stuff I didn't understand at the time.

In reality all I needed to do was to sponsor 3 people and then teach them to do the same. I remember thinking, how hard can it be?

The problem I had was finding those people whom I could teach to sponsor 3 people each. At the time I didn’t really understand what I was doing and I didn’t really know how to teach other people. Especially when I wasn’t sure what I was doing myself.

I remember thinking ‘The company I'm with is brilliant and I can’t see why my family and friends can’t see it. They keep saying to me that it’s a scam, I’m not going to make any money with it, it’s a pyramid scheme and only the people at the top are the ones who make all the money! I know that’s not true. The company has been around for a long time and network marketing is a legitimate form of business. Yes, the people at the top do make a lot of money, but that’s because they have done all the hard work and built their business’.

The only way they make money is by helping other people make money and duplicating their efforts.

I wanted to prove my friends and family wrong, they thought I was crazy but I was going to prove them wrong. I knew one day I’d succeed in the end and live my dream, I just had to find a way to do it.

I needed to duplicate my efforts and then train my downline to do the same, but before I did that I needed to build a team of 3 people, learn about duplication and teach my team to do the same.

Finding new people was hard, I'd pretty much exhausted my prospect list, my friends and family were staying away from me and they thought I was crazy. Every time I saw them I'd mention what a great businessI was involved in and they should come along to the meetings.

Getting people to the house meetings was the hard part and finding the people to invite along to the meetings was even harder!

Sometimes I had to travel to the meetings and I didn't get back until 12am. I was away from my family in the evenings because I was trying to build up my business and then I had to go back to work in the morning!

The worse of it was that I was trying to spend more time with my family, stay at home more, earn more money to pay the bills and to lead a better lifestyle but I saw my family less and less than before, and I was out more often at the meetings and was spending more money in the process.

I had to get a new credit card to help me pay for the products I needed to buy each month and to pay for the travelling to the meetings and the training materials!

It finally got to the point that I wasn't sure how much longer I was going to be able to keep it up, I really wanted it to work and I really wanted to prove every one wrong. I had my reputation staked on this.

If I could earn more money, spend time with my family more, relax more rather than working harder then I would be happy.

In the future myself and my family could go on great holidays abroad, we could get a bigger house and a nicer car. Everyone would envy me and I'd feel great! That will prove those doubters wrong!

They'd see me driving round in a great car and feel silly that they doubted me all along! I'll be going on holiday to exotic locations whilst they were still in their 9-5 jobs, driving around in their old car and going on holiday in the same places as before!

Unfortunately after several years of trying, I just couldn't make it work. I still had my goal and dreams and I knew I was going to achieve them. I'd just have to find another way of doing it!

So, I left the Network Marketing company and continued with the rat race. I tried several other businesses and opportunities but just couldn't make them work.

Eventually I came across the Internet and started designing websites. I got a bank loan and paid around £4,000 for a web design course because I realised there was a lot of money to be made online. I realised that if I increased my knowledge and learned about webdesign then there'd be a future for me on the Internet.

I saw many other people making money online and started to investigate how they were doing it. I joined business after business, set up site after site and started to make a little bit of money from my efforts. It wasn't as easy as I thought it was going to be, but I wasn't going to let it beat me!

After a couple of years of doing this, I set up a website which I focused on for 6 months solid. I started making friends in the industry and networking with as many people as I could.

A couple of months later, I was approached by another webmaster in the industry who asked if he could use some of my content on his website in return for a back link from his site. I agreed and we became friends. He owned one of the biggest sites in the industry and I wanted to learn as much from him as I could.

6 months later he told me he was selling his website and that he'd received an offer for £18,000 which to me at the time was a lot of money. The site was earning around £4,000 per month and had a great reputation in the industry. He told me he'd rather sell the site to me than the other guy but there was no way I was going to be able to pay it all in one go, so I asked him if I could pay it off over a period of 12 months and pay him back from some of the profits from the website.

He actually agreed! I was about to own an excellent website which actually earned money! This was going to be my first successful business online.

I paid him a deposit of £5,000 and started paying back a certain amount each month until it was fully paid off.

During this time, I went through a steep learning curve. I learned about Internet Marketing, traffic generation methods, autoresponders, networking, business and a whole lot more. My website started to grow and grow and so did the profits.

I've always been a sensible person and rather than wasting the money I was earning, I started to reinvest it back into my business and into me.

I started to buy other websites in the industry and over a period of time built one of the biggest network's of sites in the niche. I also started to invest in myself as a person and furthered my knowledge by reading many different courses, attending seminars and studying experts.

I purchased MLM Goldmine, Tube Ninja, Eben Pagan Guru Mastermind, Corey rudl's Internet marketing secrets, brian tracey, Ryan Deiss's whole sale adwords traffic, Mike Dillards mlm traffic system, magnetic sponsoring, Ann sieg Renegade Network marketing, building on a budget, blackbelt recruiting, Stompernet SMARTS program, 30 day challenge by Ed Dale, Print Persuasion Masterclass by Eben Pagan… The list goes on.

I must have spent well over £15,000 on books, courses, classes and seminars over the period of 3 to 4 years and I feel I can offer so much now I've been through that learning curve than if I hadn't.

Unfortunately people think they can come online and make money within a few weeks of putting up one blog post or one video and without having a deep knowledge inside them first. Unfortunately it takes time, it's a learning curve and you need to learn as much about the Industry as you can. Your failures online will be your most valuable assets. You'll learn about what works, what doesn't, why it worked and why it didn't. Best of all, you will have experienced it first hand yourself. You own that experience and someone else hasn't told it to you. This is the most powerful type of learning.

You have to improve yourself, learn as much as you can, learn about the tools of the Internet. This is why so many people give up. It's not easy!

There are a few people who come online and make money very quickly. There are usually people who are already highly developed people, people who know their industry and niche very well and know how to get what they want by networking and working with other people in the niche they want to succeed in.

One thing I realised after my early days in Network Marketing and that was my previous failures weren't my fault. I did exactly what I was told to do and followed orders to the tee. I thought I was to blame! It wasn't until later that I found out that it wasn't my fault and my upline hadn't been telling me the whole truth!

If only I'd been able to find a mentor earlier on, someone who could help me achieve my goals, I'd have been successful 10 years earlier.

Well, I've been through it all now, I have the knowledge, the money, the lifestyle and pretty much everything else I could want. I'd like to give back to other people now and help them achieve the lifestyle they'd like to achieve.

That's the first part of my story… if you can relate to me and how my life has opened out so far, you can read the next part here…