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Rick and Michelle Teague are the founders of Synergy Global Team and have been in the network marketing industry for 32 years, 29 of which have been full time, and have worked side by side with many of its top trainers and income earners.
Prior to networking, Rick was an attorney with 2 law degrees, and since they both joined the industry in 1984 they have trained over 1 million distributors, and are highly regarded industry consultants. Further, they were recently listed in Business For Home’s Top 250 Life Time Earners in Network Marketing with career earnings of close to $10 million dollars.
Rick & Michelle joined Modere early 2014, and are now E1s and rising in what they feel will be their biggest, best and final company!
Although the paths that led Michelle and I to network marketing were totally different, we both arrived in the industry at roughly the same time in 1984, in the same company, but since Michelle lived in Houston, TX and I lived in Tulsa, OK we still lived 500 miles apart geographically and didn’t know each other existed. As it turned out, this separation ended when we met at a business opportunity meeting in Dallas, TX that same year, and even though it took awhile for us to start dating, almost from the moment we met we both somehow “knew” that we were destined for each other.
This mutual attraction progressed further as we would see each other at company meetings, trainings and regional events. Further, one of the key “daily methods of operation” in that company was to put out 50-100 “post-it note flyers” per day, and Michelle and I would often run into each other while doing this at various locations around Dallas, and every once in awhile we would also see each other putting out telephone pole signs, flyers on bulletin boards, etc. Eventually in 1986 we both ended up working out of the same office coop, at which point getting more serious about our relationship got so irresistible that we officially started dating.
During this three year “1st chapter” in our network marketing story, not only did we meet, date and marry, but we also learned the basic skills, strategies and tactics of network marketing, including how to make the phone ring, prospecting, following up, closing, duplicating and promoting and holding events. And while Michelle was a full time network marketing professional at the time, I was still practicing law on a full time basis as I went through my part-time “three year boot camp” for network marketing. And lest the obvious escape you, imagine me as a young attorney with nine years of college and a post-doctorate level degree out running around town placing post-it note flyers on cars and stapling cardboard signs on telephone poles! Talk about getting out of your comfort zone!
But even at that early stage in our careers, Michelle and I both knew that it was all worth it because we were constantly surrounded by top distributors in that company, who had started building with that company 4-5 years before we did, and who were earning tens of thousands a month with better lifestyles and more time flexibility than anyone else we knew. So in spite of the fact that we never personally earned much income there, primarily because of a bad timing situation that developed, we knew that if we hung in there and paid our dues so to speak, there would someday be a huge payoff that would be virtually impossible to get any other way - - which is exactly what happened about the time we got married in December 1987, which also happened to be the time that we switched to our second network marketing company.
Almost from the second we started with our second company, it was a totally different world. Especially in my case, I had already learned my lesson about great and bad timing in the oil and gas industry, but looking back on it, timing was equally critical inside the network marketing profession as well. In short, in our first company it was great timing for the industry, but bad timing for the company. In our second company, it was great timing for the industry and the company - - and we immediately started earning more money and having more fun than either of us thought possible, while enjoying all the benefits of a home based business at the same time. Consequently, it was at this point that I decided to join Michelle as full-time network marketing professional, and to avoid the overhead and hassle of maintaining my law license, I cheerfully burned my bridges by resigning from the bar association.
To make a long story short, over the next 25-26 years, we pretty much saw and experienced it all - - the good, the bad, and the ugly of network marketing. We lived through fairy tales and nightmares, and lived on the peaks and walked through the valleys, and learned pretty much everything we could about what to do, and what not to do. Through all this, we rubbed shoulders with giants, went on countless 5 Star type trips, promoted and held team events that approached 10,000 attendees at times, became neighbors with the likes of Dave Ramsey and Lean Rimes, paid cash for a Bentley, and earned millions of dollars.
But all in all, our greatest claim to fame through all this was not the income, but the freedom and flexibility that came with it, and our ability to live what we called a “home-centric” life. In fact, we often tell people that we know a lot of people who have earned more money than we have, but we know very few who have earned as much as we have who have also spent as much time with their children while they were growing up as we have.
And on the other hand, there have also been times when we have gotten trapped in bad timing situations, and watched several companies either vaporize on us, or commit horrendous mistakes that costs us dearly, forcing us to move on. Further, we have certainly learned the hard way what not to do with money, which is beyond the scope of this book. However the bottom line is that even with all the ups and downs, the network marketing industry has been a Godsend for us in comparison to any other career we could have picked. And if we had to boil it down to perhaps the biggest frustration of our 31-year career in the network marketing profession, it would have to be the fact that we have had to switch companies more often than we desired or planned - - which leads us to Modere.
In short, to really understand the reasons we chose Modere, you have to first get a basic understanding of the main issues that often force leaders in companies to switch companies. In many cases it involves mistakes made by ownership or management, which typically stem from greed, dishonesty, arrogance, or ignorance about the profession, which ultimately causes a precipitous crash in volume and income - - which in turn creates a “layoff type scenario” that forces leaders to other companies. In other cases, companies simply go out of business, just like they do other industries and professions, many times because they are underfunded, lack experienced management, etc.
In yet other cases, especially during the last 10-15 years, there has been a growing instability in some of the fastest growing companies that is caused by an insufficient number of “real customers,” defined as someone who repeatedly purchases product from a company totally independent of that company’s opportunity. This is because of very narrow product lines that do not attract a wide spectrum of customers, but also because of “defective overall customer offers” which include factors such as non-competitively high prices, forced auto ships, customer initiation fees, sub-par branding and marketing, confusing opportunity focused retail web sites, etc.
In our case, even though our network marketing career has been phenomenal as a whole, we have also pretty much experienced “all the above,” and accordingly reached a crossroads in mid-2013 - - either continue switching companies every 3-4 years or find the final company that would allow us to break that pattern, and the starting point for finding that company was the quote “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results,” which led us to the brilliant conclusion that for us to get different results we had to find and do something different from what we had been doing.
And presumably by divine providence, during the year before we came to this conclusion, I had read 3 pivotal books - - Different, Escaping the Competitive Herd, Blue Ocean Strategy, and Collapse of Distinction, How to Stand Out & Move Up While Your Competition Fails,” which gave me an invaluable new perspective as we began our search for something different - - and as I started scrutinizing literally every company I could find, all I could see was a “sea of sameness” - - and in spite of the fact that every company talked about being different, the closer I looked, the more painfully obvious it became that pretty much the entire industry had become one big blur of similarity.
So - - what is different? Different in a way that really makes a difference? The more we looked and the more people we talked to, the more equally obvious it became that most people really don’t know what different is - - which is perfectly illustrated by this quote from Henry Ford, “if I had asked the people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” - - clearly because they didn’t yet know that something called a “car” was even possible. So said another way, as we continued the most extensive and exhaustive search of our career for something different, all we could essentially see were faster horses and shinier buggies, until on January 28th, 2014, we discovered the car - - and that car is called Modere. And although all the many reasons why Modere is different are definitely beyond the scope of this page, suffice it to say that Modere literally solves every single one of the many factors I’ve described above that have led to the decline and demise of countless other companies.