Hector_LaMarque_-_Leadership_-_01_Getting_Wide

The speaker emphasizes the importance of being "wide" in the Primerica business, which means having a large number of active agents who generate sales. They believe that being wide is the key to a successful and profitable business. They explain that the number of active agents, not just the number of coded agents, determines how wide a business is. They urge listeners to focus on recruiting and training directs to expand their business and increase their income. They stress that getting wide is within their control and is crucial for stability, consistency, and value in their business. The speaker also warns against managing the business through others and encourages personal involvement in recruiting and training. They believe that focusing on getting wide is the best way to achieve success and financial freedom in the Primerica business. The following material is copyrighted. It is intended solely for training purposes within the Lamarck hierarchy. Any unauthorized duplication, reproduction, or distribution outside of the Lamarck hierarchy is prohibited and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent allowable by law. Hello everybody. This next CD is about getting wide. You know the number one key to a stable, profitable, and drama-free business is being wide. Let me explain what wide is. It's the number of direct coded agents to you who are engaged in the business. And by engaged I mean they write at least one life insurance sale or more each month. You know the way you calculate how many directs you have is to count how many directs who wrote a life sale last month. And that is how many actual directs you have. A lot of people believe that the number of direct coded agents they have determines how wide they are. That's absolutely incorrect. But if the agent isn't active you can't count them. If they aren't productive it's just like they don't exist. You know it becomes delusional and damaging to the health of your business to count anyone but the active agents. See this is a reflection of an accurate and true gauge of the health of your business. You know the true health of a primary care business is always determined by how wide you are. You know most people really avoid this because it takes a lot of work to get wide. So people are always trying to figure out a way. How can I build a great business? How can I build a big base shop without actually having to personally go do it? That's what everybody does. They don't do it consciously most of the time but they definitely do that. I see it all the time. They think they can manage their way to success. You can't do that in prime America. You know this is true either in your base shop or through first-generation RVP. If you're really wide in your base and you build a big base shop you're going to be able to produce a bunch of first-generation RVPs which means you're going to be wide through first. That's where all the compensation is in prime America. That's where you have the ability to make big money. The best way for you to get wide is through your warm market and referrals from your warm market and referrals from your clients. You know I met with Mike Sharpe early in my career and he told me Hector if you want to build a big base shop and a huge hierarchy you've got to get wide. You have to be totally focused and committed to getting wide. And I don't mean recruit people for your people. I mean you prospect, you find them, you recruit them, you develop them. He said all good things go to those who get wide and build a big base shop. And he was absolutely 100% correct. I did what he said. I didn't try to analyze it. I didn't try to think about it. About that time he was making about $800,000 a year in 1984 when I had this conversation with him. And I said well if he's making you know nearly a million dollars a year which is a gigantic income back then then he must know what he's talking about. So what I did is I just totally focused from that point forward every day of my Primerica life. My number one total focus, complete and total focus was on hiring directs and training them really really well and seeing how wide I could get. I knew if I did that everything else would follow. A big base shop, big income, recognition, stable income. I mean just everything that I wanted. The trips, the promotions, all those things would automatically come from me focusing on getting wide which is hiring directs. And so that's what I did. And it was a great decision because since I've been in the business I've been paid about 40 million dollars. My business is worth about 40 million dollars. I've saved an awful lot of money. I've become wealthy. And I know without a shadow of doubt and a lot of my peers who probably were better than me they didn't do that. And I passed almost everybody up. There's only about two or three people ahead of me now. And you know I'm going to keep getting wider and that's the key. And I'm going to pass them up too. It's just a matter of time. It's not because I'm better than they are. It's because of what I focus on. And same thing's true for you. It's what you focus on. See the things you focus on create your business and they create your life. So what you've got to do is you've got to analyze what's the best thing for me to focus on. If I'm going to build a successful Primerica business what could be the possibly the very best thing I could focus on. I'm telling you beyond a shadow of a doubt it's your focus on getting wide. For every direct recruit you have who writes at least one sale you're going to do somewhere around three thousand dollars in life premium every month. This is the way it works then. If you become really proactive about getting the new recruit in the field immediately you're going to do more production per direct recruit. And if you don't focus on that you're going to do less. So if you want to grow the amount of production you do per recruit it really has to do it's tied in to how focused you are in getting that recruit into the field. Look an example is this. If you have ten directs who write a sale every month right you're going to do about thirty thousand dollars in your base out without any effort. It's going to be effortless. There's some people that can do thirty thousand five or six recruits but it's not effortless. They really have to work. They got to be really focused. If you have ten you'll do it like falling off a log. If you want to do a hundred thousand dollars a month you need about twenty five to thirty five active directs who write at least one sale per month. If you want to grow fast and beat all the competition in Prime America never lose your focus on getting white and recruiting in field training directs. Never lose your focus on that. It is everything. Promise you right. Believe me the competition simply won't do it and if you will you're going to beat them like a drum. If you can maintain this focus even after you begin to make decent money you're going to move into rare you're going to have the ability to make millions of dollars per year at this thing. There are a lot of people in Prime America that I know that are ultra talented that could be making millions. I have tons of them in my own hierarchy that should be making a million dollars a year with no sweat right now but they stopped doing what I'm telling you to do right now. They all stopped. They all started managing their business. That's what they did. You don't want to make that mistake. Here are some points of why you should go white. Number one it's the only thing you can truly control in Prime America. You can't control anything else. You can't control what your people do but you can control your activity in recruiting directs. It's how you create a stable and consistent income. If you want to have a really stable income the wider you are the more stable your income will be. It'll just be like a cash flow machine if you do that. It's how you create the highest value for your business. If you ever decide at some point you get tired you want to sell your business the wider you are the more first-generation RVPs you have the more valuable your business is going to be. The easier it's going to be to get a great price for your business. Prime America's compensation clearly tells you to get wide. If you get wide what ends up happening is this okay. You create a really stable income. The compensation tells you what to do in Prime America. They're screaming at you what you should be doing which is building a big base shop getting wide there and then from doing that you're going to get wide through first. There's no reason if you continue to get wide you continue to have a big base shop and you continue to produce first-generation RVPs there's no reason why you shouldn't be doing $500,000 a month through first or a million dollars a month through first and make ten million dollars a year. It's completely doable for somebody that's motivated to do that. Once you know the facts any other focus than getting wide is just crazy. What I found out that people that don't get wide they're either not very bright or they're really kind of lazy because it does take work there's no question about that. You know most people don't continue getting wide because it takes a lot of energy to do it so they get to a certain comfort level income-wise somewhere where they feel comfortable and then they begin to rationalize why they don't or shouldn't get wide. It's sad because they can become super wealthy if they decided to continue to get wide. You know the number one reason regional vice presidents don't do much better than they do is a lackadaisical approach to personal recruiting and field training. They begin to manage and try to build their business through their team and it's just a gigantic mistake that cost the millions. You know the problem is that there's a business law called the law of the lid something that John Maxwell talks about in his books which basically says that we can't attract and lead anyone that is a higher level of development than we are. So why is this a problem? Because when you've worked hard to master Primerica, which is what most Primerica regional vice presidents have done, you now have the ability to attract and recruit a much higher quality person. So if you stop recruiting personally at this point and you leave all the recruiting and the training to people who aren't as developed or whose lid is lower than yours, you essentially leave the fate of your business in the hands of people who simply can't attract and train and develop the kind of people who could explode your business. As a result, the majority of new people who are recruited tend to be followers. A Primerica business made up of followers doesn't have the capacity to become great. You need leaders to build a great business and the leader who's developed is going to do a lot better job at recruiting those people than their underlings. This is the way it works. So the regional vice president who's not clear in their role, which by the way is to become a recruiter and a field trainer until they're financially independent, is destined to sadly underperform, needlessly by the way, until they recognize their role. I would suggest you read John Maxwell's books. There's three of them that I recommend. He has a lot more than this, but I think you should at least read these. Developing the Leader Within You, Developing the Leaders Around You, and the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. What you want to be doing is raising your lid, raising your leadership skills. I was at a fairly high level of leadership when I began Primerica because I had spent the previous five years focusing on personal development, going to seminars, listening to tapes, reading books, everything having to do with becoming successful five years before I even got involved in Primerica. So I had a head start on most people. It was a little bit unusual, but those of you that don't have that background, you're going to have to do that in Primerica, and you can. There are just limitless resources. This program, by the way, is one of those resources that will allow you to raise your lid a lot faster. As a result of, you know, really having a pretty high lid myself, I made sure I was involved in virtually every recruiting appointment that had to do with somebody that was, you know, pretty sharp. Anybody that was pretty sharp, I was involved in that. I didn't train them all, but I recruited them all pretty much. You know, being wide allows you to create competition also, which allows you to grow much faster. The more competition happening in your bank shop, the faster you're going to grow. Another thing being wide does, it allows you to easily lead your team. The wider you are, the more people realize that you don't really need them as an individual. We need everybody collectively. Let's face it, but we don't need anyone individually, and when you're really wide, it's very easy to lead your team. Another thing it does, it solves virtually every problem in America. The wider you are, the more problems it solves. Number one, it solves cash flow. You're never going to have a cash flow problem when you're wide. Growth, you're going to be growing like crazy because you're going to have all kinds of competition happening, right, and you're proactive in the growth of that business. You're finding new people yourself and developing those people, and if you continue to do that, the only thing that you can do is grow. Competition, you're going to be able to create lots of competition. The wider you are, you're going to be able to get those people that are direct to you competing against each other, and when they're competing against each other, that's going to cause your business to explode as well. You have more control, much easier to control a business when you're wide than when you're not. It doesn't have as much fluctuation, and you can really, really control it very easily. The other thing too is leadership example. When you're recruiting wide and you're recruiting directs, you can constantly say, look, you need to do as I do, not as I say. You know, there's nothing worse than somebody telling you what you should do while they're doing the opposite of what you're telling them to do. You have no credibility when you're doing that with people. You get respect. If you want people to respect you, I guarantee you when they see you put numbers up, they're going to respect you. And then coachability. You're going to have people going to be much more coachable if they see you getting the kinds of results that they want to get. And boy, the dream. The dream is going to happen because you're going to get financially independent. You're going to get wealthy. The bottom line is get wide. It will shoot you past everyone else in Primerica because most people aren't going to do it. I promise you that. You want to win? You want to beat everybody? Get wide.