By Wes Moss

Hard work alone didn’t get Linda Rabb to her six-figure salary. In fact, she worked hard all her life but never got rich at the work she did in the fast-food industry. Only after making a c

Click the image above to buy the book!

hange—finding a way to compound her income instead of just drawing a paycheck—did Linda turn her hard work into a six-figure income. Now, after only 5 years of selling supplemental insurance for Aflac, the “Steak n Shake Lady” makes well north of $150,000. What’s more, she expects to reach a point where, without working forever, she can make money each year virtually as long as she lives. I’ll explain that part later in the chapter.

Linda didn’t always have such high expectations: Most of her life she had worked hard in the food and beverage industry and was happy to just get by. Her last job, as a beverage manager, was okay. But no matter how hard she worked, she still earned the same amount: “It didn’t matter how good a job I did, I was only going to be paid X amount of dollars a year,” Linda recalls. This started to bother Linda when she reached her 50s. That’s when a sudden out-of-state relocation to be near her daughter resulted in Linda working one of the hardest jobs of her life: night manager at a Steak n Shake restaurant. It was what she called a “job of necessity,” not a dream career. In fact, most of her coworkers were there because they needed money: “People there are not in it for the laughs and giggles,” she says. But it was the best job she could find in a new state with no contacts. For 3 years she worked the night shift 60 to 70 hours a week on a hard concrete floor, earning $42,000 a year.

When Linda talks about how she was working hard and not getting ahead, she has a sense of humor about it. But it must have been an awful feeling for this smartly dressed grandmother-to-be slaving away for what she now thinks of as pocket change. She didn’t know what she was going to do, but she knew she had to come up with a plan. So Linda was ready to listen when one of the Steak n Shake regular customers made her an offer: “This gentleman kept coming in and saying if I ever wanted a career instead of a job, I should come talk to him.” So Linda went to talk with the Aflac regional sales coordinator. “I knew within 15 or 20 minutes I could do this.”

The Triple Rs
Years of working in hourly and salaried jobs had taught Linda an important lesson that is the point of this whole book: She did not just need a paycheck; instead, she needed repeatable, reoccurring revenue. For years she’d been trading her hard work for a paycheck, and it hadn’t gotten her very far. With Aflac, she’d found a company that offered the ability to set up what I call the Triple Rs: repeatable, reoccurring revenue.

First, she has to land an account (by convincing a business manager to adopt the plan on Aflac’s menu of insurance offerings). Then she presents the coverage and hopefully signs up some employees to buy it. That’s how she earns her first R: revenue, in the form of commissions. The second R, repeatable, then comes from sales through word of mouth. Sometime during the first year, at least one of the employees who signs on is likely to use his or her benefits—maybe the employee breaks his wrist or throws out his back. Bam, he gets a check from Aflac. He tells his coworkers about it, and the next time Linda goes to make her presentation at that company, more employees are likely to sign up—with no extra effort on her part. She’s selling the same product and making the same number of presentations, so each year her commission base (revenue) grows and compounds. That’s what makes her commission income repeatable. Now here’s the third R: Aflac also gives Linda reoccurring income because each time one of her customers renews his or her policy, Linda gets a commission check. Same customer, new sale each year. What’s more, Aflac is able to produce statistics to show that after a customer renews coverage, he or she is extremely likely to keep renewing the Aflac coverage indefinitely. The beauty of the three Rs is that Linda’s personal income can now compound instead of having to be replaced every year.

Here’s the kicker: After Linda is an Aflac agent for 10 years, whether she continues to work for Aflac or not, she’s vested for life in those reoccurring commissions. What a great bonus for her retirement years.

Starting from Scratch
Linda had done sales once before, selling cosmetics through multilevel marketing. We’ve all heard of these kinds of companies where you give home parties, give your sales pitch, and hopefully sell some products. But what Linda found—and so many people have this experience—was that she would have to use her profits to buy more inventory to keep doing more presentations. Even when she was the number-one seller in her area of Arkansas, it never seemed like she could get ahead selling cosmetics.

But Linda saw that selling for Aflac would be different because she wasn’t making a one-time sale and hoping the customers would come back when their lipstick ran out. Instead, she would be selling an important product to a growing group of people who would likely renew their coverage, plus she had few up-front costs: “I could become my own business owner for about $300,” Linda said. “They put everything I needed to do my business right on my doorstep, postage paid.” All she had to do was secure her state insurance license, abide by corporate policies, and work hard.

In the beginning, this was a typical week: Up at 7 a.m., out the door at 8 a.m. and sell Aflac; at 2:30 p.m., arrive at Steak n Shake, change into her uniform in the restroom, and work until midnight; from 1 a.m. to 7 a.m., sleep, and then get up and start all over. Her 2 days off from Steak n Shake—Wednesdays and Thursdays—she would sell Aflac all day long. “There was no time off.”

After 3 months of this, Linda realized that instead of giving her financial security, earning the paycheck from Steak n Shake was taking valuable time away from selling the lucrative Aflac products. “Every day I stay on that job being paid a salary, I am losing money,” Linda recalls. “I am never going to succeed at this unless I give it 150 percent.”

Tools:

PrintEmail

Next Post

Previous PostBack to Main Page