In this third part of the Blog Series on the Art of Placements in the doTERRA business we are looking at the issue of how you serve the Enrollee through where they are placed.

doTERRA’s Servant Leadership Culture

Our culture in doTERRA is very much one of Servant Leadership, and it flows from doTERRA’s seven Earth Angel owners, through the long term Wellness Advocate Leadership right through the community.

Unsurprisingly then in continuing to foster the culture we all love so much we need to embody serving our Enrollees in all we do, and that includes how we make placement decisions.

Service Creates Success

As well as being a Diamond Leader in doTERRA and a blogger, I am also a Writer. I am writing my first book, and am working on my second draft. A significant theme in my book is that success in business and the profit that has been such a focus of business for decades is best created by truly deeply serving the constituency that your business exists to bring it’s products and services to. When you do this well, you create fierce loyalty in your clients or customers, and there is trust, and there is no comparison to the relationship of a business that focuses on Sales and Profits.

In the excellent book Firms of Endearment by Rajendra Sisodia, Jagdish N Sheth,and David Wolfe (not David Avocado Wolfe) first published in 2003, and released as a second edition in 2014, the Authors identified a group of companies that operated with the kind of conscious ethic of truly serving and adopting the highest values. They had clear criteria for inclusion and were rigorous in their analysis.

They did some comparisons to another seminal work Jim Collin’s book Good to Great published in 2001. Collins book had identified a set of companies that met a series of criteria that among public companies over a long period demonstrated superior returns that survived leadership transitions and hence were more about the company’s culture than the performance of a single leader.

Over ten years, the 13 Firms of Endearment companies generated a return of 1,026% and outperformed the Good to Great companies in Collins book that had returned 331%.

Truly serving your constituency creates true abundance, the FoE Authors data shows how clearly that is the case in the long term, and never has there been a clearer example of this than in the success the doTERRA owners have created since 2008.

So let us take these lessons and truly embrace serving our Enrollees as our highest calling in the business.

Geography

Geography is likely to play a significant part in how we can best service our Enrollee.
If we are to support them to truly understand how all of the doTERRA Essential Oils, and other Wellness and Spa products can serve them and their family, and can truly create change for them, it’s about education and support.

We generally start enrolling those who live near us, it’s just what happens. However as we get deeper into the business and we start broadening our approaches to our network we can end up enrolling people across town in large cities, an hour or two from us, or we can be enrolling people in other states, or even other countries.

Early in our journey we have only a handful of people to support, but as we grow our tree of love we need to be able to leverage the other leaders in our trees, and we need leaders in various regions where our tree is flourishing.

If I have a new Enrollee one of the key issues on my mind if they are geographically isolated from me, is “Do I have a leader in the region they live in, with whom they can partner, and from whom they can get support, in return for the gift of volume?”.

It is possible to support someone by phone, by Zoom, by email, and by messaging, but to have local face to face support is a big advantage at least in the early months of a journey with doTERRA, be it a Live, Share, or Build focused journey.

Love

One of the greatest things we can do to create engagement is to foster a spirit of love, of generosity, of connection, and of community. Today we had a new Enrollee of one of our Leaders reach out after we met her at a class her leader brought her to. She sent us and her leader the following message:

“Hey guys, I was hoping you could point me in the right direction for information on how to earn money with doterra. I was hoping to build a business with (which I’ve been doing) and just enjoy the oils on the side but now I’m thinking of doing things the other way around. This is solely because of people like yourselves. I feel the support and love in the doterra environment far greater then that in the . I have been receiving cheques from and even through I love the products and don’t feel part of a family. My goal is to bring my man home and to earn money from a job that I enjoy BECAUSE it fits with my moral beliefs. Much love and thank you for all the support I’ve received so far xxx”

The message string went on as we interacted, and showed on an even deeper level how much community, love, generosity and support stood out for this beautiful mother and loving wife whose husband works away from home.

It is critical that we serve our enrollees by placing them with people where they feel love, and support, where we have thought about the fit between them and the people we place them with, and where we have created opportunities to become part of a close knit community.

Other Ranking Parameters versus Service

There are many ranking factors, and this series of blog posts is a series precisely because it is a complex subject with many parameters to weigh up, and one where the experience and the wisdom of uplines is so necessary to make a good long term decision as we discussed in Part 1.

This said, the evidence presented in the book ‘Firms of Endearment’, and the kind of response from our Leaders Enrollee to love and true service tells me that truly serving our enrollees must be weighted very strongly in our decision making.

There may be multiple parts of our tree where a personal enrolment can be very well served, in which case perhaps other placement factors might lead you to choose one spot over another.

My strong counsel however is never to place an Enrollee in a position that compromises the level of service and support that they can be provided with, and the love that they can have extended to them as a part of a community.

Loyalty

In any business, there are cycles. I’ve been in business 35 years and there is no business I’ve worked with that has not gone through cycles. doTERRA is the most robust and conscious business I’ve ever been involved with, and I believe it will be less subject to cycles than most, but to imagine away any challenges would be naive.

In the event that our Wellness Advocate businesses meet a challenge at some point, if you have built lets say a Diamond Business, and if the people in your tree are subjected to pressures of some kind, there is one thing that will hold them, and create a loyalty to you and the team you have built. That thing is community and a heart based connection to being a part of something that truly serves their life in a way that they have never experienced anywhere else.

When you serve your people in every decision you make, with heart, and trusting that abundance will flow from your decision to make choices that are congruent with your values, then you are rewarded with the synchronicity of the flow of life, the universe, and creation.

You can’t weigh that into your calculator or spreadsheet. At the decision point the value of making Congruent Choices can’t be quantified, but as Firms of Endearment demonstrated, the results are very tangible as things play out over the long term.

In Summary

I have made no secret then, that my very strong counsel is to put truly serving your enrollee very high in your criteria you use to weigh up your placement decision. More than that, do not allow other placement criteria to compromise your ability to support your enrollee, to engage them in a community, and to help them feel the love of your community. The data supports this philosophy, truly and deeply serving creates success.

As we outlined in Part 1 of this series, there are no rules, but the nearest we have to a rule is to check in with your upline and draw on their wisdom too. Most successful doTERRA leaders understand the value of Servant Leadership, of Community, and of Love.

There are many more criteria we will discuss in this blog series on how to weigh up placement decisions. Rest assured though, none are more important than this one.

Ura P Auckland
Diamond Leader with Petah-Jane Auckland-Hall,
Writer, and Authentic Essential Oil Entrepreneur
Earth Spirit Pathways
Image Attributions : ‘Class in Circle’ by ‘Petah-Jane Auckland-Hall’

Placement Series Table of Contents

Placements Part 1 – Upline Wisdom
Placements Part 2 – The Human Element
Placements Part 3 – Truly Serving Creates Success
Placements Part 4 – Power of Three
Placements Part 5 – Two Legs to Premier