This is Part 6 in a series of blogs on Placements in the dōTERRA business. This part looks at a strategy that is known as ‘Tap Rooting’, which is a really important aspect of building a sustainable business, supporting your leaders, ranking, and consistently achieving your rank as a paid rank too.
Tap Rooting Defined
‘Tap Rooting’ is the practice of enrolling people yourself, and placing them in your tree under other people you have enrolled who may or may not be your leaders.
Obviously until you have identified some sharers, mega-sharers, or builders you only have yourself enrolling, and as we learned in Part 5 of this Series on Two Legs to Premier we need to concentrate our volume in two straight legs until we have a sharer or builder to work with. Necessarily then we will be tap rooting placing our enrolments one under another.
Tap Rooting once we have Leaders
Once our leaders have emerged, in a perfect world they might be the most gung-ho leader you could imagine, and they might go about building their business, and a tree under them at a rate that allows you to move on and focus on finding and supporting your next leader or leaders. Those kinds of leaders do certainly exist, and in every tree there are leaders who are more on that end of the spectrum, and there are leaders who for any number of reasons are not in a position to run that hard or effectively.
A Direct Sales business is one where our income builds slowly, so a lot of our builders may have other jobs they need to transition out of over time, so dōTERRA for them is not a full-time focus. Many dōTERRA Wellness Advocates are mums with small children, so carving out time for their business is not easy and might require support from others who may or may not be all that willing. The business requires a lot of personal development. Some people come into the business having already done a lot of personal development, some take to personal development like a duck to water, and some find it tough going or may have a lot of pain from their life to date that makes personal development something they shy away from or need to take slowly.
The point is you will have some leaders running ahead, and some leaders who need your support. Lets say you are Silver. You are running for Gold. You will need three personally enrolled Premier’s in seperate legs to go Gold. You might have Peppermint Patty one of your three leaders already at solid Premier and getting close to Silver. In your other two legs you have Ginger a solid Elite who gets to her paid rank every month easily, and Melissa who got to Elite once but has struggled to keep her people on Loyalty Rewards Orders and whose volume keeps slipping back.
In every business you will have leaders running at different paces. Pj and I did in our business. We jumped from a very solid Silver that we achieved in our fifth month and every month for the following three months, then we jumped Gold and went to Platinum in December 2015. It was a big stretch achieved with massive enrolments that month, and none of our three ranking legs were really at a sustainable Silver, so in the following months we were not hitting Platinum as a paid rank.
The thing is that as you progress up the ranks, it isn’t just your ranking leaders that govern your progress. At Platinum we had three really capable leaders all of whom identified as Builders and wanted to go to Diamond or beyond themselves. However at Silver you generally haven’t yet found your own leaders who are that clear. Of the 9 Elites who supported our 3 Silvers, probably at least 4 had no interest in really building, and another couple had perhaps the desire, but not yet the experience and skills to build.
It became very clear that if we wanted firstly a sustainable Platinum business, and then to rank to Diamond and beyond sustainably, we needed to help our leaders grow their leaders and their businesses.
Supporting versus Shoehorning
As I said, by Platinum we had three solid leaders who had the capacity and desire to grow into Diamond or beyond leadership. These kinds of leaders totally deserve our support and we were grateful to have such beautiful people on the journey with us.
As we looked at the next layer of leaders, that our leaders were ranking on, there was work to do. Some of the Elites had no engagement with a vision to rank or grow businesses. They had ranked to Elite in the main because of the volume under them and the fact that they were on the front line of our leaders and hence had the most volume. Some were not even convinced yet that they should hold a loyalty rewards order and template of 100 points, so our leader’s ability to rank on their position was not solid even if the OV was at 3,000.
Our leaders from this point needed to do some more work enrolling or identifying and supporting new leaders that they had personally enrolled, who had both the capacity and desire to build a business that would go far enough to meet the collective goals of them and our leaders.
My Why is about empowering our leaders to attain abundance that fuels their dreams and helps them achieve a powerful ‘Why’. I see Blue Diamond as the ideal rank to achieve that kind of abundance, so I want Blue Diamond for all of our leaders, and given that if our leaders even get to Platinum that supports Presidential Diamond for us once we have six legs.
That aspect is about how I want to support and serve my leaders. It is also important to understand what you need to achieve to achieve and hold particular ranks yourself. Lets say you do want Diamond, but not more, Diamond ranks on four Silvers. If you want a solid Diamond business, you probably want your leaders to be one to two ranks above where your rank needs them to be, because that makes it sustainable. So for Diamond you would want ideally Gold or Platinum leaders to know you will always hit Diamond. At Blue Diamond that ranks on five Gold Leaders, you ideally want your leaders to be Platinum or Diamond. At Presidential Diamond you need six Platinum leaders, so you would ideally want them to grow to Diamond or Blue Diamond before you know your business is sustainable at Presidential Diamond month in and month out.
So lets go back to thinking about where our leaders are at, as we and they are in the early ranks. If you are setting your sights on the abundant ranks we’ve learned above where your leaders need to be. In essence then what you really want is leaders with the desire and capacity to go all the way to Presidential Diamond themselves, or at least to Diamond.
You do not get to Diamond accidentally, you do not get there without desire, you do not get there without capability, and you do not get there without taking action personally and repeatedly.
When you are where our leaders were at this time, the temptation can be to do what I call ‘Shoehorning’ someone into leadership. You need leaders to work with and to progress your ranking journey. They might even look at you and say the words “I might be interested to make some money on the side from this”. At that point part of you throws a party and says “Hurray, I’ve got my builder”. But here’s what will happen 4 times out of 5. You will message them to follow up on their expressed interest, and they won’t answer. So you call them. They don’t answer, so you leave a message. They don’t return the call. You send them another message. Finally they respond and ask you to leave them alone because they didn’t expect so much pressure.
A builder is someone who leaves your class or meeting. Goes home and enrols her sister, Googles doTERRA and finds the Business part of the website and reads all of it, and calls you the next morning to ask if you will come and do a class for her next week, but have coffee with her before that because she wants to know everything you know. That we call someone ‘Walking towards you’.
So lets come back to tap-rooting. The important thing with tap rooting is not to use it to shoehorn people who might have expressed some interest in the business, but aren’t walking towards you, into becoming one of your leaders. Doing this always ends in disaster, and it’s why there are many of the early leaders in dōTERRA who have reported having to rebuild collapsed legs when people abandon the business. People have to want it themselves, and if we shoehorn them we invite disaster when they realise they are being pushed into something that is not their soul’s truth.
Tap-Rooting needs to be about consolidating volume, support for people who do have the desire and the capacity for the journey with you, and for creating a community from which your own true leaders will emerge.
Tap Rooting Under Your Leaders
So lets look at how we tap root under our leaders to support them. Firstly we need to make sure our energy s collaborative where we are both powerful forces co-creating. The energy can not be one of rescuing, because if you are rescuing you are probably shoehorning.
So what that means is we do not find our leader’s leaders for them and simply hand them the enrollership so they can rank on the person. There are times when transferring an enrolment makes sense. It can make sense if you both know the person as well as one another and all are as comfortable working together, and there is no attachment in your enrollee in being your personal enrolment. But you can’t hand across people your leaders don’t know and expect it to be an easy path.I can tell you from personal experience having been handed an enrolment, and having handed one of our leaders an enrolment before we understood the risks and the strategies needed to support it properly where it does make sense. There are challenges, and they may work out long term, but it can be a bumpy ride, and it really should not be a primary strategy.
Tap Rooting served our business very well, and let me tell you how we used it. My wife Pj and I went on a massive community building enrolment drive. We travelled interstate, we visited old friends and colleagues and we built significant communities under each of the Elites that were not actually engaged builders, which had made ranking consistently impossible for some of our Silvers. Now let me be clear, we were not rescuing. When our Silvers had solid Elites we had solid Silvers, and we had a solid Platinum, and soon after a solid Diamond business when we did the same in our fourth leg.
Our Silvers were all the right long term leaders, so in building under some of their Elite’s we were not shoehorning them, or the Elites. We were not asking anything of the Elites other than to hold a 100 point order, which they started to earn significant commissions from. If we had tried to build a structure under them to take those Elites to Premier or Silver, that would be shoehorning. All we did was underpin our business.
Suddenly our Elite’s who had struggled to achieve 3,000 OV in a month were achieving 20,000 OV and 9,000 OV and 5,000 OV.
We went Diamond in August 2016 and have hit it every month since. We now have a completely organic business that gets to Diamond every month with no mad scramble at month end.
Tap Rooting for Insurance
As I said we have really capable ranking leaders. However life and business have risks and it can be very helpful thing to have multiple leaders in each leg who we could rank off. People die, people have divorces and other life crises that can make what was an important part of their life, suddenly not something they can be present for.
The second benefit we received from building under our Leaders Elites was that in the amazing communities we formed more leaders personally enrolled by us have emerged, and in some of the legs two or three with both the capacity and desire to go all the way to Diamond. Some of them are actually progressing at a rate that they may even catch or pass current leaders. We will support every leader, and will never leave a leader behind who has the desire and capacity and continues to walk towards us, but in a risky world it is a great thing to have multiple leaders you have personally enrolled to work with.
The scarcity mindset might look at these tap rooted leaders and argue they should have been our fifth or sixth leg, or should have been legs on an M1 Account that could support a journey to Double Presidential Diamond, but there are plenty of examples of leaders who have pushed ahead too soon and achieve a rank once, but don’t hit it every month. It’s one thing to be a Diamond, but its entirely a different thing to hit it every month and earn like a Diamond.
Our fifth and sixth leg leaders have emerged and I know that with our profiles as Entrepreneurs as Writers and Speakers, Pj and I will have no problem attracting leaders well into the future, and the same will be true for any of us as we step into our power, our soul’s purpose and become an icon for the causes we care about in the world.
Our Leaders Own Tap Rooting
As I have said we were not by any stretch of the imagination going to create our leaders teams of leaders for them. For us to do so would be to rob them of the opportunity to learn how to do it themselves, which is a critical skill they need to be able to teach and pass on to their team, and not as theory but as something they have lived.
So as we were tap rooting to support Platinum and Diamond, we coached our leaders on how to tap root themselves, and identify real leaders walking towards them who could become their Premiers where their current Elite’s were not identifying as wanting the next step. They also stepped into supporting their budding Premiers to start identifying Executives early on who are walking towards them.
As I write on April 11th 2017 two of our leaders are Gold, one very solid and one on the cusp of it being solid. The other two of our ranking leaders are both well advanced in identifying Premiers they can work with long term and will likely be Gold within a few months. Then we have two more legs we are building that will support Blue Diamond and Presidential Diamond.
Both we and our leaders have grown, and we have a huge stable of additional leaders who are growing the volume in our business and hence our sustainability, and who mean our business is somewhat risk proofed.
In Summary
So lets summarise the key lessons we have covered with respect to Tap Rooting:
- Tap rooting is how we concentrate volume to support OV based rank advancements
- Accept that all of your leaders have different life circumstances and will run at different rates, and so some will need more of your support to run at the pace you might desire for your business and ranking objectives.
- A builder is someone who is walking towards you taking action, and wants to rank for their own reasons.
- If you want to go to Diamond or above you really want leaders with the desire and the capacity to do the same.
- We don’t use tap rooting to shoehorn people into leadership when they are not walking towards you, and when they don’t have the desire or capacity to go to Diamond or beyond.
- Tap-Rooting is a great tool to create volume to support your real leaders that are walking towards you until they have identified and inspired their own long term leaders.
- Tap-Rooting is a great tool to create additional leaders in a leg you can rank on to derisk your business.
- Our leaders need to do their own tap rooting to find and inspire their own long term leaders. It is part of their accumulation on the leadership skills they will need to educate and inspire their team.
As I reiterate in each blog, placements is an art not a science. The function of these blogs is to educate so you can have thoughtful and meaningful discussions and brain storms about options with your uplines about placement. But as we said in Part 1 of the series, if there is anything resembling a rule in respect of placements it is to consult your uplines for their wisdom to help you understand what is important at your stage of the journey among the many parameters that form part of the decision making.
Ura P Auckland
Diamond Leader with Petah-Jane Auckland-Hall
Essential Oils Entrepreneur – Earth Spirit Pathways
Writer, Facilitator & Public Speaker at Authegrity
Image Attributions : “Dicotyledoneae Asteraceae herb – root system, primary root becomes tap root and lateral roots.JPG’ by RoRo on Commons.wikimedia,org under CCO 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
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
Placements Part 6 – Tap Rooting
Ura at Authegrity - For Essential Entrepreneurs 