This is the eighth part of a Blog Series I’ve been doing on Placement Strategy in the dōTERRA business.

Generally speaking, I like to be positive and point people towards the ‘How to’ more than focusing on negatives. However, sometimes people can best be helped by understanding the mistakes that can be made with a concrete example, and it helps the penny to drop.

My wife Pj and I are at present Diamonds in the dōTERRA business, and we spend a lot of time mentoring, both our own team, and sometimes giving people outside our tree a hand. As we are doing this we see a lot of people who have gone off and done their own thing, and after months or years have passed and they aren’t achieving their ranking objectives they come and ask for help.

Not Like This

So here is a fictional representation of the kinds of trees we see in this situation.

This is the ‘How Not To’ grow a dōTERRA tree. Let’s call our fictional leader ‘Ginger’.  She is an Elite by virtue of her OV (Overall Volume) exceeding 3,000. “But hold on!”, I hear you say, “She’s got 5,000 OV and that’s Premier”

Her next rank will be Premier, yes. For Premier she will need 5,000 OV, and two personally enrolled Executives. Yes, on the volume front, she has achieved the 5,000 OV she needs for Premier. Sadly though she has gone way too wide, way too early, and Ginger has five people on her front line, and while she has one Executive second from the left hand end of her tree, who is her enrolment, the remaining volume in the tree is split between four legs. If she had only two legs, the other 2,900 in volume outside the current Executive leg would have created a second Executives and she could already be Premier.

Instead with 5 legs, her next nearest leg is 1,200, so instead she is 800 off Executive in that leg, and with the most common enrolment being a Home Essential Kit plus a Fractionated Coconut Oil for 250PV each she will need four more enrolments in that leg to achieve Premier.

Everything in dōTERRA duplicates, and very often, as in the case of our example, we see two very wide frontlines in her downline’s trees (a five under Melissa the Executive, and a four under Basil lower down in the 1,200 leg) .

The issue isn’t only though that you’ll have to do more work to rank. There is an importance to momentum in this business. When volume is concentrated it creates momentum for everyone. Everyone gets a taste of their OV growing significantly, and their understanding of, and belief in the business escalates. When volume is not concentrated, the opposite is true. People see no movement, and by the time you get around to needing to build up their leg, they have lost belief, and you will be hard pressed to reengage them.

‘My Best Friend Has To Be On My Frontline Myth’

Very commonly people like Ginger want their Daughter or their Sister, or their Best Friend nice and close on their front line. They can get very stubborn about it. People talk loosely in this business about their Front Line Leaders, when in fact what they mean is their Ranking Leaders, who they have supported to rank, and therefore who they rank upon. So in our case, our four Silver (and above) leaders who we personally enrolled, who make us Diamond.

Some people therefore form the belief that your key ranking leaders need to be on your front line, which is not the case. If as you start sharing, you know you are serious about building, then by all means go and enrol the couple of friends who come to mind as people you’d like to do the business with on your front line.

Early in your business journey however you should ideally have only two straight lines under you, as we covered in Placements Part 5 – Two Legs to Premier.

The reality is you will probably end up ranking off people at various levels of your tree. One of our Ranking Silver Leaders is on our Second Row, and a number of the people we are working with to support them to Gold to support us to Blue Diamond are between level 5 and 7.

‘My Builders All Need To Be On My Frontline Myth’

The next myth is that you don’t want to waste a builder by having them anywhere but on your front line. This attitude can come from the belief that you only get paid Unilevel Commission on your first 7 levels.

To understand why that assumption is incorrect read Placements Part 7 – Understanding Depth and watch the video my lovely wife Pj and I did on Dynamic Compression.

The truth is you will find very few leaders who have the strength entirely without you, to find and create their own builders and build a tree that gets to ranks ahead of when you need them to. So the fact is you will find out that you are going to have to place some of the builders and sharers you enrol under some of your ranking leaders to help them. For a deeper discussion on this see Placements Part 6 – Tap Rooting.

The only time you should add another leader to your front line is when in consultation with your upline or experienced Mentor, you mutually agree that your current rank is well supported and being achieved as ‘paid rank’ every month, and that it is time to add a leg to move to Silver (3 legs), or Diamond (4 legs), or Blue Diamond (5 legs), or Presidential Diamond (6 legs).

The mission up to Premier is concentrate volume in two legs.

The Dead Leg Phenomena

The last common cause of going too wide too early is people taking the view that a leg is dead, for one of a number of reasons. It can be that they have gone off the Loyalty Rewards Program (LRP), or have reduced their LRP Order below 100 meaning you can’t rank off them, or they’ve said they can’t do the business right now.

Often though these people have done some sharing before this event, and have enrolled some people who have embraced the lifestyle and are generating volume, and so that volume sits in an island, and with your decision to declare that leg a ‘dead leg’, these people get less attention than they should.

The solution if this happens is once again to Tap Root in the leg supporting those there with volume, avoiding volume islands, and building retention by having no-one in your tree who you are ignoring, or who is not seeing volume grow.

I use ‘Dead Leg’ here to describe an attitude that exists in parts of the community, but in our business it just isn’t language we use. We did make the mistake early in our business, but we have learned, and we avoid as much as we can creating parts of the tree that don’t get focus and attention.

In the event that you have created too many legs, and do have parts of your tree that you have treated as ‘dead legs’, one option open to you with your own enrolments, is if they have not ordered for six months, to reactivate them in a part of your tree that is your focus. Note, you can reactivate anyone (not just your own enrolments), but the ethical thing to do is allow your team who enrolled their own friends to reactivate their enrollees into a better part of their tree.

The other thing about the legs we assume are dead is that they are more likely dormant. Life has seasons, like the year has seasons, and countless times we have seen people we thought had shelved using, sharing, or building dōTERRA for good, come back full on and wanting to go all the way. Keep checking in, continue to believe, journal or pray, whatever floats your boat. You will be amazed by the seasons of dōTERRA in the long term.

Consult your Enrolling Upline or a Mentor

The biggest reason people’s tree’s get into a ‘Not Like This’ Case Study state is the absence of mentoring by an experienced Enrolling Upline or Mentor.

Please read Placements Part 1 – Upline Wisdom . Until you are Silver you should be seeking advice on placement for every single enrolment, and eve after Silver you should be talking to your upline very regularly and be agreed on strategy.

If you haven’t got an active Enroller who is supporting you, go to your upline listing from the left hand pane of your Team Tab, select Enroller view, and look up who your nearest upline Diamond is and give them a call. They will be able to point you to an appropriate mentor, or may be interested in mentoring you themselves.

Until you have walked the path all the way to the top ranks in dōTERRA, there will be things that you don’t know, and that upline or mentor wisdom will help you to avoid making mistakes.

It’s Never Too Late

If your tree looks anything like the fictional Ginger’s Tree, fret not. It has happened and you are best served by focusing on what you can do from here. Get mentoring and develop a strategy on where it is that you will start focusing to concentrate volume and rank. Put a majority of your time in those focus areas with the leaders in those legs, and put your personal enrolments in those focus areas to the degree it makes sense, and subject to your uplines and mentor’s advice, and the principles we’ve covered in this series on placements.

The legs you agree are the focus will be where your own discretionary enrolments go, and to the degree you can, will be where you focus the most time. However, do support the others too, to be the best they can be, they may surprise you and give you a useful strong leg later on your journey. You will ultimately need six legs to go to Presidential Diamond, or more if you want to keep going and create an M1 account and go for Double Presidential Diamond.

Ura P Auckland
Diamond Leader with Petah-Jane Auckland-Hall,
Writer & Authentic Essential Oil Entrepreur
Earth Spirit Pathways
Image Attributions:

1. ‘Not Like This’ diagram by Ura P Auckland

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
Placements Part 7 – Understanding Depth