So my beautiful wife Pj and I were sitting in the lounge after dinner tonight, talking with our Silver Leader, my 19 year old Step Daughter Chelsea Hancock about her next steps in the business, when Pj shared a question she’d had from a prospective enrollee she has been talking to, a very successful business woman.

The question was the title of this blog post “So, how do you make money in dōTERRA?”.

What an excellent subject for a blog I thought!

Does that question resonate?

To many in the business, this might be a question that doesn’t resonate for you, and to a degree I feel the same. To so many of us dōTERRA is a community, it’s a movement, it’s a cause, it’s a lifestyle, it’s a transformation of how we manage human health proactively in a mainstream way, and to me it is a gold standard example of ethics and values dominating in an incredibly successful large scale global enterprise.

All of these things make my heart sing, and I know dōTERRA has drawn millions of people who feel this way. However, there is an extraordinary difference between dōTERRA and the kinds of means of earning an income that a lot of us dōTERRA folk have chosen to get behind in recent times. The founders/owners have actually built a business model where abundance, authenticity, and integrity can coexist.

I was for 15 odd years a Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer working in early stage corporations. I was fortunate that one of them especially was a thought leader in integrity and innovation, and the others too were pretty great businesses to be involved with. Never the less though, my expiry date in corporate came around, and for a time I turned my back on that world. It coincided with something of a spiritual deepening and awakening, and at that time, and for a period of four years I became a part of what I call the spiritual poor. I went from a CFO Salary that at it’s peak created around $300,000 per annum of cash salary and bonuses (before tax) plus some long term equity opportunities, to a separated man struggling to pay rent on a unit, feed myself, and put fuel in the car. But I was on my path, and all of it was necessary for me to become who I was.

During that time as a change advocate in social media, I collected like-minded friends on Facebook, lots of whom had turned their back on the mainstream world, and corporations and conventional employment. Most of these people too were living like me, one foot in struggle street, and one foot in a conscious community not engaging in a way of life we could no longer in good conscience subscribe to.

In this community there were lots of Reiki Healers, Massage Therapists, Psychics, and all manner of spiritual folk with wonderful gifts. A majority of their market was our mutual community, very few of whom had discretionary funds, and their most common customer was another therapist who would do an exchange of services (a massage for a massage), which is nice, but doesn’t pay the rent. So the life for most lacked abundance.

Money is not evil

One of the things that changed for me was meeting my now wife Petah-Jane (Pj). Pj grew up in a middle class family, who owned their own family business, and were successful enough to live in nice suburbs and lease the latest Mercedes Benz.

When I met Pj I was contemplating moving down to the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, around Byron Bay and Mullumbimby and live amongst the trees close to the beach. By this time I had worked out that my purpose of this planet was to write, to speak, and facilitate helping people bring more consciousness to the way business is done on this planet. I’d worked out some of the ways to fail at this mission, and I was looking for the next way of giving my mission a crack.

Pj challenged me. She said “If you want to change the way the business world works, and if you want to be the powerful agent of change you so obviously are, then your place is not in amongst the trees, it’s working with the people trying to make a difference in business.”

She also challenged me to claim my value in the world, to find the ways, where the extraordinary experience I had gathered in my 30 year career was creating value, and where she and I could live a life of abundant choices, in a manner that abundance allows.

It is common in the spiritual community to believe that money is the root of all evil. I actually never subscribed to that view, but I do agree that making money the most important thing skews our lives, our decision making, and the world around us in ways that do not serve us.

Money Can Reflect the Value We Create for Others

My actual belief after a journey to an understanding of my inner and outer worlds, is that personal authenticity and integrity is everything. That was the genesis of the company brand I created for myself Authegrity.

I believe the principle applies not just to how we live our lives, but to how we come together in business. When we truly set out to serve all of our stakeholders, and we make the creation of value for others, and authentic communication and relationships our culture, we in fact create more value than those who have rapacious business models, and it creates genuine sustainable abundance. Not only that, but our customers are glad to see us profitable and abundant, because they are happy, satisfied, and loyal and want us to be around for the long haul.

Congruence Hiding in Plain Sight in MLM Clothes

So from 2011 until 2015 I had been trying in my own way to save the world, the business world anyway. I tried saving mainstream business, but it turned out there, that if I built it, they kept on doing as they liked. I found some more ways to make some positive impacts on the world, but coming up against the forces of capital that in the journey I took, could care less and made choices that shut off the road I was seeking to carve out.

Late in 2014 something significant happened. My wife Pj’s room mate from a trip she had  gone on at my encouragement shortly after we met in 2012, Vanessa Jean Boscarello Ovens came across from Perth to Brisbane, and enrolled Pj in dōTERRA. At first we were just users of the oils, though Vanessa placed Pj on her front line, and being something of an intuitive herself knew Pj would build, and planted some seeds. Pj said she wouldn’t for at least 6 months, as she was busy organising her own Egypt Tour.

Sure enough though, 6 months to the day from when she had enrolled, Pj got inner guidance that she needed to engage with the Essential Oil business.

This is where my awakening to who dōTERRA are began. Pj began having classes, and one day she put on dōTERRA’s CoImpact Sourcing Vetiver Video. Well, it had me in tears and my heart pouring out with love for the dōTERRA owners, Emily Wright, and the people in Haiti producing the Vetiver Essential Oil.

My next thought was, I do love what I have been shown here, but is it the whole. truth. Corporations often make great emotive videos to create an impression, but sometimes that impression is a facade designed to obscure the truth of a rapacious business model.

So I disappeared into my study for a couple of days, and I researched dōTERRA back to front. The more I looked the more I found that the Vetiver Video was a genuine insight into Co-Impact Sourcing Strategies designed to have a positive impact on every community they work with.

It seems that Vanessa and my beautiful wife had stumbled onto an enterprise that was everything I believed in, and was embodying a Gold Standard example of an organisation of Integrity, and Authentic Relationships and Communication, and the punch-line was that it was hiding in a Direct Sales or Multi-Level Marketing path to market.

My word for dōTERRA is Congruent. Everything they do is congruent with their values and their mission, which is so rare in this world. Lots of companies do a retreat and decide on their aspirational values. Few companies have the courage and commitment to live them. dōTERRA do, and I haven’t seen a single contrary indication in the 26 months we’ve been doing the business.

They are not really like an MLM. An MLM is usually about money, not serving the community. dōTERRA chose the Direct Sales path because word of mouth among people who had life changing experiences was the only way they were going to be able to fulfil their mission to put Essential Oils in every home.

So Who Are dōTERRA?

The original founders created four questions to inform dōTERRA’s strategy when they started it:

1) What if we could provide the world with a new and powerful wellness alternative?

2) What if we could provide this new level of wellness through a mainstream approach to essential oils?

Why the Pre-Amble?

For the left brained business person who started reading this post to understand how you make money in this business, you might wonder why I’ve just asked you to read 1,637 words before we get to the answer to the question.

It’s simple, this business will require you to unlearn a lot of what you might have thought you knew about business if you were trained in traditional corporations that put shareholder profits at the top of the pyramid.

You will make money in dōTERRA if you learn well, are teachable, are sensitive to the community around you, and if you bring a level of humility to the business that accepts you might have succeeded in other walks of life, as I had as a CFO, but that a dōTERRA business is not that.

In fact you can make more money, for a more direct payoff for your time (enrolments in a business with an extraordinary retention ratio and a lifestyle business model), and create a pipeline of cashflow for your future that in the medium to long term outshines the incomes earned in almost any other walk of life. There are no guarantees, but if you are a committed person who stays the course, and gets up again when life knocks you down, that is what creates success in dōTERRA.

So let’s go, let’s answer the question you came to read about, “How do you make money in dōTERRA?”.

The Business Model

As a former Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Business Models are something I understand.

I have never seen a more sound business model than what doTERRA have created.

The products work in extraordinary ways and convince everyone whose lives they touch that they are something that will be a real positive in supporting wellness in their family. The range is extensive and includes household products that use the oils to make them natural and effective, and to help people get toxins out of their home.

Because of this people enrol, and they come back again every month buying products.

The Loyalty Rewards Program is one of the best I’ve ever seen. I’m a loyal Qantas Flyer, and mainly because of their loyalty program, but it’s not a patch on dōTERRA. You can use the points you earn in dōTERRA at any time, and on almost any product apart from a couple of rare oils, and a handful of products like Diffusers that are manufactured externally. After 13 months of participation you get 30% of your point spend back to use to purchase products free.

The reason this is a good business model is because the retention is beyond anything the direct sales industry has seen before. After five years doTERRA still has 65 to 70% of the people enrolled coming back at least once in 3 months to continue using and buying product.

What this means for the business is that a majority of the people enrolled embrace dōTERRA as a lifestyle and buy regularly. So every month you have a community of people you’ve enrolled growing larger, and buying more. Here’s a graph of our volume over the 24 months we’ve been in the business. Things like Christmas and Promotions create the odd peak from which you might see a small fall, but the trend is just up, and up, and up, and it’s rare not to be celebrating a record month.

An example of the antithesis as a business model, as much as I love the product is Thermomix. A Thermomix Consultant has to sell more machines every month, and there is only a modest range of consumables, and as Thermomix owners I can tell you my wife and I have not bought any in our two years of ownership of our ‘Thermy’. I do recommend the product though, and they are great for cooking classes with the Essential Oils.

In dōTERRA when you do the work to support your team, and as our uplines Paul Ovens and Vanessa Jean Boscarello Ovens say, to Educate, Inspire, and Delight, your volume just continues to grow, and as your team become more and more experienced and mature, the effort required to grow your business decreases.

As the story goes in the Empowered Success Build Guide, you can haul buckets of water for the rest of your life, where the only way to make more money is work more hours, or you can build a pipeline business, where once you’ve built the pipeline it does the work for you and pays dividends for the rest of your days.

Opportunity and Earning Disclosure Summary

OK, the dōTERRA Disclosure Document is a great place to start to get some data and statistics on earning money in dōTERRA.

This is a document that any Direct Sales organisation must publish every year, and it must be factual. There is certain key data in it that is mandated by the US Federal Trade Commission (The FTC).

In the last year doTERRA have done a magnificent job of actually going beyond the compliance document that it is for most companies, and making it a genuine communication document to help people understand the business just like we are here.

So here is the 2017 Opportunity and Earnings Disclosure Summary

This document is important in a couple of ways:

1. It shows the actual average incomes that are made by wellness advocates
2. It shows the percentages of Wellness Advocates for whom each rank is the highest rank they have achieved so far.

OK, so lets take an example and assume your objective is to get to Diamond. My counsel is actually that you should aim to get to at least Blue Diamond, and the truth is once you are mentoring team you will likely want no less than Diamond for them, which means you’ll go all the way to Presidential Diamond.

But for now lets focus on Diamond, which I am going to show you is very achievable. The good news is that the average income for a Diamond is $US 201,764 per annum. Let’s be clear though that is your doTERRA income, not your profit, and to get to Diamond you will have travel costs, costs supporting your team, normal business expenses, and finally income tax.

The disclosure document gives this breakdown of dōTERRA Members:

• Customer just using products and not earning any Commission                     60%
• Consultant (entry level) Wellness Advocates making a little commission     16%
• Builders (Manager, Director, Executive, Elite, Premier)                                    23%
• Leaders (Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Blue D, Presidential D                    1%

The document tells you that 7% of the 1% who become Leaders are Diamonds.

So out of 10,000 Members, 2300 will build, 100 will become leaders, 7 will become Diamonds, 2 Blue Diamonds, and around 1 will become a Presidential Diamond.

Now stay with me, because while those numbers probably aren’t suggesting success is easy, this is not the same thing as chances of success.

Structure and Statistics

OK, so significant success means getting to Diamond, or beyond. Though I will say it’s up to you what success looks like for you. For some people it might be the $US 27,557 you make on average at Silver.

So here’s the thing, to achieve Diamond you need to create a certain structure. So lets look at a couple of documents that helps you understand ranking structures in doTERRA.

Here’s an image from the Empowered Success Build Guide that explains the ranks. It is a phenomenal document that helps support your success and helps you support your team to succeed. Empowered Success is an entire platform for creating success in dōTERRA that was founded by Natalie and Andy Goddard, Double Diamonds, and was recently brought in house by dōTERRA.

I won’t explain the whole rank tree in this blog. Perhaps in another blog soon. For our purposes here, lets just look at Diamond. At Diamond you personally enrol and support four people to rise to Silver. Each of your Silvers personally enrol 3 people who rise to Elite, so there are 12 Elites under your 4 silvers. Elite can be achieved in the first month you hit it with as few as 12 Enrolments of 250 PV (Point Value) each. That’s an enrolment with a Home Essentials Kit plus a Fractionated Coconut Oil. Here in Australia that will cost them about $AU 369 delivered including delivery and GST. In the long term Elite is about 30 people with 100PV Loyalty Rewards Orders each month, who have embraced the dōTERRA lifestyle. A point (as in PV) is about $USD 1.00, though some products vary a little depending on manufactured cost and whether the pricing has been discounted from normal margins.

So to bring things back to an actual example, when my wife PJ and I went Diamond in our 17th month (August 2016) doing the dōTERRA business we had 1,122 people in our tree, and they generated 96,972 OV (The total of all their PVs).

So lets go back to the statistics we came across in the Disclosure Summary, that the Diamonds on average are such a small percentage of the community and even of those doing the business.

The reason is that you actually become Diamond when you and the the people you have introduced and so on get to about 1,000 people. It isn’t that the chances of success are low, it is that it happens when the maths unfolds and you have about 1,000 people in your business (though it can be as few as about 500 and as much as a few thousand depending on how well you have structured your tree.)

If you think about the Diamond Structure we talked about, the Elites across the bottom each with 30 people on LRP are 12 x 30 or are 360 people in the most efficient structure, and I’ve never seen a tree quite that efficient with zero people failing to engage with the Loyalty Rewards Program.

So to become a Diamond if we accept 1,000 people as a typical benchmark, you will be 1 Diamond in 1,000 people or 0.1%. It’s not your chance of success, it’s actually your relationship to what you and your team have created.

There is nothing to stop any of your team succeeding in dōTERRA. In a rough sense, all they need to do is create a tree of 1,000 people.

Personal Enrolments

So if 1,000 people sounds like a lot, let me help you get comfortable.

My wife Pj and I got to Diamond with only 74 Personal Enrolments, between the two of us, spread across 17 months. That was 4.4 personal enrolments per month, or 2.2 each.

Outside that our job was to support our team, and as we learned we passed our learning on to them.

If you have a big network or are a great Social Media Guru with a giant following you can probably do better than this, but you don’t need to. Fundamentally it’s one enrolment a week, and if you are engaged and believe in the product that is so very doable. Pj and I have continued to average 4+ enrolments per month and after 26 months have made 114 Personal Enrolments.

Compensation Plan

Obviously the Opportunity and Income Disclosure Summary gives you an indication of what you make at each rank, but it is important to understand how you get paid and for doing what.

The best way to understand it in detail is to attend a Business Training session. We run these for our team multiple times a month and most leaders serious about the business do, so talk to your uplines and find out when they are on.

However you can get a bit of a sense from a few resources here:

Compensation Plan Summary Tables

Compensation Plan Type Comparisons

For those at the 99th percentile of left-braindom if you are really intent on understanding the Unilevel Compensation System and how Dynamic Compression makes dōTERRA’s Compensation Plan the most generous in the industry, here’s a video my wife and I did 10 months ago just before we went Diamond:
Dynamic Compression Video – PJ and Ura  

Have a look at the resources above, watch the video, and then as I said go and attend a Business Training to understand it in detail.

How Do You Make Money in dōTERRA?

So, in the sections above, we’ve seen what people on average earn at particular ranks, we’ve learned that to get to Diamond it can take as few as 74 Personal Enrolments, and co-creating with those people, with help from your upline a tree of probably about 1,000 people, though they have to be structured in accordance with the Compensation Plan and the Rank Structures.

In short you make money in dōTERRA through inspirational leadership, through servant leadership, through creating a community that people want to be a part of, through engaging with other people’s passions, purposes, and desires and helping them to succeed.

The ranks that most people asking this question are probably going to aspire to are Blue Diamond and Presidential Diamond. As the 2017 Income and Opportunity Disclosure Summary tells us, the average Blue Diamond earnings were $US 463,555, and Presidential Diamond was $US 1,259,587.

So lets understand how you create a Blue Diamond or Presidential Diamond tree, and here is the Ranking Visual again for easy reference.

A Blue Diamond has five personally enrolled Gold Leaders that they rank on. To earn every month as a Blue Diamond, they need to get to that paid rank by their Gold Leaders getting to the paid rank of Gold that month. Every month the scoreboard resets to zero OV (Overall Volume) for everyone, and you all have to recreate your ranks again.

However, as we have shared back in the business model, our OV in this business when we are focused is a solid upward trend line, with only the odd downturn after massive promotional months, or in seasonally slow months like January. Because of the retention and the phenomenal Loyalty Rewards Program that brings our loyal customers back each month, the monthly reset to zero is not as scary as it sounds.

Let’s go back to really understanding Blue Diamond. Each of your five Gold Leaders has to inspire (with your support) three Premier Leaders they personally enrolled, so your tree will have 5 x 3 or 15 Premier Leaders too.

Your 15 Premier Leaders will each have two personally enrolled Executives, who are required to have 2,000 OV each, and the Premier needs 5,000 OV in total. So across the bottom of the Blue Diamond Tree are 15 x 2 or 30 Executives.

In summary then, you need to personally enrol five people who end up being capable and desirous of working with you to build a dōTERRA business, and they must find three such people each, who find two such people each. If any of you are good enrolees, you can gift an enrolment to someone in your tree to support them and ultimately you to rank, however the giving away of enrolments can create some interesting human dynamics and will not always be a sustainable more, and takes some care and attention.

Presidential Diamond adds a sixth leg, ups the ranking leader requirement to Platinum, and their leader’s requirement to Silver, which has three Elite Legs, which is 3,000 OV. Across the bottom of a Presidential Diamond tree are 54 Elites.

A principle that all wise leaders work with is to support their leaders to go well past what is required for you to rank. Fundamentally you want to create a community that people love and want to remain a part of for the rest of their lives.

My Why if you understand the framework of the wonderful Author Simon Senek is very much about our leaders.

“To help those who hear the call to fully express their soul’s purpose, through their dōTERRA business, and to claim the freedom and abundance to make congruent choices and live a life that expresses who they really are.”

To my eyes, that freedom, abundance, and freedom of choices comes with Blue Diamond, so that is the least I want for them, assuming they want it for themselves.

Creating Community

My people, the people who want a better world, and believe that business doesn’t need to  make money something that is incongruent with the things we want for our lives and the world we live in, they have found a home at dōTERRA, and they self select into the oils, the lifestyle, and the social enterprise that dōTERRA has become.

There is a loyalty in the dōTERRA community, because many of us believe in what this collective is doing.

As I said in my preamble, there is some relearning to do if you come to dōTERRA with a hard nosed commercial style. Your team did not sign up as employees, and you don’t pay them. In fact the pay will be modest for the first 6 months to a year, and even in the early stages of Diamond they may still be investing some of their significant income in their team.

You can’t instruct your dōTERRA team, you need to inspire them to want to bounce out of bed and go sharing the extraordinary products that the Essential Oils are. You need to learn how to educate, inspire, and delight your team, and to transfer the knowledge, the belief, and the leadership skills they will need to get to where you are.

We have watched people come into this business with a tasky style fall flat on their face. The products are good enough to allow you to enrol people in a class or a 1:1, but your success comes when you educate these people on how to actually embrace using the oils, to learn about them, to see the value in expanding their collection, to understand the full product range, and to feel like they are a part of something. When we fail at these things, and all of us do in some individual instances, the Enrolment Kit will go into a cupboard, the lids will never come off the essential oils, and you will never see another order from that person, unless you realise your mistake and are able to rectify the situation.

As I’ve said, after more than two years in the business, we’ve personally enrolled only 114 people. That doesn’t take that much time after you’ve created some initial momentum. How you make money in this business is to support every single person in your business who is what we call ‘Walking towards you’. The people who are walking towards you are those who are doing a ton of research, who have called their sister on the way home from the class where they enrolled to tell her about the oils. They are the ones who call you before you’ve had a chance to call them. We follow up and support everyone, but the people we put our focus and a majority of our support behind are these people. Supporting these people as a mentor, a coach and a teacher is how you make money in dōTERRA.

You make Fast Start commissions on the enrolments of these people you have enrolled and coached (10%), and on the people they have enrolled who you and they have coached (5%).

You make UniLevel Commissions that at Diamond become thousands of dollars a month, and at Blue Diamond tens of thousands a month, and at Presidential Diamond continue to escalate, from many levels in your tree, and thanks to Dynamic Compression often far more than 7 levels. The coaching you give to anyone in your tree helps your Unilevel Commission to grow.

You make Power of Three bonuses monthly of $US 50, $US 250, or $US 1,500 as you enrol and support your leaders to enrol.

Finally as you extend your leadership to serving the entire global dōTERRA Community, by serving through training or creating resources like this blog, you share in Leadership Pools that start at Premier and increase with each Leadership Rank after that to be worth tens of thousands a month. Your efforts serve the entire community, so you earn a share of global volume.

Servant Leadership

dōTERRA’s owners are extraordinary servant leaders. They have created a community that embodies everything they are. How do you make money in dōTERRA? By being the most extraordinary servant leader, who inspires tens, then hundreds, then the thousands who follow them, and by having a ‘Why’ that is bigger than you and about more than money.

dōTERRA can create for you more abundance than you might ever have seen, but it will be a product of servant leadership and your inspiration of an entire community, and you will have the opportunity to be very proud of the person you become through that journey, and you will change many lives.

Ura P Auckland
Blue Diamond Leader with Petah-Jane Auckland-Hall,
Writer & Authentic Essential Oil Entrepreneur
Sycamore Wellbeing

Image Attributions:

1. Authegrity Logo owned by Authegrity Pty Ltd a company owned by Ura P Auckland and Petah-Jane Auckland-Hall and copyrighted.
2. Overall Volume Graph from a spreadsheet by Ura P Auckland
3. Rank Diagram from Share Success Build Guide
4. Rank Earnings Table a screen capture from the dōTERRA Income and Opportunity Disclosure Summary