My heart is warmed as I look around me in the world, to see young couples deciding they both want to share the parenting, and to support one another to both have purposeful satisfaction in their work.

I grew up through the 1960s and 1970s and had a dad fully absorbed by a demanding career, and a mum devoted to parenting, but who on many levels sacrificed her own personal growth.

In recent years more couples are both looking at 3 or 4 day weeks in corporate jobs, so each of them get time with their beloved children, and get to continue a professional life in some capacity. Let’s call this Flexible Work 1.0.

This can work, but my observation in some friends I’ve seen go this way with high powered jobs, is that they get 60% or 80% of their old full time salary, but still 100% of the responsibility, and a continued expectation of being available out of hours a great deal, and basically still getting the same job done with permission not to be in the office for one or two days a week. So it makes it difficult to truly have that focused and full presence in your child’s life with the full stress of a Professional Job.

My own view on this as a solution, is right motivation, wrong answer.

Flexible Work or Freedom 2.0

My wife and I have discovered Flexible Work 2.0 or perhaps it might better be described as Freedom 2.0. We are at an age where our respective little ones are not so little any more and range from 17 to 30, and so for us it is not a solution to both being present to raise small children, but it is that solution for those who are planning a family.

My wife and I are in business together, in a business model that is succeeding on an unprecedented scale, and which is good for the world, and a hell of a lot of fun.

Our job descriptions go like this:

• Share Inspiration
• Train people on products
• Train people on business processes
• Train people on Leadership
• Mentor people
• Lead a Team
• Grow a team
• Daily Self Development to rise to the top of our profession
• Support our teams to be successful
• Celebrate Success with our team, and among peers

We both dearly love what we do, and as a former Senior Executive, Chief Financial Officer, and Chief Operating Officer, I have never before loved 100% of my job description so completely.

My only regret is that this way of life in the form we live it, with the integrity it carries, was not available when I became a father at age 25. I might have had far more time with my children, and might not have grown apart from my first wife, following the same model my parents had modelled for me.

What is Flexible Work or Freedom 2.0?

My wife and I are Blue Diamond Leaders in a business that has become the most successful word of mouth business on the planet. It is about doubling in size every year, and is attracting people who would NEVER EVER have considered engaging with a business that seems to the outsider like a Direct Sales business.

Why do I say ‘seems’ like a Direct Sales business?

My wife Pj and I have reached the second top rank in the business among 12, and expect in the next 3 months to hit the top rank in the business, and I am yet to sell a thing.

The business we work with is dōTERRA. In the owners own words from the company website :

“Founded in 2008, doTERRA was built on the mission of sharing therapeutic-grade essential oils with the world. Having seen for themselves the incredible benefits that can be had from using these precious resources, a group of health-care and business professionals set out to make this mission a reality. They formed a company and named it doTERRA, a Latin derivative meaning “Gift of the Earth.” “

Why is dōTERRA a Lifestyle Solution for Young Parents?

There is lots I’d like to explain to answer questions and address reactions that might have arisen about Direct Sales, or Essential Oils, but lets start with the motivation this article is seeking to address, which is the freedom it can give you to parent well.

Complete Time Freedom

As I alluded to in the Job Description, most of the work is connecting with other people, inspiring them, teaching them, and mentoring them. You have complete freedom to decide who you are going to bring in to your business, when you will run training events, when it suits you to hold mentoring sessions, what time of day you rise, whether you want to build nap time into your day.

My wife and I rise late in the morning. We rarely take appointments or schedule events before 10:00am. We schedule appointments at times and on days that suit us, and if we would prefer to do our work late at night, we can and do.

This time freedom is extraordinarily valuable for nursing mothers and bottle feeding partners. You can build your working life completely around your baby’s or toddlers routines.

No Boss and No External Pressure

One of the failures of Flexible Work 1.0 is as I observed earlier, the part time career position comes with just as much pressure and while you may not be physically present at work on your days off, the pressures, phone calls, and generally the stress make it difficult to actually be emotionally present with your child.

In a dōTERRA business you are responsible to yourself. You get to decide the pace you want to run at, the time you have to invest, and to tune your personal goals and objectives to the lifestyle you want as a couple, and for your little family.

You have an enroller, or upline, and you work in partnership to a degree, but your enroller is responsible to achieve their own success, and simply to support you to succeed based on the plans you have individually, and any plans you agree together that you agree are realistic for the level you have decided to engage at. An Enroller has no authority over you, and the modus operandi they will work through is inspiration and support.

In my life I am a Writer in addition to being a dōTERRA Leader. I get to prioritise my writing in my life, just as you get to prioritise your child in your life. My passion for my writing is to write books that support the world to create new more conscious ways of doing business. It’s kind of ironic, because dōTERRA is everything I am writing about and that I care about in creating a better world, and more freedom for its people.

Abundance that Supports Freedom for Both of You

I have written other blogs that go into the detail of how abundant the dōTERRA business is and you can find a great deal of information in this blog post, titled So, How Do You Make Money in dōTERRA?

For the purposes of our analysis here what I can tell you is that any motivated, self directed and capable couple can create success in this business to the degree of reaching Blue Diamond or Presidential Diamond.

 

At Blue Diamond as you can see above the average income is $US 453,100 per annum, and even after business expenses, which are primarily travel, some team support and admin in this business, the income can support a family very comfortably and with discretionary funds remaining for savings, or your good for the world projects.

At Presidential Diamond the income goes way beyond what a family needs, and can allow a passionate couple to indulge their inner philanthropist, and to allow both of you to also indulge your mission in life, your passion, your purpose.

I take great comfort as a writer and budding author, that I can write from my heart. I do expect to write best seller books, but I won’t be relying on that income to feed my family, and I can write with a pure heart and without a commercial agenda selling out to what a publisher wants me to say.

There are many average folk who have achieved Diamond, and even Blue Diamond and Presidential Diamond do not require rocket science. They require the ability to lead a team, build and engender belief, and to stick at something consistently.

Blue Diamond can happen in 2 to 3 years, and Presidential Diamond in around 4 years.

Many couples develop a plan to pay their house off in four or five years and then have a family. What if instead you allocated four years to focusing on building a dōTERRA business that allowed both of you to retire two years in from the world of a job in a corporation, and to achieve a level of abundance that gives you and your family more choices than you ever dreamed possible.

There are a great many young couples living this dream with young children and some of our closest friends in the business are cases in point. We have dear friends living in a sea change style ecovillage in the Gold Coast hinterland with two children aged around four and two working from home, and we have multiple friends living in Mobile Homes taking their children around our country and home schooling. The choices for how you can design your life are many. The business is not limited by geography. While you need to see your key team members face to face often early on, as their own leadership matures, you can support them long term by phone, zoom, and using other online resources.

Support

There is something extraordinary in the dōTERRA community that is beyond anything I have experienced in any corporation, including a corporation that I considered had a gold standard in people culture.

Firstly there is a community in dōTERRA that operates on an abundance mentality. The people in the business do not see one another as competitors, and there is a culture of cooperation, and an attitude that there are more than enough people in the world who will ultimately come to us to experience these products. dōTERRA are genuinely unfolding a business model that sincerely can service every home on the planet.

Secondly, the culture of support is unlike anything you will have seen in any business setting, be it inside a corporation, or in a business you yourself are creating.

When you start a business on another pathway, you are usually alone. You have competitors who want you to fail, and you have almost no-one beyond yourself to draw on to succeed.

dōTERRA has been around since 2008, and in line with its culture of support, there are whole training, leadership and success resources designed to help everyone succeed. People in the business succeed when they help others in the business succeed.

• A Premier helps two Executives achieve their rank
• A Silver helps three Elites achieve their rank
• A Gold helps three Premiers achieve their rank
• A Platinum helps three Silvers achieve their rank
• A Diamond helps four Silvers achieve their rank
• A Blue Diamond helps five Golds achieve their rank
• A Presidential Diamond helps six Platinums achieve their rank

Then in practice a Presidential Diamond will continue to help their Platinums get to Diamond and Blue Diamond, so that they never fail to achieve Platinum and the business can be sustainable.

I have never seen another business where someone with a desire to succeed gets more help from people who know what success looks like and can genuinely help them achieve it.

As an example take a look at my blog site, and all of the resources I have created there for our team, and in the spirit of abundance any team that wants to use them.

If you want to understand more about what success looks like in this business, let me refer you again to my blog on So, How Do You Make Money in dōTERRA?

I truly believe that a couple who want a family focused lifestyle and abundance to claim freedom and make choices that serve their values, passions, and sense of purpose can find no better option than a dōTERRA business.

The Core of the business : CPTG Essential Oils

The reason you don’t sell in this Direct Sales business is because in truth it is simply a word of mouth business. The products are actually extraordinary and bring about changes in health and lifestyle in very tangible and obvious ways.

My wife and I have seen so many profound stories of change that we have borne witness to, including in our own family, that bring tears to our eyes. When you share experiences from this place with friends colleagues or even Front Desk Staff at a Hotel who ask you what you do, they feel the truth in your stories, and you do not need to sell. They ask you how they can enrol and experience the same things.

Again, in my blog referenced above, I talk about the products and the business model at length. What you need to know for these purposes is that the owners began with a vision of bringing an extraordinary product to every home on the planet that changes how we approach health and wellness as an amazing proactive approach that means we don’t have to lean so heavily on main stream doctors, hospitals and drugs. My wife’s and my own experience is that we are far healthier and have not been to a GP in the 27 months we’ve been doing the business.

To learn why dōTERRA’s CPTG Oils are different, and what makes them so effective here are two short videos. The first is nearly 4 minutes and explains what a Certified Pure Therapeutic Grade (CPTG) Essential Oil is.

The second video is an interview with one of dōTERRA’s founders and owners, and it’s Chief Medical Officer Dr David Hill explaining CPTG Essential Oils and how they support health and wellness.

Investment

One of the beauties of a doTERRA business is that relative to almost any business the investment is tiny, even relative to other Direct Sales businesses. A typical business takes tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands or millions to start. Even the average Direct Sales business for someone doing it as a business looks for a start-up investment of thousands of dollars and ongoing monthly commitments.

dōTERRA lets you start the business with as little as $AU 174 for the Essential Collection that includes the 10 commonly used oils that are the foundation of the business in 5 Ml bottles, or on better advice the $AU 330 Home Essentials Kit that includes 15 Ml bottles for the same ten oils (except Ice/Deep Blue which only comes in 5 Mls), and which includes a diffuser.

With either of these kits you can start doing the business.

The other aspect of the business is that to earn commissions, that is the basis of the business, you need to place a 100 PV (Point Value) order (a point is roughly equivalent to a $US dollar) each month and maintain your shopping cart/template at 100PV or more for next month’s order.

Those who are serious about this business, fall in love with the oils, and the changes they create in the lives of the people around you, and start sharing and enrolling right away will make back more then their outlays in weeks to a couple of months.

Involved with Something Extraordinary

I don’t know about you, but for me, I want to be involved with things that are good for the world. The baby boomer generation and those who went before them were sold the idea of being grateful for any job, and work all your life to pay off your house.

I truly don’t think that is the world we live in any more.

I turned my back on working with corporations that are about money more than people and our planet, and I believe that the young parents of today and aspiring parents have a different vision for themselves, their children, and the world we leave behind.

For me, I have a ‘Why’ in this business that is not about me. It is about you, and the world around us. My why is as follows:

“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.”

When I joined dōTERRA I did so because the people the owners are, look at the world the way I do. But they have done something extraordinary. The seven owners never took on capital beyond mortgaging their own homes. They are debt free. There are no shareholders or banks who are making this business about money.

The owners began with a vision for four things and they have stuck to their vision for the  nine years since they founded the company:

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?

There are two more things that get me out of bed on this journey with dōTERRA each day

Co-Impact Sourcing

The first thing is that while most corporations have a business model that is bad for the planet and then have to create positive spin about why they are good corporate citizens, dōTERRA actually pride themselves on positively changing every part of the world where they work. They have a strategy known as CoImpact Sourcing which is about working with growers to help them form cooperatives, get long term visibility and contracts, and get better prices for their products. This short video is a great summary of Co-Impact Sourcing.

Healing Hands Foundation

The second thing that absolutely fills my heart is the work the owners initiate through the Healing Hands Foundation.

While the owners were in the start up phase of their business, none of them took a salary for a period of 13 months, and this at a time while they had borrowed to the maximum they could against their houses, and this just as the Global Financial Crisis hit. I only learned a couple of months ago that through this time while the owners were struggling personally, and even wondering whether their fledgling business would succeed, they created the Healing Hands Foundation to be a vehicle to further help each of the communities that they work with around the world. It was more important to them to make giving a part of the dōTERRA culture, than it was to pay themselves.

The Healing Hands Foundation does extraordinary work and has now hundreds of projects around the world. Again, this is not a foundation that is about creating appearances of doing good to compensate for the bad a corporation does. Healing Hands goes side by side with the Co-Impact Sourcing program and seeks to do even more good in each of the communities that dōTERRA touches. It’s projects have included schools, health clinics, temporary housing in earth quake effected Tibet, and support for projects like Days for Girls feminine hygiene education and support, and Operation Underground Railroad‘s work stopping the Sex Trafficking industry.

This video from Haiti where dōTERRA sources it’s Vetiver Essential Oil gives an insight into how Co-Impact Sourcing and the Healing Hands Foundation work in partnership transforming communities.

Creating a Future for Your Family

There is a quote commonly misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, which irrespective of it’s actual source I believe holds some relevant wisdom, and it goes:

“If you want something you have never had, you must be willing to do something you have never done.”

If you as a couple want to carve out a future that actually fulfils every dream you have for one another, for your children, and for their children, it takes claiming that vision, and making choices that are congruent with what you actually want for yourself.

My parents lived a conventional life and paid the conventional price. For much of my adult life I followed them, and then eventually after two failed marriages and a lot of personal development work I realised that life doesn’t have to be that way.

The path to the future that sings to our hearts comes from stepping out of old paradigms, and recognising that Flexible Work 1.0 is just an old model in new clothes.

My wife and I are living in Freedom 2.0, and I’ve shared with you my ‘Why’, and for clarity here it is again:

“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.”

My invitation then is to reach out to me, my why is about supporting people like you to fulfil your dreams, and my wife and I travel our nation and the planet to support people embracing this life wherever they may be, and offer mountains of support by Zoom, Phone and using online resources.

I have written this piece as an expression of my soul and as an offer to you to join me on a journey. If however this piece has been shared with you personally with care, love, and support by a close friend who is also in dōTERRA, I encourage you to talk with them about the business. This is the abundant mindset that our community lives by, and I honour your relationship with them.

My wife and I are something of a package, and if you join our team you get not only my support, but my amazing wife’s support too. You can find out some more about her on her website. She is an extraordinary woman who in addition to our Essential Oil Business takes tours to Egypt, and has a ‘Why’ that scares her it is so big.

If you’d like to reach out to us you can email us or contact us on Facebook as below:

Ura : UraPAuckland@authegrity.com               FB : https://www.facebook.com/UPA1111
PJ    : Petah-Jane@sycamorewellbeing.com     FB : https://www.facebook.com/petahjane

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

Image Attributions

1. Elias-137.jpg by Vivian Chen under license CC BY-ND 2.0
2. Rank Diagram from Share Success Build Guide
3. Rank Earnings Table a screen capture from the 2016 dōTERRA Income and Opportunity Disclosure Summary