Experience

In October 1995, as a senior in high school, Jim became an independent contractor for a company called ACN. ACN marketed telecommunication services, like long distance phone service and pagers. Over four years, he enrolled 40 distributors, which turned into a team of 800 distributors capturing more than 3,000 customers. He accomplished all of this by employing some of the earliest forms of social media.

After his school’s librarian taught a handful of students, including Jim, how to use the computer, he stumbled upon AOL message boards and eventually Yahoo Chat groups.

Jim happened upon a message board called “small business.” No one judged him. Even though he was an 18-year-old kid living in a Pennsylvania coal town of 13,000 people, everyone listened. He started to enroll customers and distributors into ACN. It was amazing.

While there weren’t as many people online in the 1990s as there are today, Jim still connected with an average of 30 new people each week.

In 2001, Jim had the unique opportunity to work with one of the best mentors he ever had: Mark Yarnell. As a distributor in network marketing, Mark developed an international organization of more than 300,000 distributors in 21 countries. He was the only person from network marketing to serve as Contributing Editor to Success Magazine, and he and Dr. Charles King of Harvard University co-created the first certification course in network marketing taught at the University of Illinois, Chicago from 1993-2011. He touched the lives of millions and is known for his bestselling book Your First Year in Network Marketing.

Because Mark rapidly expanded Jim’s knowledge of network marketing and direct sales and with Jim’s ability to never run out of people to talk to using social media, he personally enrolled 600 distributors for a company called Legacy for Life in only two years. Even more thrilling, 40% of the top distributors based on personal production were on his team.  He coached these distributors how, where, and when to use the elements of social media as they built businesses.

Mark influenced Jim to push forward with social media when he said, “We aren’t ready yet for this computer thing. But one day, when someone can figure out how to build real relationships online the way we do face to face, that company will build the largest network marketing company in the world.”

Jim took his social media skills and co-founded a small business in the software space. Using social media, primarily MySpace, his team generated more than 1,200 clients. Their jobs ranged from simple $500 flash presentations, $25,000 sophisticated websites, and $40,000 enterprise software clients throughout Asia to wholesale work with existing web companies in the US averaging $150,000 in sales over a six-month period. And yes, even the bigger sales came because of relationships created through social media.

Next, Jim and his team and built their own social network to compete against Facebook and MySpace. It was a grueling nine months of writing code and designing hundreds of web pages with 18 developers and four designers. Their website, Ojeez, was the 17,000th most visited website in the world out of 85 million, according to its Alexa rating (Alexa is a website that has ranked the most popular sites on the web since 1996). Ojeez was also nominated for the 2008 Emerging Technology List by Alwayson-Network.

Towards the end of 2008, Jim attended the first social media event happening in the US in Denver, Colorado. It took him 13 years to realize that what he was doing online had a name. The speaker at the event called it “social media.” He just saw it as making new friends online, then asking those friends to do business with him. At the end of the event, hundreds of people were still confused because the speaker did not teach how to grow a business using social media. Jim and a couple others decided to start a social media agency called WeBuildYourSocialMedia (WBYSM), later renamed to Summa Social, to help independent contractors, small businesses, brands, and companies who were confused.

Summa Social taught businesses how to build relationships on social media sites that generated sales.

• within their first year they helped a 100+ small businesses with their social media management, campaigns, and content creation and trained over 1,000 businesses through seminars
• by year two, they had helped over 250 small businesses and trained in excess of 5,000 businesses
• and by year three, they had assisted more than 400 small businesses and trained 18,000 businesses

In their second year, Summa Social built software to manage social media content, post scheduling, and marketing to support 8,000 businesses.

Two of their most influential projects were co-managing 4,000 apartment complexes on Facebook with their ForRent.com partnership and working with Dr. Mikel Harry, co-creator of the world-renowned Six Sigma. Six Sigma helps companies maximize their efficiency and increase profit.

In October 2012, my wife, Marianne, relocated to Arizona. She wanted to be an entrepreneur without needing to raise a lot of money, open an office, or hire employees and work part-time because she had to travel every other month for a week to Pennsylvania for the Airforce National Guard. She joined a network marketing company called ViSalus, which markets “Body by VI Challenge,” a platform for weight loss and fitness results. Her team did $13,000 in product sales within 45 days by using social media. Due to her regimented military commitment and because we were life partners, I had a unique opportunity to teach her around the clock while at the same time coming up with a simplified version of our social media system.

A few months later, and for personal reasons relating to the ViSalus product line, she joined a new company called Zurvita. At Zurvita, her team produced $23,000 in product sales during the first 30 days by using social media. She accomplished this feat with a new team of distributors, using the new simplified version of our social media system, and during one of the slowest times of the year for network marketing companies—December.

Zurvita offered Jim the opportunity to work on the corporate side, running social media company-wide. Using Facebook and Challenge Parties, along with hardworking distributors and a committed corporate team, Zurvita grew by $70 million in company sales in just 16 months.

His time at Zurvita sparked the inspiration to write his first book, Network Marketing for Facebook, which became an Amazon #1 best-seller.

According to Dr. Mikel Harry’s research and understanding, Jim’s social media system is the only proven system in the world to help businesses grow using word of mouth on social media, the right way. Mikel believed that Jim’s system could change the world of business the same way Six Sigma had.

Social media is always updating, changing, and expanding. So, too, are the lives and demands of those who use it daily to interact with friends and for business. Jim’s inspiration to develop a system came from the blessing of being friends with the co-creator of Six Sigma, Dr. Mikel Harry. Marianne and Jim worked with more than 750 businesses over four months with dozens of different products and services in 30 countries. They shared Jim’s social media system with Dr. Mikel Harry for his review and the unthinkable happened — he wanted to endorse the social media system.

Dr. Mikel Harry’s friendship opened Jim’s eyes to the importance of sequence, timing, and process when developing simple systems that yield maximum success. You’ll find Six Sigma’s philosophy throughout this system.

It took a bit more time after that for Jim and his team to solidify their research, experience, and the expression of our social media system, but now it’s ready for you. During this time, Jim was also appointed as the Executive Director of the Social Networking Association (formerly known as MLMIA), a 33-year-old association created to help direct sales and network marketing companies, distributors and support companies be successful around the world.