A Lesson From The Wright Brothers … How to Give Your Business Wings!

by Michel Bilodeau

In 1903 Orville and Wilbur Wright were struggling to fly the world’s first airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. At the same time another man, Samuel Pierpont Langley, was also trying to build an airplane — with the assistance of an entire staff. His assumption was that if he put a big enough engine on the airplane, he could get anything off the ground. He focused all his effort on that one project: creating a super-powerful engine for the plane.
The Wright Brothers’ approach, however, was to build a glider that would glide from a hilltop with no engine at all. They focused their energy on (finesse), balance and steering — power was almost an afterthought. Only after it worked with no power would they try to put an engine on it.

After three years of tedious experimentation, the glider was working well, so they commissioned bicycle shop machinist Charlie Taylor to build them an engine. It was the smallest engine he could design — a twelve-horsepower unit that weighed 180 pounds.

Needless to say, the Wright Brothers changed the world and became famous historical figures, while few have ever heard of Mr. Langley. Their approach to making the plane fly before applying high power was the superior one.

“Langley had spent most of four years building an extraordinary engine to lift their heavy flying machine. The Wrights had spent most of four years building a flying machine so artfully designed that it could be propelled into the air by a fairly ordinary internal combustion engine.” – Smithsonian Magazine, April 2003

There’s a direct analogy to your success in network marketing here. Your advertising budget is the engine. Your sales and marketing system is the glider.

An engine without a good set of wings will not work. But when you put an engine on a workable glider, you have a plane. When you feed customers to a sales and marketing system that can “fly,” you have a business.

If you have an effective sales and marketing pipeline that simply lacks customers, you have a glider; just apply a lightweight engine (read: sensible marketing budget) and it will soar. But if you have traffic that’s going to a lousy or non-existent sales and marketing pipeline, you don’t have a business. You have a money pit.

Here’s the lesson:

Money can bring you a lot of traffic, but it’s only valuable to the extent that your sales and marketing pipeline is designed to convert the traffic to leads and sales. It’s about lead conversion. You grow your business by having a quality system.

So as you’re getting started, marketing methods such as Google Adwords are like a lightweight engine that you can turn on and off instantly. You can test your glider safely without crashing, without killing your momentum, without burning through a lot of money fast.

This is the lesson that network marketing casualties learned the hard way. We were a lot like Langley. We focused on the engine instead of the wings. When it didn’t take off, we just poured more gas into the engine (bought expensive leads, paid for expensive newspaper ads, conventions). When none of that worked, we thought we’d put it on a rocket launcher and force it up into the air.

Thank goodness for Wealthy Affiliate! Think of all those companies with their “platinum leads”, their useless cookie-cutter websites, their pills & potions. Their exotically named products, their empty promises, small checks, and their fast-folding downlines. 97 percent of distributors make a beautiful arc, smash into the ground, and explode in a ball of flames.

And you know what’s interesting? Some never see the crash coming. Some never trace the arc and wonder why they’re not gaining altitude.

My friends in network marketing, great people, hard workers, are quietly digging themselves into a deeper hole as their company and its heavy hitters feed off their labour and dreams.

Laughing all the way to the bank.

While we continue to wonder how it is that a company can present as “an opportunity” something in which at least 97 percent of people will spend more than they earn. Not to mention the toll it takes on their self-esteem, energy, and lifestyle.

And the companies seem genuinely surprised when people claim the “brick” they were sold, won’t even make it off the ground, no matter what size engine you put on it.

We on the inside, at Wealthy Affiliate, are never surprised.
What are you waiting for? Give yourself some wings.