Network Marketing: The Power of Leverage

A crowbar is an incredibly powerful tool. Archimedes used to say “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world”.

What is leverage?

Leverage is an incredibly powerful wealth building tool. In relation to the financial world, leverage is the use of various financial instruments or borrowed capital, such as margin, to increase the potential return on an investment.

Most people are familiar with the financial leverage used in real estate transactions. At one point, you were able to control a large financial asset (your home) with relatively little of your own money. And if you bought your home and the timing was right, then you could possibly turn a small amount of money (your down payment) into thousands or tens of thousands of dollars when you sold the property.

Create leverage

Real estate is just one way to use leverage to create wealth. If you look at any real deal, you can see examples of leverage. Due to the high cost of starting a business, the business owner generally borrows money through the sale of stocks or bonds. Smaller business owners can finance their business with Visa or MasterCard, a home equity loan, or even Aunt Sadie. Without taking advantage of other people’s resources (money), very few entrepreneurs could afford to start their new business.

Another way that traditional companies use leverage is by employing others. As employees trade a day’s work for a day’s pay, the business owner leverages the efforts of his employees and receives a synergistic, cumulative work pay from all employees. It is impossible to take advantage of your business if you are the only one doing the work.

Build a network

Can you think of some examples of industry leaders who have used the crowbar to build their fortunes? Donald Trump borrowed a lot of money to build his real estate empire. Warren Buffett leverages his investor’s money to create wealth for himself (and hopefully for his investors as well). Oprah Winfrey has harnessed her talents through a vast media distribution. And all true leaders will leverage the efforts of their followers to achieve their collective goals.

And that’s exactly what we do in our network marketing business. We use the power of leverage to accumulate great wealth by working with a large group of people to get a little done over a period of time. We have heard that to do something we must do it ourselves. This is the exact opposite of what we should do with our network marketing business. Andrew Carnegie said, “I’d rather have one percent of 100 people’s efforts than 100 percent of mine.” Carnegie certainly appreciated the power of leverage.

A team of people will always have the ability to accomplish more than one individual can accomplish. The power of leverage is there for everyone to use.