Dan McCormick

Dan McCormick’s Millionaire Training Story

Share this and inspire someone!

I’m here in my home in Coto de Caza, California. When I first started network marketing, I was a 19-year-old young man.  At only 12 year’s old, I got my first job at the Seattle Supersonics Racket and Health Club for $2.35 per hour.  Every day, I went to that club because it felt like home, warmer than home actually. I took my pay as credit so that I could hang out and play tennis. It was $20 an hour for court time; I washed the towels, did the laundry, and vacuumed the tennis courts. It was indoors, because of the rain in Seattle.

I watched people have a life that I never saw growing up in a single parent home. People had time freedom in the middle of the day to come and play tennis, and I remember their names even to this day. I remember the airline pilot, I remember the salesman, I remember the people who were in the military, I remember the world-class athletes.  Some of the greatest athletes that ever lived came there to either work out, played for the Sonics, or were playing tennis. They had what I didn’t have and that was money, but they loved what they did. I loved tennis, but I really wanted more than I had.

My mom was brilliant because every time I would ask for money, she said, “Son, you better make a lot of money because when you get older, you’re going to need it.  You’re always asking me for money.”  A lot of times parents would say, “What do you think, money grows on trees?” My mom said something different.

I met a man there who built tennis courts. He owned his own company and his partner and he were two of the top tennis players in the northwest.  They asked me to work for them to build tennis courts.

At the time, I was a spoiled rotten, young, arrogant, cocky, no self-esteem, no self-worth individual, horrible in school, no people skills. I just loved tennis, and I went there every day to play tennis.

This guy asked me to work for him and he said he would pay me $5 an hour. I learned what it was like to work. I mean, this guy really put me to work, taught me to work, corrected me when I was wrong, and it was just unbelievable.

I did that until I graduated from high school and went to Washington State University. I always tell people that I finished college in two weeks. The following summer after working in the tennis clubs again and building tennis courts, an ad in the newspaper showed up that said, “Are you making what you’re worth? I live in Beverly Hills, California. I drive a Clenet, and I made $96,000 in the health and nutrition industry, supervisory positions available.”

Here’s what was weird – that ad showed up in the newspaper from a group of distributors from Canada. I was scared to call it because I had no background in supervision or business. I used to look at the ads every day because it was inspiring to see what opportunities would be out there. I didn’t know what I was going to do besides build tennis courts or string tennis rackets and play tennis. 

This ad came out on a Sunday and stayed in the paper four days in a row.  Finally, I looked at my mom and said, “They must be desperate because that ad is still in the paper.” I kid you not!  I remember the phone call because it was a live answering service that said somebody would call me back. I remember sitting at my desk (in the office I set up because I wanted to be in business somehow). When that phone call came in, the guy asked me some questions (just like Larry trained them).

“Tell me about your business background,” he said.  I was nervous. I really did not want to tell them that I worked at a tennis club.  I must have done okay because he invited me to the Greenwood Inn in Bellevue, Washington, Northeast Eighth for an opportunity meeting.

I said, “How am I going to recognize you?”

“I’m a really big guy with a wide part.”

I had so much hair at the time, I had no idea what he was talking about with the wide part program. I found him, and he got his flip book out. He started going through the program with me. He talked about the company history, he told me about the products, he told me about the opportunity, and then he started telling me stories of people who were my age. Santo Roberto, Ron Touchard, people who were literally 22 to 23 years old. I was 19, and they were out there beating the streets, making sales in weight loss.

August 12th, 1982 was the day my life changed forever because that night, not only did my upline tell me about a book to read, but he gave me The Millionaire Training cassette tapes.  Now, learning on cassette tapes back in the day was a novelty. I wasn’t a good student, I wasn’t a good learner, but I want people to appreciate what this meant to me.

I’m lying on my bed in my room, and I plug in The Millionaire Training Tape One, Side A.  I promise you, if I slept more than an hour straight for the next week, that would have been amazing. There was something that came over me that was so powerful; I had so much pure adrenaline.  I found my life’s calling.

You have to understand, I was in so much pain as a kid because I didn’t know what there was in life for me outside of tennis.  Here, I saw the dream. I saw the opportunity.  I knew my skill level could grow into it. I was immature beyond belief.  My mom came to the meeting with me. I had a couple thousand dollars saved away from building tennis courts at $5 an hour. There were only 30 or so people at the meeting.

“Here’s my application,” I told my sponsor.  He invited me to go out to his car. 

He opens the trunk and says, “How much product would you like to start with?  This senior consultant package is a good way to start because it has the biggest discount available.”

I wrote him a check for $296 right there, walked away with my products and a new lease on life.

About a month later, Larry came to Seattle, and it was the big training. Now I’ve got The Millionaire Training coursing through my veins; I’m riveted. My sponsor asked me, “What did you like about those cassette tapes?” I was so immature. I was so at a loss for how to communicate. And, I was too embarrassed to say, I just wanted the money.

That was at a time when I believed money would fix everything.  I imagined how cool it would be if I could be that guy and be able to show my friends who laughed at me for dropping out of college, that I was right.

Two weeks into college, I dropped out.  (I say I finished college in two weeks.) I didn’t have the mental capacity to do it.  My brain didn’t function there in that environment.

“No, you’ve got to go to college, Dan,” my friends insisted. I just knew it wasn’t for me.  Instead, I’m inviting everyone I can to a three-hour training with Mark and Larry.  I’m standing in my tennis club recruiting men 15 years older than me who came there to work out, play tennis or play racquetball.   I remember this businessman who I invited to come with me.  He showed up. There are hundreds and hundreds of people there.

I’m all fired up.

I’ve listened to The Millionaire Training tapes. I’ve got my sponsor, and I’m introduced to this 23-year-old woman in my upline, Marilyn, who was the first distributor for Herbalife in Canada. Her sponsor lived in LA. I was so blown away at her composure, it was quite amazing.

I was young, raw, and hungry. I heard stories about people talking to people. They would wear this button that said, LOSE WEIGHT NOW, ASK ME HOW! They would do this thing called The 10 Pennies. I went to the mall with my sponsor, and I’m walking towards a Nordstrom’s counter, and you know how all the people behind the cosmetics counters look amazing. I’m walking towards this lady who’s really well put together, and I looked at my sponsor, and I looked at this lady, and I said, “This lady looks like somebody who would like to make $10,000 a month.”

She leaned forward on the counter and said, “You bet your life I would. How would I do that?”

I looked at my sponsor and said, “Yeah, Dennis. How would she do that?” I didn’t know how to do it!  True story.  She signs up, she buys her senior consultant kit just like I bought, 10 days go by and she’s not communicating very well.

My mom says, “Hey, you got something in the mail from the bank.” Her check bounced.  I never got the money.

I’m talking to everyone I can as raw as I am. I’m talking to people off the newspaper ad.  I call this guy named Joe; I remember his name to this day. “Hi, Joe.  My name’s Dan.  You’re looking for an opportunity? I can help you.”

Long story short, I signed him up, he’s absolutely fired up beyond belief, writes me a check, senior consultant kit, check bounces. I never got the money from either one of them. Tough start.

I didn’t have a lot of money, but I went to another training class where Larry showed up at the Red Lion Inn in Bellevue. There were like 300 people there, and again, it was just the reaffirmation of the principles from The Millionaire Training cassettes as well as a real-life experience where I had guests in the room.  My distributorship was starting. I can’t remember if my mom was there, but I know my grandpa was there, my cousins, my uncles, strangers, you name it. I was just doing everything I could.

It was a riveting process.  Larry will appreciate this because he’ll know. He probably can remember how immature I was. It took me seven years before I got this stuff.  Personal development is personal, and everybody comes in at a different level. I would’ve been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD or one of those things back in the day. I probably had a learning disorder, but I didn’t know it. I just remember I was not smart when it came to books, but I loved people.

Larry likes to refer to these things as concepts, right? I always use the word principles. He and I have talked about this before. A principle is a strong channel that moves you forward. PRIN is strong channel, PLE moving you forward. When you think about the concepts that he taught in The Millionaire Training, they’re universal principles that are timeless.

When I look at that period of time, I was just a young man. Larry was so good at every aspect of what his mentors taught him of breaking it down, simplifying it. The great thing is, I have done a training show for the last 18 years and I teach this stuff every day of my life.

When a distributor calls me today, and they want to talk about why they’re not where they want to be, I point to those principles. There’s nothing outside of it. There are new shiny objects, but there’s only one shiny object that Larry taught me, and that is we get paid to recruit and sell. What do I do every day? I recruit and sell. In my company, with my product, my compensation plan, it has incentives on how you recruit and how you sell. Back in 1982, it was a little bit different, right? We had different retail markup, different product, different compensation plan. We didn’t have the internet or a Zoom meeting like we do today, but every single day, 38 years later, I still teach the same thing.

February 1983, I received a compensation check for one penny.  I’ve kept it all these years.  Now, that was signed by our old friend Ed Williams, just after I started. Remember Marilyn?  The first distributor in Canada?  She and I were married only 10 months after meeting.  I always tell people it’s a good thing to marry your upline, especially three up.

Marilyn documented our career in a book several years ago about our journey in Herbalife. She documented everything, from her application, to her status of Supervisor, to her first $20,000 check, to the articles being written about her, letters from Larry and Mark, being invited to the first corporate school of all time.

When Canada was just blowing up, and she was pictured in the Alberta Report. They had Mark in there and they had my wife in there, being the first distributor in Alberta. Now, we go to Mark’s house and we have parties, and we got Millionaire Team people, and we received one of the first small trips to Hawaii through a Western Union Mailgram congratulating us on your outstanding achievement.  There’s gold in them herbs!

I grew up driving a 1967 GS 400, a Buick convertible. I always loved cars, but I never knew they made cars like Larry was driving. Here’s a picture of Larry and me and Larry Shine, we all had the same car in 1984. It was all because of what Larry did, and this is a 1984 SEC, and there’s Larry right outside the Sheraton La Reina. Larry, Larry, and me, all with the same car.

I remember him taking me for a drive in his, and he gunned it a little bit going between one of the roads there at Century Boulevard, and he kind of hit the front end, it was so low to the ground, it was unbelievable. Here I am, 22 years old, driving a 1984AMG SEC. It’s one of the coolest cars I ever had.

I might have, yeah. Needless to say, when you learn the principles and they become part of you, and you accept the fact that you are a network marketer, and I recruit and sell everyday everywhere I go. There’s been people here at my house this week who I’m recruiting. There’s been people here at my house this week that I’m selling product to. There’s people in the community that I talk to. I do this every day, this is what I do, it’s what I believe in, and it’s what I know how to do. It’s fun for me.

After the Herbalife fiasco with the FTC and the FDA, it was a rough time for a lot of people. I had a friend of mine who had a direct mail business.  I said, “Why don’t we try this?” It was another network marketing company. I was able to take all of these principles, these concepts, and wrap it around leading an organization, and teaching other people how to make recruiting and selling the most important part of what you get paid to do.

In only three years, I became the number one distributor for that company which was based in southern California. In 2002, I decided to launch a new technology with a billion-dollar player that’s a New York Stock Exchange company, which company I’m with today, Nu Skin Enterprises. We launched a biophotonic scanner, and again, the same concepts. I got started in 2002 and 90 days in, I was teaching The Millionaire Training to the entire globe. Back then, it was all on a conference call bridge, and then it went to blog talk radio, and now I do everything on Facebook. Facebook Live is how I do my trainings every Saturday now, at 8:00 AM Pacific time every single Saturday for 18 years now.

It never leaves me. I think about it all the time. How do I better communicate the art that Larry and Jim were so masterful at?

There was a magic when Mark, Larry and Jim Rohn were together. They grew up together; when Larry said something, Jim could finish the sentence. Jim could say something, Larry could finish the sentence. We were at a meeting in Bermuda. 

There was a magic at this meeting, and it was transforming for me.  I knew I wasn’t very good at many things, but I knew I was good enough not to quit, and I knew I was good enough that I could keep dialing every single day. I was a madman on the phones, and Jim said something that I will never forget that I still teach to this day. I still gauge my downline on how they do this to this day, and where Jim and Larry came up with this, I don’t know.

Every month we had printouts that were hundreds of pages long with our Supervisors and their phone numbers that were mailed to us. Jim said something sitting in Bermuda, “What would happen to your life and your downline if all you did was call five people a day in your group that you had not met?”

I will never forget a year or two later, when Larry Shine (who my wife sponsored off an ad in the newspaper) was number one in the company in 90 days. Larry Shine called me because he was the man. I called him, The Goat.  Larry Shine was the fastest growing distributor ever when he started.  One day he called me, and he said, “How do you do that? How is it that I just talk to someone on my downline and they feel so good because you’ve already called them?”

Larry Thompson taught us. You call with two points:  first, make them feel good about you, and second, make them feel good about Herbalife. How do you do that? By telling stories. I could be good at that. I just knew that if I called and called and called, and I told them about me, and I said two things, “How can I help you? How can Herbalife help you?” and by telling stories that would make a tremendous difference in my business. To me, that was a really significant Millionaire Training moment in Bermuda.

Larry learned his strategy from Bobby DePew and he learned his philosophical approach from Jim Rohn.  Recently, I was talking to one of the women I sponsored, and I said, “Look, you deserve to be making X amount of dollars a month,” and it blew her away. I said, “You just need to be at the right place at the right time with the right people.”

Literally last month, I remember asking her, and I said, “How did you find them?” She said, “Well, I was just doing a Dan McCormick.” I said, “What’s that?” She said, “Well, you always used to say, you just keep calling and make them feel good about you and make them feel good about your company. I found a distributor who found a distributor who found a distributor, and I did a Dan McCormick. I found them that way, because I called five people a day that I don’t know.”

Obviously, I let her know where I learned that. I always give credit to all of those inspirational voices from the day I listened to The Millionaire Training forward. I still talk about it all the time. How can you not? First of all, I think that Larry has shared with me the entire lineage of who taught who and what they taught. All the way back into the ’60’s. I love history, and I like to study great people. It’s just part of the journey of recognizing that great people figure things out, and they’re humble enough to share it.

These principles that I’ve learned are life skills.  My wife and I have been married 37 years. At the end of the day, one of my great mentors who was an iconic insurance agent from 1928 to 1968, and he wrote 33 books in his life, and he chronicled every aspect of how he trained his insurance team. One day while he was on stage, somebody asked, “How do I have a better year next year?”

His answer was, “Be a better person.” At the end of the day, if you’re going to be proactive in your business, hopefully those translate to your relationships.

I want to say this as candidly as I can. My relationships are real. I have thousands of people in my phone. To this day, when I’m driving down the road, I hit my contacts tab, I tap on a letter, and if I haven’t talked to that person in a year or two, I call them, because that’s what friendships are. If you’re a friend and you’re in my phone as a contact, and I don’t talk to you, why are you in my phone?

The other day I called a guy, “Mike, how are you doing?” He was a huge success in my downline years ago. “Mike, how you doing? I got a rule, your name’s in my phone, I haven’t talked to you in a while. If you’re going to be a friend in my phone, I got to reach out.”

He said, “Wow. You’re a better friend than I am.”

We are fostering relationships with people who we have things in common. We want to make people’s lives better every single day. What Larry taught me was this:  We’re looking for dissatisfied people.  When I sponsored my daughter a couple years ago, because social media was easy for her, it worked for her.  Nu Skin became okay for her. But to do it through the phone the Dan McCormick way or the Larry Thompson way, it wasn’t okay.

It changed, and so that’s why you’re genuine and you’re authentic and you’re looking for dissatisfied people. When technologies change, when a new product shows up, it’s always a reason to call somebody again. That’s what genuine authentic friends do.

“How are you? How is your family? How is your job? How is your career? Oh, by the way, who do you know who might have an interest in social media?”  What Larry and I do is not old school. We have got all the tools and even more some.

I personally don’t like the side hustle terminology. I don’t like the gig economy. I get it. Everybody tries to change terminology. I love Larry’s terminology. In the ’60’s it was pyramid marketing. In the ’70’s it was multilevel marketing, and then it became network marketing. At the end of the day, I recruit and sell. I don’t care how I recruit and sell; I recruit and sell. You want to recruit and sell online? Recruit and sell online. You want to recruit and sell in a meeting in a hotel room? Recruit and sell in a meeting in a hotel room.  I just had 1,200 people at a meeting in Austria last month for one of my team members, all in one meeting room.

It’s just different for everybody, but I recruit and sell. However, you want to word that, new school, old school, millennials, whatever, I recruit and sell. 

There are so many people who are so busy doing so many other things that they’re not doing the thing that they need to do the most.  Recruit and sell.  They’re so busy trying to market and trying to figure out this and that and make it simple.  They are asking themselves, How can I do it faster, quicker, better?  They really are not doing the one thing that’s going to build and grow their business – talking to people. I’m still doing it every single day.

I want to share another story about Larry that I will never forget.  We’re at this event, and we’ve got an upcoming event happening in LA. A distributor is arguing with Larry on whether he has time to come to the event. I’m a young 20-year-old kid sitting there.  My wife and I have a grand team, we’re doing just fine. I’m all in, and Larry’s like, “You got to be at the event. You got to recruit and sell into the event.”

What Larry taught me that night was the absolute clear importance that this is an event driven business. The cycles of that have never changed. We always are driving towards events, because leaders are born at events, and I always say in my company with our title, Blue Diamonds come in pairs, Team Elites come in triplets. You have got to be at the event.

I grasped early on that the cyclical nature of our business never stops. It’s the pre-promotion, it’s the event, it’s the post follow-up, and I teach that vigorously every single day.

In this business you have got to have your why. For me, it was clear. I didn’t have a great upbringing, I didn’t have a family and I wanted one, so I knew what my why was – my wife. I wanted to be married young. I wanted a family.  I didn’t have a dad who wanted to be with his kids. I wanted to be a dad who wanted to be with his kids. I yearned for that.

Whatever your why is, it’s genuine, authentic, real you. This book that you’re reading, you’re likely going to have read it many times. You’re going to have dog eared corners, you’re going to have highlights, you’re going to have notes, and you’re going to probably align yourself with your upline in your company because people from every company are going to read this book.

You’ve got to know what your system is, and you got to know what your recognition is, you have got to know what your event cycle is, and you got to know what the principles of your business are, and that’s what you’re going to learn.

You’re going to learn the macro principles and concepts from Larry and the people in this book; they’re going to be riveting, that’ll never change for anybody and will work for you, even if you are brand new person or you’ve been in the business for years.  No matter what the economy is doing, no matter your economy, where you’re at, it will work. We’ve never had a bear market in the world of weight loss, nutrition, and anti-aging. There’s never been a bear market for opportunity in innovation.

If you’re reading this for the first time, you’re going to take this book and you’re going to see. You’re not going to read this book, because that’s what you do with a magazine. It’s casual reading, it’s garbage. You’re going to study this book. There’s a difference.

I didn’t just listen to The Millionaire Training. I studied and dissected The Millionaire Training. I didn’t try to be a network marketer; I had to become the person who was comfortable in every scenario, even to this day, sitting around the table with extremely affluent, iconic people, and they say, “What do you do?” I say my spiel (whatever my spiel is at the time). I love it, I live it, and just like the brand-new person can who is reading this book.

At the end of the day, here’s what I’m most excited about (Jim Rohn taught me this with Larry on stage). What I’m most excited about is me, and how much more I can grow.  I think about how many more people are out there on my path who I haven’t even met yet, who I could teach these principles to, that’ll be life changing generationally for them and their family.

If you are in this business to make a million dollars so you can set sail, then do that.  I have made millions of dollars in network marketing.  I do this because I love it.  I love the people. I love the process.  I love the journey.  Doesn’t mean it’s easy.  Doesn’t mean there are not frustrations, setbacks, disappointments, and huge uh-oh’s, right? But you bounce back and you realize, Hey, you know what? Not everybody’s going to see it my way, but I only need to find one new person this year who does.  This guy just out of the blue called me two months ago. He says, “I’m going to fly out there and meet with you, and you’re going to be my sponsor at Nu Skin.”

“Nah, nah, nah, you don’t need to do that. Let’s just get on a Zoom call, we’ll chit chat, we’ll figure this out.” I can’t find the guy on social media, I don’t know who he is, we have one mutual friend. The mutual friend that we know didn’t know him.

A couple weeks later he says, “Hey look, I got a ticket.” This is a 56-year-old businessman in the Midwest who says I’m his sponsor, he picks me.

I’m like, “No, no, Ed, don’t do this. That’s a waste of money.”

“I already bought my ticket. What time tomorrow? I’m buying dinner for you and me at The Pier in San Clemente.”

“Okay, I’ll see you at 5:00.”

Long story short, he signed up.  He’s already producing, he’s already got appointments, he’s calling people every day. Look, how many more people are out there like that? He’s looking to solve a problem. He’s at the end of the runway for his career. He needs network marketing; he needs a residual income that’ll pay him for a lifetime.