Trey Herron

Trey Herron’s Millionaire Training Story

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When I was 10 years old, my parents were struggling financially.  Of course, I was totally unaware.  They were doing the very best they could to take care of me.  Everything changed when my parents joined Herbalife. I remember my dad’s health significantly improved, our vacations got better, and Christmas had a lot more presents. Everything was on a positive upswing. Seeing this transformation left a lasting impression on me that shaped my future.

Many kids grow up hearing about superheroes from their parents; in our home, those superheroes were people like the legendary Jim Rohn and, of course, Larry Thompson. Every time we were in the car together, my dad, Bill Heron, would play The Millionaire Training tapes.  Dad was always telling me stories about Larry.

When I was really into cars, dad showed me all sorts of pictures of Larry’s cars.  Back in 1983, there were two popular Mercedes models, an SEL and an SEC. Larry liked the front of one car and the back of another, so he bought one of each, cut them in half, and made a limo!  Who does that? Growing up hearing stories like that, I felt like I already knew Larry and I certainly was influenced by him, even before joining the network marketing industry. 

In 1984, trouble started brewing between Herbalife and the FTC.  My dad chose to leave Herbalife at that time. He then bounced around to six or seven different companies before landing with Body Wise, where he became their #1 distributor for 36 months. Then out of the blue, while I happened to be home from college, he gets a call from Larry and Mark Hughes telling him it’s time to come back to Herbalife. I remember this phone call because Larry and Mark had invited Dad to go to Los Angeles to meet with them and my mom didn’t want him to go saying, “Don’t you go, don’t you go. You know they’ll get you, if you do!” 

Long story short, they got to him! And he was officially back with Herbalife in 1992. At this time, lots of changes were taking place at Herbalife, When I was 19 and back home visiting from college, my dad happened to have an Opportunity conference call on speaker.  I decided to sit down in his office and listen to the call with him. During that call, a 25-year-old man was discussing how he had made $1,500 the previous month. (Believe it or not, that was the story that sold me on network marketing and not the fact that my parents had made millions of dollars over the years.)

I just didn’t think that kind of success was possible for me at my age, but I was hoping I could make an extra $1,000 a month working around my class schedule. After the call, I looked at my dad and said, “I think I can do that.” and he turned and looked me straight in the eyes and replied, “I know you can, but will you?”

I told him, “I’d like to give it a try.” Before I knew it, Mom was sitting down with me on the living room floor going over the products. 

At that time, Herbalife had a program called The High Five Club, and you started with a Success Builder order, which had 1,000 volume points worth of the products inside. If you sold all this product within 10 days and got your receipts turned in, you received a plaque with a picture of Larry and Mark in their suits and their cars on it. I remember that plaque perfectly because I wanted it. I had grown up hearing Larry’s stories, and I wanted to be like him. 

The first day back at school after receiving my Success Builder order, I headed to one of the college sorority houses. I ended up selling the entire thing and ran out of products. I called my dad and said, “Look, I’m out of product, I need more.” Instead of excitement, there was this long pause on the line before he finally responded, “Well who stole it?” Can you believe it?  He asked me, “Who stole it?”  As a result of that first day of sales, I ended up making the High Five Club and earning that plaque, which I proudly displayed in my college dorm room. 

My business started from there, but I hadn’t gone to a training yet, and my dad kept telling me I needed to go to one. I finally got around to it and booked a trip out to Los Angeles where I attended a two-day training with Mark, Larry, and Jim Rohn. These sessions blew me away.  At the time, I was a sophomore in college, and I remember taking so many notes; notes that I still have today. After being introduced to Larry, I told him that I took more notes these past two days than I did during my entire freshman year of college. It’s funny looking back on this because the notes I took there, have made me a lot more money than my college education did. 

I related so much to Larry’s trainings, both at Herbalife and The Millionaire Training.  They have left a dramatic impact on me. I’ve learned from watching and listening to Larry, and I’ve taken his strengths and messages and implemented them into the trainings I do on stage today. Storytelling is such an essential part of Larry’s method, and I incorporate that same message when I’m speaking to a group. For example, it’s easy to get up in front of a group of people and tell them they need to recruit from their “center of influence,” but how do you get people to want to do that? By storytelling.  You’re giving people a compelling vision of how to accomplish that.

In The Millionaire Training, Larry talks about communicating with feelings. I was recently with my mom, discussing the impact Larry has had on my career, and she mentioned that there’s always something from Larry’s training fused into every training I do. His stories have stuck with me for years and have molded me as a trainer. When I teach people in my organization, I use Larry’s approach.

In this day and age, it’s easy to get distracted by all the shiny objects and new things surrounding us, especially those who are just getting started with network marketing. However, even with new developments like social media, when you get down to it, the basics are always the same. The lessons in The Millionaire Training are timeless. 

My story is different than many of those who join network marketing in that I’ve never had any other job. I started in this industry at the age of 19 and built it into a career.  One of the key takeaways I got from Larry was to employ myself. I know this wasn’t as big of a challenge for me as it is for some coming from other industries. I’ve never known anything different.  Often people want to be their own boss, but they are terrible at it. And, if you start with Larry’s methods as the foundation of your business, you’ll have the right mindset to build up from. 

At first, things moved very quickly when I joined Herbalife. I made it into the Millionaire’s Club within the first eight months, but like many, I got into my comfort zone and spent 13 years in the President’s Team. Even though I’ve now been in this business for over 27 years, it’s been only in the last year that I’ve made it to the Chairman’s Club.  Now, I intend to make it into the Founder’s Club in the next few years.

I’ve seen crazy, explosive growth over the past two-and-a-half years, but this has been 25 years of buildup to get to this point.

We hear stories all the time of people join the network marketing industry for the first time and move up fast.  I believe it’s important to share my story because there are many network marketing veterans who have been around a long time who think their time has passed for that kind of exponential growth. I hope they are inspired when they see that my most significant accomplishments happened after 25 years in business in the same company.  I have heard Larry say many times, “For things to change, you’ve got to change.” I would quote this to my team endlessly; but honestly, I was saying this for them rather than for me. I thought I was good where I was at, but I came to realize I needed to say these words to myself. I had to change for things to get better. The pin level I was at with the company was exactly equal to my leadership level, and I knew then I had to change. I had to kill off the person I was and grow into someone better. 

It was time to stop chasing levels and pins within the company and instead pursue more with a purpose.  That was three or four years ago after reading a book about an accountant who worked for his family business and realized it wasn’t for him; he went on to become a Navy SEAL. It was ultimately a story of finding your purpose, and it made me think, Had I been in network marketing for the past 20 years just because my family was involved with this industry? 

I began to ask myself what my passions are and what excites me. What I realized from this time of reflection was that I love being on stage training others.  I believe a lot of that comes from watching Larry and all the things I learned from him. I still want to be like him. I remember the last time my dad and I were in a car together, and we were talking about things we had never talked about before. We talked about the network marketing industry and why he had joined this business.  He mentioned that the first time he went to an Herbalife meeting and saw Larry on stage, he had wanted to be that guy with the microphone. 

Dad was passionate about teaching others just as I am, and it’s really what I love most – training, building up leaders and mentoring. When I realized that my purpose was to help others with their success, rather than reaching a certain level or getting a particular pin, I changed.  And, then my life changed.

Inspiring, motivating, training, and teaching others is what I love to do, and I’ve come to understand that network marketing is exactly where I am meant to be.

At Herbalife, the leaders are always telling us, “Build locally, think globally.” I developed my business the other way around. After being the first in my family to graduate college, I joined Herbalife full time. At this point, the company was opening Thailand and my Dad encouraged me to move there to diversify my business.  During my six months living there, I met a man from Singapore.  At that time, Singapore did not allow network marketing, but I kept this person’s contact information, just in case the market someday opened up. 

About seven years later, the market did end up opening in Singapore, and I reached out to my contact there are started building. Because things were growing there, my wife and I sold our house and cars, put everything into storage, and lived in Singapore for three years. Our business ended up growing into Vietnam, Malaysia, and parts of Southeast Asia. We found out we were going to have a son. We planned to stay in Asia and let our son get a dual passport, but my dad passed away, and our families encouraged us to move home and have the baby in the United States.

We moved back to Mississippi, but still had the mindset to build the business outside of America so we traveled back and forth to Asia. When our son reached school age, we knew we weren’t going to be leaving. It was only then that we committed to expanding our business locally. Unfortunately, Mississippi is the most impoverished state in the country with a lack of access to proper nutrition in many areas. We realized people right here at home needed Herbalife, so we chose to stay and grow our business here. It’s been a long process of continuous growth over the past decade. In the past, I would have simply said, “Forget this,” and found a new country opening up to work in. But now, with Herbalife in over 90 countries, we’re simply running out of new places to go. That’s a good thing.

Some people in the industry say that our method is old school and outdated, but no matter what others may say, for us that mentality still works. Over the last few years, the most considerable portion of growth within our company has been social media based.  We tried to do that with our teams to attract a larger audience, but it just didn’t fit us. We’ve found that social media works as a better platform for training our organization. The key for us has been focusing on those core set of skills we learned from people like Larry and staying faithful to those teachings. 

Network marketing has truly become a multi-generational industry for our family. Our son, who is now 13, has previously never shown much interest in the business. However, this past summer, we took a trip to Asia. We were traveling from country to country, going to lots of meetings and hearing the personal stories and income testimonials from distributors in Herbalife. Several weeks later after getting home, we were sitting down to dinner, and I asked my son what he wanted to do when he grows up.  For the first time he replied, “I want to be an Herbalife distributor.” Once he turns 14, he’s going to sign up as a distributor and get going with that. 

Our whole family is extremely grateful to Larry, not only for the training he’s provided but for his friendship over all these years. When Dad passed away, I was living in Singapore at the time, and immediately had to hop on a plane and travel 36 hours to get back home. I’ll never forget being at my father’s graveside and looking up and seeing Larry. That meant everything to me and showed me who he is as a person. He’s been a massive part of my success in the business and will always have a special place in my family’s heart.