Are you looking for ways to generate more residual income during the holidays or in 2023? Return guest Paul Hutchings joins me on the show to discuss how you can generate income by having OTHERS do the work for you. Listen to how he changed the game by focusing on digital products and community building. Paul explains how they made their offers easily accessible, with everyone getting a strong sense of belonging. Learn how you can secure a powerful income stream through affiliates in this conversation filled with practical strategies, inspiring notes, and valuable advice.
To learn more about Paul’s company, and how you can generate more residual income, visit his website here – https://hbafunnelbuilder.com/?sc_ref=lvxe91lNcJwonjYg.
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How To Build Residual Income Faster Through Affiliates With Paul Hutchings
I brought on a special guest. It’s somebody here for a three-peat. This guy’s got to be in the Hall of Fame here. We got Paul Hutchings joining us once again. It’s been a few hundred episodes, so if you haven’t gone all the way back, you might only see one episode with him. Paul has been in the network marketing industry for a while. He had been burned. He’s been through it back and forth, left and right, up and down, but now has a company with direct sales called HBA. It’s an amazing company. Full disclosure, I’m in it as well.
I get residual streams of income from it. If you guys like it, I do benefit from this show, full disclosure, but it’s one of those things that I knew I couldn’t hide from you guys most importantly, not only hearing about that opportunity. I want you guys to learn from Paul’s experience about the dos and don’ts in this industry, especially if you are in network marketing or you’ve been considering it as another side hustle type of income. Paul, welcome back.
It’s wonderful to be here, Chris, and I feel like your introduction was so good. I was like, “Is this a full episode? We should just end it right there.” I’m so excited about your intro. It’s awesome. Thanks for having me back and hello to all of you fellow Ripplers out there. I’m excited to be here.
Give us some of your backstories because I know you’ve got a fascinating story. I related to it as well because you’re an amazing person. I’ll say that upfront. I didn’t say that in the intro, but you’re the kind of guy that lights up a room and that people want to be around. Also, you are of a servant’s heart. I want to say that first and foremost but tell them more about you.
As they say, you spot it. You got it, Chris. Thank you for the kind words, and I see all those same things in you. I appreciate that. We only have 20 minutes here I’ll be superfast. I grew up here in Southeast Idaho in a single-parent family. I wanted to be successful so I listened to what people said. They said to go to school, get good grades, find good company, and get a good job, and happily ever after. I was like, “That sounds good.”
I went to school. I graduated from college with a degree in Business Administration. I came back, was ready to conquer the world, and I got a job in a call center cubicle making $11.09 an hour. I’m like, “What?” With all this college debt, I’m like, “This doesn’t seem to be the story they told me,” but in any case, I tried to work hard, be a good employee, and advance up the corporate ladder. While I was there, I got to experience the joys of corporate life, corporate politics, and the fact that it seemed that the way to advance was to schmooze with the right people.
I didn’t resonate with that. I wanted to get paid for my value. I wanted to get paid for my skills. Thankfully, one of my coworkers was from Burundi, Africa. His parents were diplomats over there and they sent him and his sister to America, the Land of Opportunity. There he is in the cubicle next to me. One day, he approaches me in the hall of our office and said, “Paul, if I could show you a way to make $40,000 a month and help people get out of debt, mortgage included, in a fraction of the time, would you be open to taking a look?” I’m like, “Yeah.”
I went to my first network marketing meeting and that’s how I got introduced to the concept that you could build a residual income, a fortune, and a lifestyle, all from home outside of the traditional corporate structure. That’s how I got introduced to some of these initial ideas, and I had a long road to failure. In the very first presentation I remember on this flip chart, he said, “Here’s the plan for getting to $40,000 a month in the next 90 days.” One year later, I had made $0 and I did everything they told me to do like lists, meetings, and all this kind of stuff.
There must be something wrong with you, Paul.
I stayed on the path and I kept to my dream. I kept reading and getting around people who were more successful than I was. I did my best to pay attention and figure out what was it about me that wasn’t producing the results that I wanted to produce in my business. I noticed that a lot of people blame the company and the products. Granted, some of those things do have merit. There are accurate criticisms about some business models. I don’t want to chalk it all up to, “None of that’s there,” but at the end of the day, I believe the truth is our success is 100% dependent upon us.
The sooner we can take full, maximum, and complete responsibility for that, the faster we will grow and get the results that we want to get. Over the next few years, I still struggled, and then finally, about six years later, I hit my first $3,000 a month in income in network marketing. That turned into a $10,000 monthly income and then over $20,000 per month. That was all in network marketing.
Success is 100% dependent on you. The sooner you take complete responsibility for that, the faster you can grow and achieve your desired results. Click To TweetDisclaimer, no guaranteed income. See whatever disclaimer your company has but I started to experience a real lifestyle change and I loved it. We were able to pay off the mortgage on our house, pay off all of our credit cards, and have plenty of money to have our time disconnected from our money, which was the goal.
That’s my short story about the struggle to success. In the process, I did discover some things hopefully, as we all do. As we’re doing the different businesses that we do, there are things that you find that you love and then there are things that you find that maybe you don’t love. One of my favorite quotes from Robert Kiyosaki is, “Intelligence is the ability to make finer distinctions.”
You’ll have people in the marketplace that will say, “Network marketing is a scam. Network marketing’s the best thing ever.” The truth is that network marketing is an umbrella term and there are tons of different other ideas, terms, beliefs, and models all underneath that umbrella term. As I was going through my experience, I tried to pay attention to the things that were good and the things that were not so good.
That led me to 2016 when I got to a place where I was in a company. I had earned the most money I’d ever earned. I started to see this pattern repeat. The company started to do things that were out of alignment with my value system. They were over-promising, under-delivering, and in some cases, not even delivering. They were selling things that I perceived were hurting people rather than helping people.
My business partner and I said, “Here’s this pattern repeating yet again.” We said, “We can try to go find another company to join.” By this time, we’d been doing this for about ten years. As we look back over our experience, the same pattern kept popping up. They say the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
It’s not that they’re not out there, but our confidence level was low that we could find a company that we could trust to strive to always do the right thing and we could trust to be there far off into the future. If you’re going to build a residual income, especially if you’re starting with one, it’s important that the people you’re in alignment with within the business, you got to have an extremely high level of trust that their vision is long-term.
Their commitment is long-term and they’re not pulled around by different greedy opportunities that pop up because any of those things can cause that thing to come crashing down. My partner and I were in the hotel room of an event we were at. We’d flown to the event to meet with the company owner and say, “We love you. We’re thankful for you and all you’ve done for us, but we are leaving.”
In this hotel room, we’re like, “What are we going to do?” We had this crazy idea inspired by Gandhi who said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” We started to think, “What if we could create something that had everything that we loved and none of the things that we didn’t love?” That was the genesis of the company that you alluded to and of the company that we started. It’s been great and we have you. That’s a dream come true for a company to have Chris Miles to be involved.
To your credit too, there are a few people that read the last episode and ended up joining and they’re still a part of your company even right now, and they’re making more money than I am. They’re doing stuff. I’m seeing every once in a while some Facebook posts and stuff, and I’m like, “This person’s getting after it.” I’m this casual observer than anything.
One of the ladies you referred is amazing and I think you remember she showed up at one of our events. She’s so awesome and had such a great relationship. I texted you a picture. Do you remember that? I’m like, “Here’s so-and-so,” and here we are. Thanks, Chris.
It’s cool to see that you guys can create value for each other. There’s that good partnership. Before we get into what that’s about, I want to go back to a point you made because you’re right. Network marketing and multi-level marketing, MLM, are swear words for most average people. People are even throwing pyramid schemes with it. There are those too but the truth is that multi-level marketing and network marketing have been very legitimate businesses.
The problem though I’ve seen and you hit it right on the head is that a lot of people don’t make money in it especially because there’s such a low barrier of entry. It’s not like someone who starts a new business where they got to be committed to making sure that the business gets going. Some people join network marketing. They hear that $40,000 in 90 days and they think, “This is going to be easy when they don’t realize this is a real business.
You got to treat it like a real business and it’s going to grow. You’ve got some support and leverage you don’t get when you start your own business from scratch, but you know it still works. There’s no eye in the sky dream necessarily. You can hit that, but don’t expect it in 90 days or even 6 months or 1 year in almost every case.
In fact, I even had a father-in-law and this is the other thing too. The interesting thing with companies is that they could be the greatest company in the world, but as you said, all of a sudden, they start changing their values. Different leadership changes in and out of owners. They could change the complete culture of a company to the point where even if you’re sold on it and you love a product, you might not like it or they change the products.
That happened with one of my family members. 1) They changed products which made it harder for him to try to sell them and then 2) Even though he was one of the top producers, and this is a very big popular company, they ended up getting rid of his distributorship. They said, “There’s some drama going on that we’ve been hearing about from rumors. We’re kicking you out of the company.” It’s his “own” business that he thought he owned, but he never really owned. He was only a contractor. The contract’s gone and now, he’s in his mid-60s, launching a new business again. He’s in six figures a year again with this new business but he lost a seven-figure business as a result of that.
In normal language, people call that theft. That’s what I think when that stuff happens. His income got stolen somehow because they had their policies written in the right way and their legal team handled things in the right way. For some reason, they don’t think that’s theft, but I think that’s theft when someone puts their heart, soul, time, effort, and dreams and as you said, the timeframe. A favorite quote from Tony Robbins is, “Most people completely overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and completely underestimate what they can accomplish in ten.”
That’s a good expectation for building a business like a network marketing or even affiliate marketing but if you’re in something where you do make the ten-year investment and then they take it away, that’s so wrong. That’s theft. These are some of the things that we saw and experienced that we’re like, “That’s not right. Companies shouldn’t do that.”
Another thing too is that a lot of times people are selling products that are overpriced and way beyond what you get in the retail market normally so that they can pay commissions. Even then, there are things like breakage and all that stuff. I’m not trying to poo-poo on the industry completely because as I said, I believe there are great companies out there. I believe there are great legitimate business owners, but those that expect the sun, the moon, and the stars expect the world. Tell us more about what you did differently. How did you change with your company?
These are all changes that we made from problems that we saw. For example, one of the problems in network marketing is that you get paid such a small commission amount for the sales that you make. The only way you can grow a real income is by having a massive team. In my first company, we had 600 people in my downline, and that produced a $1,200 monthly residual, which I was grateful for at the time but if you think about that, that’s a lot of people and a lot of work.
With our company, we decided to do a one-tier affiliate model that helps us to be able to pay a higher commission rather than have to split it up amongst ten people in the upline. When you make a sale, you get paid the full commission amount. We are a digital products company so that makes it possible for us to pay out a much higher commission rate. We pay 80% commission. In a nutshell, with our company, let’s say you wanted to make $3,000 a month. $3,000 divided by our commission amount, you could do that with 25 customers. Compare that to the 600 for the $1,200 a month. That’s one thing we did differently.
Another thing we did differently was we wanted to make everything based on principles and values. A vision and principles that people could rely on forever that will help them in business, also help them in normal life and also so that we all could know it’s not going to change. As you said, the culture’s not going to change. Our vision is freedom through principle-centered leadership. Why? It’s because all the failures in our income seem to have arisen from non-principal centered leadership like greed, people quitting, and making decisions based on how much money can we gather in not necessarily, “Will this help the community at large?” That is a big one. Build it on a strong foundation.
We wanted to have products that were of more use value than they cost in cash value. That comes from Wallace Wattles. “Deliver more in use value than you take in cash value,” which as you mentioned, is sometimes a problem in network marketing. With the digital product, it is possible to deliver way more in-use value than you take from the market in-cash value. We do that. We strive to make our products as useful and as valuable as humanly possible.
Also, because they are digital, we’re able to interact with the market. Find out what people need, supplement, and fix things here and there. Our products are always evolving and getting more and more value valuable. Our price points are low. The increase in value from a consumer standpoint makes it a good deal for the consumer. We understand the community in a very high-level way which is something that people should be aware of right off the bat.
If you’re ever going to build a residual income that is dependent upon people coming together and staying together, which is exactly what network marketing is, a lot of times people, especially in the beginning are like, “What’s the product? What’s the comp plan?” These are the most important things and those things are important, but as important and maybe even sometimes more important is the community that you build.
How do people feel when they’re in your community? Do they feel inspired? Do they feel like their lives are getting better? Do they feel like they’re believed in? Do they feel like they’re judged or shamed? That’s another thing we did. One thing we didn’t like about the businesses that we’ve been in is that a lot of companies want to grow and produce. They’ll set up these competitions like rank, status, and leaderboards. I get it and in one sense, you do want to recognize people.
That part is good but the negative aspect that we noticed from that is it has the tendency to make people feel not good enough if they’re seeing the same names on the leaderboard all the time and they’re never there. The only communication from the company is always like, “Look at Chris Miles. He’s a stud. He did it again.” it’s all about money and achievement. Now, you’ve got this huge customer base of people that are feeling less than others.
They’re feeling like they’re not a valuable part of the community. We change that. We don’t have ranks. We have contribution levels because when you produce an income with us, we donate a portion of that income to help feed starving kids. We are able to attach the number of days of meals that are provided through your production as an affiliate to a contribution level. It’s not about earning the most money. It’s about contributing in a way that is adding real tangible value to the world around you.
The other thing we do is we don’t talk about it all the time. In our events and our masterminds, I’m not coming out there like, “My name is Paul and I’m a Triple Oak benefactor.” Never ever say that. At the events, we’ll do that recognition. We also have awards that are non-production based too. We reward people for following the Golden Rule. We award people for demonstrating a pleasing personality. We award people with gratitude.
We’re striving to create a culture where you feel like this is a place that you want to be even if you’re not out there producing a big income. As we said earlier, a lot of times, you don’t join and just make a big income. You can, and people do. We do have people who do that, but for most people, it’s a process of learning and getting familiar, figuring out your identity and beliefs, and dropping some of those old beliefs. That takes time. Our logo is this oak tree with dollar symbols for prosperity. One of the meanings of this is that we want to be a place of good soil where people can plant the roots of their souls and grow into great people as they’re learning how to generate income.
You mentioned a quote from Wallace Wattles and giving more than what you receive in compensation and such. Tell me about the $ 25-a-month product that someone can offer as an affiliate.
Our $ 25-a-month product is called the HBA Funnel Builder. It’s a tool that allows you to create any web-based content you want to create like lead capture pages, landing pages, sales pages, membership sites, digital products, private team areas, and traditional websites. I created a website for the charter school that my kids go to for them. Products like this the marketplace run from $50 to $300 a month. Ours is $25 a month.
You get the tool, which is awesome but then we also give you the Funnel Builders Academy, which is a step-by-step training suite on how to use the tool. We also have some cool bonus gifts that we throw in with that purchase. That’s $25 a month. That price with that value is insane but then you also add in the 80% commissions so you can share that tool with others and earn $20 residuals. It’s the best offer on the Internet.
The customers you refer, you end up making more than what you paying.
You’re in positive cashflow.
It’s not even counting the fact you can use it to create whatever website you want.
A lot of companies out there have taglines like, “Three and it’s free.” We don’t say this, but the reality is, “One referral and you’re almost free. Two referrals and you’re in positive cashflow.”
That’s a great place to be. That’s what we always talk about, cashflow and profit. You offer the other suites of products and things like that too, as part of it, but still, 1) It is a low barrier of entry, but 2) For those that aren’t familiar with this, you are a referral source. You are sending referrals to them. For getting people referred to this company, you get paid a referral fee.
This is what helped me become financially independent the first time more quickly than using real estate. I did use real estate that first time, but I also had affiliate money coming in. I was referring people to that mortgage broker. I was a mortgage licensed as well, but I didn’t want to do all the paperwork. I referred to that mortgage broker.
I got compensated 50/50. We split it 50/50. He was my partner, but I didn’t have to do all the work. I spent maybe 0.5 to 1 hour and then I get a check for $1,000 or so. I was working The 4-Hour Workweek before Tim Ferriss wrote the book. You have that ability where it doesn’t matter how busy someone might be. It’s that if you have the ability to connect, I imagine this is a natural thing for people.
You were an affiliate marketer before there was the term affiliate marketing probably. You’re the OG affiliate marketer.
That’s what people said, “What do you do?” I’m like, “I sell drugs.” I’m like, “I don’t know what they call that. I‘ve referred people to a jewelry company and get paid 5% for that.” I was connecting people. One friend did call me Mr. Hookups, which doesn’t sound great either.
If you can connect with people in a sincere way with a desire to add value to their lives, that is one easy way you can have a lot of success with this type of business model. We’ve got more advanced ways like YouTube and TikTok videos, paid ads, and all that stuff too, but connecting and giving invitations in a sincere way is an easy way to do it.
The last question here. I know we went longer than we planned, but there’s a lot to unpack here. You’ve been around this company for a while now. Who’s been the perfect person that’s done this with your company? It sounds like a servant, more of that person that is trying to create value in the world. That’s a big part of the culture, but who else seems like a natural fit for this?
We have people that are earning quite a bit of money that doesn’t plug into the community all that much and that’s fine. If you’re a person who can connect and invite or if you have experience in internet marketing, where you know how to drive traffic and send emails and stuff, that would be one category of person. One of the big differences in our company as we mentioned is community. If you’re a person that likes to serve, help, love, lift, learn, wants to generate a passive income and also at the same time, wants to have a sense of contribution and meaning that the income was great and lucrative.
Also, the income meant that starving kids in the world were having meals and you were able to help someone in our community with a question they had, that’s our core avatar for our community. It’s people who want to give. Life is God’s gift to us and how we live our lives is our gift back to God. That’s who we’re looking for, people who want to give that gift in the best way they can and do it in a business that’s heart-centered. We’re not religious, but we do have a strain of spirituality.
A line from our manifesto says, “We believe the Architect of the universe designed a stairwell that’s leading somewhere great. We strive to make our choices from this grand perspective.” It’s not religious, but there’s this sense that our choices do matter and we just don’t want to get the money. We’re missing the point like your post on Facebook. “Love people. Care about people. Build relationships. Smile, laugh, live, love,” and all those kinds of things.
What you’re saying is someone can have a big heart. They don’t have to be a digital marketing genius or a web genius, which I’m not a tech genius in any way, shape, or form, but they could still be successful at this.
As long as they’re willing to learn and be coachable, that’s all you need to have success with what we’ve got going.
You hear that arrogant jerks, the few people that might be reading this that are that way, stay away. This is not the way that you can do it.
We love you, but we’d rather love you from a distance.
There are plenty of other network marketing companies or direct sales or affiliate companies you can go talk to. Paul, I appreciate your time today. This is valuable. Not only understanding the industry but even understanding what value proposition you offer for the world and helping create a solution that I know has even helped past readers as well. I know there are more readers here today that are looking for additional streams of income and looking for ways to do that especially if it doesn’t require a lot of money out of pocket. I know that’s a big thing for a lot of people on this show.
I appreciate you and the opportunity to be here. I appreciate all the readers. Thanks for tuning in. I’m always inspired by you, Chris, and your posts. Also, the way you live your life and the way you do your shows. You are a bright light in the world. It’s how people like me stay inspired is seeing other lights like you. Thank you for all you do.
We’ll keep doing it. Remember, this life is your life. You get to choose it and you can show up to either come to serve or want people to serve you. The whole point of this is that dollars follow the value you create for other people. If you want more dollars, you want more money, and all of the wealth in your life, it’s about how you show up serving and blessing lives. I hope that this has blessed you today. Go and make it a wonderful prosperous week. We’ll see you later.
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About Paul Hutchings
Paul Hutchings calls himself a “Freedom Crusader.” Paul is the owner of HBA Funnel Builder, an online sales automation business that has helped thousands of members earn residual income, as well as easily build and create sales funnels.
After years in the network marketing space, Paul decided it was time to create a proven system that allows his community of Freedom Crusaders more easily earn higher residuals in their business offering a product that can also helps people earn more money online with their product or service.