TUPPERWARE DAYS
Because I crashed my car…
Driving too fast, too far…
Well, I was ‘driven’ as well as driving.
Gotta get there on time, so I can leave on time so I can get back home to see my babies before bed.
Gotta do this job that I hate because I need the money …. that I spend on .. childcare… so someone else can look after my babies? .. That I spend on fuel for the car to take me to the job that I hate??
HANG ON A MINUTE!! This is madness.
What if I could work less time, hours to suit, have time with the children, take them to school, fetch them home, go to school plays, sports days, special assemblies and still have the same expendable income as I have now?
Unrealistic? Absolutely not.
Back then Direct Sales was about Party Plan and I was already doing a few Tupperware parties as well as the job, and loving it. I worked out that if I did 2 or 3 parties a week, just 2 or 3 nights out plus some telephone time at home, I would make as much as I was benefiting from my salary after the travel and child care expenses. No Brainer, really.
When I told my boss at the DHSS that I was resigning to sell Tupperware she was appalled. “You’re leaving a Civil Service career to sell Tupperware!!!”
“Yup.”
Best decision I ever made.
I got myself back. My husband got his wife back. My children got their mother back. But more than that I found that when it comes to work, ‘There Is Another Way.’
Up til then I had been a student, a school teacher, an administrator for a national charity and a lower level Civil Servant and I had found that on the whole in the work place you only got noticed when you did something wrong. So work was all about negative feedback. Not something to inspire you really. What it actually did for me was to make me feel that I was a total failure at life.
On the other hand, when I started doing Tupperware parties and I attended my first weekly meeting having done my first party it was all about this thing called ‘Recognition’.
First I was welcomed as a newcomer when I arrived and assigned a ‘friend’ to show me the ropes.
Second I was given a raffle ticket just for being there at all and later I won a Tupperware canister with it. (I kept that canister for many, many years)
Third we had this thing called a ‘Spelldown’ where we all stood up if we had worked the previous week and they called out numbers, when they reached the amount you had sold you sat down. Last one standing was the winner and got a prize. I sat down fairly early, my first party had been very average, but when I sat down they said to me “thank you”. You see they recognised that every small sale added to their total and was valuable.
And that was my Light Bulb Moment – in Direct Sales you only get successful when you help others become successful. In Direct Sales you get help to get it right and get rewarded and praised for any effort. What a refreshing change!
( Reminds me of horse training methods… reward the ‘try’. )
The result of this was that I spent the next 15 years working in Party Plan, while my babies grew into teenagers. I only stopped when the Party Plan model began to be less effective and the Tupperware company had more or less closed in UK. I had a company car, a team of Demonstrators working for me and a lifestyle I loved. Not huge financial rewards but enough to live on. However I was able to enjoy my children’s childhood. I was there when they needed me to be and I fit my work into the hours they were at playgroup or school and a couple of evenings when their dad was home anyway. He would arrive home from work about 6, we’d have tea together then I would go out about 7.
It led to a life in sales of one sort or another and the attitudes and techniques I learned in Tupperware have stood me in good stead in many aspects of my life. When I began to learn about Law of Attraction I found a lot of the ideas were exactly what I had learned from Tupperware…
your attitude creates your results – how to be positive – how to handle rejection – don’t take ‘no’ personally.
These days Direct Sales is Network Marketing, although many companies still use parties to sell their products. Nowadays there are personal company websites and social media so you can gather customers from all over the country or world. Nowadays there are huge resources to help you build a direct marketing business. And with Network Marketing you can go much further than making a living, you can make a fortune! As Eric Worre ( http://networkmarketingpro.com/ ) says, ” Network Marketing may not be perfect but it is the best model to run your own business, because it is a stone cold fact, we do have a better way.” .
