Meeting a Female Bodybuilder

Yesterday, pumpkin and I stopped off at Absolute Auto Care on Sunrise Blvd next to Brake Masters to get an oil change. I usually go to Brake Masters but they pissed me off because they lost one of the hubcaps on the car and denied that they had anything to do with it. Absolute Auto Care opened up a few months ago and now was a good time to try them out. They looked pretty empty for a Saturday afternoon. Since there was no one ahead of us, I decided to just sit in the waiting room and wait for him to be finished. A few people came and went while I watched TV and pumpkin played on my phone.

Leticia Jackson

After a while a black woman came in to pick up her car. Her car wasn't quite ready so she sat down across from me. CNN was on with a large map of the U.S. displaying all the rising gas prices across the country. The woman looked up and exclaimed, "Oh, my God." That got my attention and I looked up at the map again. Oil and gas are usually pretty close to being one of my favorite topics so we started talking about how well the oil companies are profiting at our expense and how it is that oil prices are rising when demand is down. She seemed to relate to what I was saying about climate change and the need for alternatives to oil. The conversation drifted over to how time flies and how quickly kids like pumpkin learn the computer. I told her I worked out of my home and designed websites. She introduced herself as Leticia Jackson and said that she was a personal trainer. I told her about my other business and how MA might benefit her business. She seemed a little hesitant because of her prior network marketing experience. In any case, I suggested that at least she check out www.tlsslim.com. She told me about her website which she said needed some TLC. I gave her my card and she tore off a piece of paper and gave me her phone number and website address.

We said good-bye when she left and as soon as pumpkin and I got home, I went to check out her website, www.luvyourselffit.com. It definitely was an amateur job, hastily put together. I looked at some of the pictures and saw what looked like a female body builder doing incredible things with her body. No, that couldn't be her. I tried to think back to the woman I met at the auto repair place. There was nothing about her that suggested that she was muscular. Now that I think about it, she was covered from head to toe with clothing which was not out of the ordinary because the weather was kind of cool yesterday. Now I was staring at a body builder and olympic fitness expert. This woman is pure muscle. I have seen pictures of muscular women before but nothing like the definition on this woman. 

I am completely in awe of what Leticia has accomplished. This woman is amazing. She can do things that few people can do, men or women. That takes a tremendous amount of dedication. I hope we can stay in contact because I do want to help her in any way I can.

Suwanna Birthday

Su Zhen was so nice to invite me over for dinner on Friday. It was going to be beans and rice otherwise. I was commissioned to purchase a cake. Not a chocolate cake or any other typical American style cake which would have been way too sweet. Nope, it was going to be a fruit cake. But there was a problem. I needed to have the cake people at Bel Air Market write Happy Birthday Suwanna on top of the cake. No can do, they said. Wouldn't work on this cake. Okay, then a pink plastic sign would just have to do.

We had a nice dinner courtesy of Yummy Kitchen in Folsom, followed by the cake. Then it was on to play on the Wii with Tansy and Emily. I still haven't gotten the hang of interacting with the Wii but it was fun seeing me try and balance myself and then play some games. Last time I weighed myself and Emily called out in her cute little voice, "You're fat!" It sounded so cute the way she said it with half her teeth missing from her mouth so I asked her to repeat it. The second time she was a little shy. Well, she wasn't shy today.
"You're fat!", she yelled out laughing. Okay, I get it now.

Suwanna and Famly

Tansy and Emily

Chinese Food from Yummy Kitchen

With Tansy

With Emily

Talking With Strangers

One of the reasons I signed up to be an Unfranchise Business Owner with Market America was to push myself to do things I normally wouldn't do. Since I spend a lot of time in front of the computer, I felt I needed to socialize a bit more and this business is all about networking.

First goal is to get more customers. I would like to shoot for 10 customers a month. I feel that is doable.

In any case, I went to a computer training at Annie Chen's house on 7/22/2011 which happens to be located off of Riley Street in Folsom.  The training finished at about 9:45 PM. But I stuck around until about 10:30 PM talking with Su Zhen and letting Su Zhen and Annie talk to wifey on the phone about various issues relating to the Unfranchise Business back end.

Winco is conveniently located on Blue Ravine which is on the way to Annie's house. I like Winco because it is open 24/7 which suits my style. The only drawback is that late at night is when they are restocking the store so there are forklifts moving around and people rushing around scanning products as they reload the shelves. No problem. I can deal with that. I grabbed a shopping cart and started strolling through the store. First stop was my favorite section - the produce section. I passed through some overpriced apples and was about to check out the packaged lettuce when I spotted a middle aged couple in the same area. Were they speaking Chinese? Yes, they were. I know this because my ears are very sensitive to language, especially languages I am familiar with. "Should I speak to them about Market America?", I asked myself. "What's the worst that could happen to me?"

I continued debating the possibilities as I left them to head over to the cereal section. Here was my opportunity. I spotted them again in the bakery section and told myself that it was now or never.

In Chinese: "Excuse me, do you speak Chinese?" They were surprised to see an American speaking Mandarin but they were friendly right off the bat. I told them all about Market America (I later learned from Su Zhen not to tell people too much at first as that might scare people off). But the truth is my style is always to be up front from the get go because then I never have to worry about there being any misunderstandings. Nobody could ever accuse me of not being forthright.

I had the husband call my cell phone. He was all ready to sign up once I explained that it was free and there was absolutely no risk involved. The next day I went to a birthday party for Suwanna and at that time I decided to call him right in front of Su Zhen. He wasn't home so I left a message. It turns out that he called me back right away but somehow I didn't hear the cell phone ring. He not only left his email, he left his PO box. Wow!

When I got home, I immediately sent him an invite from my preferred customer back end. I also told him that I would like him to meet wifey and pumpkin after they come back from Taiwan. After he signed up, he said he was going on a short vacation but will return early August. Perfect! My first customer and probably a friend too!

MA Translation Services

Su Zhen asked me to translate her 2 minute commercial from Chinese into English. I said sure, no problem. I figured I could just copy and paste into Google translate and then modify from there. Instead of handing me a flash drive with her text neatly typed, she handed me her handwritten speech. Uh oh!

So was this going to be a challenge? I am never one to turn down a challenge. Step one was to transpose the entire speech into Google Docs. With my MDBG online dictionary, I found as many characters as I could and left blanks for Su Zhen to fill in. I honestly thought there would be more mistakes but I was pleasantly surprised when she handed it back to me with only a few corrections.

Great. But that was only step one. Step two was to not only translate it into English but make it sound like an American wrote it. I copied and pasted blocks of text into Google Translate and then rewrote the sentences so no one would suspect that this speech was originally written by a Chinese woman.

I finished this morning and emailed her the retyped Chinese version as well as the new English version. No feedback yet.

Chinese MA Meeting

This is my second MA meeting held in Newark which is in the east Bay. Pumpkin and wifey are already in Taiwan so it is up to me to once again gather information.

The unique aspect of today's meeting was the fact that the entire presentation by various leaders was in Chinese. In fact of the 100+ people attending the event held in a hotel ballroom, I was the only white person.  Did I care? No because I have always felt comfortable with people from different cultures. After all, I did live overseas in Taiwan for over a year.

Here was a good opportunity to see how much Chinese I could understand. Fortunately, most of the speakers included slideshows in their presentations which helped tremendously. Aside from the Chinese herbalist, I understood about 90% of what was spoken about. These were people who have achieved high "pin" levels in the organization, most earning between 15K - 35K each month.

For lunch we ate at the Com Tam Thanh Vietnamese restaurant across the street from the hotel. Mm good. I had a regular side bowl of Fa Ah or Vietnamese noodles and enjoyed company and conversation with women in my upline. By this time it was quite obvious that this business is more heavily skewed to female entrepreneurs. Not that there aren't any men, but the ratio is probably something like 70% - 30%.

Once again I was asked to sit for many hours at a time. This is not good. I don't know how I am going to handle these kind of all day events because my butt was getting really sore around 2 hours into the morning session. In addition, someone behind me kept goosing me around every 20 minutes. One time I turned around to see who the offending party was, but I just saw a couple of middle-aged men smiling back.

The meeting ended around 4 PM. We gathered outside to give some feedback. One of the guests expressed his denial that the MA products were scientifically proven to cure diseases. He is of course correct in that the FDA does not regulate nutritional products so claims cannot be verified. But others in the group responded in a way that I found makes a lot of sense and that is to use your own experience to prove whether it works or not. Certainly can't hurt. I added my own little feedback saying that I am glad that I do not have to reinvent the wheel. That little phrase was kind of difficult to translate into Chinese but somehow I managed to stumble through.

I got a ride home with Patricia Wang and Coco.

Wearing a Tie

I can't remember the last time I wore a tie. Could have been over 10 years ago. But Su Zhen persuaded me to upgrade my exterior look for a Home Business Presentation or HBP. The meeting was scheduled for July 7th at Qun Yu's and Wang Jun's house in Folsom. They asked me to prepare a short speech on why I decided to sign up as a MA UFB. Yes, there are a lot of acronyms here but that is how they talk about it so I might as well learn it as well.

So I am supposed to give a speech at someone's home in front of people who I don't really know and wear a tie and button down shirt to boot. This is not normal for me.  The day of the meeting, I quickly put something together but there was no time to practice so I printed it out to read when called upon.

After the speech I stuck around for a little while longer and met Gary, a Harvard educated doctor who told me that all the world's diseases can actually be distilled down to one disease which is a failure at the cellular level to either absorb the right nutrition or get rid of waste. A very controversial take on modern medicine but this theory is the premise that through nutrition and lifestyle changes, most problem diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes can either be controlled or prevented from occurring at all.

A Second Business

Today I went ahead and signed up to be an "Unfranchise Business Owner" with a company called Market America. What is MA? It is a product brokerage company. What is a product brokerage company? They have a web portal in which people can purchase two kinds of products and services. First, they have their own branded products in nutrition, cosmetics, household goods and other daily use products. They also allow their partner stores to advertise and sell through the MA portal. This is the product brokerage aspect of their business. All the well known web based stores such as homedepot.com, macys.com, walmart.com, sears.com and thousands of other stores are all accessible through the portal. So why go to walmart.com through the portal? Why not just go directly to walmart.com? The reason is that by navigating to the partner store through the portal, the consumer can get cash back. In addition, just by referring the portal to friends or family, a user who has signed up as my preferred customer can get a .5% referral fee on all their referral's purchases. Wow, that sounds good.

So what makes this business different is that in addition to getting people to sign up as preferred customers, you leverage your efforts by signing up distributors below. Sounds like multi-level but it is setup in such a way that anyone can potentially make a lot of money, not just the people at the top.

Commitment to make this business work and actually turn a profit takes about 2-3 years. Seems like a long time but it isn't that long and the investment is not that high. There are a lot of seminars and meetings to attend to stay on track.

I signed up on Cindy's behalf. The signup process involved Cindy's friend from church named Su Zhen and her upline distributor, Wang Jun. Both of them came over and walked me through the sign up process online.

What we got immediately was our own web portal. I also had to order product and setup auto transfer since there are minimum quantity requirements that need to be met each month.

Introduction to Market America

When we got back from our trip to L.A., wifey asked me to attend some presentation about a business called Market America. She and pumpkin were scheduled to take a church trip in San Jose which conflicted with this event which coincidentally also took place in the Bay Area.

I had to arrive at the In-N-Out Burger on Sunrise at 5:50 AM. Ay caray. It was not easy to get up so early but I managed to half run, half walk to the designated pickup place at 5:45. At 5:48 a van pulled up with 5 women - Coco, Wang Jun, Su Zhen, Patrica Wang and two other women who I had never met.

I had a long conversation with Su Zhen who is the person that introduced the business to Cindy. She is from Taiwan and lives in Folsom with her husband and 2 daughters.

Finally after a long ride, we arrived at Santa Clara University a little before 9 AM. I am not used to sitting all day so this was going to be a challenge, not so much for my attention span but for my reluctance to sit so long. The speaker, Phil Guido, came on and talked about Market America and how he got into the business. He also talked about how to recruit new distributors and stay focused on duplicating efforts.

My job was to take lots of notes since I had agreed to attend on Cindy's behalf. Could this work for us? Selling products was not my forte. Memories of trying to be a telemarketer for Armstrong Cabinet Refacing about 30+ years ago have always haunted me whenever confronted by a business like this but I thought I should be open to something different. Besides, it is nice to be able to do a more social activity than staring at the computer all day.