Holiday Magic

It's totally deliberate because, again, the industry doesn't care how m- how much product is actually being sold because the way that people make money is by buying in.

And that's why, you know, from the very beginning, from the early, uh, origins of the multi-level marketing industry in the s- in the nineteen seventies, right, when the, when the FTC goes after Amway or, um, these earlier companies, um, Holiday Magic, Koscot, um, that they actually successfully prosecuted out of existence They opened the books, right, to the extent that they could, and they saw that people were only making money through recruitment.

They were not selling products.

Um, some of the earliest companies didn't even have products for the first several months, even a year-

...

they were inter-in- they intersect very much with, for example, um, uh, you know, Earhart Seminars Training, EST.

He started out i-in an MLM called Holiday Magic.

The, William Earhart, who's, who that's, that's not his real name.

He's a veteran sales trainer, author, and entrepreneur, and one of the most prominent figures in the early days of direct selling.

He started as a distributor at Holiday Magic, and by the age of 25, write that down, 25, he was running the whole United States operation as the president.

So what did he see in those rooms? What changed what he thought, the way he thought about business? Who impressed him, and who let him down? And more importantly, who taught him th- things, something, anything that he still uses to this day? We're going to talk over the next several interviews about what he learned about success.

It wasn't in any book.

You made me, uh, think of a name, I just wrote it down, that I haven't thought of in years.

One of the things that you had mentioned that we might talk about is people who, uh, uh, were not ethical and, uh, you know, th- th- th- what good things I learned from them and so on.

There was a guy in Chicago, he's dead now, which comes at the end of this story, named Joe LaRose, and he worked for Holiday Magic.

And in every city, we had someone who ran that city.

So in the meantime, between pulling into that garage and escaping that garage, we went to not a job interview like Bill Dempsey had sort of implied.

but an opportunity meeting for Holiday Magic Cosmetics.

He was a distributor with them.

And one other person answered the same ad Jimmy and I did, or I did.

But it was bad, especially if you put a wife through nursing school.

So he agreed.

When we picked up our checks at the office, he endorsed his to me, and that's what we used to get into Holiday Magic.

for $91.41. Wednesday, September 15th, 1965 at noon was when we attended that meeting.