Today we’d like to introduce you to Joel Medina.
Joel, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I was born and raised in a third world country where the average monthly income of over 86% of the population is US$230, my country is Dominican Republic.
I was raised in a humble household, my mom was divorced. During my young ages, I always felt that my family could do better, I would see my mom crying many times because of financial stress in her room with the electricity, or the phone service sometimes was shut because of this constant lack of money.
My parents always told me “make sure you finish your studies to make sure you become somebody”. That’s a phrase that later in life I realized has been damaging so many generations because of what it implies. A tittle does not “make you somebody” it is just a tool for your dreams if in any case you need to specialize to fulfill them that is. I still encourage my students and younger generations to study, but to keep in mind that a tittle does not mean that you will have success in life.
Following my family’s advice, I decided to study in the hardest university of my country for Engineering, named INTEC (Instituto Tecnologico de Santo Domingo).
Right before finishing my studies I remember sitting in the classroom thinking about what to do with my life after I get my tittle, and I remember clearly saying to myself: “I don’t want to just make money, but I want to make money out of something that really helps the world or my community”. And that’s when I decided that I wanted to specialize in Renewable Energies.
When I graduated I spent almost a year actively looking for Renewable Energies opportunities, but in 2006 in my country, Renewables projects or even jobs did not exist. There were just but a couple of companies in the entire country that even did anything with renewable energies. One of them was a company that manufactured Solar Water Heaters, but even that company was literally broke (the owner had other companies so he was paying for the staff for that company just to keep it open). I decided to go there and told the owner that I would work for just enough to buy me food and transportation to go to work, because I wanted to learn.
I started working there, saved all that I could (forced fasting) and saved enough to pay me a Solar Photovoltaic Installations Course in Florida Solar Energy Center, this was in 2007. During those years my parents were really concerned that I was “wasting my time and making no money and that I should look for a real job”. I was really stubborn into staying and doing what I felt passionate about. I also remember daydreaming and visualizing me in front of a conveyor belt with a white coat looking at solar cells with a pad and pencil in my hand.
Out of nowhere, in a country that nobody was speaking about Photovoltaic Energies, a company from Spain came to the country to manufacture Solar Photovoltaic Panels becoming the first Solar Panels Manufacturer of the Caribbean. Of course, I applied to a job and when they saw in my CV the certification from the Florida Solar Energy Center I was automatically hired becoming the first employee of the entire company in that country, all of this was in 2007.
This company also manufactured robots for Volkswagen in Spain, so I learned a lot from the engineering department in this company.
I escalated quickly inside that company to where I ended up being the engineering manager for the Photovoltaic branch. And there I was in the moment that I so much dreamed about in front of a conveyor belt, but then after a while the sense that “I wanted to do more” started hitting my heart again.
So I started looking for a bigger role in the Renewable Area in my country, after a while I was offered by the main regulator entity of my country for renewable energies named the Comision Nacional de Energias (like the US Department of Energy) the position of “National Manager for unconventional energies”.
I left my job in 2010 to chase this position because they told me that it was mine, and just when I was about to start they informed me that “they were sorry but that there was a mistake and somebody else got the position”, because in our countries the jobs usually are political, and not technical.
That same year the Solar Plant where I used to work closed operations in my country and I was left without a job for over 9 months to the point where I became broke and living alone in my small rented apartment that I was about to lose.
By the end of 2010, I started again working in another company with less than half my previous salary and my life became very stressful, I had to live with enough to move around and asking for some personal loans that to this day I have never mentioned to my mom so that she would not feel stressed.
In 2011, I got tired of being broke and noticed that the next step to live the life that I wanted was not being an employee, so I started actively looking for “a business to become self-employed”. In April of that same year I was introduced to Network Marketing, which at that point I thought it was “one of those pyramid schemes”, but I started researching and noticed that it was a fair and legal business model so I enrolled into the company that was presented to me at that moment, but during those months I was working from 8am to 8pm and sometimes until 11pm and even 2am, depending the project so I just enrolled but didn’t do anything about that Network Marketing business.
In July of that same year I was started suffering from high blood pressure and headaches and when I went to the doctor, he told me that it was all from high levels of stress, that if I didn’t slow down I was about to get a heart attack. So I said to myself “enough”, I was not feeling happy at all and now my health was also paying a high price, so I decided to do something about it and after revisiting my options I remembered that I had the account from that Network Marketing company and some products left. So I started working with my girlfriend the business on July 2011 and I said to myself: “I will give my all to this to make it work no matter what it takes”. I decided to start leaving the office at 7pm (that was early for me) and every night I would go out and show the business opportunity to somebody, and by the time I noticed 4 months later I was already earning in one week in commissions the equivalent to my salary for the whole month, so when I saw that I had saved the equivalent to 6 months’ worth of salary I decided to go all in and quitted my job on November 2011, by January 2012 I was already making in one month the equivalent to a whole year of my previous salary. So that is how I was propelled to over 6 figures in less than one year.
But after that “big success” for me, I noticed some things that were not sustainable in the way that we were doing business, our mentor always wanted us to have a lot of flashy clothing, fancy cars, there was a lot of pumping people with big events and emotions to make them join, but that was not my style so I fell in the trap of buying expensive cars, clothes, etc, but never into trying to get them excited because I felt that it was manipulation. I also started thinking a lot about how the product did not make a lot of sense because the price was too high.
Later on, as I feared, we had a major fall in sales and the business was hit with a lot of drama and media attacks to the point where we ended up broke for the second time for me by January 2014.
That is when I started looking for a better “company” inside the Network Marketing World and we found what we believed could work avoiding all the things that I didn’t like from the previous one. We found one without all the negative things from the previous one, but the product was still not exactly what I was looking for, but since we couldn’t find anything else and we were broke, we gave it a chance.
This time with the knowledge that we already had, we managed to create good results again from July 2014 to May 2015, that placed us back to the 6 figures but in a more stable way. We had the business in “cruise control” to such a point that out of pure boredom we invested and started with a partner another company in Florida for Credit Repair called CredimaxUsa that is still running to this day.
After a while, I felt bad because too many people that trusted me, and were “following the system” were not having the success that was promised in the material.
When I started analyzing ways to improve the business model to make people earn more from their efforts, it all pointed back to that flaw that I noticed from the first company, and I also noticed that it was actually a common pattern in all the other companies. That flaw was for me the product. I felt that the products we were offering were good, but they were too specialized for a normal person to come in and make good money out of it, and the pricing was also too high.
With that finding that seems so basic, but so much ignored by everybody, in June 2015 I intensified my quest for the product that could meet some specific criteria that I had: Basic Need Product, Good Pricing, Great quality, Great performance. It needed to be something so basic that anybody could come and just sample somebody without the need to explain too much. But the price would have to really make sense in third world countries.
I finally found that product in November 2015. It was produced by a company from china. We brought a fair amount of product to my country and tried to launch the business for almost a whole year since December 2015 until August 2016. The results were great because we finally achieved what I was looking for, HAPPY CUSTOMERS! But because of some lies and malpractices made by that company we could not conduct more business in our country. So now I was left with the product that I was looking for, and an idea of a customer acquisition plan along with a compensation plan that I designed.
In September 2016, a friend of mine at that time who was also an owner of a Network Marketing Company invited me to his “birthday party” in the Philippines that was at the same time of his Grand Launch. And by pure coincidence and even divine intervention, I bumped into an old friend and very successful leader from my first Network Marketing Company, Mr. Demond Coleman. Who is a well-known network marketing professional in the USA Market.
In that trip was where I showed him the product and the vision behind this idea. He got super excited and was ready to jump in to build with this, but we had to decide what to do about the company because there was no “good company” out there with this product and the compensation plan that we were looking for. When the friend from Philippines heard about the whole concept he offered himself as an investor to create a new company in the USA. So, now with the money and the concept we had something to run with.
Demond Coleman invited a super star of the industry that was already retired from building networks and was mainly focused into introducing products from other companies to markets, Mr. Demond Crump, to have a meeting with me in Tampa to see his products, because Coleman thought that his products could be a perfect match to be implemented in the roster of what we had. When Crump saw the whole concept of our idea, he said that “this is what I was looking for” and he joined not only as a third party supplier, but he became one of the founders.
Later Mr. Crump showed the same idea and concept to another legend of the industry that was a CEO of a successful company, Mr. Spencer Iverson. When Mr. Iverson saw everything was blown away. And he also jumped in and said that he wanted in and help even for free if necessary, but that this is also what he was looking for.
From there we had a meeting around October 2016 and during that trip we formed the idea of what today is Nspire Network.
We launched Nspire Network on May 23rd 2017, and since its launch the sales have been averaging over US$1M monthly.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
ALOT of struggles:
– Friends and family not supporting
– Friends betrayals
– Broke twice to the level where I had to sell furnitures to eat.
– Criticism
– Emotional stress
– Attacks from competition
I think that I went through enough to make any grown up man cry many times a year. But those experiences were where I really learned and shaped who I am today.
Please tell us about Nspire Network.
Our business is a hybrid of Direct Sales and Network Marketing.
I specialized in Engineering, Renewable Energies, Network Marketing, Product Development and Personal Development.
We are proud of our NowWeNo awareness campaign (www.nowweno.net).
What sets us apart from others, apart from the Campaign, is that we are bringing to the market a company that will not manipulate people to “join” to become rich, but offering a real product that makes sense to use and that is better than what is out there combined with a compensation plan that behaves more like a franchise instead of a typical Network Marketing company. Paying a lot of commissions even without the special typical qualifications that you need in other companies.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I learned to be more careful with processing and screening the people that will do business with me, and the people close to me, from friends to partners and associates.
Contact Info:
- Address: 3399 Peachtree Road, NE Suite 400, Atlanta, GA, 30326
- Website: https://nspirenetwork.com/
- Phone: 888-275-2578
- Email: info@nspirenetwork.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nspirenetworkofficial/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wenspire/
Image Credit:
The Nspire Network Founders are Joel Medina, Demond Coleman, Demond Crump and Spencer Iverson.
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