Let me be the first to apologize if anyone was ever told that building a Juice Plus+ business was going to be easy. It’s never been easy—at least not for me. Getting started was especially challenging. My first year was a trek into very unfamiliar territory. That’s when I felt the most uncomfortable. Worrying about what people would think, or worse, knowing that people would think of me as a salesman—horror! A common peddler. Someone who’s in it just for the money.

“Here comes that Juice Plus+ guy again. Quick, look the other way.”

Interestingly, not one person ever said to me personally that I was crazy or stupid or greedy or naïve to get into “one of those things”.  Most people wished me well. A few even said that they respected me for starting my own business—that it took real guts! Some in my family did wonder if and when I planned to get a real job.

I was caught off guard once when a “deeply spiritual” man warned me that network marketing was demonic. That was about the time I realized that if I waited until everyone understood me or completely approved of what I was doing, I would never get around to building my business and providing for my family.

So, I would never tell anyone that financial and personal success in our business is easy. But I am also quick to tell someone that the hardest parts of our business have more to do with getting past our fears, our nagging self-doubt and the big personal roadblock known as  “what will people think of me?”

We can get over ourselves. What a long process that is—one that never seems to end. We can learn to get out of the way, and not take everything so personally and make every negative hiccup along the way about us and our personal worthiness. If that kind of emotional maturity seeps into our lives, we might even say that the business can be easy at times.

Here’s one way I’ve learned to describe the Juice Plus+ Virtual Franchise:

Simple, but not easy.

I’m just not comfortable using easy to depict how our business works. Unfortunately, easy to many people means effortless. Haven’t we all heard, “Well, Juice Plus+ just sells itself?” Really? There’s nothing effortless about our business on any level.

Eventually, we do have to go to work.

At some point, we do have to write down a list of names and start making those calls—lots of calls.

To build an effective and profitable business, we do need to craft our stories and have real conversations with real people—lots of conversations.

And, here’s a dose of reality all of us need:

Everything we do to build our business will be done while we are working through our fears and self-doubt, while we are learning new skills and whilewe are wrestling with how people think and feel about us.

What successful folks will tell us is that it’s in the doing of our business that we experience personal development, freedom from fear, deep joy and healthy self-confidence. We grow our business and grow up at the same time—by leaning into those conversations we are reluctant to initiate and by diving into those follow-up calls that we dread so much. It’s seldom easy for any of us. But we learn to do it anyway.

So, whether we are just getting started or we’ve been at it for twenty years, let’s remember to keep our business simple, and to not falsely mentor anyone in the hope that our amazing business is going to be easy.

It just ain’t so.