Text: ALEC JAMES ~

Richard Kall, when his daughter, Laura, turned 22, did the kindsest thing he could think of for her. He began waking her up every weekday at 5 a.m.

"You've got to get up and get the train!" he'd shout as reveille to his startled daughter. Laura never had been a morning person. Kall explains, "I wanted her to know what it feels like for the average person her age, commuting back and forth to a job every day." Call it a kind of shock therapy.

Richard and Laura Kall, a father-daughter networking team, have built family wealth together. Laura loves working at home: "I like knowing my kids are here under the same roof." Richard is retired: "A multi-trillionaire doesn't have the freedom I have."

No, Kall isn't some militaristic crackpot. He is, however, a multi-millionaire, one of the top distributors in the network marketing industry. Since joining Nu Skin International in 1985, he has made tens of millions of dollars as his downline organization has expanded to hundreds of thousands of people.

In 1992, fresh out of college, with a magna cum laude business degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton, Laura was just a young girl with no business experience who didn't know where she'd find a job.

"I was 22," she says, "But I looked about 17. I wished I were someone else - older, and male - so that people would take me more seriously." The salaries she was offered for entry-level business positions were a pittance compared to what her parents were making in network marketing. The conventional world's way of making money looks so inefficient when you've grown up in a household with successful distributors. Maybe it was time to try network marketing.

Unlike someone from another background, Laura had no doubts about whether network marketing "worked." But could she work it? Could she do what her parents had done? After all, unlike her father, she had no experience in the business world, with the credibility that brings.

Then Laura had one of those moments of insight that can turn people's lives around on a pivot: "I said to myself, 'Why focus on my weaknesses? Instead, what are my strengths?'" So she made an inventory of them: "I'm friendly, I'm outgoing, I'm not afraid to talk to people." She decided to press her advantages.

As they'd built their business, Laura's parents had already approached everyone in the family's circle of contacts. Laura had to find fresh talent. So, she started getting up at 5 a.m. every morning. But this time it wasn't an exercise devised by her father.

"I started actually taking the train down to Manhattan," Laura says. "I'd stop people on the street. I knew I'd find some who were open-minded enough to listen to me. If the truth be known, I didn't get many No's," she recalls, "because I wasn't threatening."

Indeed, looking at Laura Kall today, we can be fairly sure that she was not an ominous sight. "I'd walk up to a complete stranger, tap him on the shoulder and say, 'Excuse me, can I ask you a quick question?' Some would say 'Yes,' and some of them would walk right past me.

At age 14, working as a golf caddy, Richard Kall saw how some of the wealthy lived: Playing 18 holes day after day, tossing back gin fizzes with friends and family. He asked himself: "Why not me?"

"To those who said 'Yes,' I'd explain: 'I know this is totally crazy, but I'm expanding a business in this area, and if it didn't jeopardize what you're doing now, and had tremendous income potential - would you give me your business card, so I could send you some information?'

"I found that if I said that over and over again, I'd get plenty of cards. I used to be able to collect 20 cards in an hour. I literally couldn't have gotten a better response if I'd placed a full-page ad in USA Today," she adds.

After only two years and some months of this, Laura had attained the rank of "Hawaiian Blue Diamond" distributor in Nu Skin - the firm's highest distributor rank. At 25, she was the youngest person to have achieved this level in the history of the company.

By smashing a record, Laura was simply following in her father's large footprints.

Believe Me, Rich is Better

Richard Kall started his life simple and straight, among the thick necks and blue collars of Long Island, New York, and he never lost the values he grew up with. The son of a hard-working printer, Richard never made it past the 10th grade in school. But by then, he'd learned that while there's nothing wrong with being hard-working and poor, being rich is a whole lot better. At 14, working as a golf caddie, he saw how some of the wealthy lived: playing 18 holes day after day after day, sipping gin fizzes, and spending time with their families. He wanted that life for himself.

"I was meeting people who were on vacation in January and February and March," Kall says. "Some of them stayed on vacation all the way through to December. And that bothered me. Because I knew I had as much on the ball as they did. So I asked myself, 'Why can't I be in that position?' Then I saw that I could." Richard decided to start acting the part. Since he didn't have a car, he made a point of hitching his ride home from the course each day with one or another of the members who drove Cadillacs.

Kall made some money in real estate and life insurance. Then he was approached by a network marketing distributor - an Amway part-timer who was working at a Midas muffler shop. "The fellow behind the counter said to me, 'Do you have all the money you would like to make? Do you have freedom? Can you do whatever you want, whenever you want?'

"I said, 'Nobody can.'

"And he said, 'Well, I happen to be involved in a business like that.'

"The key thing was that I had an open mind. I didn't say to him, 'How can you tell me about freedom - when you're behind the counter of a Midas muffler shop with grease all over your uniform?'

"I was already looking for something new. I'd been in the same business for 14-and-a-half years, and I wasn't coming home every night to my wife with exciting stories, the way I had 14 years before."

In conventional industries, there was a limit on how many people Kall could manage and train - which meant a limit on the money he could make. He realized such a limit doesn't exist in network marketing.

"If I can strike a chord with one person," he says now, "if I can push a button in one person as my buttons were pushed 20 years ago, I've done my job."

Once in network marketing, Kall worked like a maniac. "The longest stretch I went was 52 hours, just calling people."

Catch a Couple of Stars

In recruiting, Kall says he just "looked for that 5 percent of the people who do 95 percent of the work. If you can get one or two phenomenal people a year, you've done your job. I had no books, no computers, no fax machines. I built this business with one telephone line."

"I've never seen anyone touch people the way my father does," says Laura. "He's all emotion, and when they walk out of his meeting, they may not have learned how to do it, but they know why they should do it. He's always said that if your 'why' is strong enough, you'll figure out the 'how.'"

Not quite so demure as she looks, Laura Kall began her networking success at age 22, buttonholing strangers on the streets of Manhattan to ask: "Excuse me, could I have your business card?" Most said yes. And the most compelling reason Richard Kall can offer why this industry works has to do with the darkest event of his life - the cancer death of Laura's mother, Carol, in 1997. The best thing Richard ever got from this industry, he still says, was the freedom it gave him to spend time with his wife throughout her illness.

Only seven months after he got started with Nu Skin, Carol's illness recurred. Kall stopped everything on a dime and changed his focus from building a business full-tilt to taking care of someone gravely ill. The only bright side: Kall had built his network so well in his first seven months that the money - and even his organization - took care of itself. Even today, ninety percent of his income comes from the seeds planted in those first months.

"Today, a multi-trillionaire still doesn't have the freedom I have," Kall marvels. He's mostly retired from recruiting, but remains in demand as a speaker. He often meets with distributors at his Connecticut estate; many are inspired to work harder, just seeing the house where he lives.

Visitors also learn a lot from meeting Laura, who lives nearby. With her husband, Mitchell Felton, a financial planner who also works from home, Laura has two children - Jessica, 4, and Cameron, almost 2 years old. And thanks to network marketing, when these newcomers arrived, Laura didn't have to choose between them and her burgeoning income.

"If I had been in some big corporation," she muses, "I would probably be commuting to Manhattan every day, and the nanny would be raising my children. Instead, for the most part, I've built my business out of my home. I have the pack-and-play crib in my office. When I'm on the phone, my distributors usually can hear cartoons in the background."

Laura says she has managed to schedule her business activities entirely around her family life. "My priority is the kids. I don't miss anything that's important because of a business event. If necessary, I just don't schedule the business event," she says. "Even if I'm working upstairs," Laura says, "I like to know that my kids are here under the same roof."

A couple of years ago at a Nu Skin convention, Richard Kall told the audience of 10,000 that he had a surprise for them. He played a tape of Laura, at age 14, bubbling over with enthusiasm about her parents' new venture into network marketing, and promising that she was going to be her father's "right hand man."

It's a Big Planet

Laura has become more than that. She was one of the young distributors who encouraged Nu Skin executives to start Big Planet, the company's Internet service and marketing division. Those who get involved with Big Planet automatically become part of the team of professional trainers in network marketing Global InterNetworks (www.globalinternetworks.com), of which Laura is president.

Big Planet newcomers are advised to get hold of Global's sales aids and training materials. Distributors are encouraged to set up their own Web pages. "We're really pioneering what we consider a whole new industry, a more advanced form of network marketing," Laura says. Within a month of joining Big Planet, Laura reached its highest level, Presidential Director.

"The big picture of network marketing," she says, "is never about how much product you can go out and sell. It's about learning to establish a network of leaders, in which dozens of people can network with hundreds of people, and that can turn into thousands of people - each doing a little, using a little product, selling a little and networking a little. And for my family that's turned into hundreds of thousands of representatives around the world."

Family is the whole point for Laura. "After all, what good is all this money if you don't spend time with your kids?"

And now she sets her own sleep schedule. "I've never been a morning person," affirms Laura, who took mostly night courses at college. "One of my first goals was to become successful in the company and never wake up before ten in the morning."

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