MARK SEYFORTH

“I really believe that travel, it’s priceless.”

CROWD sits down with LifeTRNDS CEO Mark Seyforth to benefit from his crowd marketing experience, hear his holiday plans, and why he awoke one morning to find his car upside down.

For Mark Seyforth, life happens fast. He left home at 17, was married by 18, and had his first daughter at the age of 19. He would go on to found a company with a turnover of millions of dollars before he turned 30. But the college age Seyforth wouldn’t recognise this man, or this lifestyle, today. “I was so poor when I was going through college that I had a car that was literally rusted out, it was falling apart.” Seyforth says, “I was lucky if I could get the thing to stop at a stoplight. A bunch of my buddies decided one day that the best thing they could do for my car was to turn it upside down. I actually came out in the morning to go to class and the car was flipped over. So I’m going ‘How am I supposed to get to school?’ and they said ‘The same way you always do: walk, because your car is always broken anyway.’”

After college Seyforth landed a job as a company Vice President, before quitting to pursue a new career selling soap door to door for the crowd marketing company Amway, much to his wife’s confusion.

“She said ‘What are you gonna do?’ and I said ‘I’m gonna go door to door and I’m gonna sell soap’ and she said ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of in my life.’ I thought there was a great opportunity there.”

Unconvinced by Amway’s model, Seyforth soon entered into business for himself, founding his own network marketing company in 1976.

“Two years later I was doing over a million dollars a year. You talk about rags to riches, I went from not being able to put gas in my car to owning my own private jet. So a pretty big jump in a two year period and being a kid in his 20s, it was quite the experience.”

In the midst of this huge reversal of fortunes, there’s still one decision that haunts Seyforth to this day. When Mark Hughes founded Herbalife in 1980, he offered Seyforth a 50% stake in the company, which Seyforth turned down.

"You talk about rags to riches, I went from not being able to put gas in my car to owning my own private jet."

“This is a great lesson for everybody. Sometimes you think you’re smarter than what you are. Because I said no. I could have had a 50% ownership in Herbalife for nothing and I turned it down. In life I've always told people be careful what you say no to because it might come back and bite you one day. And to this day I'm still going ‘What I was I thinking?’”

In 2018, Herbalife’s revenue was 4.89 billion dollars.

Today Seyforth is the CEO of LifeTRNDS, the online travel agent offering exclusive discounts on hotels, villas, cruises, and car rentals to Crowd1 Affiliates. Echoing Peter Jakobsson’s mantra, he credits his success in crowd marketing to belief.

“In life you are what you think you are and I mean that in all sincerity. When I look back at my life or anybody’s life, anyone who’s had great success, they are who they think they are. You attract everything in life. You create an energy about you that attracts other people, so if you create this energy about you and believe that wonderful things are going to happen to you because that’s who you are, that’s what will happen.”

“I was never handed anything. I worked for everything I have but I realised it’s not work. It's belief. It’s the conviction that I am entitled to

what I believe in, and when you believe it and you start putting those things in motion it happens.”

It’s a worldview that Seyforth firmly believes got him where he is today, one that has driven his success in the world of crowd marketing, and one that can be employed by every Crowd1 Affiliate, no matter the size of their business.

“I would tell everyone that’s a part of Crowd1, don’t take it lightly. Get serious about your business, really know your business, become a

believer. Become a believer in what you’re doing and become a user of your own products because if you do those things then when you talk to other people, great things will happen.”

“When you go to share your story with somebody, they’re going to believe you. They're going to want to be a part of it, it will sound exciting, something that they want to do. Build your business, use your products and watch what happens to your income. It really could be life changing.”

So where will the man who sells holidays for a living, and believes that wonderful things will happen to him, be travelling when the world opens up again?

“In the next four or five months I’m taking my wife and my daughter and we’re travelling all over Europe. I think everything will be opened up by July, and we’re going to spend from July until maybe December going all over Europe. We’re going to go to Spain, Greece, France, Sweden, and we’re also going to Switzerland as well. It’s going to be a blast. To me it’s a life experience that’s priceless. I really believe that travel, it’s priceless.”