Dream Team Leader of the Month: Melissa Tomas

This month, I am so excited to introduce you to Melissa Tomas, Vice President Sales Leader from Blaine, Minnesota. She and I have a great partnership and is an invaluable senior leader on the Dream Team. Her story makes me laugh since I’ve seen the transformation from skepticism to all-out-advocate. It is so inspiring to see how her doubts became stepping stones to her new career!

Melissa was invited to a Norwex party the same month she made the decision to go gluten free. Her friend called her and said, “You have allergies. You NEED to come hear this!” After experiencing multiple food reactions and some health challenges, she was open to learning and told her friend (begrudgingly) she’d go. At the party, she was interested by how the cloths cleaned with just water, and bought a set to try. It was July 2009 and it was also “Mop Month”. That means the mopping system, the most expensive item in the catalog, was the hosting reward. Normally hosting a party was NOT in Melissa’s vocabulary. She’d only hosted an in-home party once before and didn’t see herself as a party person, but she really knew that the free mop was something she wanted. Thank goodness! She booked a party for later that month and went home.

When her cloths arrived, she thought she’d put them to the test. First up, sticky gunky gross milk from a cereal bowl stuck to the kitchen table. She shrugged and wiped up her table with her kitchen cloth and just water. After doing so, she rinsed it and hung it in the sink thinking “in the morning either that table is going to be sticky, or that cloth in the sink is going to be stiff and stinky”. She was AMAZED to see that the table in the morning was squeaky clean, and the cloth was soft and ready to use again. She continued to use it all day, every day for a full week and just rinsed it out between uses and hung it to dry. For a person that used to go through 3 (often bleached) dish cloths a day, that was crazy!

Days before her party, her husband came to her with the Norwex kitchen cloth in his hand and asked, “Where did you get this?” She asked “Why?”, and he asked again where she got it and added, “Can we get more?” After explaining Norwex microfiber and the silver, and how it worked he looked at her amazed and asked if he could stay for her party. All of a sudden she went from having a silly “home party” to someone excited in sharing a “great idea that really works and everyone needs to know about!”  At her party, 8 friends came and 5 of them wanted to host.

Melissa says she should have signed up right then, in hindsight of course. But instead, she said she wasn’t interested in selling because she was “too busy”, and waited until the fifth party to sign up. At that point she called up Suzanne and said “stay home, I got this one”. The rest is history.

Looking back, she realizes her excuse of being “too busy” was just silly. Not only do the Norwex products save her time around the house, but she didn’t go back to working full time, and now makes just as much working from home part time. She’s adamant that people who are “too busy” take a serious look at the direct selling industry as a career move. In the six years that Melissa has been a Norwex consultant, she has met so many people and has been thankful each day for Norwex.

Melissa has turned Norwex into a sustainable and successful business and has been able to work from home, while enjoying the flexibility for her three children. “I used to work in corporate America and didn’t know anything about direct selling. I was likely under the impression that it wasn’t a “real job”.  In reality, I used to work long days and didn’t have much say as a manager, everything was the company’s agenda. We had a lot of mandatory meetings and managers didn’t work together toward common goals. It was simply a job. It took Norwex coming along to help me to realize that I had developed skills. I had never considered having my own business, making my own hours, earning whatever I wanted to earn, all while making a difference in people’s lives. Honestly, this is the first career where I feel like I’m paid my value, and I’m working less hours, while making more. Plus my kids like it. If we want days off, I take them off. I’m home for the summer, I’m home whenever I want to be. My kids activities go on the calendar first, my work fits around them, which is as it should be. Life is too short.”

Melissa grew a team slowly her first year, and then decided after a year that this was right for her and went for it. She currently is a Vice President Sales Leader and creates a viable and sustainable income for her team growing and dynamic team throughout the United States. Last year her team generated 1.75 million in sales. Wow! That’s an amazing income for so many consultants around the country!

She enjoys traveling to many cities throughout the U.S with Norwex, doing a variety of trade shows and expos with her team. “Meeting new people and seeing their amazement when they first use Norwex is so exciting to me”, she says, “I can’t wait until every home has an Enviro Cloth. We’re not done until we do!” 

I hope you’ve enjoyed Melissa’s story! If you’ve been on the fence about joining Norwex, just give it a try! This might be the break that you’ve been waiting for! To reach Melissa directly, you can contact her through her Norwex website: http://www.melissatomas.norwex.biz . Has Melissa touched your life in some way? If so, share in the comments below. 🙂

~ Suzanne