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I'm not wild about the MLM type business BUT I joined one back in 1995 and thru this company found an incredible product(s) that I still take 24 yrs later. Had I not been introduced to this company I may have never found what I take and feel it's a lifechanging product in my life.
And if one can make some extra $$$ selling a great product, why NOT? And yes getting in the the right time is critical.
a lot of my wife's friends are or have been involved with one or more of these things. im not an expert on most but i know a little about protein powder. so i have seen several of these health things that include some meal replacement powder. so i took a peak at the ingredients. most of them use cheap ingredients and charge high end ingredient prices. so to me, they are a scam. if you need to annoy the crap out of your friends to make some money then its probably not a great business.
I know three ladies and one gentlemen who actually do earn a decent income from four different MLM companies. They work full time at it. One does parties, one does daily videos on FB, one does financial consulting in homes and the other one does training classes.
The reason 99% of people fail is because they do not have the mindset of a business owner or sales person that has to constantly generate new customers. They think it will be easy, but it's not. Or they think they will make money off their friends and family, which is the worst. A successful MLM person knows how to build their business outside of just people they know.
It's really no different than being a sales rep for any other industry, if you don't work constantly to close deals, you won't make any money.
Well, again if a company has a possible great Product to offer and one gets in on the ground, it could work -- I'm feeling good about the product my daughter it looking into and I'd get enthused too..but at my time in life, I'll buy the product but not work to build a business.
I thought of a product some yrs ago, went thru part of the patent process and visited plants to see if the product was produced and it was NOT, but I lost my "wind" and dropped my idea and some yrs later I found it in the marketplace...and bought one of the products. If I had a partner to work with me maybe I would have gone on. It's expensive to do patents etc etc.
I'm skeptical although I agree that you have a better chance if you get in on the ground floor. A few observations:
thepinktruth.com is a pretty interesting indictment of Mary Kay.
I loved Silpada jewelry but their prices went way up when Avon bought them. Silpada was later sold back to its founders, then to some other group, and now they market directly to consumers- so they leveraged all the work their dealers did to raise brand awareness to take the business away from their dealers. Rotten.
A friend is hawking something called Juice Plus- she posts a lot about how she and her husband will clean the house from top to bottom and then play 18 holes of golf with energy left over thanks to healthy eating and Juice Plus... she tried to recruit me for her "team". I replied that I was well and truly retired. She said the residual income was great. I told her I didn't need it. It's really annoying how MLMs now push their dealers into posting about the brand on FB and other social media.
And, if you really want to get an idea of how well products are selling, go on e-Bay and look at all the heavily discounted Silpada jewelry and samples of discontinued Mary Kay products. There's our competition.
When it comes to MLM/Network Marketing you are going to get are a bunch of folks complaining about scams and pyramid schemes. As an entrepreneur and self employed, I'm open minded enough to see MLM for what they are. Nothing less, nothing more. It is capitalism.
Most people aren't cut out for it. Those who are, make money. Regardless where and when they started at. They will find a way to make money. It's true that the founder and co-founders of a company benefit the most but I have seen it time and time again people where people just started recently and have gain much success.
With that said, it's not for everyone. 90% of the people who go into MLM have no business going into it. They lack the necessary skills and discipline to be self employ and self accountable for their own actions. Being self employ is no cake walk. MLM is self employment in many ways.
The biggest issue I see in MLM is the profit margin. As a sales professional, I will not waste my time selling something if I can not make money on my own. I do not want to depend on others just to make ends meet. So for me to sell anything, the profit margin must be more than $300 or more profit per sale to be worth my time. If I chose to sell anything below $300 profit. The minimum I can settle for is nothing less than $100 profit per sale but it must be something that can create residual income and a customer must keep buying from me month after month. Year after year.
So with that requirement, it pretty much wipe out most MLM for me because selling soaps, vitamins, health drinks, weight loss, water filter, etc will not generate an average profit of $300 or more per sale.
thepinktruth.com is a pretty interesting indictment of Mary Kay.
My stepmother was in Mary Kay for seven years. She was a "director," which meant a MK leased Grand Am. But the problem with MK, like anyother MLM company, is that to support the many layers above her, she was constantly recruiting people to be on her "team." And as hard as she tried, she couldn't find people who actually SOLD the product. A lot of theproblem is that MK stuff is so expensive, and information is so freely available, it's a hard product to sell.
But after all of the time, money and energy (she went to Dallas during their yearly gathering to be on stage with Mary Kay as part of her"court") she'd put into it, she was desperate to keep her "business" alive, so, to keep her directorship, she bought MK products using a credit card my father didn't know about, to make her sales goals. When the house of cards fell apart, she had to confess to my father that they owned $80K in CC debt he didn't know about. My father said it almost bankrupted them. Needless to say, that was the end of herMary Kay career. She spent the next three years selling off all of that excess inventory at cut rates, placing ads in locals shoppers newspapers. She eventually got rid of most of it but they were still significantly in the red. Mary Kay was an absolute financial disaster for them
[font=Arial]My stepmother was in Mary Kay for seven years. <snip>......she was desperate to keep her "business" alive, so, to keep her directorship, she bought MK products using a credit card my father didn't know about, to make her sales goals. When the house of cards fell apart, she had to confess to my father that they owned $80K in CC debt he didn't know about.
There are quite a few stories on thepinktruth.com about saleswomen spending their own money on merchandise to meet their sales goals.
There must be a lot cheaper and easier way to alienate your family and friends than the modern pyramid schemes that we see flooding social media today.
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