Why do most people hate MLM?
If you are in between jobs, looking for a work at home opportunity or even looking for a career change, it won’t be long before you are presented with a Multi Level Marketing – also known as Network Marketing – opportunity.
It started for me when I left the rat race as a Chartered Accountant / Finance Director and became an interim manager and consultant. I wasn’t working every day and it just seemed a great idea at the time to fill in the gaps by building a team of people selling a Chinese herbal drink and diet cookies. OK… maybe not the smartest move in my career. I then realised my mistake and moved onto selling skin care and vitamins. My family and friends thought I had a screw loose and it took a few more mistakes before I found one that worked.
There’s always been a stigma surrounding MLM… our neighbour said when he heard about the Chinese herbal drink business “it’s not bloody Amtrak is it?” It wasn’t Amway so I could say no. Lucky escape.
Why is it that the very letters MLM strike fear into people? It’s because they’ve either experienced it firsthand or they’ve heard MLM / network marketing horror stories:
- Weird or suspect products (Himalayan wonder berry juice etc.)
- Expensive products (£1 a chunk for so-called ‘healthy chocolate’, £20 for washing up liquid etc.)
- Selling to your friends (having them round for dinner and after the first course having to whip out a whiteboard from behind the curtains)
- Filling up your friends’ (soon to become your ex-friends) garages with water filters or intruder alarms
- Pyramid selling, gifting schemes etc. (no product, just a money game…when the music stops the last people in lose their money)
- Outdated products (e.g. telecoms/broadband/utilities which in the UK was a great opportunity in the early days of deregulation but is getting ‘tired’ now.)
And for business people there’s another reason. Let’s say you are a printer and someone comes along and says “would you like a secondary income stream?” In these challenging economic times you might well say “yes”, however when you find out that the opportunity is based on selling cheap imitation perfume or a unique miracle drink from deep in the Amazonian rainforest, it probably won’t strike a chord with you. You’re finding it hard enough to make money as a printer and this would be a big distraction. No wonder business people have mainly steered clear of MLM.
I’ve been around the MLM industry for more than 10 years. The above reasons for the ‘cringe factor’ are bad enough, however from an insider perspective there is another reason why even I dislike most MLMs: there’s too much hype and too many lies. Many opportunities are run by ‘crooks’ selling a very expensive health product which, when independently analysed, does you no more good than grape juice (and you are encouraged to buy lots of it.)
It gets worse… without mentioning names there’s a good example going around at the moment whereby a big health and nutrition company – where just a few months ago the leaders were proclaiming the best product ever and best ever opportunity ever – has seen many leaders and most of their downline jump ship into another health and nutrition company. Why would they do that? Simple really: they were enticed to move their downlines into the new company with a whopping transfer fee of a million dollars or more. MLM is rarely to do with product and often to do with greed.
There’s another major flaw. Even if you find a health and nutrition MLM company and product you love you will make some of your money retailing the product however the big money will come from building a team of ‘opportunity seekers’, the vast majority of whom would not normally be allocating $100-$200 of their stretched monthly family budget on expensive pills, potions and lotions. However good the products are most of these people will quit after a couple of months of spending more than they are making. This huge attrition rate and the resulting bad feeling is largely what creates the bad feeling.
It’s not all bad news though. If you find the right company and products, MLM is a very powerful business model which has been endorsed by people like Donald Trump, Robert Kiyosaki and Richard Branson. I’ve recently added an MLM to my business portfolio which is attracting many of the world’s top personal and business development trainers and authors; it doesn’t have any negatives for business people because the products are all about helping them be more successful. And because people like billionaire Bill Bartmann and top speaker/author Brian Tracy are directly involved in an MLM for the first time it has instant credibility. So, if you are looking for another income stream get in touch with me or at least have a look at what Bill and Brian say on our eLearning page.
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Richard Wall set up Interim Career Solutions to help interim managers, consultants and anyone in between assignments set up additional income streams on the Internet. Richard’s Residual Magic eBook will help steer you through the get rich quick hype – free download available here or to the right of this page ===>
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