Interim Career Solutions

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- Outdated products (e.g. telecoms/broadband/utilities which in the UK was a great opportunity in the early days of deregulation but is getting ‘tired’ now.)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.

Fake it till you make it?

In the New Economy more and more of us are looking to change career or at least supplement our income. Maybe you are an ex professional like me who have lots of talent and experience but you are ‘over the hill’ to get a job, or maybe at the other end of the scale you’ve just left school with good A grades or university with a good degree and you can’t get a job. A gap year is a great idea but what happens after that?

There is an alternative to getting a ‘JOB’ (Just Over Broke or Jump Out of Bed?)

The Internet is where all the excitement seems to be: the thought of setting up a website and then sitting back and watching the money roll in is very appealing. Or maybe multi level marketing (MLM) is the answer? MLM doesn’t have to be just about selling pills, potions and lotions to your friends… you can also sell them intruder alarms, water filters and healthy chocolate

I’ve been around the MLM industry for a number of years… it can and does work. Spectacularly well in some cases. However, for most of us there is still a ‘Cringe Factor’: trying to make money from your friends with overpriced and/or embarrassing products. Even worse… how do you get over the problem of trying to sell someone on a ‘great millionaire opportunity’ when you have been involved for a few months and they ask the dreaded question “how much are you earning?” Well, I picked up some advice in my early days of MLM – this video might give you a few ideas.

Cringe Factor? I’ll let you be the judge:

Are you an interim manager or just a part time manager?

A few years ago I was a full time Finance Director. When I left and was in between jobs I did some management consultancy work here and there and called myself an Interim Manager.

Actually I wasn’t really an interim manager, I was a part-time Finance Director. There’s a big difference: an interim management position is full time, usually filling in for the person who is no longer doing the job, either through illness, leaving, maternity, company turnaround etc. Or maybe the interim position is for a permanent job that hasn’t yet been filled. Interim management is a career in its own right. Being out of work, in between jobs or working for a company for 2 days a week because that’s all they can afford is not being an interim manager.

It sounded good to call myself an interim manager. In one interim period of my career (or ‘mid life crisis’ a lot of friends and family called it) I left the rat race completely and went into Multi Level Marketing (MLM). When people asked me what I did for a living I had a choice of answers:

1) “I’m in Pyramid Selling” or
2) “I’m an Interim Manager.”

It was a tough choice.

Whether you are an interim manager, management consultant, part time manager, MLMer or even pyramid salesperson I can help you market yourself and set up multiple income streams on the Internet. Let me know how I can help you.

What is Pyramid Selling?

If you are in between jobs, or maybe an interim manager or consultant looking for your next assignment why not set up an alternative income stream? There’s never been a better time than now to set up a ‘home-based business’. There’s a lot of opportunity out there, however many of them will get a lot of people saying to you “Oh – that’s a pyramid – don’t do that!”

So, what is pyramid selling?

Most countries have rigorous legislation which outlaws pyramid selling (although pyramid selling itself is not legally defined). The usual horror stories are:

- There is no product – like a chain letter where people pay to join a scheme and you are paid a commission for those new ‘recruits’. A few years ago ‘gifting’ programs were very popular – if they ever became big they were closed down and the last people in lost their money. A bit like ‘pass the parcel’ when the music stops.

- There is a product, but it’s overpriced to enable the company to pay out the large commissions.

- New recruits are encouraged to buy a garage-full of products to get started. Water filters and burglar alarms here in the UK in the early/mid 90′s spring to mind.

- Distributors are paid on recruits rather than on sales of products and services.

- There’s a large up-front purchase commitment.

A Ponzi Scheme is the foundation for most of the regulatory pressure on the MLM industry over the past few years. In a nutshell, this is a money-making scheme which entices you to buy something, duplicating yourself by recruiting other people to do the same and those people recruiting people and so on. Hence the pyramid structure – just like a chain letter. Here in the UK, the courts talk about ‘bound to fail’ schemes (Titan was one of the best known ones – I knew a few people who were involved – and it ended in tears.) The main reason why they are bound to fail is somewhere down the line you will run out of people – and because there is no product the last people in the pyramid lose out. Also your success is down to chance… your commissions depend largely on people you haven’t introduced and over whom you have no influence.

The Golden Rules for MLM

Rule Number 1: Ask yourself, with your hand on your heart, “Are the products/services good enough to stand up without the business opportunity?” If yes and there are no ‘garage qualify’ purchase quotas or monthly targets, you should be fine. If not, you are going to find your circle of friends getting smaller. Brian Tracy sums up effective selling very well: “If you don’t believe in your product, if you don’t love your product, if you wouldn’t use it yourself, if you wouldn’t sell it to your best friend or your mother you are probably selling the wrong product.” Don’t worry, Brian doesn’t mean over the top bore-your-friends-to-death evangelicism, just genuine ‘constrained enthusiasm’ about your products/services.

Rule Number 2: Do you feel you are doing your friends a favour by asking them to look at your business opportunity, or do you feel a bit embarrassed asking them? If it’s the latter, you must either quit the business or raise your confidence. In some MLM businesses raising your confidence high enough is impossible. The early days of networking were often mysterious: “come round for dinner” was often the invitation. Unsuspecting punters would go round for dinner to their friends. After the first course, a whiteboard would be wheeled out from behind the curtains and the presentation would begin. There’s a stigma about this approach… for example a friend in our village said a few years ago, soon after my MLM debut, “It’s not bloody AMTRAK is it?” Well he was close. And no it wasn’t Amway.

Rule Number 3: Read Chapter 5 of my Residual Magic eBook. Without this you have no chance