Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Amway - Trusting Your Upline?

One of the things that was emphasized in my days as an IBO was to trust your upline. They said they had my best interests at heart and that they would never intentionally lead me astray as they wanted my success. At the time I believed them but looking back, I see that it was a charade and the upline really wanted their own success at my expense. For many groups, I believe this is still true although some upline leaders may have backed off just a bit since the heyday of the AMOs, which was the mid to late 90's.

Upline's profits from tools are spoken about today, alhough I believe most IBOs do not know exactly how they can qualify, nor do they know how much they would receive when they qualify. Back when I was an IBO, uplines stood on stage and proclaimed that NOBODY made a profit from the sale of tools. None of these leaders were ever made to account for their lies and with some revisionist history, the whole episode was covered up.

Some groups also teach submission and faith in the upline. Some will say there is no need to reinvent the wheel, simply copy or duplicate your upline and you will be successful That makes me wonder why so many tools and functions are needed. Also, I find it odd that someone who has my best interest at heart and truly cared about my success, get compensated for every action he/she takes to "help" my business. Voicemail, standing orders, books and functions are all profit centers for some upline leaders and therefore, just about any meeting or material designed to help an IBO puts money in the pokcets of upline. Some upline even went so far as to say you should check upline before purchasing a new car, or even before having children.

Despite the reuqest for trust and faith in upline, I fid it odd that uplines never take responsibility for the outcome of an IBO's fortunes. Many IBOs work hard and earnestly do all the recommended steps of CORE, only to fail. These IBOs are told they did not work hard enough or did not follow the steps properly. Uplines, as far as I know, have never taken responsibility for their downlines. They only take credit for downline success, but not failures.

I find a huge conflict of interest for an upline to profit from any help that he provides to downline, and then to tell downlines that training materials are vital to their business. I also see a problem when these same uplines take no responsibility when an IBO does the work but does not profit. Ironically, it is often the cost of the training materials that prevents the IBO from making a net profit. Now not all uplines are like this, but I am hopeful that some of the red flags mentioned here can be an alert for IBOs and information seekers.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Only thing you can trust upline will do is that will screw you,

As long as you kiss up to them, they will provide their so called help, which is not free as they claim.

When you become inactive and don’t kiss up to them, and if you have a few legs/groups still active in the business, upline will try and get them to switch the active IBO’s line of sponsorship so that they become the upline’s personal legs or will do some restructuring so that you don’t get to make any differential income.

Or per Amway rule 5.3.4 (link- https://www.amway.com/en/support/business-support/business-rules) you would have to pay your upline platinum or up for servicing your downline IBOs. Per rule 5.3.5.2 the upline platinum can contact the corporation to get your differential income claiming that you are not in accordance with the rules and conducts.

Now how different is this supposedly residual income is different from the job income? I thought you did the work once and get paid for your efforts forever in Amway. I just found out you get paid in Amway if you say “yes boss” to your mighty upline and forever slave in it.

Anonymous said...

sounds scarier than a haunted house at halloween!