Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Work Hard And Succeed in Amway?

One of the things that many Amway defenders will cite is that the people who don't succeed didn't work hard enough or didn't put in enough effort. While I agree that one must work hard to succeed in many endeavors, I will also state my informed opinion that working hard and success in Amway may not be related. I say this because I have seen so many testimonies of people who worked the Amway business hard and achieved little or no results. My former sponsor was a workhorse and now, about 20 years later, he has not gone beyond the level of Gold Direct. In fact, last I heard, his business has basically fallen into disrepair.

Part of the problem is that many uplines emphasize recruiting as their focus, even though there is no direct compensation for doing so. In fact, recruiting downline often comes with much expenses such as gas, babysitters, and the false belief that an IBO needs standing orders and seminars to learn this. Also, Amway has a spotty reputation in the US, thus making recruiting potential downline a very diffcult task. Most IBOs never sponsor a single downline.

An important part of any business is to find customers to buy your goods. Because IBOs already spend much of their time recruiting and not selling, they are already at a disadvantage over many other businesses. Add in the seemingly uncompetetive prices of Amway and Amway partner store products and you give IBOs yet another disadvantage over most other businesses. If there were better value in these goods and services, then IBOs who sell instead of recruit would be much more common. Also, the Amway compensation plan often rewards uplines rather than the IBOs who actually do the work of moving the volume.

I also believe that the Amway business is so outdated and inefficient. While you may have a website to sell your goods, you have restrictions that severely limit the ability of an IBO to drive traffic to their website. The person to person touch may sound nice and flowery, but it is the most inefficient way to make sales. It is why people pay millions to advertise during the Superbowl, because you may have a hundred million people watching the adervtisement and can drive up your name recognition and sales.

While working hard is definitely important to succeeding in any venture, I don't believe there is any bonafide correlation that working hard equates success in the Amway business for the reasons I have outlined in this post.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It might be good to first define what success is in amway. I saw the plan 30 years ago. Success seemed to be diamond in 2 to 5 years and walking away with residuel income. What i saw since is. 99 percent quit. Diamond takes nearly 10 years and only a few do it. Most dont requalify so fall back in pin level. Even those who maintain or increase pin level continue to work. Seems to me its a revolving door. More people join. More quit. Hence overall the net ibo numbers and overall business increases but very few succeed. Now of course some make money on the tools but thats a separate business open only to the exclusive club.

Anonymous said...

this is a great way to define this loser business!