Thursday, February 7, 2013

You Didn't Work Hard Enough?

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. Even those who took the time to learn everything upline taught and put in the hours did not succeed in Amway.

Psrt 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. Even IBOs who sponsor people will find out that many recruits will quit or do little to nothing.

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I also believe that the Amway business is so outdated and inefficient.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.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I cant see how you can make money in this business. The products are unsaleable. 4 percent only of sales to non ibo. So you need to find, recruit and convince people to buy for self consumption products they dont need. This will last till the garage fills up. In the unlikely event you get to diamond ( how many usa diamonds in the last 10 years) you can be sure one or more of your platinums will not requalify. Then you are back down to a lower pin. Thats why the majority of diamonds fall out of qualification. So i cant see how you make money. Now you can find a few who organised their groups in such a way that they maintained width to get to double diamond or even crown. But thats a hanfull. It just wont happen.By the way i am not anti amway. Its just its too difficult. Like golf , its just too difficult a game but to be like Tiger can happen. Rory mcillroy will probably be as good and there will be another in the next generation. But thats it, one in a generation. Like in amway you can say its possible to be as good as those few who maintain high pins. . Its certainly not likely.

Anonymous said...

Amway yesterday announced sales for 2012 of 11.3 billion $ up 4% versus 2011. All the 10 top markets including the usa showed growth.

Joecool said...

Strange how they won't specify what that growth was.