Your Amway Upline?

Over the years, I have encountered many IBOs and they often have a common theme. They trust their upline and in some cases, consider them mentors. Now in a business venture, it might be good to have a mentor or someone to guide you, but in the Amway opportunity, most of the upline mentors make money off those who they mentor. That is a major conflict of interest but IBOs simply fail to see it. I would say the relationship is not mentor/student, but more like a paid consultant. While there's nothing wrong with a paid consultant, I still have issues with this because your sponsor, by Amway contract is supposed to train and motivate you free of charge. IBOs should be very careful about spending money on training and motivation without having product sales first because this could result in you losing

When an IBO sees the plan in a big meeting, the speaker will often be built up as a financial guru, and possibly as an expert on how to succeed in Amway. An IBO may hear something about how the trail was already blazed by upline and you just need to follow the trail. Don't re-invent the wheel, just copy what upline did. But as I have said many times before, duplication sounds easy and looks good on paper, but in real life, the vast majority of IBOs run into problems that they simply cannot overcome, such as the bad reputation that the Amway name has in the US.

What is troubling however, is that IBOs are taught to trust upline and do as they say (defacto requirement), but they are also taught that failure is their own shortcomings, even when they do exactly what upline told them. It is also troubling that many uplines will tell their faithful followers that they need to purchase more and more tools (voicemail, cds, seminar tickets). In some cases, an upline may advise their downline to sacrifice basic family needs to buy these tools. Some IBOs were advised to skip meals to buy a cd, or skip paying the mortgage to be able to attend the next big function. This kind of advice is dangerous and self serving to the upline and IBOs need to seriously consider their financial priorities if they hear this kind of dangerous advice.

I might also add that as a newer IBO or prospect, you may have heard that "everyone starts at zero", or that it's a level playing field. It is not. As a new IBO, you will likely be in the 100 PV bracket. Since Amway pays out about 31% in bonuses, your upline(s) will split up about 28% in bonuses off your efforts while you get a 3% bonus. That doesn't sound very level to me and the reality is that is will never be level with your upline leaders. They will always have an advantage over you, simply by the virtue of them signing up before you. Yes, it's possible to surpass your sponsor but that's because most people do nothing and quit. You won't surpass a tenured diamond or higher. Those leaders have too much influence over the business and the vast downlines. If you reach a point in the business where you're growing, then this will become clear to you.

So each IBO should look at things objectively and see if your upline is helping you or simply helping himself by giving you advice that ends up in profit for himself with little or nothing for you and make your decisions carefully.