Over the years, I have encountered many Amway IBOs and they often have a common theme. They trust their upline to a fault 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. Just about any "help" you receive results in compensation for someone upline. Upline should actually be paid consultants with no accountability.
When an IBO sees the plan in a big meeting or function, 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 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. Uncompetitive prices for products do not help the cause either. If you don't believe that, go and do an honest price comparison.
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 due to their own shortcomings, even when they do exactly what upline told/advised 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. I saw some IBOs who were advised to skip meals to buy a cd, or skip paying the mortgage to be able to attend the next big function. One diamond even taught about the foreclosure procedures so people could skip a payment. That same diamond talked about how long you can hold off the electric company before being shut down. The results o this bad advice are devastating for some. I saw some fellow IBOs go bankrupt and/or lose their homes following this 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. In addition, you as an IBO are paying for this priviledge when you buy tools.
So each IBO should look at things objectively and see if your upline is actually helping you or simply helping himself by giving you advice that ends up in profit for himself with little or nothing for you.
4 comments:
Several months ago at this website, one Amway partisan showed up to argue with Joe Cool. I don't recall the exact subject of the debate, but this man said "I won't teach you for nothing!"
Now he was obviously someone with a down-line, and he was saying that his "mentorship" of his down-line wasn't going to be done gratis. He was insisting on his right to be paid for cds, tapes, books, and all the other damned "tools."
In other words, he wasn't satisfied with his cut of the retail profits. Why? Well, most likely because it would be minuscule compared with the cash he could get from all the various "tools."
And besides, he had surely been ripped off in the same way by HIS up-line, and he wasn't going to miss the opportunity for doing the same to HIS underlings.
Ask any Amway insider when you get him to loosen up a bit. He'll tell you that the real money in Amway is in recruitment, tools, functions, and all the little fees and collections that siphon off cash from IBOs. Everything else is just a lot of lying bullshit.
When you think about the tools, you'll understand that there is significant money in selling them. A CD might cost 50 cents or a dollar to make, but it sells for typically $7 or $8, or $3 if you first pay a monthly membership fee of about $50.
The tools have a higher profit margin than Amway products, and there are few people who share in the profits.
In 2009, a WWDB triple diamond filed for bankruptcy and when his bankruptcy documents were made public, he made half of him income from tools.
And food for thought. If you're paying for tools, are you making more and more money because of the tools or are the tools causing you to lose money?
Joe, when you get the chance, please blog about how it could be that someone like your old sponsor could still be in Amway for 22 years now, and possibly for the rest of his life. How can that be explained? What are the possible theories? How can he be ok with all this time and effort he's putting in, even though he has surely discovered there is no 'financial freedom in 2-5 years' as they pitched when he started?
I cannot explain it. I can only think hook like and sinker. See my new blog post.
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