Friday, April 27, 2018

A Real Business Owner?

Many folks involved with Amway call themselves "Independent Business Owners", or IBOs for short. The idea of "owning a business" sounds pretty cool, and is a selling point in recruiting new people. But in a business that touts itself and being so simply, why don't more people actually make a profit? Even some avid Amway supporters understand that most dedicated IBOs suffer a loss, primarily due to system expenses, but they dismiss the failure by saying these IBOs did not work hard enough, quit too soon, or did not take their business seriously enough.

A business exists to make a profit. Sadly, many uplines do not teach IBOs to be profitable. Instead, these uplines teach dedication to the business and to the teaching system rather than teaching IBOs to be profitable business owners. Ironically, the teaching system is disguised as a success system that is practically guaranteed to lead you to wealth. Ironically, the system in it's simplest form, simply transfers money from downline to upline. The uplines profit from the system, thus the uplines can make a nice profit whether anyone downline succeeds or not. Although uplines will say they want you to succeed, I don't think they give a rat's ass about downline success. It's more profitable for certain upline if people keep joining and quitting, as long as the standing orders get sold and there are butts in the seats at functions. If you stop and think about this for a moment, you can see that it makes perfect sense from a business standpoint.

So as a business owners, are you making business decisions with regards to expenditures? And are you assessing the worth of these expenditures? For example, if your monthly income from Amway is $25, is there enough value in attending a major function which might cost several hundreds of dollars (if out of town)? Say a major function costs $500 with airfare and hotel included. Is it worth 20 months worth of your business income to attend? If you say the function is worth the expense, then you should ask yourself what direct benefit your business received by your attendance. If your voicemail expenses exceed your monthly Amway income, how long do you stay committed to such an expenditure? Does your standing order expenses exceed your monthly Amway income? Are your expenses exceeding your income month after month? If so, as a business owner, you need to assess these expense and perhaps cut or reduce these expenses.

Are you consistenly driving more traffic to your website to generate sales? If you are not gaining more customers month after month, how do you expect to generate income? Do your uplines teach you how to drive traffic to your websites? These questions and examples are only meant to be though provoking for new and established IBOs. I have seen too many IBOs rack up tremendous debt by following the system without looking at their expenses with a critical eye.

Are you a business owner?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The curse of Amway lies in the LOS subsystems. WWDB, BWW, Network 21, and all the rest--they are the real poison.

Anonymous said...

What is LOS

Joecool said...

LOS = Line Of Sponsorship. So typically that would be Worldwide Dream Builders (WWDB) or Britt Worldwide (BWW) or Network 21 (N21) for example. They are for profit companies that sell tools to Amway IBOs and they make money even if all the IBOs lose their homes and their shirts.

Anonymous said...

Well that is ironic that that stands for line of sponsorship, normally sponsorship implies they are helping somebody. That clearly is not the case in this situation! It's more like the IBO is sponsoring that LOS!

Anonymous said...

The LOS subsystems have no real interest in whether an IBO makes money or not. They really don't care. All they want is for the IBO to buy cds, tapes, and books ("tools") continually, and attend all Amway conventions ("functions") regularly.

Anonymous said...

I've noticed that when Amway defenders show up here to say something, they inevitably bring up the "personal responsibility" meme. They keep asking Joe Cool why he doesn't "take personal responsibility" for not getting rich in the Amway racket.

This is a sure sign that the whole Amway mentality is rooted in a confidence game. Insisting that everyone take "personal responsibility" for failure means that there is no such thing as a victim. But that's insane -- there are real victims everywhere, who have been hurt through no fault of their own. And thousands of IBOs have been victimized by Amway and the rotten LOS subsystems that are parasitical on Amway.

If you lose money in a crap game, then sure -- that's your personal responsibility. But if you have been cheated out of money by an MLM pyramid scheme which you thought was a legitimate business opportunity, then you are a victim.

When one of these Amway assholes say "Take personal responsibility" all he's saying is "Don't blame me!"