What’s Your Bottom Line?

Sadly, I recently discovered that one of my friend’s adult kids have joined an MLM.  While it’s not Amway, the pitch is pretty much the same.  Buy the products, sell the products, and recruit like minded people to duplicate what you do.  It was eerily similar to Amway in that you are purchasing highly overpriced and likely overrated nutritional products.

I was not shown the compensation plan but more than likely, the rank and file distributors earn little and layers and layers of upline take the lion’s share of whatever bonus is generated by personal consumption and whatever customer sales that may occur.  Based on the prices I observed, I would guess that mainly sympathetic family and friends are the only ones making purchases to show support for the kids.

Now training and functions seemed to have been a part of the overall package although the distributors did not wear business attire to meetings.  But one common denominator was that the kids did not know what I meant when I queried them about profits and losses, as if I spoke in a foreign tongue.  I said surely a business owner tracks expenditures and income.  When it sounded like they didn’t understand what I was getting at, I asked what their bottom line looked like.

So I went on to explain that each week or month, they should be adding up all if their expenses and all of their income.  If the expenses exceed the income more often than not, then they are running a lose money business and need to determine how to adjust their actions to lower expenses and make more income,   It had not occurred to them that they should do this.  So like Amway and probably other MLMS, their financial guru uplines don’t teach business 101 to their down lines.

Uplines don’t teach their followers about the bottom line because the bottom line is bolded red ink.