Critical Mistakes?

 In professional sports, whether it be football, basketball or baseball, there are many close games. In close games, a critical mistake made will likely cost your team the game. A good example of this would be a football team trying score the winning touchdown, but they commit a game changing turnover. Or a baseball pitcher slips and throws a fastball up in the zone and it gets hammered for a home run. Or a basketball player shooting fouls shots but missing in the last minute of the game. A critical mistake nearly assures you of failure.

In my opinion one of the most critical mistakes that many IBOs make is to ignore the bottom line when analyzing their Amway businesses. I recall, in my experience, business building IBOs, sadly, taught by their uplines to ignore losses, or to view losses as investments into their businesses, or that money is really not important, because you keep building the business and the "money will be there", which is not true. Some uplines may teach that the business is really about making friends or being a nicer person. All of these things may be nice side benefits of reading personal development books or attending functions, etc., but when running a business, the most important goal should be to turn a profit. The sole purpose of a business should be to sell a product or service for a profit. Period.

For many IBOs, their businesses consist of listening to standing orders, attending functions and meetings, but not focused on selling products and earning a net profit. And for most IBOs, nobody can blame them as upline may give them bad advice and because the Amway business is person to person selling, it is so inefficient that many groups end up teaching IBOs to simply buy their own volume and get others to join the business. For groups who operate primarily in this manner, you are probably running an illegal pyramid business because new and existing IBOs can profit only by continuing to add more downline IBOs in the hope that they too, will buy their own volume and sponsor others.

When you look carefully at the business plan, whether it is 6-4-2, 9-4-2 or some other variation, the majority of these business building IBOs will have low volume and likely to earn only about $10 a month. But to earn that $10 a month, you are likely to have to spend $300 on products, and if you are on standing order, voicemail and functions, then you likely spend anywhere from $150 to $250 monthly (or more) to participate in the teaching system. Thus these IBO's bottom line is a net loss! It is only when you are able to sponsor many downline that your losses will get smaller and you will only profit when you have a sizable downline. That means your bottom line is a loss. And while Amway defenders will argue that Walmart doesn't even give you $10 a month, you can certainly get more products from Walmart for $300 than you can get from Amway for the same price. Walmart will match any advertised price on a product that they and a competitor may carry. Also, Walmart's advertising reaching millions of people, which is much more effective than person to person. While Amway runs some ads now days, they do not directly drive customers to IBOs. The vast majority of IBO business is still to themselves and their downline, and not to non IBO customers.

I challenge IBOs to look objectively at their bottom lines. It is likely a net loss. If it is, ask your upline how long this is expected to last. Set hard goals and if you are doing what is advised by upline and results do not improve, you may have to ask yourself what will change to make your business profitable? Basically, if you aren't adding active downlines and customers regularly, you aren't going anywhere and are likely to be running your business at a loss month after month after month. It won't take long before you realize that you have lost thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. Uplines often say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

As a former IBO with a 4000 PV business with eagle parameters, I was not making a net profit. I saw my bottom line and although doing and achieving what my upline advised, there was little to no money. I decided the effort, time and money invested wasn't worth it. Plus my upline started to interfere in my personal life. I saw my bottom line and wasn't satisfied, and I left Amway. I later discovered the lies my upline had fed me to keep me in the business and to keep me buying tools. It is why I started blogging. For now, my bottom line is to get the truth out about the tools scam run by upline. That is Joecool's bottom line.