One of the things I heard as an Amway IBO, and I believe is still said in some Amway meetings is that conventional businesses do not profit for up to five years. That's bogus. Conventional businesses make a profit as soon as they sell their first product. They may not have a net profit right away because of the initial investment into equipment and rental property, but they do profit by selling goods. The same principle would apply to an Amway business except that Amway IBOs have difficulty selling products. If you opened an Amway catalog and compared their prices to local retailers, you would know what I'm talking about.
Despite the small startup costs and the little to no overhead costs, most IBOs never turn a profit. I will acknowledge that many IBOs probably never do a single thing once they sign up. I believe there is an underlying story behind this as well, but I will move on. Out of the more serious IBOs, even in this group, most of them will never make a net profit if they are using tools. Factoring the cost of the website, the voicemail, standing orders, books and functions and cds, IBOs simply get drained of their money a couple hundred of bucks a month at a time. Amway uplines meanwhile, are earning nice profits on product purchases and someone upline are also earning profits on the tools. The tools carry a higher profit margin so it would make sense that some uplines earn more from tools than from Amway.Toss in other challenges such as high prices for many products (higher than local retailers) and a crappy reputation from IBO behavior such as tricking people into meetings and you have an opportunity with nearly insurmountable handicaps. Yes, a rare few and usually charismatic people can overcome these odds, but only one or two out of tens of thousands are able to do so. And even those who reach the pinnacle of diamond, may not be able to maintain qualification. It's very common for someone to reach the level of emerald or diamond only to backslide and not qualify the following year. So much for residual income and walking the beaches of the world.
So I don't know all of the detailed statistics about how long it takes for a conventional business to turn a net profit. It may take up to five years. But based on my experiences and some number crunching, I'd have to say that the vast majority of Amway Business Owners NEVER TURN A PROFIT - EVER, and most of them ending up with net losses when business expenses are factored in. And toss in the fact that Amway allegedly has little or no overhead costs and I can only conclude that the Amway opportunity sucks.
The financial disaster that almost all Amway IBOs eventually face is due to a glaring internal conflict that lies at the heart of the AMO subsystems. These organizations (WWG, BWW, Network 21, URA, LTD, and all the others) have one way of making a profit, while the ordinary IBO in them has a different one.
ReplyDeleteThe AMO subsystems make a profit by TEACHING and ENCOURAGING. They do this by the various tools they sell, and the functions they run. They make money when IBOs remain in Amway, paying up-line all the required fees and expenses every month. They know very well that the IBO has little chance of making a lot of money by selling Amway products, and that what products he does buy will be solely to make his required PV.
The IBO has a totally different motivation. He wants to make money by selling Amway products at retail, for a markup, and he wants to sell a lot so that his refund check will be big. Little does he know that almost nobody makes money this way in the Amway racket, but he will find out very soon after his friends and relatives stop buying pity purchases from him.
Amway products simply DO NOT MOVE. They are a dead weight on the market, and are consistently rejected by the general public in favor of cheaper, better, and more reliable brands.
This is why the AMO subsystems don't even bother to teach an IBO anything about salesmanship. Instead they urge him to recruit more people into Amway, so that he too will have a down-line, and maybe eventually make money just like his up-line does. In fact, the only thing that the subsystems do is work ferociously to generate enthusiasm for the Amway idea or the Amway dream, but without any real interest in the actual sale of products to the general public.
All MLMs are fake businesses. They make products purely as a disguise for the fact that the real aim of the company is to make money off those ignorant people whom they can convince to become IBOs. Amway is one big fake company.