Amway Spring Leadership Function?

I read about this topic on another blog recently and was inspired to write about my experience with the Spring Leadership function. I attended a leadership function as an IBO and I remember it quite well even though I've been removed from Amway for some time now. The leadership function was where the upline diamond would have all of his new leaders (platinums and up) speak. Kinda makes me wonder how this function is going these days when it sure doesn't seem like a lot of new leaders are emerging, at least in my old group. Seems groups are struggling to maintain status quo. Maybe the same old speakers are seen over and over?

These new leaders would talk about their trials and how they stuck to the system and now they have arrived. Some of them spoke about how they were able to retire their wives who now stay at home to care for their children. A noble task indeed. I had thought this was the great part about the business. It might interest my readers to know that not a single one of those leadership speakers from my IBO days are at the platinum level and in fact, all but one or two of these nice folks are even in the business today. My former sponsor was a platinum and he is one of the few holdovers from the old days, but he is no longer at the platinum level. Last I heard, he was somewhere around 2500 PV, which means he is likely operating at a loss if he is still dedicated to "core". Imagine how much money you can lose by being in Amway for more than 20 years?

Spring leadership is the beginning of a run of functions that can really bankrupt IBOs. I'm from Hawaii and leadership was held in March, followed by family reunion (summer conference) in July and Free Enterprise Day (FED) in October. All of these functions are held during peak travel times, thus IBOs who need to fly to functions pay a premium price for air travel. Sadly, there was no visible significant growth in the groups after these functions. Looking back, the major functions were just quarterly paychecks for the upline diamonds. If you do the math, you can easily discern that these diamonds may have made millions for a weekend of speaking and showing off their "diamond lifestyles".
You pay $100 or more for a ticket and there are thousands or tens of thousands in attendance. Sure there are some costs, but these costs are kept to a minimum because many IBOs help provide free labor at these functions.

I hope this information can help a prospect or an IBO to understand how some of these things work and allow for informed decisions to be made about joining Amway or for deciding whether or not to attend that next function. IBOs need to honestly assess their risk versus reward in making these decisions.