Saturday, July 8, 2017

The Real Amway Business?

Many people, often young and motivated, see the Amway plan and get "fired up" and join the business. Most fizzle out before making any real effort or maybe they try but quickly become discouraged by the dismal but predictable results. And that's expected because in Amway, you are selling generic quality products at premium prices with a company that has a spotty reputation. Often times when you mention the word "Amway", people look is if to say "who farted"? If you don't believe me, why do so many Amway distributors use the "curiosity" approach to avoid saying the name "Amway"? There's a reason for that.

When I first saw the plan, I thought perhaps I could find some niche market where I would capitalize and sell products and make some tidy profits. But my sponsor told me that we were to basically use the products ourself and find like minded people to sponsor who will do the same. It sounded like reasonable advice and since people by human nature, do not like selling stuff, it made perfect sense to use this approach when prospecting recruits. After all, how hard can it be to use your own products and get others to do the same?

Well, the problem was that 100 points in Amway costs between $250 and $300. As a single person, I never spent that much on household and other types of products. So I found myself purchasing vitamins and other kinds of products that I never used before because I wanted to be "teachable" and to make sure I was a good example to my downline. After all, if I didn't do my 100 to 150 points, why would my downline right? So summing it up, the Amway business was about buying and using Amway products for myself and finding others to follow me. Easy enough right? What I never realized when I was in the Amway business was that Amway was just the "front" for thr real business. Sort of like how an Italian restaurant was the front for the mafia, who met in the backroom of thr restaurant.

What is the "real business"? The real business of the Amway leaders is to sell motivation and training to downline. They sell voicemail services, books, CDs, seminars, and other functions that are designed to "help you success in Amway", but in reality, are the real "jackpots" for the Amway diamonds. Voicemail is a monthly charge, along with a book of the month program, a cd subscription called "standing order", and meetings and seminars that have entrance fees. Every 3 months, there's a "major" function that will cost over $125 to attend. Selling these materials is the "real" business in Amway. This is where the diamonds and higher pins make their "real" money. Think about this carefully, there training and functions have a higher margin of profit than Amway products and with the Amway products, the entire distributor population gets to share in the Amway bonuses if they qualify. With the training amd motivation, only the platinums or "direct" distributors and above get any cut of the profits.

Let's look at a function I attended as an IBO. I attended a major function in California at a convention center. It was a two day function at a cost of $125. The function had about 20,000 people in attendance. That means the convention grossed about 2.5 million dollars. The cost for paid staff and convention center staff and security may have cost about $500,000, leaving literally millions for the handful of diamonds to split up. Say there were 10 speakers that weekend, that's a cool $200K per speaker. And that doesn't include the thousands of people buying all the other materials I mentioned such as a monthly voicemail and cd subscription. That doesn't include income from the monthly book subscription or the other on they but smaller functions. That's the "real" business of Amway diamonds. They make bank selling your training on how to succeed in Amway, even though Amway's own stats show that less than 1% of IBOs make any significant money.

So if you are planning to join Amway, at least know that you are nearly assured of failure, unless you get to the point where you get to profit from the function tickets and other false "success" materials sold by the diamonds.

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