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person driving the automobile did a terrible job of driving the automobile? I’d suggest it is the drivers who are at fault, not the industry.
This is true with the network marketing industry as well. It is the drivers, as company owners, or individual distributors, who are not doing a good job of building their business. This is not because the industry is bad, but because the company or individual distributor makes bad choices in applying business principles. Anyone who has built a business in any industry knows that bad decisions and application of business principles are epidemic in every industry.
What made network marketing so vulnerable to ridicule? I’d suggest that when network marketing started back in the 1940s, they immediately challenged a lot of sacred cows which still cause a lot of folks to make fun of the industry. It has been so bad that many people wanted to keep changing the name of our industry. It started out as multi-level marketing, and to try to get away from the stigma that was created, switched to other names, but finally ended up by most in the industry as network marketing, which reflects most effectively what we do.
The biggest sacred cow was disrupting the career path concept that was most accepted from the 1940s on: get a trade or college education, get a career, get a job with a big company with a pension, work 40 or more hours/week with that company until you retire at 65, and live happily ever after. Or not.
You could start your own business and work 60-100 hours/week and get paid whatever is left after paying your bills, or statistically you would more likely just go broke. There is nothing wrong with either of these paths, and many do succeed brilliantly with them, but what if it doesn’t appeal to you? Or what if you aren’t the type who would like to take that kind of risk?
The problem is that most folks who followed either of these paths ended up at 65 years wondering what hit them. Their health wasn’t that good,
and since their job was their life, they tended to lose their purpose at retirement. Financially they did not have enough cash flow to sustain their existing lifestyle, so they were not ready for retirement which necessitated cutting back their lifestyle and, in many cases, ... continue to work.
Another problem is that, due to the nature of the network marketing industry, it was and is easy to persuade people to do things they never should be doing. They were sold a “bill of goods,” promised things that couldn’t be delivered, had no skills to analyze these promises, and were told to build a business in ways that would never create or sustain the promised results. The result ... disillusioned people.
If you would like to be successful at creating long-term, sustainable leveraged income, you need to approach it like you want to succeed. Ask yourself a lot of questions. Do the products fulfill a person’s needs or wants, or do they solve a problem in the marketplace? Will people purchase them every month? Will they want to buy them as customers and not necessarily because they think they will get rich? Does the company have a clearly defined mission or purpose other than to just get rich? Do they have the financial capital to deal with the challenges of the network marketing industry and rapid growth? Is their compensation plan cutting edge and can you understand it? Does it reward you for doing the right things to succeed? Do they have a track record? Or are you willing to shoulder the added risk of a new start up? Do they have good training systems, good marketing tools?
Other questions to ask yourself: what do you want from building a network distribution system? Are you willing to treat it as a business in the sense that you build a customer base and expand your network by constantly sharing your vision, products, and the system?
When we started Sunrider®, it was a new company. It was risky, but it paid off. We felt the risk was worth it because of the power of
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The Secret of 1982