Welcome back. I wanted to talk about my experiences back when I was in Amway. In 1989, that’s when I first got started in it actually, and I was in it for over 10 year. And I was thinking about it this morning. I don’t know why. But, you know, I was thinking about a couple people back in the day that I worked with while I was in Amway. When I got involved in in network marketing, with Amway, I didn’t have a negative viewpoint on it. I didn’t know anything about the company when I was presented with the opportunity. I didn’t know anything about network marketing, but I thought what a great business concept this is and you know, we started learning more and building our business.
QUIXTAR
What happened over the course of time, was that the company got handed to the second generation and some good things happened when they made this next step to what they called Quixtar which was same company but under a different name. And they started moving towards online shopping concepts and more of a digital age. I remember having a little miniature CD that had a little video embedded into it was called the digital business card. I still have some laying around. And I thought what an amazing concept. This was back in the beginning when the internet was really brand new. I mean, we still had dial up Internet access, if you could believe that. And most people probably don’t even know what dial up Internet access is. It’s still a classic sound that is used if you ever saw the movie, you’ve got mail. with actors, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. They would email each other and have the dial up sound of the modem. And it was really unreliable and slow. And so, I kind of looked at it where we were ahead of our time, because many people didn’t trust online shopping. And they were afraid to put their credit card number in because somebody might, you know, get ahold of it and their personal information and people were very unsure about it. And I think back, you know, to those times, I thought, while we were on the cutting edge. I’d already been in Amway about five years by the time that started happening. And then they kind of messed up, you know, the second generation of the family that owns the Amway Corporation took over and things got kind of messed up.
MORE CHANGES
At the same timeframe, we had changes going on in our own lives, you know, and so, what I found was is that the network marketing business was fantastic, that business concept is still great. And that’s why billions of dollars are done in network marketing today. I mean, more than the NFL, the movie industry and many others combined. Network Marketing produces billions and billions of dollars. Look it up. It’s pretty impressive. There’s nothing wrong with the business concept, multilevel marketing, network marketing, it’s the same thing. But what usually screws it up are the people. You know, you look at it. I mean, we had a pretty good organization, we reached a higher level than the Amway business. And, you know, we didn’t reach financial freedom at that point in time. We weren’t diamond level or anything like that. But that was our goal. And we’re working towards it. What we found interesting over time was is that the business that was our own, it was supposed to be our own. We didn’t get to make any of the decisions in it. You know, we had an upline that was controlling what we were doing, what we could do, what we can’t do. And I’ll give you a key example of it. I was thinking about it this morning, and I think about my time in the Amway business so often and it’s mostly positive, but there are some negatives.
COLD CONTACTING? REALLY?
You know, there was a lot of things about the business concept that were fantastic, majority of them, frankly. But a lot of the people had methods that I just wasn’t comfortable with. And I found most people weren’t. I’ll give you one good example cold contacting after you’ve, shared the Amway business with your friends and family, one of two things usually happens and sometimes some of both, your friends and family either start to ignore you and avoid you, or some of them get involved with you. And you find out that they have a negative idea of Amway, and in some cases, even some family members or friends start to think that maybe you’re better than them because you’re trying to improve yourself or your situation. And I always cracked up about that. None of those people ever came to save the day for me and my family when we were having financial difficulties. But all of them had an opinion about what I shouldn’t be doing to make more money and be more successful. And yet, you know, I didn’t listen to any of them because none of them were actually paying my bills or even offered to help financially. So, if you’re in that situation, you know, look at it and think about that for a second, why listen to people that are not supporting you, financially, or helping you financially? Why should you be discouraged about doing something that improves your family’s financial future? One of the things that came out of that process is you had to learn how to cold contact, because after your friends and families, seeing the business or did refuse to see the business, whatever the case may be, you have to talk to people that you don’t know. And this is the thing here, they teach you methods that are very difficult for the average person to use. You have to be able to talk to people that you don’t know and approach people, cold and so forth. And I got very good at doing that. But they always had a thing called duplication. Everything you had to do had to be duplicatable. I used to think about it and I thought what about cold contacting is duplicatable? Frankly, nobody duplicates it. Very few do, only the leaders do. And there’s few of those, why does it have to be so difficult? And Isn’t there another way to do it?
ARE YOU PLUGGED IN?
And, you know, you really had no wiggle room to innovate or to do your own thing you had to follow the system. If you weren’t “plugged in”, then you kind of get shunned by the upline, and then they would go around you and, you know, talk to people in your group negatively about you and say that you weren’t plugged in, and it’s just a bunch of crap. And it’s amazing people start getting into a position of what they call leadership. But really, they’re not leaders. They’re just people that want to control everything, and getting your own business is about you controlling what you do and controlling your future and deciding to work when you want to and work the way you want to. Now there’s some exceptions to that. I believe in my opinion, and in my business, you need to be ethical, honest, and you have to be able to build with the right intentions. So, there are some limits there. But the as far as flexibility and innovation, I mean, that’s what people want when they start their own business. Yes, they want a pattern for success that they can follow. They can follow their leadership; they can follow their leaders into success and do the same thing that they did to get them successful. I mean, it always made sense to me. If you wanted to be a millionaire, you need to find someone who’s willing to teach you and do what they did. And you always had that opportunity. What I found over the years was that I got very discouraged with the network marketing business and Amway not with the concept but with the people. After a while you started feeling guilty, you know, as you’re in the business for 10 plus years, things change, you know, you have children, your life changes, but if you weren’t able to be as committed as other people, you may not be able to do everything you did before. I always love this; right? My main upline was in Utah, and they’d hold their functions in their own backyard, basically in in their city in Salt Lake City, Utah. And make everybody feel like crap and guilty that couldn’t spend money or time to travel to Salt Lake City to be at their major function. It was very convenient for them, but they’d make it inconvenient for everybody else and then treat you like dirt if you couldn’t be there because you didn’t have time off from work, or you couldn’t afford the travel or you had childcare issues, and they weren’t very understanding. And I thought this is not about people caring about people. This is about people that care about people that do what you say. And I don’t like that. That’s not what individual business ownership is about. So, I kind of got burned out for a long time on the idea of dealing with this because I saw several other opportunities over the years and they all have the same kind of what I call old school thinking. Do what your upline tells you or else. And if you don’t, you’re not plugged in. If you’re not plugged in, we’re not going to support or promote your opportunity meetings or your business or work in your downline or whatnot. And I thought that’s a bunch of Crap.
WHY NOT TWO LEGS, NOT SIX?
The other difficulty is, is that we had to build six legs to be a diamond level and who had time outside of working a job to build six legs? Especially here I live in California. So, you know you need a substantial income to retire from your job if you live back in the Midwest, that’s at this time or back east, and you weren’t already a successful professional with a lifestyle that revolved around that income that you were earning. And you made $40,000 a year, it wasn’t that difficult to make $40k a year in Amway and retire as a diamond without a big organization, and then try to help other people retire. Unfortunately, it takes a whole heck of a lot more people to retire at a six-figure income for a working professional in Southern California at the time, and it’s no different today, frankly, in many other states as well. So, there was a lot of unrelatability between a lot of these old school network marketers.
STILL OLD SCHOOL-YIKES!
So, over the time, I started looking for new opportunities. And I thought, you know, the best kind of opportunity is one where it’s not a set of corporate people that own the business and run the business at a corporate level. It’s about a company that’s been started, owned and operated by network marketers that understand what the challenges are, and have built a company and organizational structure and training system around the needs of the network marketer, the distributor or the affiliate, the representative that whatever your term is. And finally, after several years of looking, I thought I found that and there was a very successful network marketing person from the old Amway days who was in my upline and that was involved in that business. And the products were fantastic and they still are, I use several of them every day. However, the building style of the business is still old school, they’re still doing it the old school way. And because they have a replicated website, they think that that’s modern and the fact that’s like, you know, 10 years old technology, and they have a canned app. And you know, nobody knows how to use attraction marketing, social media. They don’t have any of the things that we have in our business that actually work, especially when people are doing things on their cell phone more and more, and tablets, laptops and their computers. And during this time when you’re under a stay at home, or how do you expand your business when you’re old school and you got to go have home meetings, one on ones, open opportunity meetings? How do you even get people to go to those things when they are allowed?
NEW SCHOOL-FINALLY!
We build our business without any of those things. We have a network marketing business that’s successful with a system that is a “done for you” marketing system provided by the company for free. It doesn’t cost money to enroll in the business. It doesn’t cost money for the training system, because you want everybody to be successful. You provide that equally to everybody, not just the ones who could afford $24.95 a month. And then that’s just to buy the privilege for you to be able to buy the tools and things. And the reason why, is that there’s a lot of money in the training and tool system in network marketing. And in the business that I checked out for a short period of time, the person who’s running that training system, he’s got everybody locked into it. And basically, it’s the same old school thinking, if you’re not plugged into that training system, then you basically you can’t build your business successfully. And in fact, if you’re not part of that system, you can’t rank advance. What it was a scheme that is, I mean, that’s crazy, right? And then they don’t even give you the tools to be successful. And so, we work in a business that doesn’t have any of those restrictions. If you were in Amway before, or any network marketing company that this sounds familiar. You need to look around because what we’re doing; and there are other companies doing it too, that are started by network marketers having fast growth, great products, free training systems that are current up to date, and constantly being improved and evolved with the changing marketplace, the changing needed the distributors. And it’s unbelievable. That business that I was in for a very short period of time, they haven’t had a new product in a year. And they haven’t updated their methodology for building it since they started. They’re still doing what they did five years ago. And look at the comparison in growth. They haven’t grown. They probably have 20,000 distributors worldwide. And the company that I’m working with now we have over 800,000 in the same period of time. So, the numbers tell the story. It’s not about one master distributor making a lot of money. It’s about everybody being able to make a significant income and you just have to look at the compensation plans to get the opportunities.
THE RIGHT OPPORTUNITY IS HERE
So, if you have been in Amway or other businesses before and you loved certain aspects of it. Don’t give up on that concept that concept works but you do have to work a little harder to find companies that are doing it right. That are using methods that allow people that are already searching for opportunity to find you. That’s what I do and that’s what I teach my team. We work with attraction marketing, you know, I don’t cold contact. People that are already looking are able to find me and the opportunity and that’s the key and nobody has to cold contact. What’s more duplicatable than that? Because cold contacting is not duplicatable when people don’t actually do it and don’t feel comfortable doing it or they don’t ever get really good at doing it. How can you duplicate that? If one out of 10 and it’s probably not even that high, actually would do cold contacting successfully and comfortably and also key here, confidently. How duplicatable is that? Who wants to enroll 10 people that maybe only one out of 10, or one out of 20 even will be successful at duplicating that? And the process of “let’s just have them, enroll a few friends and family” and then hopefully, you know, they keep doing that until you find a leader is so much harder and takes so much work. And it doesn’t stay together. If you have to teach people how to do something that they don’t like doing, and that they won’t do; the business is not sustainable. And I was part of a group that had well over 800,000 people in the group, not my group, but I was part of that team. And that whole team is completely gone! That 800,000 plus people and the team of that person in Amway doesn’t exist anymore. And it wasn’t sustainable. And there was a lot of reasons for that. But we got out of that business and for over a decade I still was looking and thinking and wondering god you know, there’s got to be a network marketing business that’s awesome. That is run right and is done right. That’s what we’re doing today. And that’s what we’re teaching people how to be successful using new methods online. It works beautiful during the stay at home order, because people are still reaching out last month 24 or 25 people I sponsored personally, in the business and I did not chase a single one of them, they all found me and wanted to get involved. So, it’s a completely different thing.
RESEARCH AND EVALUATE
So, if you want to understand more about it, I’m happy to share with you if you don’t want to get involved in what we’re doing. I totally get it but I’m not pushing for anybody. Obviously, I’ve got so many things to do. Right now, I don’t know how many people I could work with at the moment. It’s really been crazy because a lot of people are looking and they want to do something from home in a home-based business. But I’m happy to answer questions and if you do have time and you want to look at the opportunity and ask some questions after you check out a couple of key videos HERE. I’m happy to talk to you about it. I just want to share those experiences if you are an old network marketer, and I don’t mean old age, but you’ve done the old school way, and you love certain aspects of the business, like Amway and others out there. I don’t need to name them because I wasn’t part of them. But you know, the ones we’re talking about. Things are different. And you just have to find the right opportunity for you. If you love what you’re doing in companies like Amway, then stay with that group. You don’t want to be jumping around, but if you’re looking, you’ve been uncomfortable, you felt guilty. If you feel bad about yourself, then, you know, make some changes, at least do some research, you need to make sure you’re always educating and keeping going. Like I said, if some of the key people in Amway are no longer in it, and they were at very, very high levels, making millions of dollars a year and they’re no longer in that business. And we were part of that team of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people. You got to ask yourself, are there good reasons for that? And yes, there are. Things are changing, and they have changed. Some people haven’t realized that yet. But if you’re looking for something new, it’s out there, and you can find it. And we’ll help you to do that in any way we can.
We really appreciate you. Appreciate you guys reading these articles. And if you like what we’re putting out, remember to like and subscribe because it means a lot to us. It really does. I love seeing new subscribers and new likes. And if you have negative comments and you didn’t like something, I’m okay with that too. That’s how I learn and I need that feedback. So, appreciate it. Have a great day. Stay well, we’ll talk to you next time. Bye bye.
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Mark Balderrama
