In previous posts, I’ve written about the difference between being a free person who is able to enjoy the benefits of their own life and work, and the slave who must live their life to benefit other people. In this post, I discuss whether MLM (Multi Level Marketing) is a way out of slavery.

In our society, slavery is hidden – most people who are slaves don’t really know that they are. They think they are winning the rat race, but may have a nagging idea that there is something not quite right. It is in the interest of the masters for the slave to remain deceived. That is why developing critical thinking skills are vital to regaining freedom – they open the jail door.

Slavery can potentially affects many parts of our lives if we let it – what we read, what we listen to, but more than anything, our work. Many people work in businesses or jobs where they have abdicated control over their own lives. If you work for someone, that doesn’t mean that you are a slave. You are a slave if you put someone else’s interests over your own, and stop thinking that you should be working for your own benefit.

In the back of many people’s minds, they know that there is something better, but don’t fully realise that it is their mind that is enslaved. They will grasp at straws to break out, and change the outward circumstances. But to leave the prison of the mind, you need to start thinking for yourself first. If you try to break out without freeing you mind, and don’t start thinking, you just go from one prison straight into another. Often you go from the minimum security prison farm to Alcatraz.

Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) targets those who want to achieve more freedom. No doubt someone has tried to sign you up by now. They will show you a video of attractive people in palatial mansions, with fancy cars and boats, kicking back on the beach without a care in the world and say that this is the escape you need from your slavery. So is this the escape you have been looking for? Does it help you transform your thinking? Does it then help set you on the path to total freedom? Let’s analyse it and find out.

MLM analysis

What is MLM? Essentially it is a business model that sells products, but where success comes from signing up people underneath you. MLM companies sell dishwashing liquids, belts, cosmetics, health foods, phone services and everything else you can imagine. But the biggest thing they sell are dreams, to the foot soldiers who actually have to sell the product. They rely on them to pass on a cut to those above.

Isn’t this a business model that is going to take over the world? No, personal selling of low value items is out. Why is that? Because it isn’t profitable. Why doesn’t your supermarket sell dishwashing liquid to you door to door? Because no-one wants to make less than minimum wage doing so and you can’t sell the product for enough to make any money. That’s why the supermarket has lots of aisles with thousands of products, a 2% market (if that), and a few checkout people on minimum wage.

The majority of MLM product (> 80%) is actually sold to people in the program.

But surely you can sell to your friends and relatives? Well, people who care about you are quite tolerant and forgiving. They will give you the benefit of the doubt for a while when you start seeing them as people to make money out of. But no-one likes to be used. The worst thing is that you will spend your whole life 7 x 24 in a constant search for new business – no time to turn off, the pressure is on. Eventually, friends will drop away and you’ll be left with your MLM buddies. What a rich and fulfilling life that will be!

But surely this is tolerable if I will make money? Hardly anyone makes any money. The figures that the MLM companies have been forced to release shows that the average person makes less than $115 per month. That doesn’t include all those who have simply given up, they make $0 per month. $115 per month is much less than minimum wage by the time you take into account the meetings you need to attend, the time you need to spend hustling and placing orders.

Some people at the top of the food chain make money, but that is by signing up people underneath them. Actually, 17 persons per 10,000 fall into the category that averages $47K per annum. Only 0.012% (1.2 persons per 10,000 active participants) of people make the top level that averages at $146K per annum.
If you take average incomes of people working, especially those who either own businesses or professionals, you will find that the success rate is a lot higher than that. It is a very difficult way to make any money.

But I’ll gain business skills and have the chance to build my own business, right? Well I would question the value of the high pressure sales skills that they present. No thanks, I’ll say it again, I don’t want a reversible faux leather belt. Try that in real business, and you’ll be out the door.

There are no real lessons that you can apply in any other business. You are not learning anything that helps break you out of slave mode. You exchange one hierarchy (where at least you get paid) for one where you slave away for people up the line, and pay to front up to seminars.

Also, it isn’t your business. It doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the MLM company. You can’t run it as you wish. Don’t believe me? Read the fine print in the contract.

Well, surely MLM is a good thing. Look at the growth statistics. MLM is still tiny compared to real forms of business, and always will be. It is a form of business that doesn’t provide any value in people’s lives by exchanging goods and services at a mutually agreed price under free conditions. It relies on exploiting friends and relatives and greed. It deceives with its promises of wealth which it can’t deliver on.

Any success it has is a testament to the desperation that people have to break out of slavery, and the lack of thinking skills of these people. You can see from their own statistics that it is not a good deal, so what more is there to ask?

Conclusion

I can almost guarantee someone who is a rabid MLM acolyte will try to tell me about themselves, or someone they know who is making it big in MLM. Well, that’s great, but I think my way works better.

I don’t go to boring seminars, I don’t sell telephone services or dishwashing liquid to my friends and relatives (those who would still see me after I commercialise my relationship with them), I don’t pretend to like people just so that I can bore them with my slick sales pitch, I don’t get all excited about buying the next book on how to get more minions in to get a “diamond pin”. Yet I’ve already got what they aspire to, maybe somewhat less ostentatious because I don’t care about impressing other people, and I’ve still got my soul. And I know a lot of other people who read this are the same as me.

MLM criticises paid employment as slavery, but working for someone else is sometimes a good way to sell your services to the world at a good price. The slavery comes from the attitude and stunted outlook, not the job. A free person treats their job as a business of their own, not something to do in place of life.

MLM replaces a job which can give a person a chance to make a mark by doing the thing that they are best suited for with an unpaid position in the most brutal possible hierarchy, with minimal rewards. It replaces genuine spirituality with the counterfeit fellowship and evangelism of the sales meeting.

MLM presents what appears to be a way out for slaves, but does nothing to help them move from slaves to free people. In summary, it isn’t any way out, just swapping one cage for another. If you want to regain your freedom, start learning about things for yourself, learn how to get paid for adding value, not scamming, understand money and investments, and most of all think for yourself.

Tags: freedom, MLM, multi level marketing, slavery, wealth

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Wealth and work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.