40: MLM Can Legally ROB You In Two Places...

Hey, the first thing you'll probably notice is that I am sick. I feel like crap; I'm not going to lie. My throat is killing me and I'm totally losing my voice, so I'm so sorry if ... anyway, I apologize. I promise that what? I say in this episode it's going to be great. How I say it, I apologize that I sound like I'm going through puberty right now. If my voice cracks, I promise I've gone through puberty already. Guys, I'm excited for this episode. I've been doing a lot of studying of different downlines and different models from different MLM companies and the different things that are out there. What's kind of interesting about all of it is to see the way the market is shifting. You go back and you start to look at what MLM was 30 years ago before the Internet; even 20, let's look 20; even 10, when Facebook was still a brand new thing, and everyone was excited about it. I guess it's even longer than that now. Buy you go back to pre-Internet times, and it really was a network marketing thing. If you knew how to network with people, if you knew how to pitch to your different networks like it was truly in the true sense of the form and true sense of the word - network marketing. Fast forwarding, this concept of the Internet gets put in place and people start learning how to market online. They're going and they're marketing to their friends. They get on Facebook. They're taken pictures of themselves at the gym like crazy. That always drives me crazy. They're going around and they're taking pictures of themselves. Whatever it is, they started to use social media to sell their stuff. I'm sure you guys have heard of this little site called Amazon. If you guys didn't know, this thing about how Amazon got introduced; Amazon got introduced and they are so big. They're so big. You know what's funny about Amazon, Amazon has not cared to really even make that much money they dumped almost all of their money right back into ads, which is pretty amazing. All they care about is reach. They get very easy for anyone to buy pretty much anything online. Right now, the stat is that almost out of every dollar that is spent online, about 25 cents of that dollar is going through Amazon right now. That's huge; 25% of every dollar; 25 cents of every dollar that is being spent on the Internet as a whole is going through Amazon. That's crazy! Should we pause for effect? Pause for effect. But that's pretty intense. Let's think about this as far as an MLM industry. The MLM companies have noticed the power of Amazon. They have notice how easy it is to get shipping out to people. The fulfillment that Amazon has mastered is incredible. They can ship stuff out to people really quick, two days, get it pretty much everywhere. That's insane, right? What a lot of companies and a lot of MLMs are doing now, and these are two things, I just wanted to bring up really fast this probably going to become a quick episode, but I want you to take a hard look at the MLM that you are in. Ask yourself ... okay, and this going to be probably a touchy concept, and I'm not like a doom and gloom kind of guy. I'm not. But if you go back and listen to stuff that I've done in the past like you'll see that I'm not a doom and gloom guy. In fact, I really hate that kind of mentality. But ask yourself, "Is my MLM robbing me?" Ouch! It sucks to even think about that. Not the MLM, not the corporate, those guys will never do that to me. You know what I mean? It sucks for me to even bring this up. But I'm going to, because I want you to look at it. I want you to take a good hard look at what it is that your MLM is doing, and I want you to start checking out exactly how the money flows. Let's look at this then. MLMs have realized that they can make all the money that they need to just by posting things on Amazon. How many times have you seen an MLM whose product is $80? You can see the same product being sold on Amazon for $55 by the corporate, by the MLM corporate. They head [inaudible 00:05:09]. They are undercutting the MLM distributors. The distributors go out. They do all the vetting. They go through, they find the people. They find the market. They convince the people of the product that people start buying a product. If those people just even go on the Internet and start searching for the product, which most people will nowadays, they will find a cheaper version of it. The distributor did all the work. However, the distributor gets undercut like crazy as the corporate sells for a cheaper price. This is not like a small thing. In the entire MLM industry, this is a huge deal. A lot of this is happening to a lot of people now. This is happening in a lot of MLMs. And a lot of MLMs, in order to try and keep up with revenue and trying to hit their goals, this is a very common practice. And so, what I want you to do is I want you to go out, and I want you to search for your product or your service on the Internet, specifically E-commerce sites, if it's a physical product, which most likely a lot of MLMs are. Go check it out. Where else can your customers buy your product? When I teach people, I'm the coach for a program called [Too Comical 00:06:18] Coaching. One of the things that we talk about in there is that you've got to know your competition as well as the competition knows their own business. Does that make sense? You've got to know their business as well as they do. This is part of that. Where else can your customers buy your product? Get really, really intimate. Get really familiar with that, because what it's going to allow you to do is it's going to help you figure out the talking points. If someone else is selling more than you are, is it the same or a very similar product, well it's not necessarily a bad thing. This is not meant to be like a Debbie Downer episode. What you can do is start looking and say, "Why are they selling more than I am?" And you start figuring out those pieces and you take those pieces and you add it into your pitch; you add it into your product; you add it into your offer or the thing that you're putting out there. You can start to compete again in the market place. Does that make sense? I'm not trying to be all Debbie Downers, but it does suck that that is a very, very common practice. Not all MLMs do it. Almost all of them do it though, where they go in the undercut, the actual distributor, on like Amazon or something like that. It could be any kind of E-com store or anything like that. Anyway, so that's the first way that MLMs kind of rob distributors now. And again, this is not meant to be Debbie Downer, doom and gloom. I want everyone to be aware of it. It took me a long time to become aware of it along my MLM entrepreneurial journey. Anyway, just understand that. As you start looking through comp plans, as you start looking through the actual products, if you've never really dove deep into those places, where else can people buy from ... I guess where are the other places besides you people can buy from. All right, so that's number one, undercutting you on Amazon. Number two, when an MLM has its management as part of its downline, they are seriously undercutting you as well. I'm sure you guys have heard of stories where someone gets successful, they get a lot of people in their downline; they're selling a lot of product; they're doing really well for themselves, but they get cut out of paychecks pretty frequently. One of that reasons that happens is because MLM admin, MLM owners, are a part of the downline itself. What's funny is that for a long time, I thought that that was a normal thing, and it's not. Meaning it's normal that it happens a lot, but it's not like that's really bad. What it does is it incentivizes the people in your upline to figure out ways to not pay you. What they do is they create these ceilings and they say, "Kaye, yes, you did x number of dollars in revenue." Let's put it into a po...