I've got two stories, I'm not sure either of them qualify as full-on MLM's though. One was just a job disguised as a great business opportunity.
1. When I was a freshman in college I was sitting in a large 300-person lecture hall in a class when we had someone come in to pitch to us. The pitch was that they were offering us the ability to start OUR OWN business. They 100% positioned it as owning a business.
Being an entrepreneur at heart, my heart was beating out of my chest in excitement, and I was practically frothing at the mouth at the opportunity. I ended up interviewing for the "opportunity", and in the process this is what I found out.
Basically, they work with Sherwin Williams to create branches of a residential painting company, and they were looking for people to manage the branches in each territory. You would do the hiring and run the day to day of the business, but you didn't own the business. If you performed well you would get promoted to oversee multiple territories and get a higher percentage of the earnings.
I must have been pretty blinded by passion because I didn't realize I was being deceived until after I was turned down in the second or third interview. (HUGE bullet dodged, I'm very thankful I wasn't accepted) Pretty big lesson learned there. The business model isn't neccesarily unethical, but they were just extremely deceptive about how they promoted it.
2. A couple years after the first story happened I had a classmate in an entrepreneurship class approach me and ask if I wanted to come over to his apartment with some people to hear about a business opportunity. (Seems to be the common thread for these kind of "opportunities")
There were about 6 or 7 other people there, and there was a guy there who gave the pitch, and we also had a guy streamed in on a TV to answer more in depth questions. If i'm not mistaken I believe it was for "Legalshield". Not positive on that, so don't quote me.
Basically they had a MLM style commission structure where the higher up in the ladder you are, the higher the % commission you would get. Here's the kicker though. You had to pay a pretty substantial buy-in. I believe it was a recurring fee, and it basically locked you in so that you had to get other people in the system either as customers or promoters (or both) in order to not lose money.
I made the comparison in my head to being on a hamster wheel. Jumping in to this would be like jumping on a fast moving hamster wheel in that you couldn't stop running once you started. It could have been a decent opportunity if you were a real hustler willing to risk it and place your trust in someone else's business model, but it wasn't for me. I listened to the rest of the pitch, left, and never looked back.
1. When I was a freshman in college I was sitting in a large 300-person lecture hall in a class when we had someone come in to pitch to us. The pitch was that they were offering us the ability to start OUR OWN business. They 100% positioned it as owning a business.
Being an entrepreneur at heart, my heart was beating out of my chest in excitement, and I was practically frothing at the mouth at the opportunity. I ended up interviewing for the "opportunity", and in the process this is what I found out.
Basically, they work with Sherwin Williams to create branches of a residential painting company, and they were looking for people to manage the branches in each territory. You would do the hiring and run the day to day of the business, but you didn't own the business. If you performed well you would get promoted to oversee multiple territories and get a higher percentage of the earnings.
I must have been pretty blinded by passion because I didn't realize I was being deceived until after I was turned down in the second or third interview. (HUGE bullet dodged, I'm very thankful I wasn't accepted) Pretty big lesson learned there. The business model isn't neccesarily unethical, but they were just extremely deceptive about how they promoted it.
2. A couple years after the first story happened I had a classmate in an entrepreneurship class approach me and ask if I wanted to come over to his apartment with some people to hear about a business opportunity. (Seems to be the common thread for these kind of "opportunities")
There were about 6 or 7 other people there, and there was a guy there who gave the pitch, and we also had a guy streamed in on a TV to answer more in depth questions. If i'm not mistaken I believe it was for "Legalshield". Not positive on that, so don't quote me.
Basically they had a MLM style commission structure where the higher up in the ladder you are, the higher the % commission you would get. Here's the kicker though. You had to pay a pretty substantial buy-in. I believe it was a recurring fee, and it basically locked you in so that you had to get other people in the system either as customers or promoters (or both) in order to not lose money.
I made the comparison in my head to being on a hamster wheel. Jumping in to this would be like jumping on a fast moving hamster wheel in that you couldn't stop running once you started. It could have been a decent opportunity if you were a real hustler willing to risk it and place your trust in someone else's business model, but it wasn't for me. I listened to the rest of the pitch, left, and never looked back.
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