For the last decade, whenever Amway has published income data for the Amway business they have also reported, based on a survey in 2000, an “average income” for “active IBOs” -
The average monthly gross income for “active” IBOs was $115.
Approximately 66% of all IBOs of record were found to be “active.”
“Active” means an IBO attempted to make a retail sale, or presented the Amway Independent Business Ownership Plan, or received bonus money, or attended a company or IBO meeting in the year 2000.
“Gross income” means the amount received from retail sales, minus the cost of goods sold, plus the amount of Performance Bonus retained. There may be significant business expenses, mostly discretionary, that may be greater in relation to income in the first years of operation.
Amway critics have often latched on to this “average income” and claimed (by falsely assuming all these IBOs are working hard and have business expenses) that virtually all IBOs are losing money and that it’s a poor business opportunity. In reality it’s a very poor and virtually meaningless statistic. There’s a reason why if you google “average income” you’ll be hard pressed to find it. What you’ll find instead is “median income”, which is altogether different statistic. “Average” only really works when you have a group that is homogenous, or members are similar to each other. The group used by Amway is “active IBOs”, and as per their definition includes everyone from the handful of US Founders Crown Ambassadors who have been building their businesses for decades and earn millions, through to the 19yr old college student who joined a few months back and asked their brother if they wanted to buy an XS – and the brother said “no”, and they never did anything again.
Clearly the statistic doesn’t tell us much at all! I can only surmise that Amway keeps publishing it at the behest of their lawyers, who want to keep on the good side of the FTC and ensure nobody can complain Amway gave them an overly optimistic view of their chances of making money with Amway.
So, we’re left with a lousy, misleading, statistic. At least now though, we’re not left with an old lousy, misleading statistic. Recent issues of Amway’s Achieve Magazine have been reporting new data, based on a survey from 2010 – Read More
Are you recruiting your competitors?
A supposed “criticism” of Amway, and indeed of multilevel marketing, that I’ve seen turn up regularly is the idea that it’s inherently flawed because “you are recruiting competitors”. For example, Robert T. Carroll, in his “Skeptic’s Dictionary” says -
Australian MLM critic Peter Bowditch (ratbags.com.au) says for example regarding his own business compared with MLM -
Anti-Amway obsessive JoeCool comments on one of his (many) blogs -
So, what are they on about?
Well, the claim has some truth to it because when you sponsor someone in to your business, that person is indeed now a potential competitor for a retail customer. For any given customer, you’ll make more money if you sell to them personally than if your downline does.
One flaw in this “complaint” is that the same thing applies in traditional business as well. If you owned a small clothing store, every time you sell something, you get to keep all the profit. But what if you employ someone? In the clearest example, if you simply paid them on a commission basis, then they are a direct competitor to you on each retail sale. They get that commission instead of you. The same really applies even if they’re a salaried employee. The money your paying them could have stayed in your pocket if you hadn’t employed them and sold it yourself!
Or how about Coca-Cola? If you buy a coke from an official coca-cola vending machine then are you’re buying it direct from Coca-Cola. Yet you could also buy it from your local corner store. Every time Coca-Cola reps try to get a store to sell their products, they’re recruiting competitors!
Or let’s take Pete Bowditch’s own software example. As he mentioned, he could sell the software directly himself, or he could ask retailers to stock them. In other words – he could recruit a competitor! By having a reseller sell to a customer, that’s a potential retail sale he is missing out on.
Why does Coca-Cola recruit competitors? Why does a small business owner recruit salespeople? Why does Bowditch suggest recruiting retailers?
No “MLM magic” is needed to answer that. It’s because you can make more money that way! By recruiting resellers, you can hopefully get much larger total sales volumes than by trying to do all the sales yourself. Yes, you’ll make less money per sale than if you did a sale personally, but you still get a percentage on the wholesale sale to your recruit, and you should be able to get a lot more sales for the same time invested. Asmaller percentage of a larger volume can easily be worth more than a larger percentage of a smaller volume. What’s more, the larger discount you get thanks to your recruit’s volume means you get an even bigger profit margin on your own retail sales!
Unless the marketplace for your products is saturated, and there is no room for expansion, recruiting other sales people to increase your sales volume is a smart and sensible way to increase your profitability.