Why MLM is important

last SG · 2008-02-06T15:16:25+00:00

I was reading through your posts and found it compelling enough for me to create an account just to post here. I frankly find your behavior very disturbing....

Redtide77 SG

Having worked for the last 18 years, I waked up to realise that the world has changed. Internet has removed all boundaries and the education and the way to do business must also changed to accomodate the new millennium..

When I begin to take stock of my life, I realise that gone are the days of job security and pension. Do not expect the government to take care of you for they wont.

Hence I believe that it is important for those who wants to retire early and enjoy a good income still need to have multiple streams of income. (MSI)

In this MSI, one of them must be network marketing to leverage on other's time and money.

Unfortunately in this forum, it seems that MLM has a bad name. It seems that to a lot of ppl here, MLM is almost a scam.Actually, MLM is a clever concept and a legitimate business model. but for many who had been burnt by it, MLM and those who are involved has becomes the scums of the earth.

Bad experiences aside, we still need to be mature and take a back step and understand that MLM is still a good and proven business model to make a lot of people wealthy.

So now it is about chosing the right company, srutinised the management and products that you believe in.

I just joined a friend whom I know very well and she is making good money helping others with their company products. Now after 2 years, she can relax and enjoy a monthly and still growing 5 figures income. I know becos I saw her statement. She uses the money to invest in my product to get a 60-100% return over 2-5 years with principal guaranteed. Imagine many still feel safer putting money in the bank and blatantly losing money (through inflation) than to invest it when they can because money dont come easy to them, they tend to be a lot more careful spending them..many times, too careful.

Hence not many people living from paycheck to paycheck can enjoy these benefits like my friend because they have to work very hard for their money and think twice before they invest them.

With MLM, my friend is getting good money even if she decides to quit and now she is freer with her money in the area of investment and in blessing others.

Only in MLM can u get this type of income once u hit a critical mass and life will take on another dimension as she no longer works for money but for the pure fun of helping people.

Sad thing is many are too busy looking at the failures of company and agents to see that this is a good business model worth looking into and be a part of.

I hope that many who read this will wake up and realise that the world has changed. MSI is the way to go. The company you worked for is not going to give you financial freedom unless u worked in a very senior position and been there for the last 20 years.

We need a paradigm shift in our thinking. We need to re-think what we want to do and where we are heading.

MLM is the way to go. Choose one, choose a good one and work at it and you eat the fruits of your labour.

Fatum SG

so which MLM company are you exactly working for ? .....

huzane89 SG

I agree with Redtide77. My friends from m'sia & indonesia all say that mlm is a gd opportunity. But as usual, mlm is very difficult to suceed in. But they never deem it as a scam unlike this forum. Dunno y.

laurence82 SG

if MLM is hard to succeed in, then MLM, like other career and business opportunities, are just that, opportunities, if i may paraphrase your words.

MLMers need to provide hard facts and overwhelming reasons to attract potential recruits to the industry.

I am quite pissed if MLMers do not present anything but rely on general statements like 'Everyone is doing MLM!' or 'MLM is the future!'. My response is 'Yeah right, so says Elvis!'

These are not hard fact and neither do they mean anything. There was no viable statistic or any analysis on the MLM industry, just a "US MLM industry is worth xxx billions" do not mean anything to us Singaporeans.

Get over trying to be a shrink and 'analyse' people's attitude towards MLM, like 'They are jealous', 'They are losers' or even 'People are negative'.

Tell us what we want to hear, that is hard facts.

Wurq16 SG

I can only say.. MLM is for everybody but not everybody is for MLM. :)

There' nothing wrong with in this industry just that alot of people are doing the wrong thing the right way. Making people run when they heard MLM.

There are actually some companies holding people up for 3 hrs for a presentation. Because one failed to convince, the other come to help. Failed again, another come again and this go on and on. Very unprofessional.

The professional way is , "Present the business, the person dont like the idea then just say thank you and let him go."

redstone SG

The commission based income is good drive, however unfortunately it turns into bad drive and under desperation, agents will do anything like to trick their friends or use hard selling, manipulation of emotions (insult your future, saying MLM is the only way out), telling half truths, etc.

Worse still some companies preach that MLM is the "ONLY way out", the "ONLY way to success", that "everyone is doing MLM", "MLM is the future of sales", "earn more than uni grad, why study", and they make themselves as if they are gods (James Phang, for example). Telling you of the hardships they faced to bring up the company.

Phaze SG

I think the risk is misrepresented by MLM companies. Even if you say that an MLM is hard to succeed in, how hard are we talking about? How do you define success and what is the percentage of people who succeed?

MLMs is in many ways, a fundamentally flawed business model. Maybe we can just look at a couple of those flaws.

The first is that MLMs have a high cost structure. They claim they save money on advertising. However, they suffer from the cost of having to pay high commissions to their sales force. "Residual income" means that they are paying a few levels of uplines basically nothing. This is inefficient and they have to build this into the price of the product which makes it more unattractive.

Another fundamental flaw is that in a traditional company, the size of the sales force is controlled by the company. The company looks at the market and demand, and decides on an appropriate size of the sales force. Sometimes, the company makes mistakes and have to retrench but basically since there is a cost to retrench someone, companies try to minimize that. MLMs have no such control. Each person an MLMer recruits is basically a competing salesperson. But this can only continue as long as there's infinite demand. And as we all know, there's no such thing as infinite demand. And how does an MLM know when the demand curve plateaus? When does the MLM say "stop recruiting?"

So there's two possible outcomes. Either the entire MLM fails, or a vast majority of the participants in the MLM drop out - bringing the numbers back in line with demand.

Redtide77 SG

As in every industry, there are bad hats.

So it is up to personal discretion to decide which product to buy and which company to join. Nobody can force anyone to do anything even at time, I agree that MLMers used forceful tactics. Not that I came across many anyway becos I know what I want and I know how to make my own decision.

So be open to study this solid business model and do your own due diligence.

Even a good company with good manager and downline, there will still be some jokers who try to con others to help their own promotions. These are the elements that need to be weed out.

laurence82 SG

I am always wondering if MLM is a religion or business

Its not point telling us about bad hats or saying that it's misrepresented out of proportion.

In the business world, who cares? If you dont attract the market and provide a good clean image, there is nothing else much you can say or do.

And there is no point saying it here either. Do it, not say it.

Phaze SG

Erm... I thought I just said it is not a solid business model?

Okay. Maybe I just don't quite understand. Could you explain how the MLM model handles the issue of supply and demand? How does an MLM determine the saturation point of a market and what would an MLM do in that situation?

TCH05 SG

Does anybody know how many MLM "sales people" are there in Singapore?

sniper_xp SG

redstone is right, i've come across some MLM people who said that 'MLM ' is the only way out for financial freedom, is either MLM or u becoming a modern day workhorse of the corporate world earning what corresponds to your time and effort, and having little free time for leisure and family blah blah....

And this is utter bullshit, there are so many ways to financial freedom, basically this centres upon earning adequate passive income, or also, can be considered buffer income to contain retrenchment, pay cuts e.t.c.

Stock investments, starting a business, internet marketing, estate investment and many more, why must it be only MLM? Obvious brainwashing at play here

And many MLM people love comparing the start-up cost for starting a traditional brick-and-mortar business and doing MLM, saying what starting a traditional business needs high capital and is not for the less well-to-do, and MLM with its lower 'capital' is a better choice. And when comparing the 2 they will put off other low-cost money-making channels like starting an e-business, affiliate marketing , stock investments and all that. Are they ignorant or just trying to insult our intelligence?

sniper_xp SG

LOL recently i brought up the topic on saturation to one of my MLM buddies, and guess what he said? There will always be a market for MLM due to perpetual migration of foreigners to Sg, and human reproduction. Every year there people grows a year older and eventually reaching the legal age to enter the MLM industry

Logically, that makes sense. But if at the moment the population are entering MLM faster than the resources can be replenished, then that will indeed be an issue. And taking into account the number of MLM companies in Sg, this doesn't augur well for the industry here

Phaze SG

Sure okay. Let's look at an MLM that recruits 6 downlines per person.

Level 1 - 1                 Total: 1
Level 2 - 6               Total: 7
Level 3 - 36               Total: 43
Level 4 - 216            Total: 259
Level 5 - 1296         Total: 1555
Level 6 - 7776         Total: 9331
Level 7 - 46656         Total: 55987
Level 8 - 279936         Total: 335923
Level 9 - 1679616      Total: 2015539
Level 10 - 10077696   Total: 12093235

Wow.

At the 9th level, there are 2015539 (that's over 2 million) people involved in the MLM. Of those 2 million, 1679616 are new recruits who need to attract 10,077,696 million people into the MLM.

But not everyone will succeed you say. Many will drop out. So how many have to drop out to keep the numbers down? And your income depends on your downlines succeeding right?

Let's say you join at level 5. That's not very far down right? At level 5, you are competing against 1295 other new recruits. You're competing against even more peopel if your uplines are still actively trying to recruit. Or perhaps your uplines are not actively recruiting, they are helping you to recruit. Still, that's a lot of competition to face.

How can you ethically recruit someone into a scheme where that person's chance of success is much lower than yours?

But wait, the pool is growing bigger. Foreign talent are migrating to Singapore! The marketing is growing!

So when do you put on the brakes? Is it realistic for Level 8 recruits to find 1.6 million people to join?

And that's assuming that all stay in and succeed. Let's take an unrealistically high 50% success rate. That means half the people you recruit drop out. So to get your 6 successful downlines, you need to recruit 12 people. If the success rate is 10%, to get your 6 successful downlines, you need to recruit 60 people.

sniper_xp SG

Haha brother, your post makes sense, very analytical way of seeing things. But a pity those MLM people don't have the smarts to interpret simple mathematical logic like this, or either they chose to stay away from such little little details. After all, ignorance is bliss LOL

redstone SG

And what's the rate of success? Damn slim. It's like telling your friend that the highest selling paintings in the world by living artist sell for $50 million USD. So you tell them to buy some paints and canvasses and start to paint now, hoping you would hit sales of 50M.

Okay, in singapore context. I see you buying Toto, strking 1K. I see others buy Toto strike $15 million SGD. So I say I can become rich by becoming professional Toto buyer? Don't shoot be back by saying MLM doesn't need high capital. I'm talking about probability.

You're earning a commission based pay. So by primary school kid logic, is something which is guaranteed to happen more stable or is something which has only say 5% success rate and based on commission on sales more stable? So much for financial freedom. And "retire early" as claimed by Enyouth? Oh yeah... retire... which old folks home are they in? Passive income? More like modern slavery.

AND why oh why do MLMs ALWAYS and I really mean ALWAYS pitch you would earn 6 digit earnings? And they always hide their identity as MLM company til the very last minute? Don't they know something called business ethics? Do they even know what ethics is? Does anyone have to invite Cambridge or Harvard lecturers to give lectures on Business Ethics to Enyouth?

Phaze SG

Most of them just don't think. On one hand, you could say they are blinded by greed. On the other hand, you could say they are blinded by hope. But that is still no excuse for their unethical practices.

Many years ago, my "friend" asked me out for lunch just out of the blue. I had not met her in quite a while and I thought it was kind of a group get together. I was surprised when I met her and she told me it was just going to be the two of us. After lunch, she asked if I wanted to go visit her office. I was reluctant to do so but she kept nagging me to go so I agreed.

It turned out her "office" was Astral Mag. Out of politeness, I endured an hour of ah bengs trying to explain to me the power of crystals and all kinds of other bullshit. Finally, I decided to buy something so I could get out of there. I figured, oh well, even if I don't believe in the pseudoscience, maybe I can at least get some kind of precious stone. I picked up a piece and asked the ah beng who was hovering around me, "what mineral is this?"

He stared at me blankly.

"What mineral is this rock made of?" I asked again.

"Er... it's not a mineral. It's a crystal."

That really pissed me off. Those ah bengs didn't even know what they were selling.

Anyway, I actually did buy something in the end. I shouldn't have but I took it as the price of our friendship. The price I paid for the rock was the amount my "friend" sold me out for.

dangerboi SG

come on ...get a life..don't give out some commments after reading up books on mlm.

You'll be able to see the views on mlm in most of the people in this forum. MLM may successful in other countries, however, it isn't so in sg and not many people have succeeded from mlm. Always remember that you are living in Singapore and not in some other country.

caleb_chiang SG

Seems like TS is into MLM...

AsGi4Lum SG

Any books written by ppl from sg?

And also getting sales leads is not as easily as what those agents claim to be, sell one product only and recruit 6 ppl. Easier to blabber than done.