I am more than what I earn

bTW
ON MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING
RACHEL CHAN

QUITE recently, I met a
master’s degree holder
who had lost over
$60,000 in his multi-level marketing
(MLM) edu-preneur business.

When he told me that he had
willingly parted with his
hard-earned cash because he
was promised high monthly returns,
I wasn’t all that surprised.

You won’t be reading that story
because my paper decided
not to publish the article.

But I have had my share of
unwise pursuits, too, and I don’t
mind sharing.

A few years ago, a close
friend and I decided to hawk expensivemulti-
vitamins and skincare
brands produced by a perfectly
legitimate health-care
company. I cannot remember
what returns we thought we
would get – we were mainly
drawn to the excitement of setting
up our own business.

Our uplines – the distributors
of the MLM organisation
that recruited us – would earn a
commission based on our sales
efforts, and we, in turn, had to
find our own downlines to market
the company’s products. The
downlines’ job was to market
the products to consumers by
means of relationship referrals
and direct selling.

I would later find out that
my product was harder to sell
than I thought.

The star attraction, we were
told ad infinitum, was a patented
machine invented by the
health-care company. It could
measure antioxidant levels in
our bodies by non-invasive
methods.

It was going to be the next
big thing. If the impressive PowerPoint
presentations were anything
to go by, it was slated to
make waves in the health-care
industry.

The then-popular reasoning
was: Antioxidants determined
how healthy one was, so why
wouldn’t everybody want to
know their antioxidant count?

And because of the patent,
everyone would have to approach
the company to use the
machine. It would mean money.

What’s more, should we get
into the hall of fame, we’d be going
to Salt Lake City in Utah for
a grand convocation.

So, we anticipated the arrival
to Singapore of the much-raved
machine.

In the meantime, our uplines
fed us encouragement and
made us brush up our sales
pitch at least twice a week.

But we didn’t last three
months in the business, which
cost our upline (he was kind
enough to extend a loan to us
poor undergraduates) about a
grand or so.

It certainly didn’t help that
there were other MLM groups
that had smeared the products’
reputation with unsavoury sales
tactics.

But we also quit because of
other reasons. It wasn’t just because
we were unable to meet
the monthly sales targets to cover
costs, or that it was impossible
to find another downline
with a thousand dollars to blow
on multi-vitamins.

Rather, I partly have the antioxidant
machine to thank.
When it finally arrived, long
queues formed at the hotel
where hordes of excited direct
sellers had congregated, dying
to know what their antioxidant
reading was.

Now, these people had also
been consuming the company’s
multi-vitamins everyday, so
they ought to boast the highest
antioxidant readings.

On the other hand, I had
been skivving off my pills regimen
because I simply could not
afford them.

Yet my reading far exceeded
my condo-living, Benz-driving
uplines, whom I have not seen
since the day I left.

As I fled the hotel on my
own, leaving behind the speakers
who were giving talks on
“growing seeds of success”, it hit
me that I had almost been
bought over by the machine, but
that was not what the company
was trying to sell me.

Be it health-care equipment,
investment packages or magnetic
beds, any business involving
something you had to buy on
faith is really trying to sell you
dogma, and the most deceptive
one of all, is “you are what you
earn”.

And that was something I
wasn’t ready to buy.

- rachchan@sph.com.sg

MyPaper issue: 170909