Why not? Seems like a solid testimonial.
Solid gold in fact!
You would think, but nope.
Okay, okay. You guys have made me remember everything I hate about MLMs. From the rah-rah meetings and conventions to having to embrace it like a new found religion in order to profit from it. Plus, I am not a natural salesman, it really takes a lot of energy, effort and a piece of my soul to put forth a sales pitch.
But I have to say that I KNOW some people make money from it. I have dozens of friends selling MLM products and there are a select few that are fiscally intelligent and would not do it if it were not profitable.
I just need to find some side gigs to supplement my day job. Ugh!
P.S. I have a lot of friends that sell LuLaRoe and I would never tell them to their face but that stuff is so ugly. Several years from now we’ll look back and realize it was the standard uniform of frumpy middle aged soccer moms taking their mini-vans through the drive thru at Starbucks on their way to a PTA meeting.
I know one woman who sells LuLaRoe, again in her case to get the vendor discount (and she’s expanding her business because it’s been very profitable) but I haven’t purchased anything from her because they aren’t the kind of styles that I wear. She pretty much wears nothing else, and fortunately it looks good on her. Also, during her last pregnancy, she would wear those clothes in her usual size, and they would get stretched out and be restored to their original shape after being washed and dried.
Her husband and sons, who are both preschoolers, wear them too. They have t-shirts in male sizes. 
I had a cousin who tried to sell that stuff, she lasted about a week. Of course, I hadn’t had any contact with her in years until she started sending out invites to stupid on- line parties.
But about a week later she quit and apologized to everyone.
I do sales for a living. The products I sell are not retail products. My friends and family are not part of my sales strategy.
To me, the MLM schemes have a touch of "Look around you. See your friends? See your family members? Do you realize you aren’t leveraging these relationships into cash money? " that I find insulting. And I’m also insulted when some family member or neighbor that hasn’t looked twice at me in years starts sucking up because they’re selling something.
So if you have lots of friends that you want to lose, this is a good way to do it.
Really, don’t .
Back at Christmas I was looking for inexpensive gifts for casual friends and coworkers. I found these stone pendant necklaces on Amazon, 50 for 40 bucks. They were amazingly nice and I had the thought that if I needed extra money I might set up at street fairs and sell them for 4 or 5 bucks each ( or 3 for $10 or $12). And there’s lots of stuff like that out there in that price range. I like selling stuff but I don’t like the MLM style recruiting.
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Sure. Some people make money at it or they wouldn’t exist. However, that still doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority lose money.
If you get involved in MLM schemes, you have to either directly scam others or accept that your downline is doing to directly scam others. It’s the nature of the scheme.
No money is worth that to me.
I was in sales as well, selling to businesses. We maintained long term relationships with our customers and never tired to BS them.
Most people hate to say “no” to people, and these types of schemes often work because friends and relatives would rather buy some overpriced shampoo or supplement rather than be direct.
Rather than MLM, try a more respectable and stable job that doesn’t require as much sociopathy.
Like being a pimp/madame. 
I agree with pretty much everything that has been posted here. The only real advantage of a MLM distribution channel is it gets your affiliates to buy your products (typically on a monthly “autoship”). I have no idea how the new Presidential administration will effect this but last year there were two rather significant settlements reached between the FTC and two MLM companies, Herbalife and Vemma, the most important aspect of which was that ~most~ of the money being used to pay affiliates had to come from sales of products/services to actual customers, specifically customers who were not also affiliates. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about this.
On the other hand there are a few MLM companies with quality products at more or less reasonable price points and my advice would be, if you have to join a MLM do it because you find value in the products and don’t give a crap about the comp plan. There’s nothing wrong with earning commissions from selling products to actual customers and if that as apposed to chain recruiting fresh affiliates is your focus, then you will have avoided most of the darker downsides of modern MLM.
One last thing, the current fad in MLM underbelly income opps are cryptocurrencies. “Did you miss out on BitCoin?” “$10 invested in BitCoin in 2009 would be worth elevendy billion dollars today.” “MLMCoin is starting at 10 cents each and soon Pow Alice, To The Moon. That and you can make 10% commissions on every investor you recruit going down three levels.” “Sure it’s 100% legal but if you live in the USA you’ll need a bank account in the Virgin Islands to receive your money.”
Whenever I looked into MLMs (OK, I tried a couple 15-20 years ago) the people making the most money were the ones selling tools - either things like motivational tapes or sales materials to support the business and talking downlines into buying everything to become successful. I even knew one guy who made around 50 grand a month just selling downline members to other people. Of course he didn’t call it that - he called it co-op advertising but he would just take the money and pay for someone from a business opportunity list (oh yeah, there were a lot of mailing list sellers and postcard printers making a killing) to join under someone and take the markup as profit. I looked that guy up not that long ago and he was working as a janitor.
It seemed like anyone who was just a rep and not selling support services had a hard time making money and jumped around. If these companies and programs were so solid I’d wonder why all these big “leaders” who ran training calls would switch to some new company every so often. Especially when they all touted residual income based off sales and no need to recruit. If you really had residual income you wouldn’t drop it. I had a friend who claimed to be a fulltime professional Beachbody Coach for several years, but he made a big deal over resigning, which also made no sense to me. If I had that sweet residual income I would just quietly reduce my participation. Which reminds me, I still have monthly residual income from a direct sales company I joined in 2000 and most of the sales stopped around 2008. It’s dwindling but real, because I sold real services that were essential and competitively priced to businesses.
I would sell bodily fluids or similar before doing MLM for fast cash. Seriously, I would sell plasma (I did a couple times when I was in college and my financial aid ran out), possibly do medical trials or whatever. Of course, before getting to that point I’d look at part time jobs and “gig economy” contracting work, yard sales, ebay, etc.
You can make tons of money in an MLM. TONS.
Just be sure you are the first person on the pyramid, i.e., you invented the scheme and/or product, and everyone else works for you. Otherwise, you will lose your ass.
That is a slight exaggeration Musicat, although real numbers for most MLM companies are near impossible to come by it seems typical for somewhere in the low single digits (percentage wise) of MLM participants to actually earn more than they spend let alone above minimum wage type money. The narrower the percentage the greater the income.
One amusing point, Zeek Rewards was a MLM company pretending to be a penny auction website. It was shut down in August of 2012 and alleged to be both a ponzi and pyramid scheme with sale of unregistered securities thrown in for good measure. The company and all it’s assets were liquidated through a court ordered receivership (including claw backs of payments to “net winners”) and because of this an accurate accounting of the company’s cash flows were made public.
Among the facts made public was that less than 2% of all revenue generated by the company came from the sale of penny auction bids to people who were not also Zeek Rewards affiliates. However the number that really jumped out at me was that slightly more than 10% of active Zeek Rewards affiliates were net cash positive at least per the information available in the company database (if affiliates had business related expenses not paid directly to the company it wouldn’t be reflected there).
I do have friends (in the facebook sense of the word) in MLM and a few are names that would be recognized in the industry. When I asked them how an illegal scheme like Zeek Rewards could generate a higher than industry average affiliate income level I was met with much befuddlement. One answer was “that’s easy, they were cheating.” Now that was doubtlessly true with civil and criminal convictions to prove it but I find it a sad commentary on the MLM industry that a blatantly illegal scheme provided a higher average affiliate income level than most, if not all “legitimate” MLM companies in the market.
Note that there are legit direct marketing companies that aren’t MLM.
I have relatives that have been involved in those for many years.
One got in early with a company, made a good score, left when the company got big and brought in “real management” who had other ideas about how to do things. Then actually co-founded a second company that has done amazingly well. Brought in another relative with experience in this as a early regional manager.
The first is now “retired” with enough money to last a lifetime and then some. Does charity work.
The distinguishing thing that differs these from MLMs? No layers upon layers. There’s the sales people who go around a bit having sales parties. All under a regional manager who reports direct to HQ. That’s it.
Also, they are very careful who they bring in to be sales reps. The exact opposite of a typical MLM who’ll take any warm body with money. Experience is a must. The number of reps is kept limited in proportion to the limited production so that the scarcity of the products enhances its reputation.
Sales reps have a deposit system for their samples. They get their money back on any unsold items. (Which for this is not common. It basically all gets sold.)
And they are samples only. Most items are ordered via the sales reps and shipped to customers. Once established, most orders are done out of a catalog via the sales rep so sales parties are just a way to get new customers.
But this isn’t probably going to work for the OP given the experience and screening needed to get into this. But it might be useful in comparing MLM scams to real direct marketing companies.
Can you give some examples of the direct marketing companies you are referring to?
The way to make money at an MLM is to either be at the top of the pyramid or to do just enough actual MLM to say you’re in the scheme, then sell people training seminars, dvds, books, and other ‘systems’ to supposedly do better at the MLM part. There is a lot more money in selling guides to making money to people without good financial sense.
I’d take this a step further, I would not trust what anyone says about how much they are making through their MLM unless they show me their accounting books. If they’re not keeping good records, or won’t show them to me, then they’re wrong about how much they’re making. They may be mistaken, the may be overly optimistic, they may be lying, but whatever the case they’re not actually making bank.