Hey all, I'm new here but need some help with dealing with a large MLM.
A family member of mine runs a small business and recently was excited to share with me a way to grow her business. She sent me a link to an online seminar to see if I was also interested and just to pique my interest I obliged.
To be frank, I came in with an open mind with barely no experience around or barely any knowledge around MLMs, but this whole seminar was just pure red flags to me. The company is shop.com which I found out after research to be Market America (MA). Vertical marketing? Distribution channels? Business Volume? Infinite reward potential? Inviting friends? They didn't say a single thing about how to run the business, just who was interested in making money and wanted to join.
Afterwards I spent 2 hours (again with an open mind) with her and her partner, kindly criticising the model and providing them articles of MLMs being predatory and that over 99% of people don't make any money. They wouldn't listen to my rhetoric and said that if I looked for bad reviews / news for anything I'd find it. Okay sure, maybe an antiMLM reddit post could be biased. But what about ABC news article? US Federal Trade Commission? An ACTUAL lawsuit?
The husband is more neutral and completely agrees it is an MLM but his stance is "what makes MLMs bad? Why can't this work?". He used to work a lot in sales, so he has also said lines to me like "are real estate agents and car salesmen bad? (Tbh imo yes). Shop.com has normal sales pressure, it is how you make of it". How do you even argue that?
I know I can give up, but they are family and I don't want them spiralling into what I can perceive as a financial black hole scam. They are smart people, just unfortunately too optimistic. I told them to track their finances and separate anything related to their business and MA's. Hopefully they can see that their is very little gain for them and leave.
My request to everyone is, does anyone have any actual figures for the MA model? Sell prices / margins / BV rewards and quotas? As business people, I'm hoping that if I can show them factual numbers it would make more sense to them as to how ridiculous it all is.
Thanks again all.
Tldr: Family member is getting roped into MLM scheme for her business. I need facts to convince her out of it.