Multi-Level Marketing Realities - Part 13

Part 13, that's fairly ominous.  Well I still do have good stuff to talk about before I get to the bad stuff.  In part 12, I said I would talk about the summer of 1999 when I quit my job.

Up to this point I had gotten pressure from Wayne to quit because we were doing so well and I really wanted to quit my job and run the business also.  Chris was a little more concerned, she felt we could do both but it was very busy.  We talked about hiring somebody but she didn't want to do that either, so we finally decided it would be ok to quit my job once we closed on our house.

In the spring and summer of 1999 I was advertising in various ways, mainly to try to attract new distributors into the business.  I am fairly positive that our commissions were up to nearly $15,000 per month, probably early in the year, and that was our plateau as we had that commission level for nearly all of 1999.  By the end of the summer we had over 350 distributors in our group.  My advertising consisted of small display ads in Entrepreneur magazine, a card deck advertisement, and I tried a full page ad just once.  I was a little unhappy with the results of these ads although the quality of distributor we attracted seemed to be much better.  Ultimately I went back to the internet and signed a contract with Excite by the end of the summer.  It was about $3000 per month for banner advertisements.

I had contracted out the work to create our advertisements.  Our display ads, card ads, and banner ads were all created by other companies and were generic rather than being specific to the product we were selling.  By being generic, I was trying to avoid the discerning eye of the MLM company's compliance department.

As far as our house goes, we were able to pay off our second mortgage and close on our house in August.  We had also sold our townhouse and were able to navigate both so we only had to spend one night in a hotel between closings.  Our new house was giving us space for living and space for doing our business, as it is a 4 bedroom, full basement, office on the first floor home.  We also got some nice features like a two story family room and 10,000 square foot lot.  It's a nice place to live and we have been here more than 10 years now.

I gave my notice and quit my job, with no place else to go.  This is the first time I had been completely without a job since I went to college (the first time).  I was now able to devote time to the business and I had several things on my agenda, as well as several regular things I wanted to do outside the house.  My kids were still little then so I was able to walk them to the bus and meet them at night.  I really enjoyed my family and got along with my wife very well during this time.  When the warm weather ended the story changed a bit.

In part 14 I will talk about installing a telephone server in my home and flying out to San Diego for a product launch by the MLM company.

...to be continued...