| Multi Level Money |
 I've never exactly liked multi-level marketing (MLM). Well, half of the time I hate it. It too often looks like being conned into shelling out a few hundred dollars for some supply of diet pills or something, and then you need to convince all your friends to sign up under you and get really excited about it.
But then again, I like the idea of having thousands of people under me who'll provide me with a continuous residual income. So, if I could do that without having to force my friends to buy some overpriced vitamins they don't want, I might change my mind. At times it had seemed very attractive. I've known or met people who've done extremely well with MLM, and obviously, to see those folks who've done best can inspire a lot of other people. Like, I remember this event at the house of one of the top Herbalife people. Larry something. He had made 65 million dollars at the time. So it was a recruitment event in the basement disco of his Beverly Hills mansion. There were at least 500 people. It has ostrich feathers on the wall. His couple of Ferraris and Lamborghinis were strategically parked out front. Well, he seemed like a nice guy too. And they put on quite a show. Seemed like those vitamins cured cancer and just about anything else. And lots of previously normal little folks had great success stories to tell about how well they'd done on marketing it. However inspiring it was, I didn't sign up more than maybe one or two people, who didn't do anything with it. My family ate the vitamins for a year or so, which was perfectly fine, albeit a little expensive. And, statistically speaking, that's how it goes for most people who sign up in an MLM. They think it sounds great at first. They imagine themselves making 10s of thousands in residual income every month. They find the money for the starter package somewhere. And that's usually how far they get. Because they don't know how to be as inspiring as the people who hooked them on to it. And because their friends aren't really interested, and they don't know how to reach anybody else who is. Even at those times when I temporarily thought it was a great idea, I've had moral qualms about the pyramid nature of it. I mean, obviously it is a pyramid scheme. People sign up under somebody else, becoming part of their down-line. And the money they spend to join is to a large degree what goes to fund the people higher up. Oh, plus the product sold, of course. But you can pretty easily see it as a pyramid where a few people at the top are doing really well, some of them becoming millionaires, being able to tell great success stories. And the further we go down in the pyramid, the more dull it looks. At the bottom are people who paid money for nothing, or there are people who work at actually selling the product it all was about. Seems like there will have to be a great many loosers to fund a few winners. But then it just struck me. This is really very similar to how a capitalist economy works. Most people haven't thought of it that way, but it is really structured as a pyramid scheme too. Except for that it is so complicated and cleverly done that it pretty much can keep going indefinitely. A capitalist economy works in part by expecting that one can make investments that produce returns. I.e. you give something out and you get more back. Like, an investor invests in a company, or a bank gives a loan, and they want it back with interest. So the company does a bunch of things that does the same thing. They put the money into things that give more money back. I.e. they pass the buck to somebody else, in order to get a return for themselves and the people behind them. And so forth, through numerous steps. It is really inherently the same idea as a pyramid scheme. And at the bottom of the pyramid you find the people who do the actual work, or who buy the products. And they generally get less back than they put out. I.e. they work hard and get paid less than what it is worth, in order to finance that the people higher up in the scheme get their returns. Which produces our typical societal arrangement where a small percentage of people are doing really well, and the majority of people are just getting by, stuck in a daily routine. But in that type of economy, it still keeps working. In part because it is very complex, and because there are many ways to pass the buck to others. I.e. anybody has the opportunity for investing their capital wisely and getting a return back. And there's actually nothing that stops most everybody from being a business, which gains a profit. There's no law that says you have to be the suffering lower rungs of the pyramid. People are there in part because they don't succeed in playing the capitalist game very well, so they just get taken advantage of. But they could play if they learned how. The economy is actually arranged so the money can keep moving indefinitely. The same dollar can be used any number of times. So even though you're providing a profit for somebody higher up in some pyramid, you're free to set up the same type of scheme for yourself, and do something that produces more return than what you put into it. There's no scarcity of pyramid schemes. Or, more kindly, systems that can leverage your investment into much more. So, now, a multi-level marketing scheme is not all that different. It is simply more transparent. It is easier to see the pyramid forming within a particular scheme, so easier to have qualms about it, and start thinking it is impossible. But there's nothing really that stops it from being complex enough that everybody can make profits. Because there can be many different programs, and because money can circulate endlessly, at any kind of speed. My objections about the morality of MLM aren't very different from my qualms about a general capitalist economy. Is it fair that some people get extra money back without directly doing any work for it? Well, if it would only be theoretically possible for a few people to do it, I might not think it is fair. But the point is that it indeed might be possible to keep the balls in the air, and have everybody profit from it, as long as they think as businesses, rather than as consumers and workers. Thinking as an investor or as a business is very different from thinking as a consumer or a worker. The inherent laws of how it works are different. Just like you won't be a good investor if you only think about what work you can do and what stuff you can buy, any network marketing scheme wouldn't work that way either. But if you learn the trick, and you position yourself to continuously multiply your resources, and you help others do the same, the game might actually work, and there doesn't have to be any losers. So, I'm open to games that allow me to multiply my resources, as long as there's sufficient freedom for myself and others to make choices about how best to do that. And there does luckily seem to be approaches out there that accomplish that, without having to do the things that feel wrong and that don't work. More on that later. [ Articles | 4 Nov 2004 @ 00:17 | 283 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Social Network Marketing |
 Smart Mobs: Hoping to cash in on the popularity of social networks and blog communities, POPstick has launched POPstick Outburst, a social network marketing system that entices consumers to participate in online communities centered on branding initiatives.Hm, I don't know. There's a lot of power in social networking, and if done right, freely communicating people could well have a symbiotic relationship with companies delivering what they like. But I'm not sure it will work if directly sold to those companies as a marketing ploy. [ Articles | 3 Nov 2004 @ 23:45 | 282 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| The Richest Man in Babylon |
 George S. Clason's little book "The Richest Man in Babylon" is one of the classic instructions manuals for how to attain wealth, without necessarily breaking a sweat. Just following some simple principles. It is a fable about a man named Arkad.In old Babylon there once lived a certain very rich man named Arkad. Far and wide he was famed for his great wealth. Also he was famed for his liberality. He was generous in his charities. He was generous with his family. He was liberal in his own expenses. But nevertheless each year his wealth increased more rapidly than he spent it.I'll quote some of those laws some other time. [ Articles | 3 Nov 2004 @ 21:23 | 175 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| The Reluctant Entrepreneur |
 My name is Flemming Funch. I'm starting this weblog as an experiment in exploring entrepreneurship.
As the beginning of an excellent before-after story, I start off right now being broke. In recent years I've mostly made a living making computer programs and managing internet servers. However my only stable contract just got cancelled. Meaning that as of this week I have no reliable income. And I have zero reserves. A year ago I moved with my family to another country, France, from the U.S. I'm the only provider for my family of five, and we're in a new, little known place, speaking a different language. So, to put it briefly, I'm motivated. Motivated to do something different, start something new. Right now. I could go look for a job, of course. But that's not what I have in mind. No, I'm rather thinking of how to develop businesses I can run on my own, and streams of income that will continue whether I show up in a particular office every day or not. And there's no denying that there's a lot of potential in being an internet entrepreneur. But how, what, where, with who? That's what will be explored here. For myself and for anybody who wants to read along or participate in what emerges. I'm not without skills and connections and knowledge. They are however primarily in other fields. I've written some big pieces of software that have done great for other people. I'm a trained counselor and master practitioner in NLP. I understand people quite well. I wrote a couple of do-it-yourself books about educating oneself into being a a personal counselor. I started an idealistic activist community online that has existed since 1995 and has 9000 members. I write a weblog about philosophical and technical patterns of change, which has 1500 readers every day. And, oh, I've done many other things. But the things I've done have either been as a cog in the wheel of somebody else's business. Or they've been totally divorced from the money and business world. Idealistic, often anti-commercial ventures to try to inspire the creation of a better world. The people I normally speak with are in a different category than what I envision here. Oh, many of them are successful business people or well employed. But we're not talking about money-making opportunities. But, although I want to talk about different things here, in a different way, it is an important criterion for me to speak with a real voice. I.e. to talk about what is actually going on, what I actually think, without getting into some kind of hyped-up, fake marketing speak. So, here we get into why you see the word "Reluctant" in the title. I find many kinds of sales speak and MLM talk to be fake and off-putting. I really can't bring myself into promoting things I don't believe in, just because there might be money in it. And I have many philosophical and moral issues with how money-making is done. I have to overcome by own distaste and revulsion, just to look at it. So, what I'm attempting here is to explore it without letting my own integrity out of sight. And maybe that will be useful to other people who don't quite feel in-tune with many of the money-making opportunities that are out there. I'd like to be able to look back at this point in a year or two, being independently wealthy and enjoying life, and being able to say that I did it without losing my soul. And that I've left a trail that will be useful to others. We shall see. [ Articles | 3 Nov 2004 @ 17:40 | 407 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
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