Leaving Corporate Quotas Behind and Embracing a Volume-Based Approach

We're all familiar with stories of mid-level corporate employees slogging away for 70 hours a week just to generate profits … for somebody else. They wake up at 6am, don’t finish up until 7 or 8pm, have dinner, go to bed, and do it all over again. They miss out on their kids’ soccer games, on the hobbies they once loved, on quality time with family and friends.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Diligent and talented workers don't have to sacrifice their leisure time just to keep someone else’s enterprise afloat.

Network marketing has in recent years emerged as a viable alternative for those who find themselves fed up with the corporate treadmill. Also known as direct sales, network marketing has been around for decades and allows entrepreneurs to make money based on the volume of products their distribution network sells, rather than getting paid on a per-hour or per-quota basis. 

It works like this: when you sell the company’s products to customers, you make a profit on each of those sales. Then, when you enroll others into  your team and  they sell products to customers, you earn an override commission. That means the entire enterprise benefits from the profits generated through the sale of products to real customers..

Rather than working a 60- or 70-hour week as you would in a corporate environment, you might work, say, 10 hours a week. If you have a small team of 10 people who do the same, you’re now effectively getting paid for 110 hours of work while only actually working 10 hours. 

Or, to look at it another way, you might draw in 20 customers by yourself, but if each member of your network does the same, you’re up to 220 customers, while doing a fraction of the sales and marketing work required to service those customers yourself.

Thanks to the structure of network marketing companies, those involved benefit from what is called leveraged income (i.e., income from multiple places), as opposed to the linear, pay-per-hour income that most people earn in a corporate environment. There is no limit to how successful you can be -- no single promotion that every employee is vying for. 

In fact, success in network marketing is refreshingly straightforward: the more sales volume your team generates, the more income you receive.

In a traditional corporate setting a certain value is placed on each job, the result being that people are not paid what they’re worth, but rather what the company believes a given job is worth. But there are no such limits in network marketing. Rather, a person’s income is dependent solely on his or her productivity. In short, it boils down to the grit, competence, and dedication of the individual distributors to achieve success. 

For folks who are all too familiar with the corporate world, network marketing offers an opportunity to excel based on merit alone, and not corporate politics. It also offers the obvious benefit of getting one’s life back -- enjoying more leisure time and a greater work-life balance -- all while continually increasing income potential.