Why Someone Quit the MLM Industry AT THE TOP! ??

Wow! What an incredibly insightful tea spill about MLM companies and the life of network marketers. With such monikers as multi-level marketing, community-based marketing, network marketing, social selling, direct sales, social marketing, business opportunity, pyramid scheme, and commercial cult, these organizations have ensnared millions of individuals seeking a better life, myself being one of them. Since my "epic $#!& storm of unfortunate life events of 2011" that knocked me off-track from being eligible for "a real job", as it were, I spent many years in [first world] poverty and seeking any opportunity to get ahead. I was the perfect target for an MLM company recruiter.

Well, I'm not sure exactly why (as I don't normally consume content related to this), but for some reason, this video randomly popped up in my YouTube recommendations, and the video title piqued my interest (hey, great marketing! ??????) and I watched it. Although I had left MLM life about 3 years ago, I was curious about why someone who had reached high ranks in an MLM company decided to walk away. ??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzOt_Hmjcbo

I have worked in more than my fair share of MLMs, and the success I experienced in them was, in the grand scheme of things, virtually none. ?? Looking back, I came to terms with the fact that I just was not willing to forge the social clout required to gain traction in this type of business model. Thankfully, I already had thousands of friends who loved, trusted, and looked up to me when I first started out with MLMs, which made me a great candidate. But, like any sales gig, it's a numbers game, and when it comes to selling to friends & family, the conversion rates are extremely low, so in order to make a sustainable income, you necessarily have to make EVEN MORE friends—exponentially more friends.

That's what rubbed me the wrong way. Friendship, to me, is something that you build over the course of years and with many conversations in which each of the two people gets to know each other, their history, their family, their values, their struggles, their hopes, their fears, their quirks, their everything. All of these friendships I had took much cultivation to get the level of trust, love, and respect we felt toward each other. Friendships aren't expendable resources because a lot of personal time and investment goes into them. Working in MLMs, I felt like I had to constantly balance on the proverbial tightrope that is maintaining integrity with my friendships and selling my product.

While I, of course, only sold products that I not only genuinely believed in but also purchased and regularly used myself, the line between casually promoting your product to friends and banking on friends making purchases from me was nevertheless extremely thin and precarious. And when it came to having to quickly manufacture those "exponentially more friends" I mentioned earlier, it felt categorically disingenuous.

Taking the money and high stakes out of it, MLM companies are quite fascinating from an anthropological perspective. In fact, it's a kind of game theory. I can appreciate it on that level, but when playing with real lives and real livelihoods, Josie's video (linked above) demonstrates the ugly underbelly of how the mathematical inevitability of wins for some and losses for most affects the players far beyond their income. There are casualties to the players' emotions, self-worth, self-esteem, social security (by that I mean, where along the spectrum of "secure vs. paranoid" one lies with regard to how they are perceived socially), and even family and other relationships. I am very appreciative of Josie Naikoi's courageous and honest exposé of how that cookie really crumbles. She's even part of a movement that only just now came into my field of awareness: "The Anti MLM Movement". ?? (Go research that if you're curious...)

After many attempts at creating sustainable wealth (or even just making my minimum monthly bills) working for MLM companies, I walked away concluding that it didn't work for me because the business model inherently requires a personal sacrifice of a nature that no other sales gig does. After years with MLMs, I'm left with an overwhelming part of my employable skills being sales skills, so I've continued working in sales even after leaving MLMs, and I'm grateful for how far I've come on my sales career journey. I'll always remember my humble beginnings in sales, and I can at least thank MLM companies for getting my foot in the door of the extremely completive world of sales. ????