Is Multi Level Marketing Your Chance to be a Business Owner?

Whether you’ve seen one of the infommericals for multi level marketing business opportunities on television or you’ve actually gone to a multi level marketing seminar (or worse yet, you’ve been put on the spot by a friend or relative who has done one of the first two things), then you know all about the emotional buttons the marketers like to push to try and get you on board. Of course, there is a heavy emphasis on the all of the material gains these companies say that joining their organizations can bring you. You’ll hear testimonials supposedly from other people who have joined the program claiming that they barely work and have tens of thousands of dollars rolling in every, single month. That sounds tempting to many, of course, but another big button they push is the idea of you owning your own business. Is a multi level marketing program really the big chance to get involved in business for you that you’ve been waiting for, or is that one more pipe dream?

In reality, multi level marketing really isn’t much like owning your own business at all, or perhaps the better way of looking at it is that it has a lot of the cons of running your own business without many of the benefits. It is true that with a multi level marketing program, you have generate all of your own sales opportunities and you have to make decisions about the best way to find customers and get them on board to buy things from you. You also have to invest in the business to get it going, and you have to invest in all of the marketing tools along the way. You can also set your own hours and work as little or as much as you like. Of course, your results will vary with how much you work, but if you want to take a day off or put off working until the afternoon, you have no one to answer to. Further, you get to make decisions about bringing other people in to help you, essentially hiring employees, and you have to decide how to compensate them. Sounds a lot like having your own business, right?

Well, not so fast. These things are all true about multi level marketing, but there are also many things that separate it from actual self employment. You don’t really “own” anything. The multi level marketing parent company owns the brand, and you really work for them. They set the prices you have to pay on the products you sell, which essentially sets your own sale prices for you. They can decide to stop working with you at any time, without recourse for you, and they can prevent you from selling any other merchandise than that they offer. Further, they have their own business model, and you have to stick to it.

Multi level marketing isn’t a disaster for everyone, and with hard work and the right kinds of skills, you can make it work for you. But be realistic about what you’re getting into, so you don’t set yourself up for disaster from the outset.