Univera Lifesciences - Good Business Or Scam?

Univera Life Sciences is a network marketing company that provides a variety of nutritional supplements and services. They have established themselves as a leading network marketing company, and are quickly becoming known for their business opportunity.

However, there have been some concerns about the Univera business opportunity. In this article, we will go through and give an unbiased review of the pros and cons of promoting a Univera business, and see if Univera is truly a great business opportunity...or a great scam.

1. Univera - The Good

Univera was founded in 1998 by YunHo Lee, a Korean businessman that had long-suffered poor health. As the story goes, Mr. Lee tried all the tonics of conventional medicine with no results. One day, a friend gave him some juice from an Aloe vera plant, and made a "miraculous recovery".

In fact, Univera is one part of the ECONET conglomerate, which consist of

• Univera
• Unigen
• Aloecorp / Russia Biomass
• NatureTech

The flagship product for Univera is their AgelessXtra nutritional supplement. They are also have a well-structured compensation plan for their associates. As a network marketing business, you earn up to 15% on direct signups, and up to 5% on your downline, depending on what rank you achieve. They also have a 2% profit sharing program for distributors that reach a certain rank. They also have a BMW car program that allows their reps to bank an additional $1,600 per month toward the payment of a BMW. Not too shabby.

2. Univera - The Bad

The Univera business opportunity looks really good at first sight; however, flags start to appear when we see their marketing plan. Like many network marketing businesses, Univera recommends that you grow your business with "relationship" marketing, i.e. selling product to friends, family members, and others that you know. Their program focuses on leveraging your "warm market" to grow your business which worked really well...50 years ago.

We live in a very different society today than we did in the 1950's, when network marketing first got started. These days, most people do not have large warm markets, and even if they are large, most people do not like to be sold items from their friends and family members.

3. Univera - The Ugly

Another issue is the concept of marketing the business first, the product second. Like many compensation plans, Univera gives out the most generous bonuses for the recruitment of other associates, so form a distributors standpoint, they are compensated for finding distributors first, product-users second.

The problem comes when a new distributor (who is not making any money yet) approaches their warm market with a business opportunity to make money. There is a credibility issue that arises when someone who is making no money is telling other people how they can make a whole lot of money. Many network marketing companies try and resolve this issue with "3-way calling", where the distributor calls their upline (who is supposedly making money) to talk to their prospect. Unfortunately, this only positions the distributor as a gopher instead of a legitimate business builder.

Growing a Univera business can be a great opportunity. They appear to have some good products, but there are plenty of companies that have great products, and many people that market great products never make a dime. There are also plenty of terrible products that generate millions of dollars in revenue (anyone remember the pet rock?) The difference is the marketer, and their ability to target their market effectively.

In closing, I would say that starting and developing a Univera business is lucrative if you know how to use the telephone, the Internet, and other effective marketing tools to grow your business. It is not a scam, but like any business, success will be determined by the skill-set of the marketer. Univera is definitely not a lottery ticket or a stock option - meaning, you do not just buy in and wait for a payout.

If someone does not have the first clue on how to market effectively, then I would suggest they either learn how to be an effective marketer, or else just use the Univera products as way increase personal health.