If you’re looking to start a home business of your own, looking into multi-level marketing and currently investigating Herbalife International, I have information that will help you. I did some research and found four pros and four cons that will help you make a sound decision before investing your time, money and energy into the business. I decided on four to give you enough of a picture of what the business is like. Pros of the business: easy start up system, high quality products, high income potential from compensation plan, and interactive training. Cons of the business: high inventory costs, marketing plan, franchise site, and live trainings.
First pro of the business, Herbalife has an easy start up system. It is designed as a “turnkey” step by step system; you literally follow their instructions, click on and fill out a few forms and within minutes you’ve got a business and website of our own. Next, Herbalife has numerous quality product lines for inner and outer nutrition. The products are developed and tested by a group of scientists and nutritionists along with multiple independent 3rd party companies whose sole duty is to perform clinical trials and verify the tests of products for the various regulatory bodies. Herbalife also has compensation with great potential for substantial income. As it is designed from a multi-level marketing structure you grow your business by teaching other business owners within your down line to run a successful business. Using a principal known at duplication, you receive a percentage of their productivity. That continues until 6 levels or a tier of distributors, that’s the vertical chain of your down line, the horizontal lines of distributors are unlimited within each level. The final pro is interactive training; once you begin with Herbalife you’re given the leverage of your mentor’s ability to close sales with your customer and distributors sales calls. Once you’re more comfortable with the process and confident in your ability you can upgrade your calls with your mentor on the line listening in and providing feedback to increase your skills and understanding with each call, on occasion you can phone in on various up line leaders calls and hear how it’s done.
Cons of the business, Herbalife has high startup costs due to inventory. To begin with Herbalife you must buy into the company by purchasing inventory. The amount of inventory you purchase indicates your level with the company. The level in the company governs your commission percentage with each sale and leaves you with the responsibility of selling the corresponding inventory amount. The inventory startup cost can reach thousands of dollars and many find the task daunting when dozens of boxes are shipped to your house. Next, the marketing structure I put down as a con for a couple of reasons. The marketing plan relies heavily on your local market and the problem there is nobody’s local market is the same. You may not have the influence required to sell things like a business opportunity or nutrition products to your market. In addition, your warm market may not be a qualified market, which means not interested in or have the money to spend on the product or the opportunity. Those two factors are very variable and incredibly important because starting a home business is an uphill battle without adding those struggles to your plate. Another con of the marketing plan is that you’re relying on others for your income. Many refer to this as the problem of constant recruiting each month. I’ll back up a second, multi-level marketing uses one simple but hard to swallow law, the law of large numbers. You need to see so many people, say 100 people for 1 to be interested and you need to see 50 interested people before you find a solid lead. A solid lead is someone who is interested but has the work ethic and character needed to make the business a success; they will treat it like a full time job instead of a part time hobby. When you end up recruiting a lot of part timers you need to constantly recruit each month to acquire the income you’re seeking and recruiting takes time, money and energy.
Next, con is the website design. The websites are set up as franchise sites and website franchise sites are much like brick and mortar franchises, they all look alike and operate the same. Great for brick and mortar like subway but bad for the internet. When everything looks the same there is no unique value for the consumer that separates you from the competition and if you’re advertising on Google and so is your competition, and let’s say they pay more for the ad. They will get the customer because it makes no difference to them so they buy from the first site they see and you lose the customers because you lost the bidding war. Franchise sites are online cash registers, they work when you guide people to them and do all the work to get the money but you must be in control of every aspect of the sale. The final con is the live trainings, like many home businesses extensive training and support is a must and trainings are great, you get more understanding, more confident and overall feel good about your success. The reason it is in con is because you need to see things over and over again to understand them, absorb the information and internalize the trainings. Let’s take an example on this one, you get done with your day job and hustle to the local internet café with your laptop and since you’re a home business owner now you’ve got 15 things to do. Learn criteria, learn the operations, get better at selling, meet enough people to make it work and be on the training call. Here in lies the problem, you need the info to get better at this and fast. So you can do revenue generating activities and make money to pay bills and put food on the table. The meeting takes place and has good information but you don’t get all the information from note taking and then they move on to 30 minutes worth of announcements and promotions for your business. You have 10 minutes worth of value for your business and realize you could’ve been doing something to generate sales instead of going to the meeting. My point here is live trainings cause you to hustle to the meeting and wait for information that you hope is good, and when the meeting is over the information is gone.
When I looked at the opportunity I passed and here’s why. I wasn’t looking for high inventory startup costs and inventory management, which means I’ll have a lot of administrative duties each day to do and time is of the essence when you’re a home business entrepreneur. I didn’t like the franchise site, I don’t want a site that’s pre-maid and I can’t control and update its layout and be stuck with a digital cash register. Finally, I didn’t like being confined to my local market, I live in a small town and don’t’ want to be branded as the person who goes around pitching a business or product, people don’t like being pitched or worried they’ll be sold.
I was looking for a service, with no unnecessary amounts of inventory for my garage or basement, I wanted the opportunity to promote and brand myself and more importantly leverage my time by marketing over the internet. The internet is an incredible tool and I wanted to market in multiple places to masses of people who are looking for what I had to offer.
To see the company that fit my criteria go to my blog and for your own research, expanding knowledge and convenience I’ve provided you with the report that I used for my research into Herbalife.
Comments are closed.