With MLMs, you making the founders rich… roughly 97% of the people don’t make their original investment back (this is with MonaVie)… all the sales go up the chain to make the people who got in on the ground floor rich.

You forgot about other ideas such as writing a blog or eBook and teaching people the things you know. People will pay for that and you don’t have to buy a pile of tools to be successful – I didn’t. I don’t franchise anything. It wasn’t too difficult to come up with my idea… I simply wanted to do as you say, “Solve problems.” When you do that, it’s surprising how much money is around.

When I look at business today for the common everyday working person to get out of the job that they hate, to create a safety net, or for the unemployeed person its no real option its either franchising, MLM, and the most difficult to think, create, develop, and distribute a product or service on their own the option for most will be MLM.

My wife attended PSI in Dec 08 – prior to her going in we had a very loving relationship, like all relationships we had our issues, but if there was one thing never in doubt it was the love we had for each other. Pretty much day one of my wife coming out of the process she told me she didn’t think we had a future together, and quoted “with my new inner strength and the love I have for myself I don’t feel you fit in to my future plans, I now feel we have different perspectives on life and I need to follow my own path in life and do what truly makes me happy”.

We stayed together for the following 4 months (in separate bedrooms) and 1 month ago she moved out and said she cannot be in a relationship as she needs to focus on herself. The post’s here screams out a lot of similarities in what my wife has been saying to me post the PSI process, excluding the recruiting of friends, and the aggressive nature of the Lifespring seminar.

Post all of this happening I have spent a lot of time studying the internet and have found a lot of negative press around these residential LGAT type programs. What I found was both interesting and scary. The PSI program seems to come from the same stable as EST, Life spring etc………as Thomas Wilhite the “creator” of PSI originally worked with Werner Erhard as an aide promoting EST.

My view from what I have seen is this is a real slick operation that has taken a good look at all of the negative press around LGAT’s, and created an incredibly slick program that minimizes negative press after their process. Ie: Landmark, PSI, and Lifespring rely on re-recruiting attendees to maximize the revenue they would generate, the PSI program maximizes their revenue in one swoop as they offer a 4 day residential program that costs $550.00. People thereafter are focused on aggressively recruiting, and because they are so hyped up from the guided visualizations and meditation sessions naturally want to promote the process to their friends as they are still on a serotonin high.

My biggest gripe with PSI (as well as losing my wife) is the fact they are not accountable to anyone, they do not truly stringently pre-screen applications, and not being medically trained are not skilled enough to know when people are not suitable for the intense training they are putting people through. I ask you how can you truly assess someone by simply reading an application form……..?

My wife suffered from abuse as a child and bouts of depression; speaking to a qualified psychologist I was told my wife should not have done this process as it seems to have caused dissociation, and has caused her to disconnect from some of her emotions, hence her black and white approach towards me.

Maybe I’m being a complete idiot and maybe my wife never loved me, but I find that very hard to believe as she often called me her rock, and told me no-one has ever stood by her like I did, and gave un-conditional love and support accepting all her quirks.

Past couple discussions with him has turned into a bitter argument. What I realized I have done wrong is I make him feel like an idiot. He is upset.

Any advice?

Help a brother out, just tell us.

WE ALL WANT TO BELIEVE !!!!!!

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If he let’s me know his location or his email then I will direct him to a Distributor that would gladly tell him all about the product and sell him some at retail.
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hmmm 3rd grade thing is very tempting, but I’ll let that one go for now.
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J-man Said BTW:
I am glad your family and friends are making money on the juice (although, once again you have no proof:) If this is true then I guess being a scamer just runs in the family.

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And I guess inbreeding runs in yours.
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J-man Said : Why do I have to devil you to even respond to my comments,
I just get tired of you not answering my questions, dont you get tired of my comments????If you cant answer or dont have the answers just say so. Damn man how hard is it….

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It’s really very simply actually, but I’ll answer when I choose to do so.
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J-man Said : If everyone on here needs all of these professional backgrounds then what is yours, more so why are you even posting if we are not even worth reading???

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FIrst of all not everyone needs qualifications, just the ones taking the MV study apart and claiming it’s flawed. I don’t need any qualifications to support the results of the MV study, the study was already done, peer reviewed and published by professional scientists and researchers, not a bunch of bloggers.

Why should anyone believe that the Glen or Vogel analysis is accurate or valid compared to the professionally completed study? One thing about the MV study is that I can look up the qualifications of every scientist and researcher that was involved with, and peer reviewed it, Glen and Vogel are still just bloggers.
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I’m pretty sure that’s why it’s not amazing that people find me and not the Federal sites.

I’d also argue that it makes a difference here, since it probably has more visibility to those who are looking for information on MonaVie.

It’s truly amazing that people can find the Lazy Man blog and send emails to him, yet they somehow can’t manage to find ftc.gov or fda.gov and send emails directly to where they would actually make a difference.

I agree with replies #3, 4, & 5. The only other thing I can say from experience, is this: time away. Time away from the people in the upline, time away from all books/tapes/CDs/DVDs/meetings. Cold turkey. If the friend has the funds and the time, a nice long week or two getaway where the one friend can have NO contact whatsoever with her MonaBot friends, her thought process may clear a bit. Sadly, tho, this usually occurs over something more like a 6 month to a year span of absence or cutting off all contact/association.

The constant propaganda intake is crucial to these types of scams. Tell them you don’t have the money for book of the week, tape of the week, etc, and watch them really freak out on you. “You can’t build the business without the proper tools”, etc. They know very well that without constant indoctrination, they will lose you.

If there is anyway to remove those influences it would help greatly. I wish them both the best, recovering from something like this can be very very difficult.

Work hard, spend/save/invest prudently and you’ll do OK in life. No need to scam your friends and families into MLMs and end up ruining the relationships that are actually important in life.

About time people learnt not to trust any scheme that you have to pay money upfront though.

Also with affiliate marketing the focus is on the product. In many cases the product is secondary to the MLMer. It’s used to try to sell the next prospective person in your downline.

Most MLMers don’t sell “the business” as a full-time business. I’ve never heard anyone pitch it as, “quit your job tomorrow and work on this new business full time.” They don’t pitch it that way, because then no one would sign up.

Personally I believe you are splitting hairs in your definition of MLM vs affiliate marketing. In MLM no one gets paid until product moves, same as affiliate marketing.

I’m sorry your experience with MLM companies was not a good one. Again I want to stress that few people view such endeavors as the real business they can be and rather approach them as a hobby and thus get hobby results from them.

Cheers.

There is a very big difference between multi-level marketing and affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is earning a commission on the sales that you actually generate. Multi-level marketing urges people to “sell the dream of being rich” to others, so that you can get rich.

In every MLM system I’ve seen, the only way for someone to make any real money is by bringing in people underneath you. Of course, when you are starting out in an MLM program, you have no one beneath you, so you can’t show any prospective people your success. This often leads to people lying or giving some other testimonial that may or may not be true.

I would highly recommend that you correct your language about the business MonoVia provides. While their product may suck and the over all company might not be very good, personally I know little about the company, network marketing is a legitimate form of business.

The problem with it is that while some people are making great money, others make little to none.
The main reason?? Those that make little don’t work like they are self employed people building a sales team, which is effectively what you are doing.
There really isn’t much difference between affiliate programs and MLM companies. They both promote products for a third party company. Yet for some reason being an affiliate marketer doesn’t have the same stigma that MLM has, yet I would venture to guess there are as many making very little as an affiliate.

Please do all your readers a favor and post an unbiased review of the marketing.

Here is a suggestion for your friend “Buffy”… have her talk to Faith and just tell her that she can’t dedicate the time, energy, or money to build a business right now like Faith wants to do, as the timing for Buffy isn’t right. Buffy can still be supportive of her friend, asking how she plans to grow her business, gain more customers as well as business partners. Maybe if she asks real world business questions Faith will start to see a couple things, one this company isn’t cut out to make her dreams a reality, or she will step up and do what is needed to really be successful and that is gather real customers, and find a few people that want to also want gather customers.

Cheers!