World Wide Dreambuilders was founded in 1997 by Ron and Georgia Lee Puryear and is a leading network marketing promotions organization for Amway Global. Most of Amway’s total sales are generated from Independent Business Owners (IBOs), who are essentially your sales representatives.
An IBO can develop his business in different ways. One is to make individual sales to consumers, make a 35% retail margin on products, and earn a 2.9% commission. Commissions can only be made if the IBO makes a minimum of approximately $ 300 in sales. An IBO can also build volume through personal consumption, helping to achieve a minimum volume for commissions. IBOs also get a discount on products they buy from their store for internal consumption.
Product purchases can also be made on an IBO website, which is a corporate copy site. An IBO can name their own personal website and use it to redirect to their affiliate site, where customers can make their purchase or an IBO can order a product for personal use.
The most widely used method of achieving success with Worldwide Dreambuilders is word of mouth advertising when recruiting other IBOs. The idea is that when you enroll recruits into the program, you create more reach in word of mouth for Amway products. One thing that is critical to not turning this into a pyramid scheme is that there must be a minimum of $ 145 worth of product sold to consumer customers in order to receive downline performance bonuses.
In one word:
- You sign up, you start shopping in your own store as much as possible.
- You tell people about your store and create customers who buy from you.
- Inform people about the business opportunity and receive bonuses for the volume created.
The World Wide Dreambuilders recruitment program also has an elaborate means of training and mentoring your IBOs. This is done by organizing training / recruiting seminars at local hotel conference centers, distributing motivational reading and audio material for personal growth, and promoting the importance of strong family values.
It seems like a very legitimate business plan. I have attended hotel and regional seminars, which can host up to tens of thousands of people and I must say they are quite motivating and can provide excellent leadership training. I was involved with Quixtar from 2003 to 2005, which was a renowned Amway but has since changed its name back to Amway Global. I learned a lot about leading a team and gained a ton of personal sales experience, so my time with Quixtar wasn’t exactly bad.
Now, here is the list of disclosures that Amway publishes on all of its recruiting brochures. This is straight from the horse’s mouth and the information comes from an Amway internal analysis in 2000:
- Average monthly Gross income for all the “active” IBO was $ 115 (US) / $ 181 (Canada).
- Approximately 66% of all registered IBOs were “active”
- “Active” basically means trying to make a sale once in that year.
- “Gross income” means retail sales minus cost of goods sold plus the amount of commissions withheld (in ordinary people’s words, after all, how much money did you make?)
If you’re wondering if this program is a scam, it certainly isn’t. The Federal Trade Commission considers the Amway Sales and Marketing Plan to be the benchmark for all other network marketing companies. People who are successful, not just in network marketing opportunities but in all forms of financial success, would agree that hard work, perseverance, and a constant effort for learning and personal growth are key elements. This would be an important part of the success of World Wide Dreambuilders. Wikipedia has a great explanation of the difference between MLM and pyramid schemes if you are just starting to research that type of marketing.
The only improvement I would like to see with World Wide Dreambuilders is using online marketing to generate sales. Their websites never appear in search engines, so in a sense, they are just a means to buy, not a way to attract customers to the business. Things like blogging and using social media is just the tip of the iceberg of opportunity lost by using only word of mouth advertising.