Monday, May 2, 2011

Pricing Yourself Out of Business

There was a recent post on Amthrax referring to a post on MLM Punisher’s blog on how much money you want.

The original post by Punisher is about the costs in Monavie. Its similar to a post I wrote about costs in Amway in Save First Spend Later.

Punisher estimated $496.90/month for Monavie and I estimated $476.90/month in Amway. Wow! Very close! $20 difference. The thing is both of us estimated these to be minimum monthly costs for a “serious business builder” and its likely much higher once you add in other costs such as meals and gas for the car. I estimated you’d have to set aside $700/month to be involved in Amway and maybe get a $10 check back each month from Amway for all the effort and money invested.

Hmmm. Spend $500 to $700 and get back $10. SCAM!!!!

Actually the real point of this post is getting back to Amthrax’s post about Punisher. One commenter said something about figuring out how much money you want to earn and dividing that amount by the hours you want to work to come up with an hourly wage. Mowing lawns and house cleaning was used as an example so it brought back another memory of the first time we were in Amway/WWDB.

We live in a small house about 1300 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 2 baths. There was another IBO in our line who’d been unemployed for awhile and thought that Amway was going to be the answer to all her financial troubles. She’d fallen several months behind on mortgage payments and I’m not certain if she had any income coming in at all. Alimony? Unemployment insurance? She was offering to clean houses at $15/hour. We felt bad for her and had her in to clean our house once a week or maybe every other week. I don’t recall the frequency. Took her about 2 hours to clean it or maybe it didn’t take that long because she was always yack yack yack and we paid her 2 hours anyway. Our house wasn’t that big to clean and not filthy dirty either. She didn’t do a good job. I mean if Ambot comes home and points out the counter is dirty and has to clean it himself then that’s pretty bad!

She’d been cleaning our house for maybe 2 months and one day she left a message on our answering machine that her rates were going up to $17.50/hour.

If she did a better job of cleaning maybe it would be worth it but we were only letting her clean our house out of pity. Its not like I couldn’t manage the housecleaning. Its not like she came into a filthy house that had to be scrubbed to death. Basically she was dusting, vacuuming, and washing the tile floors, wiping down counters and cleaning the baths. How that takes 2 hours I don't know.....Ambot left her a message letting her know we got her message and that we’d decided we didn’t need her to clean our house anymore.

The funny thing was she phoned back and left a message on our machine saying she was sorry we couldn’t afford her housecleaning services!

Ha ha, that was a laugh. She’s talking about who can afford what? Our mortgage payments were up to date. We were in a better financial position than her and hadn’t gone too deep into Amway debt at that point. We felt she wasn’t worth it at $15/hour because she didn’t do all that good a job cleaning so she really wasn’t worth it at $17.50. Priced herself right out of business. Using the philosophy of the commenter on Amthrax’s blog she must have figured out how much she needed to earn an hour to meet her monthly expenses and pay back the missed mortgage payments and that was her number and she was sticking to it. Didn’t work out too good for her though. I don’t know how many housecleaning clients she had. Only one other that I knew of who was also in Amway and had a HUGE house.

Predictably the bank foreclosed on her house and the last I heard she’d moved to another state to move in with her daughter. I wonder if Amway got the old heave ho too.....

That’s something for every business owner to keep in mind whether they sell products or offer a service. If you price yourself too high customers will go elsewhere. If you currently offer substandard products or services and jack up the price you’ve just given your customer the excuse they’ve been looking for to ditch you. Everyone who is not a brainwashed IBO knows Amway products are outrageously overpriced. Amway’s sales reports show that less than 5% of their sales are to people who are not IBO’s. So that tells me normal people who are not brainwashed ambots know a shitty deal when they see one.

Price yourself out of business and customers disappear.

13 comments:

  1. I lost it on the 'old heave-ho.' That was a good one, Anna.

    I am so happy not building amway anymore. The weight off my back is indescribable.

    CASSETTE TAPE-ASAURUS

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  2. Its such a wonderful feeling not being part of Amway anymore. The stress and tension have gone.

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  3. For bloody sakes i can go eating at a ritzy fine dining restaurant once a week and probably not spend 500-700 a month. Or take a few days off a month just to chill out with my friend and do nothing.

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  4. That's right, Colin.

    500-700/mo. would be a significant 401(k) deposit.

    CT

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  5. After the credit card was maxed out that was also the minimum monthly payment.

    That money could have gone towards a mortgage on another investment house.

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  6. "After the credit card was maxed out that was also the minimum monthly payment."

    You got me with this one LOL!

    Collin/AnnaB - agreed it's a very liberating feeling just hanging out with friends without thinking how i am going to pitch amroid "business" to them.

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  7. Its nice meeting new people and striking up normal conversations without the ulterior motive of prospecting them ino Amway.

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  8. Ah, yes. A normal conversation. We didn't know how good we had it until we had to start pitching something.

    It's the same with every mlm. I've been in several and it's all exactly the same. As soon as you sign up, the hunt begins.

    Gads, I hated it.

    Now I go out an it's pure bliss just to 'be.'

    CASSETTE TAPE

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  9. CASSETTE TAPE... You look like a real go getter. I have a business acquaintance expanding into the area and is looking to make a few people Millionaires. He's only looking for a few good people, I might be able to get you in front of him. bla bla bla. Everywhere we went we were sizing people up, making conversation with only one goal. It is and has been pure bliss to converse with people without any warped arterial motive.

    ***Former WWDB Lemming***

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  10. Our upline were looking for "sharp" business people not good ones.

    They were warped all right!

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  11. Anna, the worst lie i heard was diamonds talking about not cashing their paycheques for 4-6 months. They cash their paycheques when they turn emerald or diamond. Just to screw up the employers payroll. There's no logic to this scam and people continue to buy overpriced junk.

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  12. Ha ha had to laugh at that. Holding on to checks for a few months before cashing just to screw up the company/person who wrote it. Brought back memories of 20 years ago when I worked in an accounting department and had to reconcile thousands of checks each month. Well maybe not the cancelled ones. Had to figure out which ones hadn't cleared yet! Couldn't close out the month until they were all accounted for.

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  13. Former;

    It's amazing that we have never been prospected since 1995.- us being so 'sharp' and all.

    And amway's all the rage, right?

    The diamonds used to say how tough it was to get people in the southwest to work. It was so insulting. How are we different than any other part of the country?

    Do they think we still get around in covered wagons, too? Drive the herds to market? Use a matati to grind our corn? Use smoke signals to communicate? What, we're still hunting Geronimo? Using ancient trade routes with the Incas? We're building our houses with adobe bricks we make by hand? Spend our evenings cleaning our weapons and watching for Indian raids (I'm part Indian)? Waiting for Pa to come back from his yearly peace-pipe-smoking-ritual with the Hopis ?

    One of these days we'll get paved roads. You just watch.

    CT (CASSETTE TAPE)

    We had an upline fly in one time and when he got off the plane he said (I'm not kidding), "Wow, I can still feel the heat from the jet engines."

    Um, no that's the outdoor temperature. He couldn't believe it.

    ReplyDelete

Comments are moderated but we publish just about everything. Even brainwashed ambots who show up here to accuse us of not trying hard enough and that we are lazy, quitters, negative, unchristian dreamstealers. Like we haven’t heard that Amspeak abuse from the assholes in our upline!

If your comment didn’t get published it could be one of these reasons:
1. Is it the weekend? We don’t moderate comments on weekends. Maybe not every day during the week either. Patience.
2. Racist/bigoted comments? Take that shit somewhere else.
3. Naming names? Public figures like politicians and actors and people known in Amway are probably OK – the owners, Diamonds with CDs or who speak at functions, people in Amway’s publicity department who write press releases and blogs. Its humiliating for people to admit their association with Amway so respect their privacy if they’re not out there telling everyone about the love of their life.
4. Gossip that serves no purpose. There are other places to dish about what Diamonds are having affairs or guessing why they’re getting divorced. If you absolutely must share that here – don’t name names. I get too many nosy ambots searching for this. Lets not help them find this shit.
5. Posting something creepy anonymously and we can’t track your location because you’re on a mobile device or using hide my ass or some other proxy. I attracted an obsessed fan and one of my blog administrators attracted a cyberstalker. Lets keep it safe for everyone. Anonymous is OK. Creepy anonymous and hiding – go fuck yourselves!
6. Posting something that serves no purpose other than to cause fighting.
7. Posting bullshit Amway propaganda. We might publish that comment to make fun of you. Otherwise take your agenda somewhere else. Not interested.
8. Notice how this blog is written in English? That's our language so keep your comments in English too. If you leave a comment written in another language then we either have to use Google translate to put it into English so everyone can understand what you wrote or we can hit the Delete button. Guess which one is easier for us to do?
9. We suspect you're a troublemaking Amway asshole.
10. Your comment got caught in the spam filter. Gets checked occasionally. We’ll get to you eventually and approve it as long as it really isn’t spam.