There is good news and bad news for direct sales nutritional companies.  The good news, the recession has not decreased demand in the nutritional supplement business. In fact, supplements are selling quite well in the consumer market place. In a Packaged Facts survey, 63% of adults surveyed have taken a supplement in the last 12 months. That is phenomenal news if you are selling supplements. The bad news for network marketers, people are more price conscious than ever and let’s face it, network marketing has never quite matched up with Wal-Mart’s pricing.

It is time to get a little real, network marketers. Yes, I am talking to the big distributors and company executives here.  It is time to acknowledge what the public is saying with their checkbooks. The public is buying more health and nutrition products, but not from you. Few network-marketing representatives encourage retailing and instead tell their downlines to focus on the business opportunity and personal consumption. The problem is that there is only a small percentage of people that make sustainable money with their downlines. When people don’t make money, they look at how much they are paying for their $30 bottles of juice and switch back to Wal-Mart multivitamins and $4 orange juice.

The CEO of Dominos pizza recently said, “We are going to learn and we are going to get better.” Dominos even has the guts to post customers’ pictures of bad pizza and apologize to those customers. It is time for network marketing to step up and admit that, although we have a great form of distribution, we also have some issues that need to be addressed.

We can get better, but we better start looking at some facts. In order to pay commissions of 40-50% on a product, network-marketing companies must mark up their cost 6-10 times. As a result, the product value can suffer at the expense of the opportunity.  We can preach product value all day long, but if it is too expensive, the public will stop buying.  Network marketing works because of the opportunity. I am not encouraging that to stop. On the contrary, I am saying that the days of over priced supplements for the sake of the opportunity are fading quickly.

Before you start thinking I don’t know what I am talking about look at these numbers. Packaged Facts shows that supplements continue to grow steadily in sales with the market steadily progressing from 5.5% annual growth in 2007 to 6.5% in 2008 to 7.5% in 2009, bringing U.S. retail sales to $9.4 billion in 2009. However, as supplements continue to increase in sales, network marketing companies’ site traffic continues to decline during the economic hard times.

Company   –  Monthly Unique Visitors  - Yearly Change

Tahitian Noni (tni.com) 15,277               – 36.13%

Monavie (monavie.com) 63,847              - 59.39%

Xango (xango.com) 29,259                       – 40.46%

Amway (amway.com) 453,490                  +165.68%

Melaleuca (melaleuca.com) 390,923       – 30.80%

Usana (usana.com) 74,994                         – 12.93%

Getting people to buy product with the pitch that they will eventually make a ton of money is not statistically sustainable. However, selling a great product that people want regardless of opportunity will always improve the bottom line.

I am a fanatical entrepreneur, I admit it. I love the thrill of attempting to organize chaos.  I love taking new and undeveloped ideas and making them a reality. I love challenging myself and others. I started my first business when I was 8 buying candy in bulk from a wholesaler and selling it to the neighborhood kids at retail. I have helped raise millions of dollars for two startups and I have had some great successes. I have also had some miserable failures.

For you new business owners and also you job-laden entrepreneurs seeking to strike out on your own and throw so-called security to the wind in hopes of achieving the seductive dream of riches and independence, I speak to you. I embrace you, my fellow entrepreneurs, and applaud that fire in your belly that keeps you up at night seeking something more, but I also have a couple of suggestions and warnings.

If you are afraid to talk about money, you’ll probably always be broke. Becoming comfortable with money requires an understanding that money itself represents far more to each of us than just pieces of paper. Understanding your emotions as they relate to money is vital to taking control of it instead of money controlling you. As an entrepreneur, if you don’t learn what money really means, you will never be able to help yourself, let alone others change their financial status.

Wallace Wattleswrote: “[S]ociety is so organized that man must have money in order to become the possessor of things…” Whether you are a fan of Wattles or not, he is right, the days of trading a pound of butter for a bag of wheat are a little past us now. Randy Gage wrote recently that money is a measuring stick. “If you do something at an extraordinary, exemplary and world class level in the marketplace, the market will make you rich. Because that is the way prosperity works.”

The problem is not money, but how people use it and view it. Money is a symbol and a powerful one at that. Money is not just paper to most people. According to Richard Trachtman, Ph.D., the problem for most people is that money represents such a wide area of problems including anxiety, depression, paranoia, impotence, impulse spending, gambling, social isolation, suicide, and murder. Most people have been taught that it is a taboo to talk about money. There are even books such as Etiquette written in 1922 and its new 17th edition, Emily Post’s Etiquette, that tell us it is rude in most cases to talk to people about personal finances. In 1908 Freud even connected money with feces and connected it to anal eroticism… WHAT in the world? No wonder people are so afraid of money.

No question that money surrounds us. Money can be influential, tempting and seductive. It is a main motivation in our world today. It is a primary reason for divorce and the love of money is for many one of the strongest moving forces in life.

The philosopher, Jacob Needlemansays that money must become a tool for any modern man or woman seriously wishing to find meaning in their lives. “We must use money in order to study ourselves as we are and as we can become.” Money is just a tool and it is about time we studied how we feel about ourselves.

Randy Gage is right, money is a measuring stick (a tool) and most people subconsciously know that. That is why it scares the heck out of them. People feel that money proves they are worth little and accomplish almost nothing. Why do you think people run from the topic of money and are secretive, embarrassed and conflicted about the subject of money?

If money scares you to death, join the club. It is so hard to talk about, the majority of newly weds have yet to even discuss it in any depth before the big day. However, to be successful in business and especially in network marketing, it is time to comfort your fear and understand what money can become to you, instead of how you think it defines you today.

What do you think?

In network marketing we build romantic stories about the successful leaders. We imagine that they hit home runs every at bat, throw 90 yard touch down passes and sink hook shots from 50 feet out on a consistent basis. It reminds of the Mel Gibson Classic Braveheart, where a young soldier doubted Wallace’s identity because he looked too ordinary:

William Wallace: Sons of Scotland! I am William Wallace.

Young Soldier: William Wallace is seven feet tall!

William Wallace: Yes, I’ve heard. Kills men by the hundreds. And if HE were here, he’d consume the English with fireballs from his eyes, and bolts of lightning from his arse.

It borders the absurd how we describe the accomplishments of ordinary people (Network marketing icons are really just normal dudes like the rest of us). This improper characterization is bad for new people and discourages rather than keeping them going. Who in the world really ever built their business without getting the crud beat of them?  New people get discouraged if they think they have to live up to impossible feats of marketing. In reality network marketing legends become what they are because they do the little things well. In an Eric Worre video post, he accurately tells us the secret to retention in network marketing is really just small victories. He is right.

Jenkins Lloyd Jones summed life up pretty well when he said, “[The fact is] most putts don’t drop. Most beef is tough. Most children grow up to be just people. Most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration. Most jobs are more often dull than otherwise… Life is like an old?time rail journey delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed.”

The people who think they will build their businesses with 4,000 people at every meeting and sponsoring only superstars do not understand how real success is achieved in MLM. Only marketers who consistently and diligently achieve small successes will create extraordinary profits in network marketing or make a lasting difference in the lives of their downline.

If you want a group of successful people in your downline, teach them that you will not fill coliseums without filling out a ton of names lists with newbies, teaching them to get passionate about a great product and sharing it with others. Great accomplishments are rarely achieved by overcoming the impossible with a miraculous effort in a short period of time. Great success in network marketing comes from creating habits over time that allow you to build persistently and which allow you to consistently improve your performance.

Great marketing leaders such as Eric Worre, Dexter Yager and Doug Wead are often credited with making a giant impact on groups. These icons within network marketing became who they are because of their ability to do the small things every day. I would even go so far as to say that the icons in network marketing are who they are because of the thousands of people like you and me who are doing the small things each day in their downline. The ultimate downline does not consist of just an incredible leader, but a group of people dedicated to the same goal. May I be so bold as to say that our main goal should be to deliver small victories every day to our new people.

It is time to dispel the myth of the network marketing Hail Mary which is the false belief that we can skip the growth pains and create the foundation for our business instantly and painlessly.  Hail Mary’s almost never work in American football and it does not work in MLM either. True success comes from the small and simple things done continuously. When we do the basics of network marketing consistently it can lead to exhilarating moments when we fill an arena with people.

Great leaders in network marketing are just simple people. I have met so many of them and what makes them geniuses is the fact that they know they are not geniuses. Our industry will become respected and our incomes sustained when we realize that we too can create extraordinary results by consistently doing the ordinary.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Rule 1 – Expect high output. A network-marketing superstar does not need to have years of experience in sales or in network marketing. Age and background are irrelevant. Chet Holmes says, Young or old, if you have the stuff, we’ll know
My circle of influence is much greater today, but when I started in network marketing I was 22. My circle of influence was young and I was in inexperienced.

Much as been written about ORAC scores over the past 5 years. According to The Berry Doctor, Paul Gross, it is not a viable way to judge the health benefits of nutritional supplements.