Jack Bastide had always prided himself as a man with the passion to call his own shots. Handsome, articulate, smart, and extroverted enough to wow people over, Jack had made a successful place for himself in the computer industry as a programmer in the early 1990s.
"I was getting by, living the American dream, happily married, and for the better part of most days content. Sure, I still had my dreams of financial independence," Jack told me, "but it would take the evaporation of my industry to push me out of my comfort zone."
Jack didn’t feel like Superman the day he stepped into that hot New York City phone booth, but as fate would have it, something transformative was about to happen. Nothing in his past could have prepared him for Network Marketing. He hadn’t even heard the term and couldn’t have told you what it meant if his life depended on it. There, stuck in a corner of the booth, was a sign of things to come in the form of a business card reading only, ‘Earn More in One Month than Doctors Earn in a Year.’
"It couldn’t have appeared on my radar at a better time," Jack recalls. "Jobs were drying up in computer programming faster than a puddle in the sweltering August heat. This was an industry going the way of the dinosaur, and after being laid off, I just couldn’t find work in the industry that had been my bread and butter for so long. This little white business card I found seemed like a gift from above."
"It just so happened that my burning desire to be my own boss and run my own show had begun to burn a hole in my consciousness again. I just knew that there had to be something better than the nine-to-five grind." Yet, trained to search for work in traditional ways, Jack had answered an ad in one of the New York papers for a sales job that coincided in perfect timing with the business card he now had resting in his shirt pocket next to his heart.
"What the heck," Jack thought, "I’ll just kill two birds with one stone." Jack recalled later, "This seemed perfect. Here I was with two opportunities to make money, so I scheduled the meetings back to back and headed out to meet my destiny. Since I had been making ends meet by owning a potato chip route, this double interview seemed a small price to pay."
Jack continued, "I was looking to get back into the job market at this point in time. The potato chip route had taken up the last two years of my life. I had tried to find work immediately following my first layoff, but after six months of searching for another job in programming without success, I purchased the potato chip route on borrowed money. It was a nightmare of a business with long hours and little return, so I was anxious to find something new."
When fate and opportunity meet, the rest is history. The morning of Jack’s interviews, he felt enormous elation soar within himself. "This might be the night I find something better," he thought.
Dressed in his best business suit and ready to make a stellar impression, Jack arrived promptly for his first interview. A young couple entered minutes later and sat down nearby. They were the only people in the room. Years later, Jack recalled, "I couldn’t shake the feeling throughout the whole presentation that they were plants. Although to this day I can’t prove it, the whole evening just felt like a setup."
Jack listened with the intensity of a hound after prey as the presenter made his pitch for Equaloxe*, a now defunct Network Marketing company. "Equaloxe was an opportunity I had found in a classified ad in the New York Times in the sales job section. A lawyer had placed the ad saying how Equaloxe had allowed him to leave his practice. His ability to leave a law practice and make even better money was intriguing to me.
"I sat there mentally kicking myself because I knew nothing about Network Marketing, and I had a whole different idea in my mind about the sales position for which I was interviewing. Here I was sitting in a hotel meeting room watching a video for a company that sold nutritional supplements. The only idea I could compare it to was sending chain letters! My ignorance was just huge at that point in time, and I was just totally confused."
Jack later recalled, "I left the meeting with my head in a spin. The Equaloxe presenter/distributor wanted me to lay five grand in start-up costs down on the table. He shrewdly told me that this would buy me enough of the products to elevate me to the status of ‘Manager,’ where commissions were higher."
"At the time I had no idea that this was called front loading," Jack said. "I couldn’t have explained the concept if my life had depended on it. I just knew that my wife wouldn’t be very pleased with me. However, I was willing to risk her displeasure and warehouse $5000.00 worth of products in my garage if it meant a job in sales where I could call my own shots.
"As I can tell anyone now, front loading is being asked to purchase inventory in excess of what you can personally use and storing it with the hope of someday selling it. This is beneficial to the company and the upline but often results in a garage full of unsold product; thus the term garage qualified," Jack said.
As luck would have it, Jack declined to lay his plastic on the line until he weighed whatever he might learn from his second scheduled interview that night. "That little business card was another lifeline. I wanted to explore all my options as I was itching with desire. All the work I had done previously in my life had paid me well enough, been respectable enough, but had come with all the baggage associated with working for someone else," Jack said.
"I was tired of the headaches that I traded daily for a wage, and I wanted to be free of them. No more bosses, no more worrying about money, and no more making someone else rich. Here I was in my early thirties, and I knew in my heart that it was now or never if I was ever going to realize my dreams," Jack explained.
Jack wasn’t focused on a particular industry or product for which he had a passion. He was focused on any opportunity, regardless of the product, if it would allow him the pursuit of financial and lifestyle freedom. Looking back, Jack recalls, "I had no idea what I was doing, but I was obsessively driven to do it. When I got to the second meeting that night, I met Roy Grayson*. Roy was presenting the ‘business card’ opportunity where you could ‘Earn More Money in One Month than Doctors Earn in a Year’ with a company called Neutron*.
"For the second time in one evening, I found myself in a Network Marketing presentation with no concept of what that meant, but like many others have experienced, the inspirational value of that meeting was priceless. Needless to say, I was impressed with the advertising pizzazz surrounding Neutron," Jack said.
"There were many famous athletes endorsing the products, which were a line of nutritional supplements. The whole atmosphere was full of excitement. They even had an endorsement as a sponsor for the 1996 Olympics," Jack recalled. "I was hooked on the glamour. It didn’t occur to me till years later that Neutron may have simply purchased that Olympic sponsorship."
Jack remembers, "As I drove home that evening from the hotel, I couldn’t help but wonder what was going to happen. I was dizzy with excitement. I had listened with rapt attention to Roy Grayson, the presenter and now my new upline sponsor, and had plunked down $1500.00 for five ‘lifetime packs’ to sell to my friends. It was the price of getting started."
"When I mentioned to Roy that there was no way I could have the products shipped to my house without my wife finding out, he suggested that I have them shipped to his house. His garage was a perfect warehouse. I was in business! I was a Neutron distributor and I had product! In a word, I was naïve!" Jack said.
Jack laughed, "You know," he said, "looking back many years after the fact, it’s amazing how much I have learned in the school of hard knocks. Some days, it’s a wonder I accomplished anything. The only support I received as a new Neutron distributor was one day of training that consisted of marketing ideas that mimicked how I was introduced to the business. Here I was, for over a year, running around like a maniac putting stickers and business cards with my 800 number in phone booths! This was truly marketing by the seat of my pants."
Jack smiled and began his story again, "I only lasted in Neutron for about a year. My wife had disagreed with the idea from the beginning, and I finally began to see things through her eyes. This wasn’t the right opportunity for me. When I laid all the facts on the table, I had made a grand total of $300.00 and sponsored only two people for all my time and energy. If you considered the weekly hotel meetings and the recruitment effort that went into getting one prospect to attend that meeting, it was a losing proposition."
"One thing I discovered," Jack said, "is that understanding the company’s compensation plan in detail is essential. At the time, Neutron had a breakaway compensation plan that posed just too many hoops for the average person to jump through. There was the possibility to make a lot of money by personally sponsoring 12 people. However, too much money was being left on the table for the small distributor; especially when the stats show that they will usually only sponsor two people into the business. Never believe anyone who says that you can be successful by only sponsoring two people. It takes many more than two to be successful."
Leaving Neutron behind, Jack felt like an old soldier returning home from battle; weary but not spent. "It wasn’t over for me yet, not by a long shot. I had the Network Marketing bug bad. I could see what this could do for me and my family if I could just find the right opportunity," Jack explained.
Jack went on, "All the experiences that Neutron had given me made me consider the variables that went into each unique networking opportunity. I knew now to avoid front loading. I also knew that I had to have better training and wouldn’t want to participate in a company with a breakaway comp plan again. I was learning what worked and what didn’t. However, I can tell you right now that I didn’t fully realize just how unique each Network Marketing company was until I had experienced it for myself."
"All of this was back in the early days of the business when structures were different with each company, payouts varied, and training was virtually nonexistent. It was literally impossible to judge how long a company might be in business without doing a thorough investigation. At that time in my life, I didn’t know how to really examine the bones of the organization and the management structure. It was still mostly an emotional decision for me. I wanted to leverage the experience for the money and the time freedom. I was ready to go back into battle for a few more lessons," Jack continued.
Jack went on, "Like most Network Marketers, learning firsthand is often the only introduction into this business. Unless you’re lucky enough to have friends who’ve been there and done that, or industry watchdogs giving you the latest scoop on what companies are viable, it’s nearly impossible to know the good from the bad and the ugly. There are very few Network Marketers in the business today who don’t have battle scars of their own."
Jack’s next experience was with a company called ING*, a company that sold prepaid phone cards with a binary compensation plan. He was introduced to ING by a man named Jim whom he had tried to recruit into Neutron. Jack liked the idea of a phone card as a product because the timing was right and the market seemed poised for explosive sales.
ING’s binary compensation plan was something with which Jack was totally unfamiliar. It sounded great as Jim explained it, "Don’t worry, I’ll put people under you. Just recruit two people and you’ll get my spillover." Two months later ING was out of business, but Jack was hooked on phone cards and spillover.
"The way I saw it," Jack explained, "was that if I could find the perfect phone-card Network Marketing company with a price point per minute comparable to the old industry giants, I’d have a winner on my hands."
As luck would have it, Jack’s habit of scouring the newspapers would not go unrewarded. "I answered an ad in USA Today placed by a distributor for Son Not Telecom*," Jack recalled. "I had a gut feeling this one was going to be good. Son Not Telecom met all my criteria for the perfect Network Marketing opportunity at the time. It was a phone-card product, and it had a binary compensation plan with spillover."
Jack elaborated, "At the time phone cards exploded on the national scene, many of the companies had huge markups on the minutes and thus appeared to be nothing more than scams. Son Not Telecom, however, was different. The rates per minute were reasonable.
"What I hadn’t fully understood was the binary compensation plan," Jack explained. "I hadn’t been in ING long enough to have grasped how it really worked. I was so enamored with spillover that the concept of how the two legs in the binary compensation plan paid out had gone completely in one ear and out the other. Jim had covered the concept, but it just hadn’t stuck in my mind. I was about to get a firsthand experience that would burn the lesson of binaries into my brain forever." Jack laughed again. "It was a painful lesson.
"Keep in mind," Jack went on, "I was still working full-time to keep a roof over the family’s head. I had been lucky and found full-time employment with Prudential Securities as a computer programmer, but I was pouring every spare minute into working the phone-card business on the side. When the phone cards finally took off for me, I ended up with a runaway leg.
"A runaway leg is the leg in your binary compensation plan that by its very nature would consistently and continually outperform the weaker leg," Jack said. "This leg exceeded my wildest expectations for sales volume. I kept dreaming of all the fat commission checks that would be coming my way, until I learned differently. I found out that I would only be paid on my weaker leg. It was a painful and critical wake-up call as to how much money this type of plan wasn’t paying me.
"On the other hand, the good thing that impresses me to this day," Jack said, "is that I got lucky with Son Not Telecom. I had a great upline sponsor. This was my first experience with someone who actually used tested marketing concepts like lead generation and cooperative advertising. It was beginning to sink in that if I was going to be successful, I was going to have to treat the Network Marketing business like a real business."
The writing was on the wall at Son Not Telecom when incompetent management and poor business practices put the company out of business. "I had been there one year," Jack recalled, "and was earning about $500.00 a month. I wasn’t getting rich quickly, but the payback was sufficient to keep my interest peaked.
"This one really stung," Jack said, "because I had a good upline. I was working to compensate for my runaway leg, and I liked the easy to sell product. However, I hadn’t done my homework. I hadn’t investigated the company. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I should interview the company management and review their business operations BEFORE getting involved. I was letting the emotion, the enthusiasm of the business, and my blind optimism get the better of me. Any appreciation of traditional business practices on my part had simply flown out the window.
"Just as my days at Son Not Telecom were coming to a close, I was approached about a company called Fotofolio International*. Fotofolio was touted to be the solution for those of us who had failed at other Network Marketing attempts. The bait was simple. I was invited to get in on the ground floor, pre-launch phase of a business where there would be enormous opportunity to earn multiple checks from multiple companies. But the truth was," Jack stated, "this kind of mutual fund approach to Network Marketing had been tried several times before and failed. I just didn’t know it at the time."
Jack went on, "This was 1994, and the idea that attracted me to Fotofolio International was that it was a ‘mutual fund’ of multi-level marketing companies. I was promised I would be taking wheelbarrows of money to the bank. With this promise and the ground-floor opportunity, there was no way I was going to let my disillusion with binary compensation plans stand in my way. I was excited and thought that it was an incredible idea that couldn’t fail. Boy was I wrong again!
"About this time I received an e-mail from Diane Walker. I couldn’t have realized that her e-mail would spark a friendship and even a business partnership that endures to this day," Jack mused. "Those online conversations covered a lot of multi-level marketing companies."
"Yes, I remember," Diane remarked, "You told me that you were working for Prudential, as a computer programmer, and doing Network Marketing on the side.
"Jack came across as someone who was already successful and knowledgeable," Diane laughed. "Boy, did he have me fooled! I had no idea at the time that he had been through so much and not yet made it! He presented himself well, and I was looking for someone who knew their way around the industry. We became great online friends and later business partners.
"I was new to Network Marketing and just getting started in Lifetime Programs*," Diane recalled. "As a novice, I thought Jack was the old guru of Network Marketing! I was all ears and ready to learn anything he was willing to share."
"Diane hammered me with questions about Fotofolio International," Jack said. "She really was tenacious about wanting to understand the business. Diane was in Lifetime Programs at the time, and our relationship began with a lot of good-natured bantering between the two of us. I teased her about her ‘jalopy’ company; she teased me about the wheelbarrows full of money that I had told her I making. However, the crow was all mine to eat as Lifetime Programs endures to this day and Fotofolio is long gone," Jack laughed.
"That’s right," Diane chimed in, "I couldn’t make heads or tails out of Fotofolio International. It just didn’t make much sense to me that you could join one company and then put prospects into another. It appeared to me that if you made any money in one of the companies, you would be giving it back to the next company. It seemed a little crazy to me. However, in the process of our conversations Jack and I discovered we had a lot in common both in our life and in our business philosophies.
"While we are opposites in temperament, Jack liking the limelight and me preferring the background, we knew instinctively that between the two of us we had the perfect head for business. By combining our skills we could help others," Diane declared. "We were both pretty stubborn and adamant about making it work. We were much too determined to ever quit."
"Yes, that’s true. If ever there were two people whose unique business and social talents perfectly complemented each other, it was us," Jack stated. "I enjoyed being the front man presenting concepts and engaging people with the ideas. I was the hunter. Diane, on the other hand was relentless about follow-up, closing the sale, and babysitting both the customers and the team. She was the gatherer and had patience to work with them and answer their never-ending questions."
"We didn’t know it then, but we had the characteristics for an enduring and complementary friendship. Our spouses were as much alike as we were, so the whole thing just meshed."
"You know though, Jack," Diane chuckled, "don’t you think at the time that it was really more like the blind leading the blind?
"Actually, thoughts of a friendship were the last thing on my mind when I initially contacted Jack," Diane articulated. "I was on a mission that Lifetime Programs had awakened in me. My compelling why was to learn a different lifestyle and free myself from the job scene.
"For years I had been a stay-at-home mom, caring for my children until they were old enough to attend school. Because my husband and I wanted them to attend private school to get a decent education, it became imperative that I go to work to assist with the cost of tuition. Through the grapevine I learned that I could drive a school bus at the private school to cover the cost of this expense and still be around when the kids were home, taking them on the bus with me," Diane remembered.
"Even though I had never driven a bus before, I was confident that I could learn anything if I set my mind to it," Diane said. "It seemed like a perfect solution at the time. However, as I was yet to discover, I just didn’t possess the patience necessary to chauffeur a bus load of screaming schoolchildren. A year or so later, I quit. I was brave enough to try anything once and smart enough to let it go when it wasn’t working. So I went out into the world to seek employment among adults, where it was quieter. I only needed to earn a part-time living to cover the tuition.
"I worked part-time for about five years doing different things that I enjoyed very much. Some of the things I did included payroll processing in the citrus industry and working in several insurance agencies. I did some part-time, seasonal work as well. This way I could be home in the summer when the kids were out of school. It was the best of all worlds at that time. As the kids got older, I began to think about security, benefits, working full-time, and finding a job, preferably one with no commute," Diane remembered.
"What I really had my sights set on was a job at Honeywell. It was within two miles of my home and had excellent benefits and the work promised to be interesting. I figured that a job there would offer me long-term security, because they were a major corporation. I made up my mind that Honeywell was where I would be working next. Once my mind is made up, wild horses can’t stop me from getting where I want to be," Diane said.
"I put in my application and went on an interview. Even though there was nothing available at the time, I was very determined to end up there. I checked to see who I knew that might work there to keep their eye out for me on job postings and found a friend of a friend. She told me of a job opening posted internally, so I called and applied. I was finally called in for an interview, which went fairly well. I kept in touch and just kept bugging them so that they wouldn’t forget about me! The ability to continually remind people of my presence is one of my best traits!" Diane declared.
"The problem was that Honeywell kept telling me there wouldn’t be a position open for a few months. Always one to find a solution to any problem, I came in the back door by signing up with a temporary agency. I told them that I wanted the next position available at Honeywell no matter what it was. I ended up taking a job through the temporary staffing company and working for two months in this capacity. I immediately let personnel know I was there and what department I was in. Within a few weeks they called me up and offered me a permanent position in the finance department," Diane spoke softly.
"For the first five years I loved Honeywell. I loved the work, the people, and the company. I looked forward to going to work every day. It was challenging and fun. It was here that I was introduced to the world of computers. Initially, I felt like a duck out of water, but I knew that my desire to take on this technology and my tenacity to see it through would help me overcome my initial discomfort," Diane said.
"I took to PCs like bees to honey. At the time, Honeywell had Apple computers (IIes), and I fell in love with them. The company was always quick to shift to the latest technology available, so we changed over to Windows PCs as they became standard in the industry. From this beginning, I shifted easily into Windows and learned all the software programs including Lotus, Excel, Quattro, Paradox, Access, and Word. I was in seventh heaven!" Diane exclaimed.
"This was the learning challenge I had been seeking," Diane said. "I taught myself all the new software packages and soon became the department expert. I enjoyed helping others and leading the way. Whenever a new program came along, I taught myself and quickly adapted our reporting to the new software. It was great fun at the time.
"Then something very demoralizing started to happen," Diane sighed. "Change was in the air. The first thing that happened was that the company sold out without notice to another company. This was in and of itself very shocking to everyone. It was followed by a brief period of adjustments, changes, and some spurts of growth, but soon this change led to downsizing. People were laid off weekly, and no one knew if their job was secure. The environment changed. It became quite depressing, and morale was extremely low. Nobody knew who was leaving next.
"When a company goes from around 2,700 employees to less than 800 employees over a 9–12 month period and changes its name twice, it’s easy to see the writing on the wall. All our workloads were increasing as personnel left. Salaries were frozen, and raises were nonexistent. With morale so low, it became a very sad environment. People either didn’t talk, or if they did talk they were fighting. It made me realize that I had to do something else. I just didn’t know what at the time," Diane recalled.
"As I was exploring my options, I came home one day to discover a letter from a complete stranger promising financial independence," Diane remarked. "What really caught and held my attention was the quality of the letter. It was on expensive resume paper and came in a very high-quality envelope. I was extremely attracted to the passive marketing aspect of this business. All I had to do was mail letters, put my identification number on the bottom right corner of each letter, and sit back and watch as recruits were placed on my team by my sponsor.
"Boy, was I naïve!" Diane laughed. "I was told the name of the company was Hills International*. However, after mailing out the first batch of several hundred letters, I was informed that I would be part of a company called Lifetime Programs* instead. My upline said this move was for the better, and who was I to question the ‘experts,’ so I believed them. This was my very first introduction to MLM.
"Now keep in mind," Diane continued, "I had no idea what Network Marketing was. I didn’t even realize at the time that Lifetime Programs was a Network Marketing company! All I knew was that the concept was simple enough. I was just looking for a business that I could do, and I was following the advice of the people that recruited me by simply responding to their letter.
"Over the course of my time with Lifetime Programs, I mailed thousands and thousands of letters," Diane remembered. "One day, a friend of mine at work asked me about all the letters I was mailing as she saw me drop them off in the mailroom daily. I gave her a copy of a letter to look at and told her to call the number on it. I was curious and wanted to know what was said to people who called.
"At the time, my upline was taking all the calls for me, which seemed perfect, as I was too shy to talk to anyone. I never even questioned it! I was told they were building a business for me and in time I would see the money come rolling in. How’s that for gullible?
"What happened next blew my mind and immediately put me on red alert. My friend called the number on the letter that I had given her. When I saw her the next day, she told me that she was being sent a package of information in the mail. A week later her package came, and when we examined it, I found out that she was being put into an entirely different company. I discovered, much to my dismay, that my uplines were using my letters to recruit for whatever they wanted. It was a real eye opener," exclaimed Diane. "This was a bitter first lesson in learning not to take everything at face value.
"I immediately contacted the sponsor they assigned me. Her name was Michelle and she had sent me the original letter. I asked her what was going on. She had been doing the same thing I was doing, and we were both wondering why thousands of letters had produced NO CHECKS. Michelle was as surprised as I was to discover that our upline had been building his team at entirely different companies with all of our recruits," Diane recalled. "It was just too much."
Diane went on, "Michelle suggested that we test the waters. She volunteered to take an 800 number. We changed the identification number on our letters to see if we got any calls. Once we sent the letters with Michelle’s number on them, we began to get calls. Many of the callers wanted to earn an extra income from home! Michelle took the calls on our behalf and signed up several new distributors. We thought we were finally on our way.
"What I learned from this experience was both powerful and profound. Never again would I let the promise of a sponsor doing all the work for me deter me from keeping an eye on my business. I was extremely naïve at the time, and that betrayal was a very painful lesson," Diane sighed.
"Having experienced the success of signing up our own recruits, we felt that we knew how to do that part. It kept bugging us that the crooked uplines who cheated us were still in the company above us, and we were making them rich." Diane continued, "Michelle and I decided to petition the company for help. We asked them to investigate the folks who had been ripping us off. We also requested that we be moved to another sponsor.
"We found that this was not easy to do, as they don’t let you move or pick another sponsor. However, they did take our complaints seriously, and after five or six months and much investigation and documentation, the company graciously granted our requests. We had decided that we would interview candidates to find a good sponsor. While in theory, interviewing your upline sponsor is an excellent idea, we didn’t yet have enough experience to know exactly what we were looking for, so it was just another case of the blind leading the blind," Diane sighed.
"Our initial attempts for a new sponsor led us to Stephen and his partner Mary, a couple we really liked and respected. We felt that they were honest. They were working the business full-time and seemed to be successful. They appeared to have the knowledge to be able to teach us. We finally thought we had found a couple from whom we could receive some proper training. They were quite patient with us and answered all our questions through e-mail.
"Even though both Michelle and I both worked extremely hard, our success was elusive. We followed all the things that they said to do such as flyers, phone calls, and follow-up, but the business did not grow as we had expected. In retrospect, I don’t think that Stephen and Mary were making the money that they indicated they were making.
"Stephen and Mary soon took on an additional business themselves, which made us wonder why," Diane remembered. "This left Michelle and me with their upline sponsor who seemed to make most of his money selling his training tapes to the rest of us. When I look back now, selling tapes reminded me of the old days 20 years before when we heard about corporations that made money promoting books and tapes to their distributors.
"Michelle and I finally threw up our hands in disgust and tried to work the business together without an additional upline support," Diane continued. "This attempt on our part to run the business lasted for about a year. While it was fun and we formed a great friendship that has lasted through the years, the people Michelle and I recruited never stuck around long enough to make it work."
Diane continued, "Michelle was a trooper. She took all the phone calls and did all the front work. I held up the back end by signing them up and helping them to develop their team. However, I didn’t yet fully understand the power of the Internet.
"Our team was spread all across the country, and we didn’t have any efficient way to communicate with them. We were essentially beating our heads against the wall. Here we were signing up people in other states without any effective way to build the relationships that would sustain our efforts," Diane sighed.
"We were further encumbered because we had no effective training to give our team so that they could duplicate the system," Diane said. "Without a system that could be duplicated, it was all quite pitiful. We would sign up people from all over and then try to communicate with them by mailing paper newsletters and calling them.
"It was all very expensive," Diane recalled. "We were spending more than we were making in an attempt to help others learn. All of this trial and error was taking place before we had the opportunity to work online and use e-mail effectively. Those were the days when long-distance rates were prohibitively expensive, so calling was costly."
Diane concluded her story on her first experience in Network Marketing. "After working this business hard for about three years or so, the biggest check I had received was about $400.00. It was all very discouraging. I figured if I couldn’t make more money than this in three years, knowing how hard I had worked, I really didn’t have much to offer others.
"With the realization that I had been down the road and back again, I knew that it was time to move on and find a better way," Diane said. "I bought a PC for home and got connected to the Internet. That’s when I met Jack. I was pretty new to all this. You can understand why I thought he was the savior of the world. One saving grace was that while he didn’t know much more than me, at least he was HONEST and was not out to rip anyone off.
"I was learning my way around the Internet and accidentally stumbled on a cute, easy little product-—business cards. That’s when Automated Business Builders (ABB) showed up in my life. Since Jack and I were frequently e-mailing each other, I immediately shared the opportunity with him. This was the first company we would be in together. We weren’t partners yet," Diane continued, "but Jack thought it was cool and a good fit with Fotofolio.
"Automated Business Builders was a great business because it had an awesome product at a reasonable price. Here was a product with universal appeal. It was all about business cards. I knew that I needed some business cards, so I ordered them and found them to be of high quality. I started telling others I had met along the way, including Network Marketers. It was fun. You could buy 1,000 raised two-color cards for $30.00, which was a steal in those days. There was no start-up cost for the business. I thought I had hit pay dirt because I made $15.00 from each order," Diane said.
"I was learning to build a team, and Network Marketing was bringing me out of my shell. So it was a really good experience for me personally. Our compensation plan was a matrix with five legs, and I had four of them performing beautifully," Diane exclaimed.
"Yes," Jack laughed, "I was the only underperforming leg. It’s amazing to look back on that experience now; however, the company only lasted one year. Like most of our exploits in Network Marketing, this one didn’t go the distance. It was obvious that we had to develop more effective methods of research on the front end before getting involved with our next Network Marketing company."
"As a side note I’d like to caution people to be careful when meeting strangers online," Diane said. "I’ve been more than lucky in this regard. I did meet a guy online about this time who was coming to Florida with his wife on vacation. Because he was starting a company with friends and needed to check his e-mail while away from his PC, I invited him and his wife to dinner.
"This was long before the days of laptops. Needless to say, I took a huge risk having these total strangers come into my home for dinner," Diane cautioned. "Don and I are still friends with these fabulous people to this day, but I don’t recommend this behavior."
"The biggest lesson I learned from all of this is that both Diane and I were learning the business dos and don’ts that had always been standard practice in the corporate world. We just weren’t good at applying them to Network Marketing. We didn’t see Network Marketing embracing these practices. Things have changed now, but in the early days, it was a free-for-all as to how anyone ran their business," Jack remembered.
"We would like to have each and every reader take away some very valuable lessons for which we paid a dear price. It is our hope that every reader will use both reason and passion when exploring all the opportunities in Network Marketing today," both Jack and Diane chorused, "and that our experiences can save them all the drama we experienced."