Navigating the World of Network Marketing

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."