« How a *Free* BWM is Going to Ruin Your Life. »

Over the past year, my FaceBook news feed has been inundated with people shilling for Visalus. Coincidentally, my FB friend count has decreased proportionately to the number of people joining the 90 Day Challenge. I have one simple rule, if you push BBV in your news feed, you must go. Full stop. If you don’t use FB as your marketing method, then that’s fine, you can stay.

This morning a new BBVer popped up, excited about her new BMW, and I had to finally dig into the BMW angle of Visalus. 

If you happen to join Visalus, and you attain the level of Regional Director, this means your *team* is selling over $12,500 of Visalus products every month. You can now take advantage of the *Great BMW Rip Off Offer.

Essentially, as long as your team continues to perform at $12,500/month or greater, you will get $600/month towards the purchase or lease of a new or used BMW. Oh, and the BMW HAS to be black. (shoulder shrug)

It’s up to you to go to a BMW dealership and make the purchase or lease arrangements. This means you’re locking yourself into a LARGE financial commitment, based on the uncommitted volumes of sales your team is responsible for over the next 3 years. It’s also up to you to make sure that you’ve got a credit rating that can support the purchase or lease of said BMW. It’s also up to you to purchase the insurance.

If your team doesn’t perform consistently, you lose your Regional Director status, and the $600 bonus for the BMW. Unfortunately, you, yourself are still on the hook for the lease or purchase of the car that’s now an albatross around your neck. Some stats illustrate that most MLM sales people only stay in the program for 90 to 120 days. The turnover and attrition of your team is going to be HUGE. Relying on the efforts of your downstream to ensure that you don’t default on a car that you can’t really afford by yourself is something that should be keeping you awake at night.

Provided that you’re not getting a used BMW with over 60,000 kms, you’re looking at about $35,000 + taxes for a pre-owned vehicle. (I picked a 2008 328I with 43,000 kms for the financial sampling)

 Let’s do some math here. Let’s also just consider the Lease option for a $35,000 BMW. You’ve got to put down $3800 in order to get the monthly lease rate to $600/month. 

Now you’ve got a 3 year lease to contend with. 

Sure, if your downstream tanks, you can leasebust your lease, but that’s going to cost you a few thousand dollars as well. On Leasebusters right now, there are 108 BMWs available for lease take over in Ontario. Get in line. You’re going to have to offer a pretty sweet incentive in order to catch someone’s attention and get out of the financial mess you’re now in.

You never know…. perhaps you are going to be part of the 5% of Multi-Level Marketing people who are going to be successful at this. 

On the other hand, that BMW is going to end up costing you:

$3800 for the down payment

Responsibility for the lease for 36 months

$2500 to break the lease

$1500 cash incentive for someone to take your lease

That’s almost $8000 in costs for a free car, and I’m not even going to consider the insurance portion of the expense. If you’re selling MLM, the odds are that you don’t have $8000 in your savings account to cover this. No offence.

 Sweet dreams.

Comments

[Sebastien]

Hey, interesting post... I'm a Visalus promoter - I think you know. I think you're right about using Facebook to promote, and being a little too eager and flooding everything with Body by Vi. But you have to admit that it's a genuine business opportunity.

Everything you explain about the BMW offer by Visalus is accurate - you have to negotiate the deal on your own, and there is a risk that if you fall below the thresholds, you're on the hook for the BMW payments... But that's not hidden in the offer or anything. Basically, people should see it as a $600 monthly bonus (or $300 if you don't want to buy a BMW) for achieving certain group thresholds... And it's easier than you might think.

Anyways, just thought I'd give my 2 cents... no offense taken by your post!

[jules]

Thanks Seb!
I think the challenge I have is in the misleading promotions of a Free BMW. I don't think that's the problem of Visalus, but is a tactic used by folks to bring on down-streamers.

The fact that Visalus puts some conditions around the vehicle and the size of the bonus is curious ---- but not unreasonable for a bonus plan, provided that folks go in with eyes wide open. My suspicion is that people get caught up in the excitement of thinking they're going to get a free car.... when in fact it's a pretty big expense to take on, based on an unknown variable of downstreamers.

:-D

[brian]

Many people "thrive on stupidity"