After seeing the "Crazy Fox" commercial on television we rushed to the computer to go to their web site. We submitted our information and $9.95 to receive more information on a home based business that promised to make us wealthy. Our "coach" called and left voice mail messages saying it was urgent that we contact her right away.in the meantime we received the $9.95 training package. We were instructed by our mentor (coach) to watch the training package and set up an appointment with her to take place after watching the training package. We made the appointment and she gave us a code to watch the second half of the training package. Before we were given a code we had to pay $29.95 for a starter business package. We watched the second half of the DVD and had another phone meeting with our coach. She told us in order to become successful we had to purchase the "supervisor inventory" for $4,000.00. This would give us products to sell at a 50% profit to us and qualify us for the seven levels of income. We did purchase the Supervisor inventory thinking that we found a perfect opportunity with Herbalife. How could we fail? After all we were going to have a coach that would help us to achieve our financial success. Turn key business tools and top notch training were available and if we did exactly what our coach and upline told us to do we were going to be successful. Failure was not an option!
After going through the "Welcome training" I realized that this new opportunity was going to cost us even more money. The I-Office business management site and a web based webinar/message center all came with initial $199 sign up fees as well as $60 monthly fees. Also, as part of the training you must purchase sample packs, business cards, a messenger bag and the list goes on and the costs to get started keeps going up. Keeping the faith at the coaching of my mentor I continued with the training and paid all of the costs for these "success" tools. I was believing that it takes money to make money.
Towards the end of the web based training program my coach insists that we get on the phone with her coach (our upline) for a three-way call. The purpose of this call was to get us to buy "media" leads. They pushed hard and convinced us to purchase the leads at $2600 - $3,000 per month. I completed the training, purchased the leads and worked diligently calling all of my leads for five hours every evening. These were supposed to be premium leads, but all I got was hangups and wrong phone numbers with no reimbursement for bad leads. At this point I was still spending more money than I was making but I was convinced that the plan does work eventually if I keep working it. This continued for six months of working hard and making no money. After cold calling these leads, I didn't see any value as most of these were useless leads for various reasons and there was no lead replacement policy for bad leads. My prospects could care less about the incredible opportunity that I had to offer. I never did have the opportunity to speak to a $20 media lead named Cup Cake because the phone number he provided was a number to a sex chat line and no one there wanted to listen to me pitch my incredible home biz opportunity.
The truth is the market has become saturated with Herbalife and that other distributors have given the company a bad reputation over the years. This observation is based on many responses from my more intelligent prospects that actually took the time to listen to me. They encouraged me to find another company because they thought I did a good job performing my prospecting steps with them. Many times the no came after they found out the name of my company. This was very discouraging and that my diligent efforts at success with this company were futile to say the least.
I soon began to realize that I simply could not afford to stay with this opportunity and continue with the plan that my mentors had laid out for my success. I was racking up credit card charges and there was no money coming in for my hard work. There was literally no return on my investment no matter how hard I tried to make this program work. I was going broke fast! The plan for achieving success was very costly.
More frustration set in because I also felt that my up line seemed to have too much control over me and my business and this did not feel like it was my business and I was not my own boss. The numerous training calls and filling out my nightly reports and submitting these up to my upline every night left me with little time for my family. It felt like I had bought another job and I was working for someone else againbummer! Training calls consisted of pushing us into buying more media leads and reprimanding us for not making our dialing sessions on holiday weekends. It seemed like our mentors were disappointed in us and made us feel like failures. Our upline mentors kept referring to distributors they wished they never met and as time went on I was convinced that I was one of them. After a while, numerous scolding emails from our mentors written in large red capital letters found themselves in my email trash without even being read.
Six months of working this business every day and I was becoming more and more discouraged and deeper in debt. My incredible opportunity turned into a nightmare. I dreaded picking up the phone to call a prospect, or listening to another training call. I was more willing to eat worms for fifty grand so I could kiss this home based business goodbye and be out of debt. I found myself being envious of the prospects that slammed the phone down on me when I called on them because they were a lot wiser than me. All of a sudden my job was not so bad. At least they did pay me for my work. I am very thankful that I didn't do something stupid and quit my job for a career in Herbalife.
To sum it all up the only ones getting rich here are my upline, credit card companies and the upline owned advertising/marketing tool companies. I had invested $35,000 in this home based business for nothing in return except a huge amount of credit card debt and unused Herbalife products that I cannot even give away.
We submitted our distributor resignation to Herbalife a month ago. We are still waiting for our packet to get a refund on our unused product. Herbalife does not treat their distributors very well and their web site has not been updated since Shep was a pup.
My advice - Greed does make you stupid. Do not get involved with Herbalife. Just recently, I have read that these products are unsafe and have dangerous amounts of lead in them. I cannot even give my leftover products away! Beware - this upline organization is running a new television commercial advertising their training packages on how to get rich. Don't fall for it.
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