I worked for Elite Marketing Int. For about 6 weeks. I know that doesn't sound like a lot of time, but in this business, it really is. For all of those who will try to say that I just wasn't good at it, let me tell you you're wrong. I was a "rock star". I went out solo on my 3rd or 4th day, and I was training people in my second week. I became a leader at the end of my 3rd week. Of course, they put me in a fairly poor location in my third week without much traffic, so in order to sell enough on the critical day that would decide my promotion, I actually left my event early, went to my mom's house, and she bought all of the items that she was thinking of buying from me in order to drop the right amount of pieces. I know you're not supposed to do that, but having learned B2B and being very uncomfortable with it, what else could I do? So I told them that I went to my salon and dropped those, and got my rhino pin.
Well, I was a leader for 3 weeks. I lost a lot of money paying people while I was training them. Sometimes I'd even train other leaders' guys just to "get the experience" and pay half of what they were supposed to get out of my pocket.
I started getting really sick. I already have a bad knee from dancing, so standing up from 7a-9p was horrible for my knees. But all of a sudden I was nauseous, and one day at Lowe's, I actually threw up in the parking lot. My manager, Patrick Gefrich, would not let me take off a day unless I had a doctor's appt. I was fatigued and sick, and I had already been to the doctor. I needed rest. I needed to not work 14 hour days (work a full 8 hours my a*!) But my manager made me work. Another thing about those 14 hour days - when I was hired, I said that I teach dance t, th at 8:00, and I would need to leave at 7:30 every day. That was fine until the 2nd week, when I started being lucky to leave at 9:00. The more seniority you have, the later you have to stay before you can leave. So now I was missing my most important obligation in my life, and I was letting people that I love, my dancers and the owner of the studio down.
But I regress. So I was starting to feel down about the job, and not feel like I wanted to stay. It wasn't because I wasn't selling well, I actually usually came back with a couple of pieces in my box. It was because I was starting to see this company for what it was. YES - they offer an opportunity. It does make money, but it doesn't have much independence. But it goes about it with deception. We led people to believe that we actually were helping DARE (one of the reasons I was excited to work there). When I realized that we weren't giving them much of the profits, I got upset.
Once I became a leader, I was taught how to do interviews. We were supposed to keep it simple. We weren't Quantum, or Innovage, or Cydcor, or Granton. We were just this litte marketing company trying to expand our market. I think that's because they were more likely to find bad things said of the other names than of this little marketing company named Elite. And even as I worked there I was told - "DS MAX, we have NOTHING to do with them. DS Max doesn't even exist!" Yeah, that's right, DS-Max doesn't exist, because they CHANGED THEIR NAME. DS Max is now Innovage. I couldn't understand how we had nothing to do with them when all of the boxes in the warehouse had DS MAX written all over them. Now I know.
So as a leader I did two days of O. One of them saw the company for what it was, called a cab, and left me. The other one, a sweetheart named Amina, chose to give it a try because she liked ME, and was excited to work with ME, as I was excited to work with her. Unfortunately for Elite, she came along when I was feeling very ill, and getting very weary of the company. So when, on our car ride back on the first day she said, "I'm not going to come inside, I don't think I'm going to come back anymore. The only reason that I even decided to start was because of you" I turned to her and said, "then you shouldn't come back anyway, because I have tomorrow off, and I might not be coming back after that."
So on Friday I called and told Patrick that this wasn't the job for me. He didn't even care enough to call me back and ask me why. I felt so important. So needed. I wasn't.
I've kept up a friendship with my "guy", Amina. I tried to keep up a friendship with a man that I had connected with at Elite. His name in Darron. He kept in touch for a while, but has stopped. I think he's being discouraged from talking to me because they're afraid that I might "neg" him out.
Oh, and the reason I was so sick is that I had a lot of gallstones, which with the fast food that I had to eat, or the lack of eating, made me really sick. I had to have surgery about a month after I quit and took a month to recoup. That probably would have been the end of my days at Elite anyway. The scary part is that they cared so little about my health, and gave me such a hard time about going to the doctor, that my gallsones could have become fatal if I had continued to work there much longer. That is so scary to me, and I'm so glad that I saw the light when I did.
For all of you still working with these companies, I know it seems like there's nothing better out there, but trust me. There is.
Sorry this is so long. I just had a lot to say.
I am college educated (in the midst of being), and I shouldn't have fallen for this. It's so hard to find out about this company before hand if you don't know this site. I checked out the BBB, nothing there.
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