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What they don’t tell you is that you never have any proprietary rights, i.e. you never ‘Own’ your business.
In fact they promote that your position can be sold ( after they take a commission on the sale and ‘if’ they approve the new puchasers)
Whilst you ‘pay’ to buy your business position under another ‘representative and a % of your work goes to your upline, (even though in many cases they do nothing to assist you, and they get a part of your hard earned commissions , irrespective of their competency).
Did you know you have to pay a renewal charge each year to ACN to keep your business going ?
Commissions on items like, land line connection fees you only get ½ commission rates, and you cannot offer your services to major businesses, and what is worse it is virtually impossible to confirm if the amount ACN pay you as commission is correct, as they don’t give you a copy of your clients bill ( they claim privacy issues) to check what they pay you is correct ! So guess what ? you get paid what they calculate and for reps this is virtually impossible to calculate. They also keep a % for bad debts ! Can you imagine that ! You have no control over who is paying and what arrangements ACN accounts department has with your clients, yet if they stuff up their own financial management with which you have no control over, they take the amount out of your commissions. You are meant to be responsible for bad debts.
You cannot cold call clients for business. In every other business you can do your own marketing, but not with ACN, they only want your friends and family ( those loyal to you) who are unlikely to leave ACN due to their relationship with you, and similarly with your downline reps, you are encouraged to ‘stitch’ up their friends also.
One huge market you cannot offer a competitive solution to is retirees, as ACN cannot match the discounted line rental given to this class of customer. Also 10% discounts offered to other telco networks for bundling of mobile, land line and cable TV also are not matched.
You have to pay for your own marketing material, even you have to pay for web based on-line reporting of your own position on a monthly basis. So you can see who is making the residual ongoing fees ! ACN company is reaping from you clients and you as well, not you as an individual representative.
At representative meetings this writer was told “ ACN customer service telephone line answer within three rings and you get to speak to a real person, unlike that major Australian telco ( meaning Telstra) where you can wait ages before speaking to anyone. In fact recently the opposite is true. Put it to the test yourself especially after hours, Telstra and Optus actually answer your enquiries faster than ACN. This is very misleading information given to reps in a reps ‘hype’ meeting alone with many other claims of superiority. The Internet has been promised for years as an additional income stream for reps, yet has never been rolled out.
ACN claim to be an international business, it really is a joke, in that contacts that you send to opportunity meetings in another country, are easily 'poached’ by local reps over there to join their team ( thereby no ‘upline’ payment is received by you for your networking efforts) and you risk loosing friends. ACN compliance department again are very slow to reply and never completely tell you a result or suggest a solution. As I said earlier they often refuse to discuss with you what action (if any) they are taking to protect your Intellectual Property ( ‘IP’ i.e. read here “your business” ) of your network.
Lets say you see another MLM opportunity, and another person in your family joins up…if ACN find out about it they will terminate your position – without talking to you about it, even if you are a high level within their scale of reps.
You will have to spend an inordinate amount of time getting up to speed attending rep meetings, annual “events’ and even they push you to attend American style ‘hype’ confrences . All these cost you and take so many hours that in fact if you added this time up you would be better off earning an hourly wage.
If you challenge these guys, and even after you are kicked out they cease to pay you anything, then threaten to sue you and there really is no opportunity to fight them as you commissions are usually so low, that it doesn’t cover your legal fees. Their decisions are a ‘kangaroo’ court and you cannot discuss any issues with them as they refuse to discuss verbally any issues with you.
Result of joining ACN …a lot of hard work, little reward, they keep your customers, and you waste a huge amount of time and expense, and loose your network and risk loosing them as friends. Think seriously before wasting your time joining up. There are much better opportunities you can start which you then can actually own !.
My suggestion …Stay well away from this American style hype Multi Level Marketing company. Think Hard before joining this company, ask for some sort of performance guarantees ( you’ll get none) then consider other franchise opportunities as at least you will get some indication of where you are headed. For a huge number of people who have joined this has been a waste of money and a huge amount of time diverting their attention. This for most is not a way to get rich.
Best of luck to you all.
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