Timing Is Crucial To Your Network Marketing Success

I’ll take timing over hard work every time. When the timing is right, NON-network marketers will take your product to the marketplace. Correct timing means NOW. Not 2 years too early. Not 2 years too late.

Millionaires have been made in this industry JUST because of timing alone. So how can you gauge the timing?

It’s not easy, but here are some tips:

1. You’ll waste time, money & energy getting in too early, because over 90% of companies fail in the first year or two.

You probably remember or have heard of a company called Excel. We can talk about them, because they’re bankrupt and long gone.

When the US Federal Government deregulated long distance service, Excel was the first company to jump in and start re-selling phone time. They were strictly a re-seller. They bought from the Big Bells and re-sold the time.

In Excel’s first 1 1/2 to 2 years, it was impossible to build the business. Why? Because the Bells would absolutely not switch your new customers to Excel! They’d had your Mom for 30 years, and as far as they were concerned, she belonged to them.

So Excel had to fight the Big Bells in court and win the lawsuits before they could finally get the Big Bells to actually switch customers to Excel.

Which meant that if you joined Excel in the first couple years, you could’ve had 300, 400, 1000 customers … but so what? You couldn’t get them switched to Excel. So you would have worked your butt off and made absolutely zero money. After the lawsuits, after those first 2 years, that’s when people started making money.

But the people who believed the promise of “Get in early!” walked away frustrated & disappointed. They lost money, they lost their fire, and they dropped out. The timing was not right. It was only the people who came in AFTER the lawsuits who made the big, easy money.

2. You’ll waste a lot of time, money & energy getting in too late. If the company is a household name (imagine the MLM companies you think of as dinosaurs!), its momentum growth occurred years ago. For several reasons, you’re fighting a real uphill financial battle to start new in companies like this:

a. The compensation plan strongly favors the company over the rep. Think about the companies who started 20 or 30 years ago. Most used the old insurance industry’s stairstep-breakaway compensation plan … state-of-the-art back then. But those plans are strongly weighted in favor of the company, at the expense of the reps.

b. Massive company overhead comes directly out of YOUR paycheck! They didn’t set out to build a streamlined company. Instead, they hired more and more and more office staff, and they built bigger & bigger & bigger buildings to handle their people and to impress their market. The expenses are enormous … and the only income source to pay them all is the compensation plan.

c. They’re now way too big to make necessary course corrections. You can probably change a flat tire. Get the jack out, take the wheel off, and I’ll bet you could change the tire.

But what about the same car, same tire, with the car rolling down the road at just 1 mph? You probably couldn’t even remove the hubcap. And no way you could get the lugnuts off. So I don’t care how good you are, you can’t change a flat while the vehicle is moving down the road.

And the big old network marketing companies, the dinosaurs - you know their names - they can’t make a change, either. For instance, they can’t change from a monthly payplan to the newer, more popular weekly pay plans. Just cannot do it. They were not forward-thinking companies way back when, so now they are stuck with the plans they made decades ago.

3. You want to join AFTER a company has proven it has staying power (maybe 2-5 years), but BEFORE its momentum growth period (in general, the time it takes a company to go from $100,000,000 to $500,000,000 a year in sales). If you can find a company like this, and which also has the other parts of the formula in place, some fun work will give you the chance to ride a momentum wave to wealth.

Conclusions? Timing is a major factor in your success when you choose a network marketing company. Don’t get suckered into the “pre-launch” or the “before ground floor” opportunity. That is not timing. It’s just hype.

And don’t join one of the MLM dinosaurs with a very stingy pay plan. You’ll have no shot at success.

Look for companies with at least a 2-3 year track record, but which have not yet entered “momentum.” And make sure they also have experienced network marketing leadership, a fair compensation plan, an outstanding flagship product, and a proven, tested support & training system. THAT situation gives you real opportunity in MLM!