This past year, I have been interviewed by many of my friends regarding the Leadership Team Development job opportunity. All of these friends have sat down with me and given me a 20-minute speech about the large corporations that Leadership Team Development (LTD) is affiliated with. A couple of these "corporate affiliates" included such large companies as Circuit City and Bass Pro, and during the first seminar that my friends invited me to attend, I learned that there are over 1100 "large-corporate affiliates" that LTD has partnered with. Now, during my friends' 20-minute speeches, I was told that what they were going to tell me during our meeting was going to be vague, and that in order to learn more, I would have to attend that first seminar that I mentioned above. The questions that they asked me were, "Are you interested in this opportunity?" and "Are you interested in making additional income?" After I answered "yes" to both of those questions, there was no further information given to me, and any questions that I asked were answered with this phrase:
'The object of this meeting was to give you a small amount of information so that you can gauge whether or not you were interested in getting more information. Now that you are showing interest, all you have to do is say, "I am interested in learning more and getting more information." Upon doing that, I will invite you to a seminar that will answer all of your questions.'
Well, upon hearing that response and not getting clear responses or any further answers from my friends, I reluctantly said yes to attending the meeting.
At the meeting, a well-dressed and well-spoken gentlemen gave a lecture about how participating in LTD's job opportunity can potentially make me money. To me, it was very unclear. Here is what he talked about:
The first thing he mentioned was that most people are employees employed by employers, and as such, they are gaining 'active' income. Then he discussed how 'active' income is negative income in the fact that the employee only receives monies for the hours that the employee is actively working at his or her job. Then the gentlemen introduced a business system that was supposedly a much better method of attaining income than actively working for an employer is. This business system was essentially equivalent to a franchise. For example, the man used McDonald's. If you look at McDonald's, when the owner first started it and saw that people were consuming his product and giving him revenue, he decided to 'maximize his time.' Here is how he did it--while he worked at his original McDonald's location and kept it open for ten hours a day, the most he could gain in revenues would be $100. Well the owner of McDonald's wanted to earn more, so he opened up nine identical McDonald's locations and hired one manager to run each new location exactly the way he ran his location. In order to do this, they would have to keep each location open for ten hours a day. So, while the owner of McDonald's only had to work for ten hours a day and run only his location, each of the nine other locations added a net total of 90 additional hours and an additional $900--making his total net profit for the day $1000 . As such, the owner of McDonald's increased his profits ten-fold while personally putting in the same amount time that he put in before when he was only making $100 a day. As such, his revenue did not equal the number of hours that he worked, it equaled the way he maximized his time.
Now, after the gentleman finished that spiel, I wondered what I would be doing, how I would be maximizing my time, and most importantly, how I would be making money. And here is the way I interpreted the gentleman's response:
Because the internet is being more widely used in today's era, companies are wanting to use it to market their products/services and gain more revenue. The problem with this is that when they enter the internet market, they lose customer loyalty (and as a result, potential revenue) because customers are able to find the same products/services for cheaper prices with other companies who are using the internet, too. So here is how you and I would fit into this picture and make money for ourselves...First we would pay $200 and join the 'team.' By doing that, we would be making an agreement that we would be providing the "large-company affiliates" with our future customer loyalty. This means that we would loyally buy our every-day purchases through the "large-company affiliates." As such, since we would be providing the "large-company affiliates" with customer loyalty (which equals guaranteed profit for them), they would be willing to compensate us by paying us a certain percentage of the profits that they would acquire through us. This means that every time we would buy one of their products, we would be getting some of the money that we had spent back. This Sounded like a good deal until I heard the numbers. The ratio that the gentleman presented in the seminar was that you would receive $1 for every $300 spent.
So my question was, why would I want to spend $300 in order to only get $1 back from them? He explained to me that I wouldn't and that this is where the franchise derived business system comes into play. So here is what I would do:
I would recruit new people, as much as I could, and as they would spend money for these companies, because I brought the companies more loyal customers, I would gain a percentage of the profits that they gained from my recruitees (the more loyal customers). So for every $300 that each of my recruitees would spend for these companies, I would get $1. Also, on top of all of that, each recruitee would pay an initial one-time fee of $200, which I would get for recruiting them. So based on this information, I would have to recruit 300 people, and each of those people would have to spend $300 a month with these "affiliate corporations, " and if that happened, and only if that happened, then I would get $300 for that month. That doesn't seem like a lot, but when you factor in the $200, you get $200 times 300 people equals $60, 000. Then you add that to $300 a month times twelve months in a year ($3, 600) and get $63, 600 for that year. This is not bad, and it makes sense. On top of that, the gentlemen explains that most people are able to make closer to $80, 000 after their first year, which happens after they successfully complete a twelve to sixteen month project (which I presume is recruiting as much people as you can).
I am not sure if this is an actual scam or not, but it does seem like one, and a very enticing one, too. I am going to do some more research, go to another meeting, and talk to my already-experienced friends some more before I make my decision, and I am going to ask them some hard questions. If they won't answer these questions to my satisfaction, then I am going to unfortunately not partake in this "money-making" opportunity (which will cost them a potential $200). |
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