Pre-Paid Legal Services Ripoff A questionable career move Ada Oklahoma

I am a "Director" in PPL, sponsored by a Director who is also a family member. I have been to many PPL functions, the national convention, and the recent incentive vacation to Paradise Island, Bahamas. My family has about 75 associates in our downline, 97% of whom are inactive and have therefore lost money.

I believe that PPL's services, *when represented correctly*, are of good value. That is not in question at all for me.

What IS in question is the strength of the marketing business as a career choice.

Unlike many MLM's, it is very possible for a new associate to go out and make good money marketing the services without recruiting ANY new sales associates. PPL has over 30,000 companies offering our services to their employees on the merits of the services themselves.

However, retailing of memberships is certainly not the preferred method of "building the business" for PPL associates 99% of the time. I've talked to countless successful associates who tout the benefits of building very large downlines to achieve a high degree of passive income, instead of burdening themselves with maintaining group sales accounts or selling individual plans as a primary focus. There are definitely exceptions to this. I met an associate who personally sells 200+ plans to individuals (not even as part of groups) every month, as evidenced by his Executive Director 200 recognition pin. This is impressive, and it is the exception. After being involved with PPL for the last 8 months or so, I can say without a doubt that the company pushes recruiting extremely heavily. Believe me, our CEO is near-obsessed with our recruiting numbers, excitedly informing the whole organization that our recruiting numbers exceeded 10,000 new associates in a SINGLE WEEK recently.

New associates are encouraged to approach individuals with the intent to recruit, with lines similar to, "Do you keep your career options open?" "Would you be interested in making an additional $500-$1000 a month?" "Is your job providing the kind of lifestyle that you want?" Many new associates have told me how its very hard to close individuals consistently on membership purchases alone unless there is the "business opportunity" involved. Herein lies part of the problem.

Since this MLM is focused on recruiting to such a high degree (which many other posts on this site agree that it is) the opportunity morphs into a kind of evangelistic proselytizing that promises financial freedom for all by following the "fail-safe system". This is exploitive.

Why, so? Because the simple rules of geometric progression demonstrate that if the MLM-recruiting opportunity worked as well as we say it should, the number of recruits would have to grow staggeringly large after just a few generations. When this fact is pointed out by those of us who aren't blinded by greed, the recruiters say something to the effect of: "Well, of course that's absurd! Not everyone is going to succeed in this business, so therefore the market will never saturate." So, either the MLM works so well that geometric progression eats up the availability of new recruits quickly, or we happily accept that most people are going to fail and lose their time and money, so the MLM can give us many years of positive returns before we have to worry about the fundamentally unsound structure collapsing. In fact, they say, the birthrate of the country will provide more than enough recruits ad infinitum. This is clearly double-speak--we can't have it both ways. Either it works for everybody who works it and an infinite pool of new recruits is required, or we know that 99% of recruits will fail and we count on that for the long-term survival of our structure.

So what are we doing? Are we recruiting a series of winners with the opportunity of a lifetime? Or, are we admitting that the MLM structure is not the financial promised-land, and the only reason we stay afloat for as long as we do is because losers continue to cycle in and out of the lower tiers of our pyramid?

Think about illegal pyramid schemes (PPL is certainly NOT illegal). When we participate in them we don't think about where the money is coming from. We separate ourselves from the inevitable losers that must come because they will be so far from us, and they'll probably be people we never know. We GOT IN EARLY.

MLM profiteers stay in the game because they are able to keep dangling the financial carrot in front of new recruits for years, watching many cycle in and out and few ever joining the profitable ranks. It HAS to be this way, otherwise geometric progression would quickly saturate the market and the scheme would be over.

It doesn't matter that as associates we don't get paid directly for recruiting, as many people claim exempts us from being a pyramid. We are highly, highly incentivised to recruit as the quickest and best way to "build our business", and we are paid when every one of our recruits buys memberships (and you know they all do).

I really regret the fact that PPL is an MLM, because I think the retailing side of the business may have a lot of potential. However, with over 100,000+ associates cycling in and out of the MLM every year, and the glut of lawsuits and image problems caused by being an MLM, I think the retailing potential is undermined as a long-term career option.

More chillingly, sales of our core product, the legal plan, have decreased recently according to the 2004 annual report--approximately 13% from 2002 to 2003, and another 10% from 2003 to 2004, if memory serves. Recruiting of associates is down too, from 155,000 in 2002 to just over 107,000 in 2004. The continued growth of the company is directly attributable to the Identity Theft Shield sales, which are also threatened. It was announced at the 2004 Oklahoma convention that our partner in IDTS, Kroll Background America, will be marketing the IDT shield in multiple avenues besides PPL in the coming years. That doesn't send off good vibes when the other aspects of our growth are slowing so substantially.

Recruiting MLM's are cheesy. They dangle lifestyle spreads and "Profiles of Success" in front of an endless chain of new recruits, promising that with hard work this can be theirs too. But what work do 99% of the associates do? We show them how to simply duplicate the process, dangle lifestyle spreads in front of new recruits and promise the same thing. That is NOT a business. It distracts from the sales of the legimate products and is unacceptably exploitive and pyramidal in nature.

PPL as a career opportunity gets a C- in my book. I don't know whether I will continue to pursue retailing or recruiting for this company.

Brandon
Overland Park, Kansas
U.S.A.

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