I’ve been contacted by a number of individuals claiming to be mentees in entrepreneurship, marketing, and financial freedom. They claimed they’re retiring in a few years and all credit is due to their mentors. They gave the impression they’re very selective in who they want to work with, so you have to go through a number of steps to prove your worthiness. This is my experience with Amway’s recruiting efforts.
Couple years ago I got a message in LinkedIn from a Sabrina Liu who claimed they’re looking for people to mentor into entrepreneurship. At that time, I was a freelancer struggling to make ends meet. I thought I got lucky somehow because someone would be willing to mentor me into being a “successful entrepreneur”; and it doesn’t cost me anything but hard work? Sign me up, what do I gotta do?
Well, we have this process where we determine if we’re a good fit for each other. We don’t work with just anyone because our mentors are very selective and not everyone is cut out to be entrepreneurs.
For an aspiring entrepreneur, those words are impactful. Could I also be selected by these mentors so one day I can be financially free too?
The woman and I scheduled an in-person meeting to determine if ‘we’re a good fit for one another.’ We met at a Panera bread. She asked me where I am in life and where do I want to go. I told her I want to be comfortable and out of debt so I could take care of my parents. She gave me a book called The Compound Effect and only two days before we’d be meeting again.
I read the book from cover to cover. The principles taught in that book are similar to self-help books. Basically anything you invest your time into will compound into who we become in life. While this is powerful, unlike other self-help books, there is another side to its story that can be seen in the review below.
In our second day of meeting, we talked about what I’d learned from the book. She’s vetting me to see if I’d make the cut to be mentored. I asked who these mentors were, do they have a website, a memoir, anything to learn about them. After all, we are here to see if “we’re” a good fit for one another.
Our mentors like to be low-key as much as possible because all the media attention is very distracting and they wholeheartedly want to focus on their students and expect nothing in return for it.
What a kind intention! Forget the part about being low-key, they expect nothing in return 😱 ?!
Sabrina —
I have to meet with a mega-successful guy tomorrow, he’s very busy, but he’s just stopping by the area. We’re all meeting him.
Me —
oh cool [she wanted me to prompt her to let me go to this meeting. This was a way of making me think it’s my idea. I didn’t take the bait]
Sabrina —
At this stage, I’d love for you to meet him. It is a closed group, so it’s just people within the network. We’re still seeing if you’re a good fit but it’ll give you a boost. Not guaranteeing anything because I still have to ask them for permission to see if you could join.
Me —
Oh my goodness, I’d love to. [I can definitely waste my evening on whatever this is so I can one day call myself a “successful entrepreneur”.]
I put whatever important stuff I had going on that day to the back burner and went to meet this important guy.
It turned out to be a seminar with lots of other “aspiring marketers and entrepreneurs.” We were glued to our seats for two hours while this guy gave a speech on how to sell household products to your friends and family. He closed the speech by telling you to take the next steps, which involved listening to some audio recordings.
On my drive back home, I listened to one of the recordings, persuading you to take this life-changing step by investing into Amway. These recordings didn’t show their length so for all I knew the second one could be an hour long. So I just gave up.
I felt so cheated for some reason. What a waste of my time.
Needless to say, I stopped responding to the woman. She sent me one last message that read-
I met another guy by the name of Ryan Rowley, very similar settings — read this book, a mega-successful guy coming to town Wednesday and blah blah blah.
This time I knew what it was so I pestered with questions like who is this guy, are you affiliated with Amway etc.
Others keep reaching out to me in LinkedIn. One woman I met today, I chose to be vulnerable with her about some of my experiences. I try to be as authentic with people as I can because my time here is very limited so I try to give folks my full attention, my full self in every meeting. And she was condescending in return —
My takeaways from these numerous interactions
I notice a pattern of control in my interactions with them. They want to be in control of certain decisions you make. If you reject their network, they can’t handle rejections. So they tell you you’re not fit to be an entrepreneur.
On the other hand, if you decide to keep wasting your time and money doing all the things they’re asking you to do, then it was all your idea to want to be this “entrepreneur”.
It is a manipulative recruitment tactic. They show no transparency and are in my view, some of the most unique scam artists. Of course they all got sucked into it, they think they invested their money and so they’re just trying to reap their investment. They take advantage of your insecurities and use those to tell you why you can’t be an entrepreneur. This is a huge commitment on their part so they do whatever they can to not lose control.
And of course, this definition of entrepreneurship they shove down your throat is the biggest scam yet. Entrepreneurs are creators and inventors, not network marketers.
They carefully choose their words, for example, network marketing, Amway, never shows up in their vocabulary until later phases like in the seminar.
The same woman from today, when I asked her about her affiliations to Amway, she claimed google reviews do not tell you everything. “If you google us, of course, you’ll see a lot of negative things but it’s ignorant to base your decision off just that.”
I base all my decisions off google and yelp; bite me!
Please be safe out there. Whatever you do, don’t fall for this scam. If you have experienced these recruitments, leave me a comment. I don’t want other people in desperate places and especially kids out of high school, falling for this crap.
Thank you for reading 🙏
