I'd be more impressed with Icerat if she / he stopped bickering about terminology and gave some cold, hard numbers on what they did to make a profit selling Amway, and how many hours a week it took.
Enough with the semantics and tautology, let's get to the math!
Icerat, how much were you making per hour when you sold Amway products?
That's a reasonable question, but it's not actually a
sensible question. How much did Ingvar Kamprad make per hour when he was selling furniture?
Some people treat Amway as a sales job, but I wasn't - I was doing it to build a business. Neither I, nor anyone else, has done any work in the network I built for about 15 years, and it continues to generate an income because there's a solid core of customers who continue to purchase products from Amway, order on the website, get them shipped home to them. We (well, mostly my former wife, but that's another story) get a percentage from Amway for being the ones who first introduced them to the products. Some months it's single figures, some months it's been 4 figures, all depends what people are buying. I don't think there's been a month it's been zero though. If I drop dead tomorrow it will
still generate income. There's no real way of calculating an "hourly rate" that was earned until it stops paying. And of course, as any entrepreneur will tell you, when you're involved in a startup you don't clock in your hours! Put it this way, I've been working on another business project the last few years and I've put in at least 50 times more hours in to it than I did in to Amway, and tens of thousands more dollars, and it's yet to generate
any income. That's life as an entrepreneur!
So, what did I do? Varied from month to month, but I found when I was doing what was recommended, the business grew. In short, learn what to do and show the business and products to at least 15 people a month consistently and it will grow. A few people will be interested in trying the products. A few people will be interested in trying the business side. That's exactly what I found happened, and I reached break even point within a few months, working maybe 10-15hrs/wk on average.
What I
didn't do was do that for long enough to develop a solid core group of people doing the same, for their own reasons. If I had then the network (and my income) may have continued to grow. My sponsor, an old friend, stopped building their Amway business when they moved countries and started a chocolate factory, something they'd always wanted to do. At the time their Amway business was generating about $25,000 worth of sales a month. Now it does at least 20 or 30 times that volume. How? Another friend of theirs that they introduced continued to develop their business. Their friend, working part-time, makes a solid full-time equivalent income from it, they continue to earn a small percentage for finding him, training him, and helping him get started.
It's really not that complicated. The problem is, as I've seen so much here is that people make certain assumptions about the industry that just aren't true. Probably the biggest assumption is that the products have no legitimate market demand, and then they move on from there to make various conclusions. False assumptions lead to false conclusions.