Bye, Hun: The Fall of the MLM Industry and What That Means for Self-help
A look inside the future of MLMs, the self-help industry, and how this all relates to the U.S. government.
Over the past year, many multi-level marketing companies have eliminated the portion of their business that makes them an MLM (these businesses include Seint, Rodan & Fields, and BODi) while some have completely closed their doors (Modere). Companies that have changed their business model now only allow their independent contract representatives to make commissions off of sales, rather than profit off of recruiting others to join their downline.
This is in direct response to the rising anti-MLM movement which has been educating the public about the predatory, harmful, and illegal practices of MLM companies where 99.6% of representatives not only don’t make any money, but actually lose money. They were pyramid schemes that got away with it because they hid behind selling a product.
The fact that public (and perhaps legal) opinions surrounding MLMs has drastically shifted over the past few years, should be good news. And it would be if the self-help industry wasn’t so deeply tied to the MLM industry.
Although a lot of key players in the self-help industry will be losing income from speaking engagements at MLM conferences and events, I’m worried that this will only strengthen the self-help industry.
MLMs and their reps will re-brand to self-help. They’ve already started doing so.
MLMs work because individuals are blamed and shamed for “not succeeding”, even though they’re in an industry that is built for them fail and that industry is crumbling around them.
As these companies go under or reframe their business models, the companies certainly won’t take accountability and say that they failed because of their exploitative business models or because their company is selling over-priced, non-essential goods in a looming recession. They will blame their distributors for not working hard enough.
This will prompt victims of the MLM industry into thinking that they need to “be better.” This will lead them right into the hands of self-help.
And the MLM industry knows this. In fact, this is exactly what they want because this places their victims right where they want them to be as they rebrand.
MLMs and individuals who are perpetuating the harms of MLMs (now unemployed reps) will lean on the self-help industry to further profit off of individual’s vulnerabilities.
And this is nothing new.
In fact, the interconnectedness of MLMs and self-help has been there from the inception of the industry.
With the rise of Direct Selling companies in the 1920s, there also came an even bigger boom of the industry teaching people how to sell. The man at the forefront of this was Dale Carnegie, who you may know from his bestseller that still tops the charts today, “How to WIn Friends and Influence People.” This book is still widely used across MLMs and courses are also encouraged, costing individuals $2,000.
The book, “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill was published a year later and is also still widely used and read today. Hill’s book was one of the key books that started the “positive thinking” movement, used within the self-help industry to manipulate and keep vulnerable individuals complacent still to this day.
In Bridget Read’s book “Little Bosses Everywhere: How The Pyramid Scheme Shaped America”, Read states, “Hill claimed [rich people]…weren’t rich and powerful because they had access to something other people didn’t. It was simply that they knew how to manifest wealth.”
This is a blatant lie. Individuals under capitalism are born into certain privileges which makes access to wealth more readily available than others. However, sharing the truth of this takes the power away from those individuals, something these individuals will do anything to prevent.
And as Read argues in her book and I have argued in the past, the rise of the MLM industry and the self-help industry is directly related to the rise of alt-right ideologies.
Changing the understanding of capitalism was vital in the early years of MLM companies as can be seen through the example of Leonard Read, an MLM keynote speaker and think-tank head.
As Read states in her book, “He wanted to promote the idea that a society in which every individual has an unlimited capacity to accumulate wealth is not greedy, it is democratic…Big government was bad for everyone, unions were bad for everyone, and the welfare state turned people into parasites. They needed to get workers to root for the boss.”
The ties between the MLM industry and the self-help industry can be seen through self-help’s largest celebrity, Tony Robbins who was a protégé of Jim Rohn, an evangelical preacher and former VP of the MLM Nutri-Bio.
This messaging has continued throughout the years, especially within companies such as Amway. Read states, “Amway turned positive thinking into a patriotic call of duty: You are the only thing standing between yourself and vast riches, and getting rich is your American right.”
For a large part, MLMs have been very successful at convincing the American public that this is the truth. To root for the boss. That the government isn’t standing in their way of wealth, they are.
They’ve convinced the public of this narrative so much so that the MLM and self-help industry are directly tied to the American government. The DeVos and Van Andel families (founders of Amway) have held (and continue to hold) prominent positions within the U.S. government and have also spearheaded Project 2025.
Donald Trump himself has direct ties to the MLM industry. He formerly partnered with Rich Dad, Poor Dad’s author Robert Kiyosaki whose books were spread by Amway; he had a business relationship with an internet and phone MLM called ACN; and even rebranded an existing vitamin MLM to “The Trump Network” from 2009-2011.
So what does this all mean for the MLM industry as a whole? The MLM and self-help industries are inextricably linked and both are also deeply connected to the current government. With the fall of the MLM industry, the logical step for the industry to take would be to rebrand themselves as the self-help industry and to sell self-help products instead of shampoo.
And this is exactly what’s happening.
As stated earlier, larger companies have started new models of work to get rid of the MLM model in order to combat the bad PR of MLMs. We’ll see how successful that ends up being for them. My guess? We’ll see many of these remaining companies go under in the coming years. You can’t eliminate the model that makes money for your company and still expect to profit.
However, former MLM reps and business owners are on track of starting new businesses focusing on self-help. These businesses will sell courses, seminars, educational materials all focused on how you can better yourself and profit more. In reality, as is true within the entire self-help industry, these products will make you feel like you’re making progress when in reality, they’re stringing you along to buy the next product because nothing will actually change.
Many former MLM reps are embracing an industry called Master Resell Rights where individuals purchase the rights of a pre-made self-help course, which allows them to sell that course to someone else, who then purchases the rights themselves. If you think that this sounds suspiciously like an MLM model, you’d be correct. But it’s disguising itself as an opportunity to sell.
This also isn’t anything new. Remember Tony Robbins and his connections to the MLM industry? Well, he’s the forefather of this business model. He initially sold his seminars as a franchise opportunity where individuals could purchase “exclusive rights” to sell his courses for $16,000. This model was also embraced by the self-help cult NXIVM.
It’s for this exact reason that while I’m glad that the anti-MLM movement has led to the closing of so many predatory companies, I’m worried about what this means for the future of the self-help industry as a whole.
If unregulated, the risk of extreme predatory behavior is inevitable.
The education in regards to the predatory behavior behind the MLM industry worked and pressured companies to change course or go under. We now need to do the same thing for the self-help industry as it continues to profit off of individuals who are caught in a capitalistic society that tells them time and time again that they’re the ones that need to change, not the system. The more that these ideas are perpetuated, the more conservative the politics of America will continue to become. There’s no escaping the interconnectedness of the two.
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