There is a lot of buzz on the internet about whether or not the Leadership Team Development (LTD) business is a scam. In order to figure this out, let’s first gain some insight into what exactly LTD is.

LTD was originally known as Winters Marketing, named after its founder, Larry Winters. Larry is an Independent Business Owner (IBO) in the Amway Global opportunity, who was originally part of the Britt World Wide (BWW) team. Sponsored by Crown Paul Miller, Larry has achieved great success within Amway, having reached the level of Double Diamond in August 2007. Larry and his top leaders formed LTD as a way to provide training and support for the IBO’s on their teams. Amway offers training specific to particular products within the Amway business line for IBOs, but organizations like LTD provide more in depth knowledge, motivational messages and training.

LTD is made up of the 12 diamond businesses that are actually a part of Larry’s Amway business team, as well as 11 additional Diamond businesses that are Amway affiliated, but not part of Larry’s Amway business. PDP’s are not mandatory, and a business team is not required to affiliate their business with any PDP, including that of their upline.

The LTD team provides training to IBO’s in these organizations through several means: books, CD’s, DVD’s, weekly and quarterly training seminars, and special events. In particular, the LTD team puts focus on teaching the Quality Invite (QI) marketing system for building their business, which is used to interview potential prospects, as well as promote attendance at their weekly education seminars throughout the country.

The answer to the question “Is the LTD business a scam” is a resounding no. The LTD business team provides an educational backbone that has resulted in proven success for LTD/Amway Global businesses. They offer training materials and events at a reasonable price, and the information provided typically is of good quality.

Where LTD has a deficiency is in the adoption and teaching of marketing strategies other than the QI to its affiliated members. Members are discouraged from learning techniques and strategies for building a successful network marketing business other than those being taught by their upline. At this time, they have deployed a web presence, but their efforts to drive traffic to their sites through online marketing strategies has been limited.

Typically, an LTD upline teaches their downline to build a list of names of everyone they know, through some type of memory jogger, the names and numbers in their cell phone, their friends on Facebook, etc… This list is where their initial QI prospects come from. Once they have gone through this list, the IBO is then encouraged to talk with everyone they meet as a potential QI candidate-the barista at Starbuck’s, the mailman, the janitor at work, anyone who gets within three feet of the business owner. All 23 of the LTD Diamonds have achieved that level using this technique. However, this is an approach that the larger portion of the population will struggle to execute, due primarily to differing personality types.