World Wide Dreambuilders was founded in 1997 by Ron and Georgia Lee Puryear and is a leading organisation in network marketing promotions for Amway Global. The bulk of Amway’s total sales are generated from Independent Business Owners (IBO’s), which are essentially their sales reps.

An IBO can build their business in a few different ways. One is by making individual sales to consumers, making a 35% retail mark-up on the products and gaining a commission of 2.9%. Commissions can only be made if the IBO does a minimal of approximately $300 in sales. An IBO can build volume by personal consumption as well, which helps in attaining minimum volume for commissions. IBO’s also get a discount on the products they purchase from their store for internal consumption.

Purchases of products can also be made on an IBO’s website, which is a corporate copied site. An IBO is able to name their own personal website and use it to re-direct to their affiliate site where clients can then make their purchase or an IBO can order product for personal use.

The most widely used method for creating success with Worldwide Dreambuilders’ is the word of mouth advertising done in recruiting other IBO’s. The idea is that when you sign-up recruits in to the program, you create more reach in word of mouth advertising for Amway’s products. One thing that is critical to not making this a pyramid scheme is that there must be a minimum of $145 of product sold to consumer clients in order to receive downline performance bonuses.

In a nutshell:

1. You sign-up, begin buying from your own store as much as possible.
2. You tell people about your store and create clients that buy from you.
3. Tell people about the business opportunity, and receive bonuses for their volume created

World Wide Dreambuilders’ recruitment program also has an elaborate means to train and mentor its IBO’s. This is done by hosting training/recruitment seminars in local hotel conference centers, distributing motivating audio and reading material for personal growth, and promoting the importance of strong family values.

Seems like a very legitimate business plan. I’ve attended the hotel seminars and the regional ones, which can host as many as tens of thousands of people and I have to say they are pretty motivating and can provide great leadership training. I was involved with Quixtar from 2003-2005, which was a rebranded Amway but has since rebranded again back to Amway Global. I learned a lot about how to lead a team and gained a ton of personal selling experience so my time with Quixtar didn’t go exactly sour.

Now, here is the list of disclosures that Amway posts on all of its recruitment flyers. This is directly from the horse’s mouth and the information comes from an internal analysis by Amway in the year 2000:

1. The average monthly Gross Income for all “active” IBO’s was $115 (U.S.)/$181 (Canada).
2. Approximately 66% of all IBO’s of record were found to be “active”
3. “Active” means basically to have attempted to make a sale once in that year.
4. “Gross Income” means retail sales minus cost of goods sold plus the amount of commissions retained (in normal people words, after all is said and done, how much money did you make?)

If you are wondering if this program is a scam it most certainly is not. The Federal Trade Commission views Amway’s Sales and Marketing Plan as the benchmark for all other network marketing companies. People who are successful, not just in network marketing opportunities but in all forms of financial success, would agree that hard work, perseverance and a constant strive for learning and personal growth are key elements. This would be a major part of World Wide Dreambuilders’ success. Wikipedia has a great explanation of the difference between MLM’s and pyramid schemes if you are just beginning to look into that type of marketing.

The only improvement I’d like to see with World Wide Dreambuilders is utilizing online marketing to generate sales. Their websites never come up on the search engines so they are in a sense just a means to buy, not a way to attract clients into the business. Things like blog writing and utilizing social media is just the tip of the iceberg to the opportunity being lost by only using word of mouth advertising.