LIFE Business Compensation Plan

The other night, as I spoke at the LIFE meeting, I had a lot of thoughts running through my mind.  I kicked off the evening with a success talk on the “Attributes of a Leader” and then after a short break proudly shared the LIFE opportunity with everyone in the room. As I stood in front of the crowd I felt both excited and honored to share the LIFE compensation plan. I can reflect back over the past 18 years and how I started my own business journey in a similar fashion sitting in a hotel conference room.  I remember hoping that what the speaker said was true and dreaming of my freedom.

Today I have the blessing and opportunity to play a role ensuring that everyone sitting in those seats is presented with a world-class LIFE business plan.  Few people understand what they are seeing the first night and it will take months before they fully grasp the big picture; however, I feel as leaders, we have an obligation to make sure that they start in a business that is beneficial for them, regardless of whether they understand all the reason why at first.

When I started in community building, it was with a company called Amway.  Although I felt the product pricing and the work to reward ratios were extremely high, I dreamed and work hard enough to overcome these issues and succeed anyway. I am thankful my sponsor had a big dream too, because he travelled across Canada numerous times to help me reach my goals. Why did I decide to build Amway you ask? Strictly speaking, because no one showed me anything else and I felt that I had nothing to lose and much to gain by giving it my best. Through the many struggles and tons of personal growth, I moved through the ranks and achieved the Diamond level. Indeed, I maintained this level until the day I resigned from Amway.

With 14 years experience in Amway and having achieved one of the highest levels of success in all of Canada, I understand the compensation plan extremely well and am qualified to share on the subject. Recently, a few of the Amway drones criticized the LIFE compensation plan, even though they have never been involved in LIFE or had any level of success in Amway. Nevertheless, it is because of their ignorant chirping that I resolved to compare the compensation plans of both companies in a head to head analysis. Furthermore, since I was a large business owner in Amway and am a large business owner in LIFE, I am uniquely qualified to perform this comparison and share my real life experiences with both compensation plans with the readers.

Just a cursory glance at the bonus schedules displays that LIFE’s plan compensates double what Amway’s does! Not to mention that the Amway percentages are not as they seem. Let me explain.  LIFE has a very favorable point to dollar ratio; to earn 100 points it’s no more then $140 of business.  In contrast, Amway’s ratio is 1pv to 2.90bv. In addition, depending on what kind of product you’re buying, the actual cash ratio can be much higher still. I had to purchase between $400 to $600 to earn a 100 points; meanwhile, in LIFE, I receive 100 points with $140 or less. This is a significant difference when starting a business!

Here is a comparison of the bonus schedule:

BONUS SCHEDULE
LIFE		AMWAY
Total PV	Performance Bonus	Total PV	Performance Bonus
5%	150	3%	100
10%	300	6%	300
15%	600	9%	600
20%	1000	12%	1000
25%	1500	15%	1500
30%	2500	18%	2500
35%	4000	21%	4000
40%	6000	23%	6000
45%	10000	25%	7500
50%	15000

Ok, Ok, you might be thinking to yourself, it’s extremely obvious that LIFE pays better than Amway in a head to head comparison. You might also be thinking, please Claude move on, you’ve made your point! In fact, as I did this analysis it makes me wonder why an Amway failure drone would want to open this subject up by criticizing the LIFE plan in the first place? Since it is so much better than what he allegedly failed in, why criticize such drastic improvement? However, since the Amway drones brought it up, I am going to put the issue to rest factually. Let’s examine how this affects the numbers.  In Amway, when you hit the top of the chart (7500pv x 2.9 ratio) its approximately 21,750 bv.  At 25% of BV, that means approximately $5,437 gets paid back to the organization. But here’s the kicker! The organization has to do approximately $30k of business to pay back $5,437! On the other hand, in Life, 15,000 points is the top of the chart and pays 50% for a total of $7,500 being paid back, but even that’s not the whole picture! To get to the top of the chart within LIFE takes 15,000 points or approximately 21k of business. Therefore, if we compared apples to apples, an Amway and LIFE organization that both did 30k of business would pay back $5,437 for Amway and $11,000 for LIFE.

The main purpose of a leader is to build other leaders.  Producing world-class leaders that have the ability to change the world for the better is one of the goals of the LIFE opportunity.  Let’s compare how well each company rewards its leaders for building other leaders in depth. When you break a leg over the top of the chart and help those leaders break leaders over the top of the chart, how are you compensated in each company?

Depth Bonus	LIFE	AMWAY
Break a leg at top of chart	8%	4 %
3 legs	4%	1%
6 leg	2%	0
9 legs	1%	0
12 legs	.75%	0
15 legs	.50%	0
18 legs	.25%	0

Personally, I would prefer to move on from my Amway days. I am focused on taking LIFE to millions of people working with Orrin Woodward; however, after hearing about the cheap-shots taken by unqualified examiners at the LIFE compensation plan, I decided to set the record straight.  The funny thing about this analysis is that I didn’t even get into the value of the free trips or the One-Time-Cash-Awards (OTCA’s)!  I literally could have taken another 6 hours and examined every bonus each company has, including the free trips, pin bonuses, and growth bonuses, but here is the bottom line: Amway pays out about 35% of BV while LIFE pays out 70% of PV.  Nuff said. Any Amway drone can spew endlessly on compensation plan minutiae but is simply won’t change the fundamental analysis presented above. If anything, the results will fall further in LIFE’s favor.

I love the fact that in North America we have a free market place and can succeed or fail based on the merits of our effort and enterprise. I have focused on competing in that marketplace, building what I feel is the best business opportunity in the world. It makes me wonder though, when there is such a clear contrast between the two compensation plans, why would an alleged former Amway person single out the LIFE compensation plan when it’s the most lucrative in the entire industry?

Perhaps the Amway drones real purpose is less about sharing truth and more about attacking a growing competitor who has changing the rules of the game. LIFE has no interest in smearing competitors to get ahead; rather, the founders of LIFE have chosen to build a better business model that serves the customers needs and win in the free enterprise marketplace. May the best company win by serving its’ customers, not by bashing its’ competitors.

Sincerely,

Claude Hamilton