‘Multilevel Marketer’ Objects to Depiction

While James Bates wrote a balanced column (“Footnotes,” Dec. 7) about my multilevel marketing business, he made one serious slip of the word that unfairly indicted my company. When he wrote, “Omnitrition is a ‘multilevel marketing’ company, in which distributors make money when they recruit other distributors,” he inadvertently accused us of illegal activity.

Not only is the statement absolutely wrong, making money strictly off recruitment, in fact, is against federal law. Omnitrition is a legal company providing part-time and full-time financial opportunities for thousands.

In an honest MLM like ours, distributors only make money when they (and the people they sponsor into the business) sell products. In my company, it costs only $20 to become a distributor. Nobody makes money on that $20.

The mere act of “recruiting” creates no income for anyone. Only when distributors use and sell products do people make money.

Of course, it is a self-evident truth that the more people you recruit who successfully sell products, the more money you make.

It’s the same as McDonald’s. What good would it do to open thousands of outlets if no one sold hamburgers? It’s the same with insurance salespeople. What good would it be to recruit thousands of insurance salespeople if none of them sold insurance?

The same is true in MLM. If you have one distributor working under you, you can make a little money. If you have hundreds, you can make a lot of money. That’s obvious.

In every business there are those who do things right and those who do things wrong. There are pseudo-MLMs that charge large recruiting fees and/or do a lot of front-loading and, in fact, illegally make money through the act of recruiting itself.

My company, Omnitrition, does things right. We make money only when products are sold (and we have great products!), and the more distributors we have selling products, the more money we make. MLM is an exploding part of the American economic system, as families take control of their financial lives. The future, in my opinion, belongs to the entrepreneur, and MLM is the heart of entrepreneurship.

JERRY RUBIN

Los Angeles

Former radical-turned-entrepreneur Rubin is an Omnitrition independent distributor.