World Wide Dreambuilders was founded in 1997 by Ron and Georgia Lee Puryear and is a leading network marketing promotions organization for Amway Global. The majority of Amway’s total sales are generated by Independent Business Owners (IBOs), who are essentially its sales representatives.

An IBO can build their business in different ways. One is by making individual sales to consumers, making a 35% retail markup on products, and earning a 2.9% commission. Commissions can only be made if the IBO makes a minimum of approximately $300 in sales. An IBO can also generate volume through personal consumption, which helps to achieve a minimum volume for commissions. IBOs also get a discount on products they buy from your store for internal consumption.

Product purchases can also be made on an IBO’s website, which is a copied corporate site. An IBO may name their own personal website and use it to redirect to your affiliate site where customers can make purchases or an IBO may order products for personal use.

The most widely used method of achieving success with Worldwide Dreambuilders is word of mouth advertising done to recruit other IBOs. The idea is that when you enroll recruits in the program, you create more word-of-mouth reach for Amway 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 consuming customers to receive downline performance bonuses.

In one word:

1. You register, you start shopping in your own store as much as possible.
2. You tell people about your store and create customers who buy from you.
3. Let people know about the business opportunity and receive bonuses for their volume created

The World Wide Dreambuilders Recruitment Program also has an elaborate means of training and mentoring their IBOs. This is done by hosting training/recruitment seminars at local hotel conference centers, distributing motivational audio and reading material for personal growth, and promoting the importance of strong family values.

Sounds like a very legitimate business plan. I have attended the hotel seminars and the regional ones which can hold up to tens of thousands of people and I must say they are quite motivating and can provide excellent leadership training. I was involved with Quixtar from 2003 to 2005, which was a rebranded Amway, but has since rebranded as Amway Global. I learned a lot about leading a team and gained a lot of personal sales experience, so my time with Quixtar wasn’t exactly bad.

Now, here is the list of disclosures that Amway publishes in all of their recruiting flyers. This is straight from the horse’s mouth, and the information comes from internal Amway analysis in 2000:

1. Average monthly gross income for everybody “active” IBOs were $115 (US)/$181 (Canada).
2. Approximately 66% of all IBO registrations were found to be “active”
3. “Active” basically means having attempted to make a sale once in that year.
4. “Gross income” means retail sales minus cost of goods sold plus amount of commissions withheld (in normal words, after all is said and done, how much money did you make?)

If you are wondering if this program is a scam, it certainly is not. The Federal Trade Commission considers the Amway Sales and Marketing Plan 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 effort to learn and grow personally are key elements. This would be an important part of the success of World Wide Dreambuilders. Wikipedia has an excellent explanation of the difference between pyramid schemes and MLM if you’re just starting to research that type of marketing.

The only improvement I would like to see with World Wide Dreambuilders is to use online marketing to generate sales. Their websites never show up in search engines, so in a sense they are just a means to buy, not a way to attract customers to the business. Things like blogging and using social media are just the tip of the iceberg of opportunity lost by using only word of mouth advertising.