It's all about balance

Success in life is always a delicate balancing act, or you can end up spectacularly successful in one area and an abject failure in other, more important areas... such as success in business at the expense of your family. Or sacrificing your health in the quest for wealth, so that you end up as the richest person in the cemetery!

It's the same with evaluating a network marketing opportunity.

Balancing the various criteria for evaluation can be tricky. I list them in their general order of importance (left), but sometimes an opportunity relies on a unique, high-demand product while offering a really poor-paying compensation plan. Or everything else may be in place, but there are tell-tale signs that the company management is fundamentally ignorant of the principles that ensure long-term success in network marketing. Or the compensation plan creates excessive breakage to the company because of high group volume requirements.

In other words, you need to look for a good overall balance between all of these criteria.

Four outstanding results with one shaky result may seem preferable, but that questionable area can easily trigger failure for the entire enterprise, leaving you with no business and an expensive loss.

All network marketing companies are created and run by human beings. That makes them imperfect by their very natures. So striking a reasonable balance across all five areas is more likely to produce a workable, long term result for you than an opportunity that offers spectacular appeal in one or two areas, but lousy prospects for success in others.

After two decades in network marketing, more than fifteen of those years spent as a management consultant to MLM companies, I've learned some valuable lessons. Of all those lessons, one is more valuable than any of the others. That lesson is that careful, intelligent BALANCE is the name of the game.

What about leverage? Isn't leverage vital?

Yes, leverage is critically important. But leverage is really all about balance, if you think about it. Leverage doesn't create balance. Balance creates leverage. You can't have leverage until you have the right balance to begin. (Actually, leverage can be viewed as a form of controlled imbalance between input and output – using less of one to create more of the other. Try doing that without proper balance as the starting point!)

So being strong in one or two aspects of the business, while leaving others weak or vulnerable, can lead to serious risk. Just because a business opportunity has the best products, or the best compensation plan, or the best support systems, is NOT reason enough to choose it over another if there are serious deficiencies in other aspects of the business, such as company management, management priorities, or an upline team that isn't serious about supporting its downline people – or chooses to exploit them!

You need to look for a well-balanced mix, so that the end result is a business opportunity that can actually be made to work, and to make you money in the process.

Sometimes the lack of balance applies only to the local scene. A company may be a solid success on its home turf, but face serious problems in other local markets, due to any number of causes, including those not of its own making, such as over-regulation, ruinous exchange rates (if the reward plan is seamless globally) or logistical problems with things like deliveries, collateral materials, etc.

How do you know if the right balance exists?

The simplest way is to rate the opportunity you're analysing in each of the five critical criteria for assessment. Draw up a grid like this one, analyse each of the five criteria in turn, and rate them on a scale of, say, 1 to 5. This gives you a basis for comparison with other opportunities.

I realise that this isn't a totally objective method. I'm not convinced that there is such a thing. All personal decisions will have some degree of subjectivity. It's when subjective, emotional decisions outweigh the objective, rational decisions that imbalance occurs. As long as the balance is reasonable, you should be able to come to a realistic choice.

Prepare a small chart like this for each opportunity you wish to compare (perhaps on Post-It® notes), circle the rating you assign to each criterion, then see where the strengths and weaknesses lie. Which opportunity offers the best overall balance? Simply averaging out the scores isn't the answer... look for meaningful patterns. These four example show increasingly better balance from first to last.

Great company, great products, but lousy plan and poor support
and training make for serious imbalance.


Ordinary company and upline support, plus a questionable plan,
make this a poor prospect despite terrific products and good systems.


Better balanced, but nothing special except for very good products.


This would be a strong prospective company. Nothing truly
outstanding except the remarkable balance, with everything
above average. Hard to imagine that any company would
be this balanced, to be frank.

Remember… this is only a basis for comparison. The ratings will only have real relevance when you compare two or more business opportunities. But you'll find, as you make adjustments and revisions to your initial ratings, that you'll gain a progressively better overall comparison.

For a really comprehensive evaluation and comparison between MLM opportunities, the online MLM Appraisal Kit is the most powerful and incisive tool available. With more than 200 evaluation criteria, each one weighted for importance and relevance, you can obtain numeric ratings for the key evaluation areas as well as overall ratings for each MLM opportunity.