If you were looking around for information online, you fall into one of these buckets. You are trying to wrap your mind around joining Team Beach Body, and need more info on the business, or you are already a part of Team Beach Body, and you want to learn more about how to achieve the success you deserve. Either way, this review will provide you with some great information to mull over.
In the interest of full disclosure, this will not be an impartial review. I am a Team BeachBody Coach, and do build wealth promoting their products and services. If that fact is going to keep you from reading further, close the browser, and forget you ever saw this article.
i'm convinced my background as a corporate IT recruiter during the last 11 years qualifies me to evaluate an opportunity honestly, objectively and fairly. This article will not be a puff op ed piece about the joys of being a Team Beach Body Coach.
What is Team Beachbody About?
BeachBody has earned a significant amount of brand recognition for itself, primarily in consideration ofinfomercials they’ve produced for their highly popular workout programs. P90X is a household name worldwide, and Insanity is a close second. Since 1998, Carl Daikeler and his team have worked diligently to eliminate the obesity plague we face, one success story at a time. The team has enjoyed incredible success, garnering a considerable amount of success stories.
But most people are oblivious to Team Beachbody, the Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) business unit of the organization. In 2007, the Team Beach Body Network Marketing Opportunity came into existence in the Beachbody world. What’s happened in those short 3 1/2 years? Greater than fifty thousand online fitness coaches have joined the Team Beach Body ranks.
After 9 profitable years in business, Carl had an inspired idea. Without question, so many are having success using the Beach Body programs was not just that the workouts being sold were great. The magic was the community of people who supported, encouraged, and held each other accountable on their fitness journeys. Beyond the scale of regular customer is the world of the Brand Evangelist, and after 9 successful years, Carl realized that he had a lot of them. How could Carl reward them for their loyalty?
Why is Team BeachBody So Special?
On the surface, Team Beachbody is exactly like many other Home business opportunities. It has a great compensation plan, and products to can believe in. But there are thousands of other organizations within the health and wellness space of the industry, so what makes Team Beach Body so special?
The most obvious and glaring difference is this: Beachbody DOES NOT need their reps to generate retail profit. Say WHAT? Beachbody generates greater than 50,000 new customers every week. They were over the $100 million dollar a year sales mark well before the first coach signed up. They spend about $100 million a year in advertising their products.
This made me pay close attention. Having been in network marketing for awhile, I’ve seen a ton of companies start out in network marketing, then suddenly pull the rug out from under their distributor force. I had never before witnessed a already successful company move TO a home based model from a traditional marketing strategy.
The reason is simple. Beachbody wants their coaches to focus on what has made them successful to date: growing relationships within the community, and helping others achieve their fitness goals. Beachbody distributes new customers and coaches to qualified coaches, for free, every single week. If one of those customers buy something, the rep that they’ve been assigned to. This translates into the chance to earn a solid income, outside of the effort and energy a coach puts into their own marketing plan.
Many people don't realize that there are as many different compensation plans in MLM as there are businesses in the industry. Team Beachbody has chosen to use the binary compensation plan for their opportunity. In very simple terms, a binary plan just means that each coach has two legs. As the new Team Beachbody coach sponsors more reps on their business team, they can only go into one of the two legs.
The power of the binary plan is twofold. First, it allows a new rep to participate in a higher bonus pool early in their business. Second, it creates a phenomena known as spillover. For example, if Bob sponsors 2 coaches at the same time, and chooses to put them both into the same leg, the first coach sponsored has the opportunity to earn bonuses based on the productivity of the second coach, as does Bob. Now your team is incentivized to work together, and help each other build profitable business centers.
What’s the Downside of Team Beach Body?
There is no such thing as a perfect business, so for all of the great things about Beachbody's business model, there are negatives that exist as well. There are actually 5 key weaknesses that I have found in the Beachbody business opportunity.
Lack of Cashflow – the day that your new Team Beachbody coach gets signed up, the clock starts. Which clock? The "get me paid or lose me forever" clock! On average, you’ve got 63 days to get your new coach making money, or they are checking out. But it’s hard to help someone with no cash to get started in marketing, right?
And yet, many new network marketers get started with a shoestring budget, using money they didn’t have in the first place to get started in business. Eventually the juggling act of playing Russian Roulette with their financial life wears thin, and you're left with a negative, frustrated person who turns completely negative to network marketing.
Lead Poverty – It's easy to know how a new MLMer will get started, because so many are taught the time honored tradition of talking to all your friends and family, and anyone else that comes within 3 feet of you. Many Team Beachbody coaches are teaching this strategy in their business.
I do believe that there is a way to target people within your warm market who might be interested in Beachbody, and approach them in a way that will allow you to still be invited to family functions. However, the bottom line is that not only are you putting your financial destiny in the hands of people who may or may not be interested in being a Beachbody coach, but this list will eventually run out.
Since many have not learned how to advance their business building efforts beyond the level of warm market prospecting and cold calling, they get frustrated with their Beachbody business, and quit just like those with no cashflow.
Inadequate Systems - Home meetings can be great. So can hotel meetings. Three way calls can do a ton to supercharge the growth of your Beachbody dynasty. Large conferences can be life changing events, packed with value. There’s no problem with building a Beachbody business using these methods IF you got in business to put in 40 hours a week.
But if you saw the window to create a perpetual residual income that Beachbody provides, and you like it, this method of marketing will NEVER allow you to do that.
Attrition - as an industry, MLM has about a 12 – 15% retention rate annually. In other words, if you sponsor 100 Beachbody coaches in 2010, you can generally expect that 12 – 15 of them will still be with you in 2011. Seems very depressing, but there are many ways to firewall your personal Team Beachbody business against such heavy losses.
Blood Thirsty Competition - Not only do you have to fight against the other Beachbody coaches out there, you have an industry that added over 1 million reps last year, with no signs of stopping. More than 16.1 million people all competing to attract the same prospects. Team Beachbody provides a tremendous business opportunity, but in the current financial climate, and with such fierce competition out there, it takes more than just a tremendous opportunity to make yourself bee seen through the crowd.
After weighing my options, and giving a thorough review to several programs out there, I am very comfortable that my choice to join Team Beachbody was the right one. Fortunately, I’ve discovered how to market my business in a way that keeps me from experiencing the pain of the five challenges listed above, and take full advantage of all the benefits the Beachbody business opportunity provides.
If you’d like to learn exactly what I’m doing to take the network marketing world by storm, go to my Beachbody Training Center. Also, to get more information on why I have entrusted my family’s financial future to this particular business opportunity, take a look at Why Beachbody.
