One of our clients is an MLM company with revenues approaching $250 million. Through an aggressive business development program, skilled operations teams, and tight overhead controls, they have consistently grown annual profitability within a range of 12% to 15% per year.
Notwithstanding their success, the leverage available to them through MLM distributor retention has been enormous. Improving distributor retention by an increase of just over 3% has moved their profit gains to 22% (nearly double their historical results), with no corresponding increase in their new distributor acquisition rate. This is the essence of leverage applied to distributor retention, even when you are considering how to start and run an MLM company.
Improvements in retention offer other self-perpetuating benefits, including:
1. Facilitating efficiency of new business development processes
2. Increasing morale of the entire organization
3. Improving the company’s momentum
4. Stabilizing the company’s reputation in the industry
This becomes a vital consideration for an MLM startup because too often I see the attitude of “I’ll worry about retention when I have some distributors to retain!” The time to start working on MLM distributor retention is at the beginning when you launch.