The Administration function in MLM and Party Plan Companies refers to the administration of business processes, with the responsibility to ensure business processes are operating properly.  In many organizational charts, Administration refers to the physical plant, office operations, etc.  Both are correct.  In our world, we refer to the System Administrator as the individual who is on the lookout for potential problems that can hold up processes such as unposted orders or shipments that have not been ship verified.

This function is accountable (as an individual administrator as well as a departmental team) to both company management as well as to the distributor force who depend on 24/7 effectiveness of the business processes.

The success of a fast-growth direct selling company is found in its ability to respond to change.  Every direct selling organization has to build into its very structure the management of change.  Forces that affect change in fast-growth MLM and Party Plan companies come from all angles:

• Legally mandated issues such as the “5 customer rule” or the “70% rule”
• Sales-driven challenges that respond to trends and newly discovered sales techniques
• Marketing-based opportunities in an ever-evolving global market based more and more in technology
• Relationship and connection-based situations
• Growth and scale-related demands (including manufacturing, financial, and fulfillment)
• Technology-driven mandates

Regardless of the sources and types of change, adaptation and innovation are essential.  As circumstances require, system administrators can keep up by understanding their business processes and knowing the settings within their enterprise application.  Familiarity with these can alleviate, if not delay, the need for much of the custom programming that is costly and usually aggravating.

Thanks Sonia (from India) for your question about MLM companies.

Your Question:

Here is a question for the MLM Consultant.  I am planning to launch a new MLM company and after the planning I see that the model is very strong.  If my understanding is correct, why don’t most of the big companies start MLM as the returns in this are huge.  Is there something I am missing?

Our Response:

A surprising number of large companies are either considering, testing, or actually launching direct selling divisions.  Some of our clients are still at the stage where they are confidentially testing a market.  Others, such as Kimberly Clark (Fortune 500 Company), Discovery Toys, Dove Chocolate, Jockey, and Maidenform have already jumped in, as examples.  Direct selling is a high-leverage business model that works well for a variety of products and services, and we believe that it will continue to gain prominence and acceptance in the global markets.

That’s one of the reasons we are wildly excited about direct selling!

Thanks for contacting us.  Terrel

P.S. Be sure to join us at our start-up conference, held monthly.  You’ll be amazed by all that we teach you about starting and running a successful direct selling company.  Here’s the link:  http://www.launchsmart.com/launch-essentials-best-practices-workshop.html

More and more, I see claims from emerging authors and MLM consultants that they “wrote the book” on Direct Selling.  Makes me scratch my head.

There are some good writings on aspects of MLM and Home Party Plan business.  In the aggregate, however, they still are only fragments of a great body of work that has yet to be created.  The Book on MLM is being researched by a few thousand companies who are actually doing it, learning what works and what doesn’t work.  MLM and Home Party Plan comprise “direct selling” (in our way of referring to it), and they are largely social experiments that are working!

All good things have an evil twin.  If you’ve heard the negative about illegal pyramids and MLM scams, the pull the string and you’ll find on the other end of the spectrum are glorious, vibrant companies doing good.  Products that have a story to tell can make their way instantly into the marketplace if someone will tell that story.  That’ the essence of direct selling – paying people to sell your products by telling the story.  And the growing collection of those stories is truly the “book of direct selling,” or the definitive works comprising the Book of MLM and the Book of Home Party Plan.