Direct selling and wellness industry

8/14/2019 Direct selling and wellness industry

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34 |YOUR BUSINESS VOLUME 1 ISSUE 8

PAUL ZANEPILZER

The NextMillionairesTe emerging industries of wellness

and direct selling are combining to

create the next generation of wealth.

by Paul Zane Pilzer

Next Millionaires.indd 34Next Millionaires.indd 34 8/1/06 6:07:25 8/1/06 6:07:25


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PAUL ZANEPILZER

For 10 years (against medical advice), Ihad put off getting expensive knee sur-

gery. I started taking a dietary supple-ment called glucosamineand withina year, the cartilage was repaired. Tesurgeon was positively amazed when heexamined my X-rays. I no longer neededthe operation.

Tis experience piqued my interest. Iwanted to find out what else my surgeonand my other medical providers didntknow. I also noticed that people werespending more on new things such asexercise programs and fitness coaches,supplements and organic foods, alterna-tive medicine and anti-aging therapies.

I began to research this field and soonarrived at an amazing conclusion: Tisnew and emerging industry, which onlya decade earlier had hardly existed, wasalready a $200 billion business.

Tis represents an extraordinary eco-nomic opportunity. he millions ofpeople spending billions of dollars tofurther their wellness represent a newand growing economic sector who are

eating and living healthier than anyoneever before in history. Tey are primarily

wealthy people who, as they star t to havemoney, start looking for ways they canbe healthier outside the medical estab-lishment. oday, for example, this sec-tor spends more than $70 billion annu-ally on vitamins and food supplements.

Who are these people? Mostly babyboomers: prosperous people from theages of 40 to 60. Baby boomers are thefirst generation in history who refuse toblindly accept the aging process. Teyare also a powerfu l economic force; theyrepresent only 28 percent of our popula-tionyet this group and their spending

represent 50 percent of our economy.Until recently, marketing to baby

boomers had been all about how to helpthem remember what it was like to beyoungoldies music, retro clothes and50s-styled automobiles. Now, it hasgone a step further. oday, boomersare starting to buy things that actuallymake them younger in terms of having ahealthier body, more acute senses and a

sharper mind.

Network

Marketing and

WellnessAs I began exploring

this fascinating newindustr y, I found myselfasking a basic question:How are people learn-ing about all these newapproaches to theirhealth and fitness?

C e r t a i n l y n o tthrough their doctors.Doctors, hospitals andpharmaceutical com-panies are mostly part

of the sickness indus-t ry because , unt i lrecently, most scien-tists and public policyleaders viewed well-ness or preventive careas quacker y.

oday, numerous scientific stud-ies have validated what a few million

Americans seem to have known all along:Tere are hundreds or t housands of effi -cacious treatments to make people feelhealthier, to slow the effects of aging, orto prevent diseases from developing inthe first place. But until you first experi-ence one of these treatments working foryou or a member of your family, you areprobably going to remain a skeptic andmiss out on improving the quality ofyour life, and reducing your long-termhealth care costs.

he best way to learn about wellnessis through someone close to you who

has had a wellness experience. You seeyour college roommate and go, MyGod, John, you look great. You look sohealthywhat did you do? You bumpinto a wellness experience and start tofind out that there is a whole wellnessindustry out there, with al l sorts of newproducts and services.

Distribution in the New

Economy

In my 1990 book Unlimited Wealth,I wrote that the new wealth in thatdecade would be created mainly by

people who distributedthings, ratherthan by people who made things. hegreat fortunes of the 1990s would bemade in distribution.

But that opportunity has come andgone. he fortunes to be made todayand in the years ahead will be madeby those who are involved in teachingpeople about new products and servicesthat they either didnt know existedor didnt know were now affordable.Intellectual distribution, as opposed to

physical distribution, is where the great-est fortunes are being made today and

will continue to be made for at lea st thenext decade.

Manufacturers today report that thegreatest bottleneck they have is not increating the next great new product; itshow to reach people and teach them thatthese new products exist.



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VOLUME 1 ISSUE 8 YOUR BUSINESS | 37

People like to do things the old way.Tey fight change. In everything we do,

from shopping and cooking to taking careof our health, we often have the nostalgicview that the good old days were better,that the good old ways are the best ways.But the good old days were times ofmanure in the streets and rampant diph-theria, of abject poverty and wretched liv-ing conditions.

Te truth is that the good old dayswere not so good. Nevertheless, peopletend to cling to the known and resist

the unknown. Consequently, when theywatch television, read magazines or surfthe Internet, they tend to look for thingsthat reinforce what they a lready know.

So where will they learn? here isreally only one place: from other people.Te most effective way we have to teachpeople the new method is one-on-one,

word-of-mouth communication. Tis iswhy, even though we have sophisticated

video-conferencing tools available, busi-nesspeople will still fly clear across thecountry to meet face-to-face when theyhave important issues to decide.

Network Marketing in the

Years Ahead

I have always been keenly interestedin education; I taught college studentsfor 20 years at New York University, andin the 1990s, I developed an educationalsoftware product line. One of the mostexciting things Im seeing about this newcrop of 10 million millionaires is that they

are more often teachers at heart, ratherthan conventional businesspeople. Teyare people who learn about a new productor new service and adopt it for themselvesand their familiesbut they dont stopthere. Tey then go out and teach newpeople what they just learned.

Network marketing is both the oldestmethod of sales communication and also

the newest. And its the best method wehave today to change someones paradigmand teach them about a new product orservicea new way of doing somethingthat they wouldnt have gotten by read-ing a magazine, surfing the Internet or

watching television.Person-to-person, word-of-mouth com-

munication represents the cutting edge ofintellectual distribution. Tis is why weare seeing so manyFortune500 compa-

nies jumping into the direct selling arena,and Wall Street investors such as WarrenBuffet entering the business.

Network marketing has grown steadilyover the last 20 years, increasing 91 per-cent in just the last decade. With morethan 13 million Americans and 53 mil-lion people worldwide involved, it isnow a $100 billion global industry. Yetas impressive as this is, its not hard to

see that the real growth in this businessmodel has only just begun.

For one thing, demand is increasingexponentially. Because of the ever-acceler-ating pace of technological advancement,there is a growing flood of new productsand services that desperately need theirstory told in the marketplacestories

which no amount of screaming V adsor sprawling Internet pop-ups and bannerads can effectively tell.

Neil Offen, president of the DirectSelling Association, predicts that, at thecurrent rate of increase, worldwide some

200 million people will enter this indus-try over the next 10 years, effectivelyquadrupling its current percentage ofthe population.

Network marketing is already a forceto be reckoned withbut its growth willexplode in the coming decade.

The Home-Based

Business Boom

he advent of intellectual distribu-tion is one reason that network market-ing offers such a favorable opportunity,but it is not the only reason. Anotherpowerful factor is the current boom inhome-based businesses.

Only 20 years ago, people who workedfrom home were immediately suspect,as if that implied there was something

wrong with them, that they couldnt get areal job. oday, the sharpest and richest

people we know are the people who workat home.

One factor in this change is a massiveshift in the dominant unit of technology,the building block of our total economy.

When I graduated from Wharton 30years ago, I went to work at Citibank,not because I was interested in banking,but because I wanted access to the besttechnology, and Citibank had the biggest,

best computers available. Back then, thatwas the only way to have access to the besttechnology. Computers were expensivemainframes owned and managed exclu-sively by large businesses, which gave theman enormous competitive advantage.

oday, the opposite is the case. You aremore likely to find the hottest and bestnew technology on the desk of an entre-preneur sitting in his home offi ce.

he unit of technology has changedfrom a $2 million mainframe that servedhuge corporations, to a home computeryou can put on your desktop for well under

$1,000and which is far more powerfulthan the mainframe. As a home-basedentrepreneur, you can now do businessfar better than someone whos working ina large company and has to deal with theoverhead. Te big companies just cantinnovate fast enough.

Of the $2 trillion we spend on health care,most has very little to do with health.



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In the 80s, the rule was the biggerthe company, the newer and better the

technology. oday, the rule often is thebigger the company, the older and moreout-of-date the technology.

Where are the greatest opportunitiestoday? Even for people starting rightout of school, the best opportunities arenot to go work for some big company(unless its a company that make s toolsfor individuals), but to go into businessfor yourself as an entrepreneur.

Healthy Family, Healthy

Economy, Healthy Society

he change in technology is one rea-

son we are experiencing such a boom inhome-based businesses. Another reasonis that working from home is a morepersonally satisfying way to live.

In the new economy, the sheerquantity of compensation is no longerenough. More and more, we have cometo realize we also want a certain qualityof compensation, too. We dont simply

want money; we want lifestyle.It doesnt matter how much money

you earn if you never get to see yourfamily. It doesnt matter how many pos-sessions you have if you never get to

use or play with them. And it doesntmatter how great of a persona l economy

you create if you dont have the healthto enjoy it.

Te concept of quality of life, whichwe take for granted today, is actually afairly recent invention. Our economy andliving standards have grown to the point

where we not only expect to make a liv-ing, but we also expect to have the best

possible experiencedoing it.wenty percent of the average corpo-

rate workday is spent just commuting toand from workand up to 50 percent ofthe time spent actually inside the work-place is wasted around the water cooler,gossiping and talking to other people.

oday, more and more people dont

want to spend their time chatting withother workers in the offi cetheyd ratherspend that time with their spouse or theirchildren. heyd rather get their workdone in a few hours, and then get back tothe business of being with their families.For these people, a home-based businesstoday is both a more effi cient way to workand a lifestyle choice.

We often talk about the challenge ofkeeping a balance between our work andour families. Picture it like a seesaw, with

work on one end and family on the other.When youre constantly playing these pri-

orities against each other, your life swingsand swings, until eventually the whole

thing breaks, whether that means losingyour job, your family or your health.

But if we are fortunate enough to finda way to integrate work into your home,then we dont have to think about bal-ance between work and family so muchas how we can weave the two together.

here is actually something ironicabout this. Te United States started outas an agrarian society of entrepreneurs,

where everyone was a small-business per-son. Te rise of the giant corporations,

which my generation took for granted asthe normal employment path, is reallya historical anomaly. And its rapidly slip-ping into the history books as we return

to our entrepreneurial roots.

A Perfect Storm

In many ways, wellness and networkmarketing are natural sister industries.For one thing, wellness is rich in the kindsof new technologies that are best learnedperson-to-person. And for another, it isoften the same quest for a better qual-ity of life that finds expression both inexploring wellness and in pursuing anentrepreneurial, home-based business.

Wellness and network marketing alsoboth represent enormous financial oppor-

tunities; either opportunity alone has tre-mendous potential to create new wealth.Some companies have combined the bestof both worlds, creating a perfect stormof unprecedented economic opportunity:

A convergence of forces enabling entre-preneurs to create a satisfying lifestyle,andat the same timetremendousnew wealth.

Over the next 10 years, the U.S. econ-omy will create 10 million new million-aires. You have the opportunity to startnow and become one of them. You shoulddo so not only for the benefits in health

and happiness to yourself and your fam-ily, but also because you will be addingto our economy while you also add tothe wellness and personal fulfillment ofmany others. In so doing, you will becontributing immeasurably to your com-munity, your nation and the world. YB


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