WakeUpNow fail to address retail elephant in the room
Retail sales are the lifeblood of any MLM company. Without a steady flow of revenue from people outside of the opportunity purchasing your products, you’re only putting off an inevitable collapse.
A complete lack of retail sales saw WakeUpNow rack up $3.3 million dollars in losses for 2012. This trend continued and in 2013 the company recorded another loss of $4.5 million.
No doubt seeing the writing on the wall, WakeUpNow management introduced mandatory retail quotas in late 2013. Forced onto an affiliate-base that had previously been solely focused on affiliate recruitment, these changes were met with mixed reactions.
Affiliates who had focused on signing up, paying the minimum volume-spend themselves and then recruiting others to do the same were rather unhappy.
The loss figures above are quoted from WakeUpNow’s own 2013 Disclosure statement, which was the focus of a recent BehindMLM article. Titled "WakeUpNow blows through almost $8 million in two years", the article looked at the current situation, what WakeUpNow focused on in the statement and what that likely meant for the business going forward.
In summary, WakeUpNow looked to be pushing more of the same - which I suggested would in turn result in more of the same. That being the ongoing loss of millions of dollars from year to year.
That evidently didn’t go over too well with WakeUpNow corporate, who were quick to deploy their PR agency.
The first response came in less than 24 hours by way of a spammy press-release. Written for no other reason than to be linked back to by over-zealous WakeUpNow affiliates, who for some reason can’t quite seem to grasp WakeUpNow themselves author (or at the very least solicit) such works, declares "WakeUpNow passes 100,000 customer milestone".
Sounds impressive, until you consider there’s no mention of how many of those customers are retail.
Furthermore, the maths doesn’t add up either. How does a company with 100,000 customers still manage to lose $8 million over two years? Even the smallest of spends ($10), translates into millions of dollars in revenue.
Some things need to be considered here. In addition to no mention of retail ratios, WakeUpNow also don’t clarify whether these 100,000 customers are currently active (having made any recent orders), or whether it’s a cumulative number.
Anyway, it is what it is - a bunch of spam that’s both misleading and ultimately irrelevant.
WakeUpNow followed up this response with an email sent to me via BehindMLM’s contact form. Well, not from them per say but from Mike Scerbo of Rose Moser Allyn Public Relations, who appear to be working for them.
Scerbo’s email was anything but personal, containing seemingly recently written spammy press-release that asked me to "consider" the following "key points":
Source: http://internetcrimefightersorg.com/wakeupnow-retail-sales/ (already removed)