About
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My working background is in the IT industry, I was involved in it for for 28 years. The last twelve years of which, I had my own company specialising in local area network support and LAN/WAN consulting. We closed in 2000 after the “dot bomb” crash that followed Y2K. The next five years I spent in the Financial Services industry working with venture capitalists and the like.
In 2005 my wife and I decided to move from Johannesburg on the Witwatersrand(where the biggest gold find ever was discovered in 1886) to a smaller town on the coast, the traffic and crime on “The Rand” was beginning to get to us. We finished the renovations to our home(which had been dragging on for ten years) sold it, and moved to Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape. Its a fairly small place, you can drive from one end to the other in about 25 minutes, and around it on the freeway in 15, you even begin to recognise people at the super-markets, and I don’t mean the check-out clerks! Having arrived here, I started looking around for something to do – being the wrong side of 50 finding a job was not going to be easy and South Africa like the rest of the world was heading into a recession precipitated by the sub-prime mortgage crises. I also did not want to go back to the IT world or Financial Services, it was time for a change.
One thing I had begun to pick up on, was that there were people out there making a living off the internet. This interested me coming from an IT background. At this time in South Africa there weren’t too many people around that knew anything about this – a lot of our telephone exchanges didn’t even support DSL! So any web surfing had to be done with a 56K modem which seldom had data transfers faster than 33K, very time consuming and very frustrating.
I tried various things, none of which worked. Then one day I was handed a flyer at a intersection which said “if I wanted to start my own home based business to call this number”– I did. And that was the beginning of my introduction to network marketing aka multilevel marketing(MLM) aka referral marketing and recently I came across yet another term, social-level marketing, I have no doubt that there are many more terms referring to this type of marketing.
The blogs that follow were what I encountered as I learnt about network marketing and my subsequent search for the best network marketing model for me to use. The comments I make about the various network marketing companies are my own views based on what I experienced when exposed to them. Some of these companies have been, and still are, very successful well run businesses. AMWAY in particular, established this type of business model well over sixty years ago and we can be grateful that it did. In no way do I mean to be disparaging about network marketing companies, except for one based on the so-called “Gifting” philosophy – but more of that later. I hope that these experiences and what I discovered will be of benefit to you.
