Team Beach Body Coach Opportunity Review: Can I Build a Walkaway Income or Should I Walk Away?

If you’re reading this post right now, you fit into one of two categories. You’re either someone who is thinking about becoming involved with Team Beach Body, and need more information on the opportunity, or you are already involved with Team Beach Body, and you want to learn more about how to build your business. Either way, this review will provide you with some great information to go on.

In the interest of full disclosure, this is not an impartial review. I am a Team Beach Body Coach, and do make an income promoting their business opportunity. If that fact is going to keep you from reading further, that’s your decision.

However, I truly believe that my background as a successful technical recruiter for the better part of the last 11 years qualifies me to evaluate an opportunity honestly, objectively and fairly. This article will not be a puff op ed piece about the joys of being a Team Beach Body Coach. So, with that said, let’s dig in!

Who is Team Beachbody?

Beachbody has gained a tremendous amount of notoriety for itself, primarily from the infomercials they’ve produced for their many workout programs. P90X is a household name worldwide, and Insanity is not too far behind it. Since 1998, Carl Daikeler and his team have been working to eliminate the obesity epidemic we face, one customer at a time. And they’ve had a great deal of success, to the tune of about $400 million in annual sales, and countless success stories.

But most people are not real familiar with Team Beachbody, the multi-level marketing (MLM) business unit of the company. In 2007, the Team Beachbody Coaching Opportunity was rolled out to the Beachbody customer base. What’s happened in those short 3 1/2 years? More than 50,000 online fitness coaches have joined the Team Beachbody ranks.

After 9 years in business, Carl had recognized something. The greatest reason that people were having success with the workout programs Beachbody offered was not just that the workouts being sold were great. The secret was the community of people who supported, encouraged, and held each other accountable on their fitness journeys. Beyond the scale of regular customer is the world of the Brand Evangelist, and after 9 successful years, Carl realized that he had a lot of them.  So why not reward them for it?

What Makes Team Beach Body So Different?

On the surface, Team Beach Body is exactly like many other MLM business opportunities. It has a great compensation plan, and products that you can believe in. But there are thousands of other companies within the health and wellness space of the industry, so what makes Team Beach Body so special?

The most obvious and glaring difference is this: Beachbody DOES NOT need their distributor force to generate retail profit. Say WHAT? Beachbody generates more than 50,000 new customers every week. They were over the $100 million dollar a year sales mark well before the first coach signed up. They spend about $100 million a year in advertising their products.

This made me sit up and pay attention. Having been in network marketing for awhile, I’ve seen a ton of companies start out in network marketing, then suddenly pull the rug out from under their distributor force. This was the first time I’d ever seen an already successful company move TO network marketing from a traditional marketing strategy.

The reason is simple. Beachbody wants their coaches to focus on what has made them successful to date: growing relationships within the community, and helping others achieve their fitness goals. Beachbody gives new customers and coaches to qualified coaches, for free, every single week. Any purchases those customers make going forward are fully commissionable to the coach that they’ve been assigned to. This translates into the opportunity to earn a significant income, outside of the effort and energy a coach puts into generating their own customers.

Many people don’t realize that the types of compensation plans in network marketing varies as widely as the number of different companies in the industry. Team Beachbody has chosen to use the binary compensation plan for their business. In very simple terms, a binary plan just means that each coach has two legs. As the new Team Beachbody coach sponsors more coaches on their team, they can only go into one of the two legs.

The power of the binary plan is twofold. First, it allows a brand new coach to participate in a higher bonus pool at a very early point in their business. Second, it creates a phenomena known as spillover. For example, if Bob sponsors 2 coaches at the same time, and chooses to put them both into the same leg, the first coach sponsored has the opportunity to earn bonuses based on the production of the second coach, as does Bob. This creates a tremendous incentive for teamwork and collaboration throughout the team, even for coaches that are not directly sponsored by each other.

What’s the Downside of Team Beach Body?

There is no such thing as a perfect business, so for all of the great things about Team Beachbody, there are negatives that exist as well. There are actually 5 key weaknesses that I have found in the Beachbody business opportunity.

Lack of Cashflow – the day that your new Team Beachbody coach gets signed up, the clock starts. Which clock? The “get me a doggone check” clock! On average, you’ve got 63 days to get your newbie making money, or they are checking out. But it’s hard to help someone with no marketing budget to get started in marketing, right?

And yet, many new network marketers get started with a shoestring budget, using money they didn’t have in the first place to get started in business. Eventually the juggling act of keeping their business alive using the rent/electric/phone bill money wears thin, and you’re left with a negative, frustrated person who believes network marketing just doesn’t work.

Lead Poverty – Rule #1 of the standard network marketing operating manual clearly states that any new distributor in the industry MUST begin by making a list of every person they know, and have ever known, and ever will know. Many Team Beachbody coaches teach this same tactic in their business.

I do believe that there is a way to target people within your warm market who might be interested in Beachbody, and approach them in a way that will allow you to still be invited to family functions. However, the bottom line is that not only are you soliciting people who may or may not be interested in being a Beachbody coach, but this list will eventually run out.

Since many have not learned how to advance their expansion efforts beyond the level of warm market prospecting and cold calling, they get frustrated with their Beachbody business, and quit in much the same manner as those with no cashflow.

Inadequate Systems - Home meetings can be cool. So can hotel meetings. Three way calls can do a ton to assist the growth of your Beachbody team. Large conferences can be life changing events, packed with value. There’s no problem with building a Beachbody business using these methods IF you got in business to replace your job with another, much higher paying one.

But if you saw the opportunity to create a walkaway income that Beachbody provides, and you like it, this method of building your business will NEVER allow you to do that.

Attrition - as an industry, network marketing has about a 12 – 15% retention rate annually.In other words, if you sponsor 100 Beachbody coaches in 2010, you can generally expect that 12 – 15 of them will still be with you in 2011. Seems very depressing, but their are many ways to firewall your personal Team Beachbody business against such heavy attrition rates.

Blood Thirsty Competition - Not only do you have to compete against the other Beachbody coaches out there, you have an industry that added over 1 million reps last year, with no signs of stopping. More than 16.1 million people all competing to recruit the same talent pool. Team Beachbody provides a tremendous business opportunity, but in the current economic climate, and with such fierce competition out there, it takes more than just a tremendous opportunity to make yourself stand out in the crowd.

After assessing my options, and giving a thorough review to several opportunities out there, I am very comfortable that my decision to join Team Beachbody was the right one. Fortunately, I’ve learned how to market my business in a way that keeps me from experiencing the pain of the five negatives listed above, and take full advantage of all the benefits the Beachbody business opportunity provides.

If you’d like to learn exactly what I’m doing to take the network marketing world by storm, go to my Beachbody Training Center. Also, to get more information on why I have entrusted my family’s financial future to this particular business opportunity, take a look at Why Beachbody.

Please leave me a comment, and let me know what you think of this post.

Related posts:

1. Team Beachbody Advantage-You Don’t Want to Make More Money
2. Team BeachBody Compensation Plan-Structure Yields Results to Super Star Diamond

Tagged with: Beach body • BeachBody • Team Beach Body • team beach body coach • Team Beach Body Coach Opportunity Review • team beachbody • team beachbody coach

Filed under: Beachbody • MLM Company Reviews

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