Kleeneeze or Betterware?

PatrickD

Morethanconcerned wrote: »

Having taken the time to sit back and read through all of this thread at least going back to when I was last here , it's obvious that , even though you said you did Kleeneze that you'd don't understand it. You can't *teach* kleeneze catalogues - there are hundreds if not thousands of products ranging from homecare, car care, to OAP aids, to gardening to beauty products. You don't knock on the door and go let me demonstrate this OAP toilet seat , you put the catalogue and all the ancillary books that go with it in the pack through the door and let the customer look , you go back on a prearranged day to collect and take any orders left.

Now an encyclopaedic knowledge of the different products helps on the doorstep if someone says *Oh I wanted such and such* **Oh do you have something that will clean the rings on Xmas balballs ?** . Obviously this level of knowledge comes with doing it for ages and ordering hundreds if not thousands of pounds worth each week. But at no time did I have to or was expected to *sell* the products by personal recommendation, nor was anyone recruited - they are told *no selling needed* .

Personally the stuff was overpriced crap - nothing there no able bodied person couldn't have got off the high street or online for a fraction of the cost, few of the weird gadgets were any good, the consumables like cleaners and cosmetics were cheap crap sold for inflated prices, the big high value items like big brushes and push along cleaners , furniture and bedding etc were way over priced and often shamefully cheap and nasty. The Xmas book is full of pound shop tat no one with any taste would have anywhere near their house. Of course you'd go to uplines houses - often quite poor houses really given the fact they reckon they are doing so well - and there would be the glow in the dark out door rock things , the light changing ball things that frankly were laughable.

Of course putting out near to 1000 books a week over a continuous cycle through out the whole week I would enthuse as much as I could if some ne'er do well wanted to know if the £18 singing and dancing reindeer on the front cover was any good *Oh yes they are flying out the warehouse and may soon be all out of stock so popular are they!* no good for sales and my bills if I said , *no it's sh%%te plastic tat that you can get for £5 in argos but you'd need a brainectomy if you were daft enough to buy one!*

Hi

i wasn't referring to teaching people to do the catalogues, I was referring to teaching and working with people to help them mainly sponsor people. I dont agree with the Kleeneze way of doing nothing but putting out catalogues..

Pat

Peter_Pan

PatrickD wrote: »

Hi

i wasn't referring to teaching people to do the catalogues, I was referring to teaching and working with people to help them mainly sponsor people. I dont agree with the Kleeneze way of doing nothing but putting out catalogues..

Pat

I agree, retailing is just one oar in this type of Business which can give you an extra income and i know of people who have managed to not lose their house because of the extra income they earnt from Kleeneze but large retailing doesn't pay the bills if you ever have to stop retailing for any reason which is why you need no 2 oar and where you may need to learn new skills because you are helping others and have to be a mentor, teacher and a leader which doesn't necessarily come naturally and i don't mean phonming the team up every day checking to see what they done as some people believe is the way :eek::eek:, its about helping them get what THEY want from the Biz .

Debbie

Honest_John_666

alanbluecat wrote: »

Hi Pat, the amount is in there above but probably lost in all the words!

It would be £3174 income.

Edited to add - of course there would be expenses to come off such as replacement catalogues, petrol, sponsoring materials etc so it is impossible to know what the net figure is. However this person drives a nice, nearly new car, pays the mortgage and has no other means of income and on the face of it, a seemingly nice standard of living. They seem to be doing very well for themselves but it should be noted that they work really, really hard, in all weathers to achieve this. It is a very physical job at this level. As someone said earlier - simple, but not easy.

GREAT HONEST post Alan &..........is your cat realy BLUE :eek:

I would say good luck to these guys & I for one know that theres quite a few of these bods about. They've stuck at it & earning a living. I should imagine if you cut these people in two they'd have Kleeneze through written through the middle of them

Would have to say IMO though earning that amount for 7 days work is not brilliant in my eyes though. £793 per week MINUS all expenses @ tax & NI. What do we reckon the net profit is per week here???

Anyone can have a nice car & house if you can afford the repayments cant they???

How many years have they been doing this Alan???

Regards
John

Morethanconcerned

PatrickD wrote: »

Hi

i wasn't referring to teaching people to do the catalogues, I was referring to teaching and working with people to help them mainly sponsor people. I dont agree with the Kleeneze way of doing nothing but putting out catalogues..

Pat

Where does it say the Kleeneze way is just putting out catalogues? Everyone joins with the books but nothing stops anyone just concentrating on sponsoring - of course the problem with this is that they are trying to get people to sign up to put the books out so they don't have to.

This is the problem , someone somewhere actually has to trudge out with the books, when I went to meetings (to show a face ) it was sponsor sponsor sponsor. **Oh look Jemima has sponsored three people this month** - the problem was they never did anything and Jemima never progressed up the plan at all , like many teams they had team table of who was where and bods like Jemima never even got to 10% and soon disappeared.

This was replicated time after time , so if you were in a few years you see new fresh faces come and go with much fanfare. The thing is no upline will go far up the plan unless those below do so it was get to gold, get to gold. For a long while I wasn't thought much of with my steady 13% from retail, but there were subtle changes when sponsoring just didn't seem to be coming up with the goods and people were struggling to hold gold, then my steady hard work become quite desirable.

When I really ramped up the retail then I was much more appreciated as their seemingly endless attempts at sponsoring got no where - my upline when I was there had been in for 5 yrs and had by then sponsored over 200 people, yet had just 10 actually putting orders in. The rest had dropped out.

The way it is sold is clear - the actual * circles* are based on me doing £500 and then recruiting lots of others doing £500. The problem is so few actually sign up , and those that do rarely do it for more than a few weeks that most folk who stick with it end up doing far more than £500 retail - just to cover this costs and make all the hassle worth while.

Thus to end a long story we end up with these Golds doing MEGA retail just to cover their increasing costs, had I made gold , if I could have got a few folk daft enough to trudge round like me then my mega retail would have been just the ticket - but the idea of doing (as is the idea) just 10% level or less retail then trying to get gold with the rest being done by new sponsored people ? forget it now.

Morethanconcerned

Honest_John_666 wrote: »

GREAT HONEST post Alan &..........is your cat realy BLUE :eek:

I would say good luck to these guys & I for one know that theres quite a few of these bods about. They've stuck at it & earning a living. I should imagine if you cut these people in two they'd have Kleeneze through written through the middle of them

Would have to say IMO though earning that amount for 7 days work is not brilliant in my eyes though. £793 per week MINUS all expenses @ tax & NI. What do we reckon the net profit is per week here???

Anyone can have a nice car & house if you can afford the repayments cant they???

How many years have they been doing this Alan???




Regards
John

There were a few bods doing this while I was in - they did it to get the gold level as there were some one time awards at that point. Now of course Gold entitles them to the foreign conferences whereas then it was still Bronze. Of course the poor sods were killing themselves doing this - never alone always with a wife at home turning round books all day.

This is the key - the utterly enourmous amount of catalogues you need to do , I did 750 - 1000 depending on my stock at that time , a mixture of mostly customer base and blanket. To do retail gold they need literally thousands of houses each week - try to picture the amount of streets they need , given that with customer base there might only be a few in each street. No one can do this with *just* blanket. The bods I knew were travelling miles - used to go out upto 9 miles from home they covered far more distance.

In fact one of the key problems for new bods is high retailing golds - with a small team but they do mega retail, no one else really stood a chance in my areas for I was so relentless.

The there is the little but hoary chestnut problem of expenses - the sheer amount of catalogues they need to do this , the petrol , the bags, the labels , all of this really eats into *any* profit they made with all this work.

Now even if they make over £3000 that month there is a really good chance they won't be physically able to do it the next, take their earning over the WHOLE year including any holidays and duff weeks , take out ALL the costs including things like bank charges given the bank would have asked them to open a business account ( which is what happened to me when I was taking in over a grand in cash to bank each week). When all those costs have been removed I'll hazard a guess they barely make minimum wage - hardly worth it for the 7 day a week 12+ hour days they'll have put in.

Peter_Pan

Morethanconcerned wrote: »

This is the key - the utterly enourmous amount of catalogues you need to do , I did 750 - 1000 depending on my stock at that time , a mixture of mostly customer base and blanket. To do retail gold they need literally thousands of houses each week - try to picture the amount of streets they need , given that with customer base there might only be a few in each street. No one can do this with *just* blanket. The bods I knew were travelling miles - used to go out upto 9 miles from home they covered far more distance.

In fact one of the key problems for new bods is high retailing golds - with a small team but they do mega retail, no one else really stood a chance in my areas for I was so relentless.

The there is the little but hoary chestnut problem of expenses - the sheer amount of catalogues they need to do this , the petrol , the bags, the labels , all of this really eats into *any* profit they made with all this work.

.

OMG 750-1000 books :eek::eek::eek:, we used to work with 250 a week and there was two of us and that was hard enough especially as we had two young children at the time. I admire anyone working with that number, bagging up 250 is not a light task, but to do 3x or 4x that makes me feel rather weak. Then theres the deliveries which is probably another story, our house was like a Kleeneze warehouse.;)

Debbie

alanbluecat

Hi Honest John and Morethanconcerned.

Without knowing the full details of the person's finances the best we can do is make an educated guess at what lies behind the facts we do know.
They have been operating a Kleeneze business for less than 4 years.
The person is single so has no help with turning catalogues round and getting them out and in or with deliveries.
The last figure I was told by another Kleeneze bod was that this person was getting an average of £5 worth of orders for each catalogue and was working mainly from a customer base.
If you do the maths on this - total orders were at least £8813, so at £5 per catalogue that would be approx 1763 catalogues delivered over the 4 week period, or 441 catalogues per week. It may be that it was less than this as the 2 periods before Christmas would normally see higher than usual returns per catalogue. Either way, 441 catalogues in and out per week is perfectly manageable.
It is impossible to know the level of catalogue losses but my losses were typically 10% and I've heard others mention this fugues too, so using that would mean they would have to replace 177 catalogues over the period. I don't know the current price but in my day it was about £30 for a box of 50, so using that it would be 4 boxes (200 catalogues) @ £30 = £120
NI - Class 2 contributions = £2.50 per week = £10
Class 4 contributiuons = 9% for profits between £7225 and £42475 = impossible to know unless we know how much profit is made over the year.
Tax - I know the person uses an accountant so any smart accountant will offset as many expenses as possible to reduce any tax liability on declared profits. It is surprising how much can actually be declared as a business expense so I would assume the person's tax liability would be a low as the accountant could manage. Impossible to know exactly how much unless we knew the person's whole financial details.

John, I only mentioned the car and house as I don't know the person's full finances so this is the only way I could use anything which might reflect their income level. I take your point completely but all I was meaning by this is that they don't appear to be on the breadline with an ancient car and run down house. They have no other job so Kleeneze is their only source of income and there is no spouse or partner.

Morethanconcerned - I don't know if they have a business account, but having recently opened one myself I know you can get free banking for 12 months, 18 months and in some cases 24 months. I don't know this person's banking arrangements but they have an accountant who I'm sure must give them advice on this type of thing if they need it and if they were any good would hopefully advise them of any current free deals available. We can only speculate.

I would say the only other major expense would be petrol. I believe most of the customer base is local but it would be impossible to know how much was being spent.
The only other thing I would say is that the person has always been a huge retailer. They quickly climbed the bonus levels and reached 18% in a couple of months, then 21% not much longer after that and for the last 2/3 years have been retailing consistently at that level before finally breaking the 24% recently.

I say good luck to them. From what I can see they are making a reasonable living from this, but it is not my idea of a sustainable business and I wouldn't fancy the hard work of heavy retail with catalogues year after year. I'm pretty sure if the person was asked they would say it is the best job they ever had and they are earning more than they ever had as I believe that their employement history is a string of low paid, bottom-rung-of-the-ladder type jobs. No disrespect meant to them or anyone else who is at that level, I'm just stating the facts.

I think that is about as much light as I can shed on this. Anyone reading can make their own judgement on what the person's profit might or might not be. We will probably never know. I hope it helps anyone trying to decide if Kleeneze might be for them.

wongawonga

Findel,s senior independent director and chair of its audit committee, did not know for almost a year that he had not taken up his share of there rights issues. :eek:


http://www.londonstockexchange.com/exchange/news/market-news/market-news-detail.html?announcementId=11045304

Honest_John_666

alanbluecat wrote: »

Hi Honest John and Morethanconcerned.

Without knowing the full details of the person's finances the best we can do is make an educated guess at what lies behind the facts we do know.
They have been operating a Kleeneze business for less than 4 years.
The person is single so has no help with turning catalogues round and getting them out and in or with deliveries.
The last figure I was told by another Kleeneze bod was that this person was getting an average of £5 worth of orders for each catalogue and was working mainly from a customer base.
If you do the maths on this - total orders were at least £8813, so at £5 per catalogue that would be approx 1763 catalogues delivered over the 4 week period, or 441 catalogues per week. It may be that it was less than this as the 2 periods before Christmas would normally see higher than usual returns per catalogue. Either way, 441 catalogues in and out per week is perfectly manageable.
It is impossible to know the level of catalogue losses but my losses were typically 10% and I've heard others mention this fugues too, so using that would mean they would have to replace 177 catalogues over the period. I don't know the current price but in my day it was about £30 for a box of 50, so using that it would be 4 boxes (200 catalogues) @ £30 = £120
NI - Class 2 contributions = £2.50 per week = £10
Class 4 contributiuons = 9% for profits between £7225 and £42475 = impossible to know unless we know how much profit is made over the year.
Tax - I know the person uses an accountant so any smart accountant will offset as many expenses as possible to reduce any tax liability on declared profits. It is surprising how much can actually be declared as a business expense so I would assume the person's tax liability would be a low as the accountant could manage. Impossible to know exactly how much unless we knew the person's whole financial details.

John, I only mentioned the car and house as I don't know the person's full finances so this is the only way I could use anything which might reflect their income level. I take your point completely but all I was meaning by this is that they don't appear to be on the breadline with an ancient car and run down house. They have no other job so Kleeneze is their only source of income and there is no spouse or partner.

Morethanconcerned - I don't know if they have a business account, but having recently opened one myself I know you can get free banking for 12 months, 18 months and in some cases 24 months. I don't know this person's banking arrangements but they have an accountant who I'm sure must give them advice on this type of thing if they need it and if they were any good would hopefully advise them of any current free deals available. We can only speculate.

I would say the only other major expense would be petrol. I believe most of the customer base is local but it would be impossible to know how much was being spent.
The only other thing I would say is that the person has always been a huge retailer. They quickly climbed the bonus levels and reached 18% in a couple of months, then 21% not much longer after that and for the last 2/3 years have been retailing consistently at that level before finally breaking the 24% recently.

I say good luck to them. From what I can see they are making a reasonable living from this, but it is not my idea of a sustainable business and I wouldn't fancy the hard work of heavy retail with catalogues year after year. I'm pretty sure if the person was asked they would say it is the best job they ever had and they are earning more than they ever had as I believe that their employement history is a string of low paid, bottom-rung-of-the-ladder type jobs. No disrespect meant to them or anyone else who is at that level, I'm just stating the facts.

I think that is about as much light as I can shed on this. Anyone reading can make their own judgement on what the person's profit might or might not be. We will probably never know. I hope it helps anyone trying to decide if Kleeneze might be for them.

Great reply again Alan & I also have to say good luck to them too. :T They probably dont have holiday's either if they're working 7 days

More importantly though Alan.......is your cat really BLUE :rotfl:

Regards
John

alanbluecat

Hi John,
When I knew them well they tended to work 6 days, sometimes 7.

Holidays are a good point - I don't know what they take but on the basis that they have no team to earn volume bonuses on then obviously if they took 2 weeks off out of a 4 week period then the income for that period would drop significantly. Just as an example if 'typical' retail sales figures for a period outside the Christmas periods was, say, £6000 (which is just going into the 21% bonus level) this would earn them an income (before expenses) of £2049. If the retail sales were half of this, £3000, due to taking half the period off, then the income would be £913 (before expenses) - quite a significant drop.
Something else to consider is - in the week before taking time off I used to scale back the catalogues otherwise if I worked right up until the day before a holiday putting catalogues out, they would be sitting in the customers homes for a week or two - more time for them to lose them and cost me more to replace. Then the first week back I wouldn't have any catalogues out ready to collect so if you take a 2 week holiday, if you did it my way, you would have more than a reduction in orders for the 2 weeks. You would have less orders than normal on the weeks either side of the holidays too, so just as an exercise using the above figures, instead of reduced retail sales in that period being £3000 it might well drop even further to £2000 which would provide an income of only £584 (before expenses).
The 'training' I received told me to leave the catalogues with the customers but be very clear when you would collect again so that you had orders to collect upon your return, but in practice I found that it didn't work like that for me. Yes there were some catalogues put out on the correct date, but that first collection required lots of knocking on doors as people had forgotten the date to put them out and others binned them because they thought I wasn't coming back. All in all a lot more work that day for a few orders and an increase in my expenses replacing lost catalogues.

Sorry I didn't answer your most important questions! I don't even have a cat!