John with grandkids Jake and Levi

My youngest brother did Amway for 2-3 years about 4 years later. He want after it pretty hard, got my sister and her husband involved, and built a decent starter downline. We tried to be supportive, attended several of the meetings, may have even bought some product, but we were just not interested. We were doing okay in our work-a-day world, not getting rich but paying the bills, and felt no desire to try something new. Life continued on for another 13-14 years, most of the kids grew up, went to college, on missions, got married, gave us grandkids, etc. Life was really pretty good!

In 1998 Rebecca designed a line of greeting cards, we had them printed, and set off for New York to make our fortune at the National Stationery Show in the Javits center. I was pretty excited to go since I had never been to New York; actually no farther east than Illinois north of Chicago where I worked for Great America for a couple of years after college. I am not a lover of big cities but I really enjoyed New York. Our hotel was just off of Times Square. The night life there was amazing! So bright and active with all the people, the street vendors, all the cabs, the Broadway Shows, it was Great! Okay, to be honest, the Stationary Show wasn’t so great, incredibly boring actually. It was okay when people stopped to talk to us and look at Rebecca’s cards but overall it was very slow. We went back there for 4 years and each year was slower than the one before. Although the trips were money losing propositions the time in New York was great. We saw many Broadway shows, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Ellis Island, Rockefeller Plaza, the Chrysler Building, Grand Central, Central Park, rode the subway (people really need to leard to spit their gum into the trash, ugh!), and did many great touristy things. We also got to see the Twin Towers and then the next year the big hole in the ground where they stood. Such a horrible tragedy. I am really not a very good tourist, can only stand to sight see for a few hours a day, but I loved our trips to New York.
I mentioned our trips to New York because they happened at a time when both Rebecca and I started our own businesses. She went out on her own full time as a graphic artist and I tried to sell our greeting cards. We wanted to be entrepreneurs. Thankfully she was successful because my selling greeting cards was a bad, and expensive idea. I went back to work as an employee a couple of years later.
So what does our employment situation have to do with eXfuze and MLM? In about 2005 rebecca met a client named Michael who asked her to do some labels, signs etc, for his business. He became a good client and a very good friend. In late 2007 he was introduced by his daughter to a nutritional product that he really liked. When he told Rebecca about it and asked her if she would give it a try, she asked him if he had a brochure that would tell about the products. The company did not have a brochure so over the next several weeks they decided to create one with the hopes of selling them to the companies distributors. With over 250,000 distributors they felt it would be a pretty good captive market. Meanwhile, back at the ranch (okay, it is just a house, we only want to live on a ranch), rebecca was trying to get me to look at the companys DVD on their compensation plan. I watched for a minute or two but quickly fell asleep. I was not interested, as I said before, “MLM stay far away!”
Michael and Rebecca put a great deal of time into creating the brochure, several weeks, and many hours. When it was almost finished they roped me into helping to edit it. We went over it again and again; when you are printing tens of thousands of copies you don’t need any errors. Finally we got it perfect; and by now there were hundreds of hours invested in it, and got it printed. Michael had gone on a couple of trips to regional meetings and came home with orders for thousands of the brochure. We were going to strike it rich!
We decided to take our little company to their World convention in Salt Lake City in September of 2008. In order to get in to the convention and talk to the distributors so we could sell our product, we joined the company. We paid our bucks and became official distributors, MLMers. Surprisingly, the convention was not as bad as I expected it to be. Much of it was uplifting and inspiring. I kept hearing the theme of helping people to be healthier and wealthier. It was a theme that translated to me as “service”. Doing multi-level marketing could actually be a service to people. What a novel thought! As Rebecca and I traveled home from Salt Lake City we talked about what we had heard and seen, listened to their CDs, read the magazine, and decided we could and should do this!
So we arrived home with great intentions, we were going to grow a MLM business. But even though we were going to do it their was still a couple of little naggy problems that stood in our way: 1) the taste and texture of the product wasn’t all that appealing 2) the product was much too expensive, $75.00 to $150.00+ per person per month. We had been convinced that MLM could be a viable business for us but we could not get past the products price. So even though we wanted to move forward and sell both the product and the business we just couldn’t bring ourselves to do it.