I Went to Capitol Hill. Here's What Washington Doesn't Know About Us.

This past Wednesday, about a hundred of us, representing dozens of different network marketing companies, went to the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. We spent the day going from appointment to appointment in congressmen's and senators' offices, teaching them about the direct selling profession.

I had never been inside the Capitol, and I had never met with a congressman or senator in a professional capacity. I've met a few casually. This was different.

Who was in the room

Four full-time Nu Skin distributors came with me: Tori, Jill, Desiree, and Kyle. Kyle is from North Carolina, and the other three are from Ohio. They're brilliant people and wonderful leaders who have built fantastic businesses here in the United States. Danny Lee, the CEO of 4Life, was there. So were Kevin Guest, the CEO of USANA, and Navena Srebreva, the CEO of Pampered Chef.

We split into groups, each with its own appointments, and worked our way down the halls. Most of our meetings were with staffers. As you may have heard, the Speaker had sent most members home a couple of weeks earlier. A few were still there, including Congressman Mike Kennedy of Utah.

What we were there to do

Each meeting gave us about 20 or 30 minutes to explain why our representatives need to understand this profession, and specifically why they need to vote on upcoming bills in a way that keeps all of us direct sellers independent contractors instead of employees. There are people in Congress and the Senate who want us to be employees.

And of course, the Federal Trade Commission always comes up.

The moment that stopped me

This is the most important thing I want to tell you about the day.

Lee Lonsberry the chief liaison from the DSA opened the meetings and soon kicked it to me to explain what we do. In 4 out of the 6 meetings the staffer did not know what we do.

I would start off by asking have you ever heard of Amway. 3 out of the 4 said No. What about Herbalife or Nuskin? Nope.

"Nope, never heard of them either."

That may be a big part of the problem. The people who vote on our future, don't know what we do. Even with the congressmen and senators who should know, I was struck by how little they knew. They weren't disinterested. They weren't negative about our profession at all. They just didn't know much about it.

So that became our job on the Hill. Here's what we do. Here's how the model works. And then here are some stories. Tori, Jill, Desiree, and Kyle talked about why they got involved, how they built, and what it means for their families now. All four of them are full time, so it really matters to them that this model keeps working.

We have a lot of teaching to do

What struck me most was how much work we have ahead of us. We already spend our days educating prospects. We also need to educate the media, the regulators, and the people who write the laws that govern how business is done.

Because selling a product you are absolutely in love with is not illegal. Recruiting people to help you sell it is not illegal. Recruiting a lot of people to help you sell it is not illegal. Recruiting a lot of people fast is not illegal either. And it is not illegal for a company to pay you on all the sales generated by all the people you recruited.

And yet we carry a stigma about how we do business. We need to change that.

Here is an example of how misinformed our marketplace is. Get ready to laugh.

We have to band together

If you take one thing from this post, make it this: as a profession, we need to band together.

We need to stop recruiting each other's teams. We need to stop raiding each other's companies. We need to stop the back-and-forth on social media about whose company is greatest, when the only people listening are other distributors and other companies.

There are 300 million people who aren't doing this yet. Think about everyone you know. If they knew what you know about your company, your products, and your opportunity, would they at least take a look? Of course they would. That's our job.

So stay in your own lane. Build your team with your own network, and stop dreaming about landing some giant leader from another company. Raiding creates bad blood between companies. Picture two CEOs sitting in a Direct Selling Association board meeting while one is raiding the other. How are they supposed to get along? How are they supposed to build policies and strategies that help our profession become well known and well respected if they're suing each other?

It's childish, it's selfish, and it's unnecessary. If you're as good as you say you are, go build it without raiding.

Is your company a member of the DSA?

Here is my question for you. Is your company a member of the Direct Selling Association?

You may not know. If you don't, ask. If the answer is no, find out why. What is missing that keeps your company from being a member?

Why should any company want to join? Because the DSA is the only organization in the United States whose job is to educate and lobby regulators and legislators about what we do and how we do it. It's based in Washington, D.C., and it's more than a hundred years old.

I don't care how slick your company is, how deep its government relations team is, or how successful it is. No company is anywhere near as powerful alone as we are when we're bound together.

Amway is a perfect example. It's an $8 billion-a-year company that has been around for decades, and it just settled with the FTC. How big you are doesn't matter. What matters is whether we band together as a profession. The DSA is all we have. And its new CEO, Dave Grimaldi, is a champion and a warrior who is ready to take our fight to lawmakers and regulators. He needs our help.

What you can do right now

If you want the bigger picture of what's happening with the FTC right now, read my earlier post: The FTC Is on a Roll. Here Is What It Actually Means for Us.

United we stand.