Most of us aren’t ready to retire. We don’t want to. We have way too much energy, hard-earned wisdom, and professional value stored up that we still want to activate. We’re not ready to box up our business books and shove them away in the attic to be ultimately thrown away after the funeral. We still want to be a part of things. We still want to go to the conventions. We still want people to ask us for our advice, counsel, and opinions. We still want to be able to say, “You know, I have this idea for you….” We still want our phone to ring.

So what do we do? We go into consulting. Just like everyone else in our city, state, region who is retiring and wondering, “what next?” But how many comp and ben consultants does the world really need? And there comes a time when you’ve been out of the scene long enough when you realize, “You know what? I really can’t get excited about comp and ben anymore.” Certainly not so excited to be able to compete effectively with the younger waves of HR hi-po’s with more current knowledge on comp and ben. Still you’re not ready to retire fully yet.

How do we take all this accumulated knowledge and still burning passion for the people side of business and turn it into something else? Something maybe better, even? What are our transferable skills and where can we invest them to continue to have relevance, significance, wealth-building, and mind-blowing meaning?

I have found at least one answer that makes me very happy when I consider the possibilities. Network marketing – or multi-level marketing (MLM).

Bear with me for a moment. If you’re like me, you have said “Yeah, I don’t think so,” at least once in your career when someone said, “Will you take a look at this?” (Me: four times.) But like the HR profession, MLM has profoundly changed in the last 30 years, especially the last decade or so. Just like people who don’t pay attention to HR still think of it in terms of the 1970s (you know what I’m talking about), people who haven’t paid attention to MLM have it locked away in old, outdated concepts that were very real then. Not so much now.

Robert Kiyosaki (author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad) has called MLM the “Business of the 21st Century.” The following realities of today’s employment world are environmental facts of life that make MLM a perfect solution for the need for more income, time freedom, flexibility, and independence:

Changing demographics,
The job market and economy,
The demise of the social contract and the increasing understanding that there’s no such thing as job security,
The introduction of easily and cheaply available Internet-based technology,
And a growing acceptance of portfolio careers and an untethering from the physical workplace.
But I’d like to take it one step more specific to the HR profession and invite you to consider this business model from the perspective of the skills you already have installed in your professional bucket. With an open-minded revisit of the business model, you may discover MLM to be perfect for you…and you’re perfect for it. Or not. It’s up to you. But only a fresh, updated, and knowledgeable reconsideration will help you decide.

MLM compensates you for truly caring about people: With MLM you’re rewarded for helping others. Period. The opportunities for both you and your people are limited only by the commitment and work you’re willing to invest. Everyone can succeed without taking away from anyone else. There are no right-sizing, top grading, downsizing, laying off, bell curves, diversity quotas, soloed job descriptions, disparate impact second-thinking, organizational politics.

MLM leverages your inner Influencer. You know that HR’s power never lies in command and control. It lies in the ability to influence – no matter whether you’re talking to the individual contributor or the denizens of the C Suite. You have developed the talent for listening for your people’s needs and motivations, and then presenting your programs, projects and concerns in a way that best appeals to your people’s driving self-interests. You know that your effectiveness comes from communicating, inspiring, and influencing accordingly.

MLM gives you that opportunity for meaningful work that you have been craving. MLM gives you the chance to do what you might have entered HR to do in the first place: Change lives for the better. With MLM you’re no longer playing go-between in turf wars, sending bad-news letters disappointing hopeful candidates, telling the CEO that he can’t do that (whatever it is this week), balancing the latest regulation coming down from the state or DC with the company’s need to build a bench strength of qualified talent; firing the slackers.

Now you are providing solutions and extending hope to anyone and everyone who sees the opportunity and says, “I get this. I’m doing this. How soon can I start?” Single parents who want to stay at home with their children. Professionals who have suddenly discovered that they are so ready for something else – like residual income that will keep paying them monthly long after they stopped doing the work. Veterans and their spouses who are rebuilding their civilian lives.

With MLM, you get to work with the people you want to work with. You pick and choose your teammates without anyone second-guessing your selection. You’re not stuck with having to play nice with obnoxious co-workers that someone else hired and assigned to sit in the office next to you. You are building a team of hand-picked colleagues, who are hand-picking their colleagues, and so on and so on.

With MLM, the nitty gritty of business functions are taken care of for you. With MLM you are compensated for teaching, inspiring, recruiting, leading, caring, sharing, coaching, organizational development, and authentically being there to serve your people. All those things you’re doing in HR now. Or at least would like to be doing. But go off on your own and you’re now personally responsible for those other aspects of running a successful organization. Marketing. Advertising. Research and development. Inventory control and fulfillment. Bookkeeping. Invoicing. Corporate strategy. Employment and management of support staff. All that paperwork. With MLM all those services are done for you.

MLM gives you the time and geographical freedom to do what is most important to you. Catherine Carr is a HR senior leader who left the corporate world to join a humanitarian NGO and dedicate her professional expertise to disaster-struck locations all over the world. While on leave from her work with her NGO this year, she decided to begin an MLM enterprise. She has the best of both worlds: Meaningful work in the field, and a meaningful business at home that sets her up for a well-deserved retirement when that time comes. The system is there for her, designed precisely in this way that will release her to do what calls her to do most powerfully.

With MLM you can like who you see in the mirror again. In any corporate role in a conventional business, you will be forced to do things now and then that just don’t sit right with your soul. HR is especially at risk for this. You carry around secrets and strategies that will have impacts on lives – some of them truly terrible impacts. When you jockey for promotion, you do it with the knowledge that your advancement means someone else won’t get the opportunity. You’re forced to deliver bad news that you don’t believe in because the senior executives don’t have the guts to do it themselves. You casually eat lunch with trusting colleagues who have no clue that inside three months they will be gone with a mediocre severance package. You’re constantly having to watch your back because you know that with a moment’s distraction, someone might be eating your lunch. That’s just tiring. With MLM your tasks include encouraging, incentivizing, inspiring, supporting, coaching, empowering, truth-telling.

With MLM you can build your business along side your full-time career and retirement activities. While I personally know people who changed their lives inside of a year, for most people it takes three to five years to establish a solid, grounded MLM business that is set to generate eye-popping residual income that you can one day will to your descendants. So you will need to factor in some ramp up time. Showing the business to two people a day on a consistent basis is one way to do it. Or you can dedicate regular daily hours to your enterprise.

In conclusion
As much as MLM may be a great match for you, you’re also great for the profession. You bring to the table world-class abilities in training, organizational development, talent management, team building, culture building, leadership behaviors – all those elements of executive skills that will serve to keep MLM as a profession moving on its own path toward the future. This could be the most influential work you will ever do.

If you have come this far in this article and you are still thinking to yourself, “Yeah but, we’re talking about network marketing. Really? Network marketing? Really??” consider this:

While the HR world was focused on transforming itself from personnel to HR professional, the profession of network marketing has also been transforming itself.

As you’re considering your future, and how you want to live out the rest of your working years, network marketing truly is worth a second look. Even if that second look is your eighth look. Maybe now is the time when it will be right for you to say yes.

First Published: http://health2wealth.com.ng/mlm-perfect-retirement-plan-hr-professionals/