The gig economy is no longer an outlier. According to a recent McKinsey Global report entitled Independent Work: Choice, Necessity and the Gig Economy found that 162 million people in Europe and the United States—or 20 to 30 percent of those in the working-age population engage in some form of independent work.
Working from home or a local coffee shop allows people to have freedom and more control over their schedules and their earning potential. This is the beauty of the gig economy: It can be whatever a person needs it to be.
What is the gig economy? Think about Uber and Lyft. These companies are two perfect examples of how people are creating secondary sources of income through a side gig. A study by Intuit predicted that by 2020, 40 percent of American workers will have some kind of side hustle going on to supplement their income.
There are a number of forces contributing to this increase. For one thing, the digital age has given birth to the mobilepreneur. If you have a connected smart phone, you can be in business. A second factor contributing to this rise is the desire by many to live debt free. Americans paid 113 billion in credit card interest in 2018. This is up 12 percent from 2017. The good news is the economy is thriving right now. The bad new is that in this good economy, people are accruing more debt. As financial education continues to be readily available with the click of a website, more and more people are looking for a path that will lead them to debt-free living. Having a secondary source of income allows people an opportunity to collapse that time frame in eliminating debt.
So what does this rise in the gig economy mean for direct sales? Long before it was normal to rent out your spare bedroom to strangers on Air BNB, direct selling was the norm when it came to creating a secondary source of income. Well, it is my belief that network marketing companies are going to have to evolve. As professional network marketers, we have to stop overselling the opportunity. A lot of people are not looking for the brass ring because they don’t believe it’s attainable. The biggest criticism, and rightly so, of network marketing is when reps oversell the income potential. Most people can’t see beyond their current financial circumstances, so when companies are making outlandish income claims, it’s no wonder that a large segment of society looks at MLM with great skepticism and negativity.
If you examine companies like Uber, nowhere will you see Uber make any type of extraordinary income claims. Many of the drivers are making a few hundred dollars a month and that’s exactly what they are looking for. What would our industry look like if instead of overselling the six and seven-figure income potential, we helped all of our distributors earn an extra $500 to $1000 per month? During the housing collapse in the 2000s, an extra $300 to $500 per month would have saved the vast majority of people from losing their homes. That’s where our profession must go. When we provide products and services that people want and need and provide a distribution model that allows them to earn quickly, that will increase retention and decrease the negativity.
In today’s gig economy, network marketing can be at the forefront of helping people earn that extra income, but it’s incumbant upon company owners to create compensation structures that will allow representatives and consultants to earn an income when they make sale, and that means even one sale. If it’s true that compensation drives behavior, and it does, the companies that build large numbers of $500 to $1000 per month income earners will be the same companies that create that largest incomes in our industry. That’s the power and potential of network marketing in our gig economy.
Make it a great day!
Bill Garner
205-317-1031
