Unless you’re in the top bracket of an MLM or Network Marketing company, traditionally you don’t make a lot of money. Despite numerous startups over the years covering a variety of products and compensation plans, a common trait amongst these companies are that a small core of elite members take home the lion’s share of revenue.

These associates are usually the ones who jumped on the opportunity first, or brought with them insanely long downlines that they accumilated during their time in other MLM companies over the years. In short not at all representative of your average associate within the company.

Unfortunately if their first month of commissions is anything to go by, LiveSmart 360 doesn’t appear to be any different.

Following the announcement that ‘just 1.1% of LiveSmart 360 associates received a commission payout‘, LiveSmart 360 CEO Mark McCool made a followup blog post regarding the top earners of the company.

We just had to celebrate these out-of-this-world results, so we took the Williamses and all of our Top Earners to Lido Beach Resort in beautiful Sarasota, Florida, for a full weekend of fun in the sun.

Sounds like the top earners and staff at LiveSmart 360 corporate had a great time. What about the rest of the LiveSmart 360 team though?

Accompanying McCool’s blog post is a photo  showing the exact dollar amounts these top earners made (currently the photo is hosted via Flickr and is unavailable via the LiveSmart 360 blog).

Full credit to LiveSmart 360 earning transparency but the dollar amounts these eight top earners made paints a pretty bleak picture for all the other LiveSmart 360 associates out there.

Note: Mark McCool’s blog post mentions nine top earners but the photo published only contains eight visible cheques.

For starters the sum of the total amount earned by these eight top earners is $355609. This is 35% of the total one million paid out to LiveSmart 360 members in the company’s first month of business.

For the next set of statistics exact numbers aren’t provided but the company mentions they paid out just short of a million dollars to over 2000 members. For the sake of mathematical calculations lets just assume that the difference between rounding down the paid out members to 2000 and that increasing the commissions paid out amount to one million balances out.

Using the 2000 members were paid out figure, we can also then say that 0.4% of commission eligible LiveSmart 360 members took home 35% of the commission profits.

Massively skewed much?

LiveSmart 360 claim that they paid out commissions to over 2000 members and this means that the remaining 1992 paid out members were left with $644,391 to share.

If you blanket share this amount over 1992 paid out members you get a whopping $323 per member. If the top 8 earners are anything to go by though one would assume there’d be a further small percentage taking home the bulk of the remaining $644,391. This would then leave the majority of remaining eligible members earning much closer to the minimum $10 payout amount.

Note that this commission distribution is an estimate based on the percentages the top 8 earners made and took home.

With just 8 members out of 167,694 taking home 35% of LiveSmart 360 commissions, it seems a bit rich that Mark McCool ends his blog post with

Why don’t you get to work building your own team, so we can see you at the next event!

To put it bluntly, if you joined LiveSmart 360 tomorrow you’d have exactly 0.004% (8/167694) of a chance to be invited to their next event. Assuming of course they cap it again at the top 8 earners.

Make no mistake the financial earnings made by these top eight LiveSmart 360 members is nothing short of impressive, but is it really ethical to showcase them as a representation of company earnings?

By plastering your top earners with big grins holding giantsized cheques LiveSmart 360 no doubt intends to send the message out that it’s a company where big earnings are possible. However no mention at all is made that these top 8 represent just 0.04% of the total membership pool.

Seeing as LiveSmart 360 just launched one can assume that the bulk of these commissions cannot possibly be from retail sales. Instead I imagine most of the money being generated is flowing internally as the top 8 earners downlines place their stock orders in preparation for hitting the retail market over the next few months.

Hopefully LiveSmart 360 continue their income transparency and publish top earnings over the following months. It’ll certainly be interesting to see if company earnings remain steady once tested against the retail market.