Pure Leverage Review: GVO tries 100% commissions
Pure Leverage is the latest division of Global Virtual Opportunities (GVO) and founder Joel Therien.
Launched in 2009, GVO have launched a number of MLM business opportunities that typically revolve around internet marketing training.
Two of the prior GVO business opportunities that have been reviewed on BehindMLM include HostThenProfit (recruitment driven web hosting) and 7 Minute Workout (retail focused fitness program).
What I’ve observed with GVO opportunities is every so often Therien (photo right) launches a new opportunity, which a loyal team of GVO distributors set about marketing.
Sometimes these opportunities bring new ideas to the table (such as 7 Minute Workout), but from what I’ve seen they’re usually just a rehash of GVO’s internet training and marketing properties, attached to different MLM compensation plans and business models.
Today we take a look at GVO and Therien’s latest offering, Pure Leverage. Read on for a full review.
The Pure Leverage Product Line
As previously mentioned most of GVO’s MLM business opportunities combine the company’s existing internet marketing tools to varying MLM business models.
In that sense Pure Leverage is no different, combining the following GVO services:
Elite Coaching Program
You will be recruiting new prospects into your business without ever making a single cold call guaranteed!
GVO claim the retail value of their Elite Coaching Program is $297 a month and that subscribers will ‘learn the steps on how to pick up 18 paid signups into your primary business everyday‘.
Based on “attraction marketing”, GVO also claim that Elite Coaching Program subscribers will also learn how to ‘create predictable monthly and residual income for life‘ and ‘what to say to prospects so that you know you have the “right type” of people on your team‘.
Easy Lead Flow
Easy Lead Flow is a “lead capture system” with GVO claiming the retail value of which is $49.95 a month.
Once you register a prospect, the system comes with a pre written auto responder series written by our adcopy specialists designed specifically to get your prospects to know, like and trust who you are. When your prospects come to trust you, they will naturally want to buy from you and join your team..
Video Email Service
GVO’s Video Email Service (retail $20 a month) is a “video autoresponder service” that allows subscribers to connect to their downlines and potential leads via video.
Turbo Traffic Generation
Despite the name, Turbo Traffic Generation appears to be a marketing guide on how to ‘get the best quality traffic to your site’.
GVO value Turbo Traffic Generation at $47 a month and claim it will enable subscribers to generate ‘an endless supply of hot qualified leads for (their) home based business‘.
Live Meeting Room
GVO state their Live Meeting Room product ‘allows you to communicate in real time audio and video, conduct presentations, share your desktop or files with all your attendees‘.
Live Meeting Room is retail valued by GVO at $49 a month.
Blogging Platform
Arguably the centerpiece of the opportunity and I believe the only new offering under the GVO brand, not much is currently known about the Pure Leverage blogging platform.
The marketing copy for the Pure Leverage blogging platform displays both the WordPress and Blogger logos, however it’s noted that only WordPress currently offer a standalone version of their blogging platform.
Despite WordPress being free, GVO put a $19.95 a month value on their blogging platform.
GVO claim their blogging platform will provide subscribers with an “authority blog” they can use to ‘blog about (their) opportunity 3 times per week, then send an email to your list inviting them to come and comment on (their) new blog post‘.
The Pure Leverage Compensation Plan
The Pure Leverage compensation plan is best explained if it’s split into two parts.
100% Commissions
Upon recruiting a new customer or affiliate, Pure Leverage affiliates are paid 100% of the subscription price Pure Leverage charge customers and affiliates ($24.95 a month).
50/50 Check Match
From the second month onwards, each affiliate earns only 50% of the monthly subscription fee paid by customers and recruited affiliates, with the other 50% being passed up to their upline as a matching bonus.
Joining Pure Leverage
Membership to Pure Leverage as an affiliate (they use the term “reseller”) is $19.95 a month.
It is currently unclear whether or not affiliates are required to purchase the $24.95 a month service package in order to qualify themselves for commissions.
Conclusion
First and foremost I’m going to answer what I figure a lot of people are going to be asking themselves upon seeing a blogging platform combined with 100% commissions:
Is Pure Leverage just an Empower Network clone?
Short answer? No. Although they do have their similarities.
In Empower Network (review here) affiliates are gifting (passing up) subscription fees to eachother, determined by assigning each new subscriber a number relative to how many subscribers (affiliates or customers) that affiliate has signed up.
Affiliates gift the fees paid by their second, fourth, sixth and every fifth recruited subscriber to their uplines.
In Pure Leverage the first recruited subscriber pays their first months fees directly to the person who recruited them. From the second month onwards half of this fee goes to the recruiting affiliate and half to their upline.
In turn, the upline gifts half of their earnings to their upline and so on and so forth all the way up the compensation plan with GVO (or Therien) himself sitting at the top of the scheme, receiving half of everyone’s monthly earnings.
Otherwise between Empower Network and Pure Leverage you’ve got the same “blahblahblah” training programs and tools (which are split in Empower Network, effectively combining a series of gifting schemes under the one brand), designed to do market and promote the opportunity itself.
The slight difference between how subscription fees are gifted each month is all that differentiates the two opportunities.
And I use the term gifting to refer to subscribers paying 100% of their fees to their uplines (direct and indirect) because, let’s face it: that’s what it is.
Key to analysis of Pure Leverage is that the company cannot survive with customers alone.
GVO only make money on the $19.95 a month fee they charge affiliates. With members paying their monthly subscription fees to their uplines, Pure Leverage and GVO make nothing on these “sales”.
You could make the argument that Pure Leverage have positioned themselves at the top of what is essentially a gifting pyramid (everyone passing up money to eachother) and that’s how the company profits on “sales”, however that’s problematic in itself.
To participate in the compensation plan that would mean Pure Leverage (and GVO) themselves would be affiliates. If the company supposedly selling the services everyone is buying is an affiliate, that raises the question of “what exactly are they affiliates of?”
Alternatively if Therien has positioned himself at the top of the gifting pyramid, then the issue of Pure Leverage only earning off affiliate fees remains.
Why is this a problem?
What does the monthly affiliate fee entitle affiliates to? Participation in the income opportunity (the ability to recruit new subscribers and receive their monthly subscription fees).
Fundamentally, Pure Leverage requires new affiliates to survive. Retail customers don’t pay them anything.
This is also true when you consider things from an affiliate standpoint, it is much more profitable to recruit new Pure Leverage affiliates than acquire customers.
A single customer gifts an affiliate $24.95 their first month and half of that each month thereafter.
A recruited affiliate does the same, with the potential to increase the amount gifted up each month because they can recruit new subscribers of their own.
When you can market Pure Leverage to leads on the potential of the income opportunity, thus potentially vastly increasing your own monthly earning per subscriber beyond whatever half of $24.95 is each month – why would an affiliate even bother acquiring retail customers?
To summarise:
Subscribers in Pure Leverage aren’t paying the company for what they allege are “products being sold” and there’s bugger all incentive to acquire customers, with a massive financially beneficial advantage to recruiting new affiliates instead.
A few more (free) blogging platforms attached to thinly veiled cash gifting schemes launched this year and I can easily see “blog + cash gifting” being the “penny auction + Ponzi scheme” MLM industry disaster of 2013.
Bottom line?
If you’re with an MLM company (as an affiliate or customer) and handing money over each month that is not going directly to the company, who in turn pay a commission to the distributor/affiliate/rep who made the sale (keeping a portion for themselves (the amount actually paid for the product) and splitting the rest via an MLM compensation structure), something is fundamentally problematic with that MLM company’s business model.
Hey, I actually joined this opportunity because I needed all this tools anway, I almost paid iwowwe 190$ for they’re tools, but thank’s god I heard about this.
So I get all this tools for 25$, it’s amazing. I don’t care if someone will join me there or not. I care about all this product’s email autoresponeder, video email, web conference room, blog..and it cost me only 25$. This gonna be game changer .
I heard we will get maybe even 10 000 subscribers (max) for 25$..And even for email marketing i would need pay more to let’s say aweber. This is something awesome in 2013.
Best wishes to this guy’s. Joel is great and loyal guy that’s why i joined instantly for this.
That’s funny, I thought you joined because you ‘needed all this tools anway‘. Sounds like you just rehashed the official Pure Leverage marketing material.
In anycase if you’ve joined as a customer because of value in Pure Leverage’s offering then more power to you. The legitimacy of the scheme comes down to whether or not they’ll have more customers than affiliates promoting the thing.
If the Pure Leverage blogs are spammed with “join the opportunity!” ads (as was Empower Network until only recently), then it’s probably going to be affiliate heavy.
It’s not easy balancing the 100% commission payout with attracting retail customers but then that’s what you get when you open the cash gifting floodgates.
Revenue wise should a regulator come knocking Pure Leverage and GVO are going to have the same issue as Empower Network. 100% of the company revenue is from affiliate membership fees, nothing comes from the sale of any products (affiliates/customers just pay affiliates).
You write a detailed review while…
You are missing the point. Both are selling marketing platforms and marketing training. Every affiliate is also a customer to the training within the products and also the platform.
As for the passive, EN passups are far less than you get to keep. Also, if you get all in, then you make far more in sales on the products than you pass up.
PURE LEVERAGE: Is a platform designed for marketers to sell products in other businesses and removes the hassle of having to comply with “community guidelines” while trying to get your product exposure over Internet by video and auto responder. After all marketing is geared toward capitalism and not communism.
However, Empower Network affiliates have formed communities on the Internet social media platforms of Facebook and G+ where they gather on routine basis to help and learn from each other. Pure Leverage on the other hand provides that meeting space themselves.
No they’re not. Nobody is paying them for it.
In order for something to sell it has to be paid for. All we have here are affiliates shuffling affiliate money around amongst themselves. The only fees charged are the “pay to play” fee both companies charge their affiliates to participate.
Non-retail customers yes. Where are the retail customers? Just like every other MLM company both EN and Pure Leverage should have at least 50% retail revenue.
Yes, yes I’ve read the marketing spiels thankyou. Too bad about the whole gifting compensation plan.
Hmmm! I look at my stack of college books vs periodically updated Empower Network 15k formula that I only had to purchase one time and can sell as often as I can and I’ll take the latter. It’s a lot cheaper and I like the idea of having opportunity to earn while I learn.
If I am not any good at attracting people and selling the educational products, that’s my fault. Not Empower Network.
I don’t understand what you mean by “nobody is paying them for it”. If you are referring to the large amount of time and effort that leaders put into helping others, that’s the secret to building wealth.
It’s teaching a man to fish in a world where Empower Network does have lawyers to make sure they are FTC compliant in a world where communists become lawyers before they become politicians so that they can shut this kind of growth down.
After all, their crony capitalist friends who put them in office can afford to see a massive move into the home office reselling intangible educational products that actually can and only become tangible if you are able to implement and capitalize on what you have learned.
30,000 painting EN members in July 2012. 100,000 paid active members real soon as they are way over 90,000 active members this month. I hope you don’t edit this and cut this out because I want to come back and revisit after I walk cross the stage and bring some people with me.
Since June 2012, how much have you paid EN for their “training”? Not your upline and not your affiliate fees.
How much?
I have no idea what “FTC compliant” is, is it a new “badass” buzzword?
That’s nice. How many retail customers do they have?
That was more about EN. As for Pure Leverage, a customer doesn’t have to be an affiliate. They can simply pay the monthly fee to use the services provided. Same with EN.
There is no use in my commenting anymore, it ends up being a discussion between people who view the world in different ways.
I strive to use the Internet to create wealth and help others do the same. The folks at Pure Leverage and Empower Network provide vehicles to do it. If I fail at driving, I’m not going on the Internet to complain.
Meanwhile I know that Empower Network is building corporate office to be sure they are compliant. I am sure Joel Therien has done the same.
@Michael
An affiliate choosing not recruit isn’t a retail customer. How many retail customers does EN have who cannot participate in the gifting scheme if they recruit new affiliates?
When it comes to cash gifting schemes, that much is blatantly obvious.
You can make up all the excuses in the world son, whatever helps you sleep at night.
Thanks for the examples.
I purchased the host then profit product and it is a good product at a fair price.(my opinion)
Now, i will purchase Pure Leverage product and then give an opinion on value after i try it for a bit.
p.s like this blog cheers.b
I am with GVO but not for the compensation plan. I use their products for internet marketing. I use the Meet Cheap Conference Software. $10 per month for a 100 seat. Come on, you can not beat a deal like that. I like GVO and I believe in them. They are here to help us internet marketers with great tools at low cost.
I feel sorry for the OP for wasting their time with is post. There are a lot of us who are here only for the tools. If people want to make money while selling these great tool, let them be.
@John
What you’re there for is irrelevant. Not to mention you can’t speak for “us”.
100% commissions underwrites the value of the products, which when paid out over multiple levels and an affiliate fee introduces the possibility of a gifting scheme.
If there’s more affiliates in Pure Leverage then retail customers, it’s an effective gifting scheme – regardless of why you personally joined the company.
I got into Pure Leverage the same day I got a bill from Aweber for $149.99 for February (that was just a coincidence!).
To get a bundle of high quality marketing tools including a 10,000 subscriber autoresponder for $25/mo is a no brainer in my opinion.
I am definitely recommending these GVO tools to my subscribers who are looking to save money yet who want to market online. If you can make some $$ and provide a quality product at a really good price, that’s good business as far as I’m concerned.
Steve
@SteveHawk — ah, thought your name looked familiar… You’re the one who published a wishy-washy review of TVI Express scam a while back, right? i.e. “I don’t know if this is really a scam”?
http://ezinearticles.com/?My-Honest-and-Unbiased-TVI-Express-Review&id=3830179
@K. Chang. You have a great memory! I appreciate you paying attention. I hope you weren’t in TVI btw.
Steve
i was in pure leverage for a while and the whole time i was there …pre launch and launch the blog which was the flagship product was never functional and that was the reason i joined and eventually left…
I paid for a system that was not fully useable, kept being told it was conming…still don’t know if it working or not…quite a while after i left it was still inoperable…
I don’t believe you should launch with advertised products that are not available and charge for them. Lot’s of upgrades, upsells and pay to play options to be eligible for the money.
I come from a sales background and have owned several businesses….no organization i have ever worked for made me pay to have a desk there or charged me the selling price of the products to be able to use them or sell them.
just sayin’
Oz, I didn’t see you mention anything about their email autoresponder that’s also included…
Was it there when I first reviewed the program? Does it change the compensation plan or review?
I covered the video email autoresponder, is that it?
Hi Oz,
I am fairly new to this so forgive me for my ignorance…
You write, “It is much more profitable to recruit new Pure Leverage affiliates than acquire customers. A single customer gifts an affiliate $24.95 their first month and half of that each month thereafter. A recruited affiliate does the same, with the potential to increase the amount gifted up each month because they can recruit new subscribers of their own.”
Isn’t this true of all MLMs, a defining characteristic, whereby according to the FTC: even with totally legit & legal MLM’s “distributors earn commissions, not only for their own sales, but also for sales made by the people they recruit.”
All else being equal (such as number & value of products purchased), I don’t see any MLM situation in which making a product sale to an eventual affiliate wouldn’t be better than to a regular customer–even if only for the potential that the affiliate might make a product sale sometime in the future.
Also, what exactly is problematic or illegal (pyramid) about a company not paying out any commissions on the recruitment of new affiliates ($19.95 in this case). I thought that was a good & smart thing because it shows they’re not rewarding/incentivizing recruitment of new resellers more so than product sales. I don’t have any data on the ratio of sales made to affiliates versus non-affiliates, but theoretically with this structure, you can have a customer NOT be an affiliate.
And isn’t that LESS “pyramidy” than having everyone of their customers also being an affiliate by default? (…for example, if they didn’t have that separate $20/mth reseller fee, and just made every customer an affiliate and paid out 75% commissions).
Isn’t this structure, with a separate upgrade to become a reseller, LESS of a pyramid than “eBooks with Resell Rights”?… where resell rights are included with the main purchase, and 0% of product sales are made to the public, and the FTC could argue that the eBook itself has absolutely NO value
One final question… how can these companies like Pure Leverage and Empower Network offer traffic training and solo ad rolodexes, for example? I thought that the new FTC Biz Op rule would prevent them from offering any type of assistance in getting customers.
Thanks for your insights!
Nope. Only in cash gifting schemes.
Pass-ups of 100% of monies being put in is not the same as paying out a percentage on multiple levels.
There’s a difference between sales and gifting 100% of your participation fees to the person who recruited you, just so that you can then qualify to go out and find new people to send gift payments to you.
There is no problem. You seem to have made that argument up yourself.
It’s less pyramid-like with the commissionable payment detached from the membership fee, however now all it represents is a gifting scheme with an attached participation fee.
Given their compensation plans, I don’t think they’re worried about the FTC. They’re operating in the grey and hoping for the best. This is why the FTC need to clean up this crap and put out some definitive benchmarks.
So the latest is Joel Therrien’s Instant Income System – which appears to be a recruiting vehicle for Pure Leverage.
All of this reminds me of the old-school internet/powerline/mlm stuff of the early 2000s – except now Joel is inviting people to invite (bug their family/friends) about joining a FaceBook group. Wow.
This is one of the emails – so old-school:
I didn’t even know powerlines were still around. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.