the-beehive-strategy-logoShortly after the launch of PreLaunch Australia, I uncovered that it was nothing more than a marketing campaign for the public prelaunch phase of The Beehive Strategy.

Utilising the MLM company MyShoppingGenie, The Beehive Strategy sought to maximise the recruitment bonuses offered by My Shopping Genie by getting everybody to join in a systematic manner.

Whilst the PreLaunch Australia campaign wrapped up last night at midnight, as of yet The Beehive Strategy still hasn’t officially launched (at least not online in any official capacity). Despite the delay in transitioning over from prelaunch to official launch however, today I’m going to jump the gun and give you a review of the Beehive Strategy.

What it’s about, what you as a member will need to do if you join the strategy and how exactly as a member the Beehive Strategy will enable you to make money.

The Company

The Beehive Strategy is a joint venture between Sam Fawahl, Bassem Tal and Adam Marks, who are all existing MyShoppingGenie distributors working out of Melbourne in Australia.

The three of them first launched The Beehive Strategy back in late 2010. ‘Phase 1’ as they called it sold out before December 2010, which was then followed by Phase 2 (roughly 300 positions I believe), both of which were ‘invitation only’.

Following Phase 2, PreLaunch Australia was launched which was the opening up of The Beehive Strategy to the public.

The Beehive Strategy Concept

Not being a MLM company but rather an ‘income strategy’, the Beehive Strategy doesn’t have any products or compensation plan within itself. Instead, the strategy is designed to be attached to existing MLM business opportunities with the idea of making the most out of recruitment bonuses in order to maximise the financial return of its members.

The founders of the Beehive Strategy themselves even acknowledge that

the computers  that pay the (recruitment) bonuses do not care what the product is we are buying and/or selling.

Or in other words, the buying and selling of products is completely irrelevant to the main income generating methodology of the Beehive Strategy.

So what is that methodology?

In a nutshell, the Beehive Strategy seeks to reduce any MLM business opportunity that utilises a matrix based compensation plan, down to a forced 4×7 matrix.

This first few levels of the 4×7 matrix will look something like this;

Eventually expanding and working its way down 7 levels.

Note that this is because this size matrix works with the MyShoppingGenie compensation plan it has been deliberately chosen. Should the Beehive Strategy move onto other opportunities in the future, this matrix size will be tailored in size to each individual opportunity.

That is to say within the Beehive Strategy, everyone is placed on an internal matrix (separate to the matrix used by the MLM company being utilised at any given particular time), along with any recruits they sponsor.

For members joining the Beehive Strategy, the only basic requirement is that they go out and recruit four people. Being a co-op however, whilst this is ideal it is acknowledged that this isn’t doable by everyone and whereas in a traditional MLM compensation plan structure the people you directly sponsor make up your direct genealogy, the Beehive Strategy caps you at four direct recruits and uses any additional recruits (whether you personally sponsor them or not) to fill up other people’s four top level spots.

The fundamental principle is to bring in four people for every person who joins the Beehive Strategy and for as long as this is duplicated, people will earn money.

Initially, the Beehive Strategy is launching utilising the MyShoppingGenie opportunity and as such all income projections are based off the recruitment commissions paid out by MyShoppingGenie. A snapshot of these recruitment commissions looks something like this;

As you can see, the end goal is to get 16,384 people in your downline (via co-op downline placements) and live off the $13,647 residual income the MyShoppingGenie compensation plan allows for with this kind of recruitment effort.

The only problem of course is that each person needs 16384 people under them. Whereas usually people work alone to achieve this and some spillover occurs as people’s downlines go about their own recruiting efforts, the Beehive Strategy seeks to streamline this by capping people at four and using the entire group’s efforts to fill up everyone’s matrix faster.

Basically instead of thousands of people required to fill individual member’s matrices, the Beehive Strategy are pooling their resources together.

Sounds great and all but it all comes down to the fundamental problem that at the end of the day, no matter how you dress this up, everybody is just relying on recruitment commissions.

If new recruitments dry up, the income strategy doesn’t work.

Given that there’s no correlation between income generated in the Beehive Strategy (at least not directly, as members are free to earn additional income via the commission of product sales and searches from the MyShoppingGenie application), this major income goal solely relies on recruitment efforts.

Conclusion

Boiled down, the Beehive Strategy is nothing more than a recruitment driven pyramid scheme capitalizing on what appears to be already existing pyramid scheme opportunities within existing MLM compensation plans.

Currently only MyShoppingGenie is being utilised but looking forward the Beehive Strategy aims to incorporate other opportunities, with the caveat of course that any recruitment bonuses offered are separate from any retail commissions offered, otherwise of course the strategy doesn’t work.

Interestingly if and when the Beehive Strategy will incorporate other MLM opportunities into their own strategy, the company promises protected genealogies, meaning that whoever you’ve got in your Beehive downline will follow you over to the new opportunity as your protected downline.

That sounds great in theory but what about the joining fees required to participate in the new opportunity?

To further clarify what I’m talking about here, let’s take a look at what it costs to join the Beehive Strategy.

The strategy itself costs $49.95 a month to participate. On top of this, MyShoppingGenie is a once off cost of $199 and then an additional $29 a month to remain active.

All up your initial investment is $248.95 and then $78.95 a month thereafter.

That’s all well and dandy for MyShoppingGenie, but what about when the Beehive Strategy starts incorporating other opportunities? What if your downline doesn’t want to pay the additional cost?

How on Earth can the Beehive Strategy guarantee your lineage when they’re not the ones coughing up the monthly subscription fees?

Further to that, what about retention within the Beehive Strategy itself. If someone leaves, the Beehive Strategy can dynamically compress their own internal matrix sure, but what about at the MLM opportunity end.

The Beehive Strategy have no control whatsoever over the MyShoppingGenie downline structure. If I joined the Beehive Strategy and then stopped paying my $49.95 a month but continued to pay my $29 a month to MyShoppingGenie, I’m still going to benefit from downline commissions via MyShoppingGenie.

This could be a major problem for the Beehive Strategy if people don’t think they’re getting enough value for their $49.95 a month Beehive Strategy subscription. MyShoppingGenie certainly aren’t going to restructure their own internal genealogy just because people are leaving a third party income plan.

Nor will any other independent MLM opportunity for that matter.

And finally, what if MyShoppingGenie (or another opportunity later down the track) decide that they never intended for their compensation plan and opportunity to be used merely as a recruitment game? They themselves reserve the right to prohibit the Beehive Strategy from gaming their system so to speak, and the Beehive Strategy would be powerless to stop them.

Of course you’d want to hope the Beehive Strategy management had run this by any MLM opportunity they were hoping to utilise first, but I’d prefer not to leave anything to chance when it comes to business.

But I digress, all of that is underscored by the fact that in essence, this is all just a big recruitment game. The numbers alone should be enough to make you balk at the strategy.

Let’s take for example a single lineage starting with the company founders (who are no doubt placed at the top of the initial 4×7 matrix.

Theoretically at the bottom of their matrix sit 16,384 people. These 16,384 all need four directly sponsored recruits of their own, totalling 65,536 new members.

They will all eventually need four too, so now we’re looking at 262,144… then 1,048,576, then 4,194,304 and so on and so forth. See where this is going?

The Beehive Strategy promises to not leave anyone behind meaning everyone who joins is going to be working towards having four direct recruits under them.

Really, it doesn’t take a mathematical genius to work out the Beehive Strategy isn’t sustainable in the slightest. What I imagine will happen is that once the numbers reach critical mass in one opportunity, a new one will be announced and the whole process will repeat itself (hopefully, enough people have left so that dynamic compression culls enough members so that the program looks viable for a few months again at least).

No doubt we’ll see some initial decent enough payouts which will be used in attempts to validate the Beehive Strategy (‘but it pays out, how can it be faulted??‘), but numbers wise… the Beehive Strategy simply isn’t going to work in the longterm.