Recently TVI Express celebrated two years of being in business in the MLM industry. Along with the celebrations, most of which used the milestone as a pointer to the legitimacy of the TVI, TVI members took the opportunity to share with the world some statistics about the company.

Despite troubles in Africa and Australia recently and slowing down due to members jumping onto similar new opportunities so they can relive the early fast cycling glory days of TVI, some members persist in shouting the praises of TVI.

These members most likely have a lot of money and time invested in TVI along with huge downlines. For them, jumping ship isn’t an option until TVI itself is absolutely no longer financial viable.

One such possible TVI member duo are Ros Kaspi and Vanessa Jackson from over at IncreaseMyMonthlyIncome. In light of TVI’s two year milestone, some of the claims Jackson and Kaspi have made are quite dubious.

Here’s a rundown of Kaspi and Jackson’s 2010 TVI factsheet;

1. TVI has distributorship in over 150 countries serving all continents

This is one of those statistics that whilst it looks good on paper and sounds nice, is statistically not very effective.

We live in an age of internet marketing and as such, if I publish something online it’s instantly readable by people in every country with internet access.

Just as easily as TVI claims to have ‘distributorship in over 150 countries serving all continents‘, so too could I claim to have readership in over 150 countries serving all continents.

But then so could anybody who publishes anything on the internet. A global marketplace is hardly unique to TVI Express.

2. TVI Express has over 3 Million Members

Now if true, this one definitely sounds impressive. Having 3 million members would put TVI well up there as being one of the largest MLM business opportunities in the world.

With the simplicity of joining TVI Express though (just pay someone a couple of hundred dollars and you’re in) coupled with the companies refusal to stamp out membership fraud occurring en-masse around the world, one can only wonder just how accurate citing over three million members is.

No doubt somewhere in TVI’s servers there’s a membership list that runs up to over three million but how many of those accounts are legitimate and how many were just created as a once off to cycle someone off a board so they could receive a commission?

Also an attrition rate would be something to consider too. Even if TVI had over three million legitimate users, there’d be a sizeable chunk of them who were once off signups trying their luck who failed to  recruit anyone to the business and ultimately moved on.

But of course those kind of detailed statistics would never see the light of day.

3. TVI Express has 173 employees worldwide providing support in 13 languages.

This is an interesting statistic as from what I can gather, the bulk of TVI Express’ business model revolves around automation.

There’s the guys that work on the backend (less than 10?), the call centre staff (again, less than 10?), verification team (less than 10?)  and executive management (probably less than 5), so who else makes up the remaining 140+ employee base?

As far as I know all of the rest of TVI’s business operations consist of automated computer booked deals which don’t require any human input unless there’s a problem. And if there is a problem, then I’m sure one of the call centre staff would be handling it.

With no further specific details provided it’s hard to pinpoint the accuracy of this claim. One would hope that TVI aren’t including the staff of the third party booking agencies it uses as their own. That’d be of course misleading and grossly overstating TVI’s business size.

4. TVI Express has 19,000 direct contracts and 95,000 indirect contracts in over 6000 global destinations

This is another interesting statistic in that TVI Express don’t themselves directly handle the travel bookings of their members. TVI outsource this to Travelocity (the North American division of World Choice Travel, owned by Sabre Holdings), so in reality they only have one contract and that is with World Choice Travel.

Any contracts World Choice Travel has globally might be utilised by TVI Express indirectly, but they can hardly claim them as their own.

5. TVI Express has $16 million invested in technological services

‘Technological services’? What’s that?

Are TVI talking about their backend? Future online expansion? The travel portal? The hardware that powers it all?

Technological services is such a vague term to use that quite frankly it could mean anything. Sixteen million is a nice figure but who knows what it’s being invested in.

6. TVI Express members gross $ 1.1 million in sales per day

$1.1 million in sales every day you say? That’s interesting, considering the TVI Express website explicitly states;

Do I need to sell any products?

No. You don’t need to sell any products.

I think what Kaspi and Jackson meant to boast was that TVI Express member’s generate $1.1 million in recruitment fees per day.

At $250-$275 a pop that’s a hell of a lot of new recruits being brought into the company each day (4000 to be exact using the $275 figure).

Of course they’re probably counting the vouchers used to recycle people so that would put a sizeable dent in the actual sales figure. After all, vouchers issued by the company to be re-invested back into the company can hardly count as sales now can they.

Still, maybe that three million plus membership count isn’t a load of baloney…

7. TVI Express has offices in 3 countries with 3 major expansions happening in the first quarter of 2011

TVI recently announced expansion into two companies. In the Philippines TVI want to have an office running by mid March 2011, and over in Bangladesh by sometime in the first quarter.

The vagueness of the Bangladesh office opening could possibly be related to the opposition of TVI operating in Bangladesh on behalf of the Bangladesh MLM industry itself.

As far as I know TVI haven’t named a third country yet so I’m not sure where the third major office will be.

Whether or not any of these offices will actually open obviously remains to be seen.

8. TVI have held ‘I am TVI’ events, regional conferences, seminars and trainings spreading the word around, along with hosting 4 International ‘Boot Camps’

That’s an awful lot of training and good on TVI Express for providing it’s members with it.

But really, how much training is too much when all you’ve got to train people in is how to go out and recruit others to the business.

It’s not like the TVI Express compensation plan is rocket science. Pay money to sign up and then go out and get others to do the same.

The fact that TVI Express’ business model can be summarized in one sentence leaves a big question mark over the need of such extensive training programs.

 

Whilst it is a true milestone to be in business for two years, as you can see some of the claims laid out by TVI supporters are dubious and misleading at best.

Whilst in my opinion the company is winding down it’s interesting to note that there are still members out there pushing TVI despite their local markets slowing down.

Most recently the trend seems to be a push into South East Asia and an attempt to break ground into the Middle East (TVI are hosting their latest ‘Boot Camp’ in Dubai for example).

For the most part, in the west and Africa where regulators had a field day with TVI Express throughout 2010, the company seems to have mostly abandoned it’s operations and members.

Those looking to join TVI Express as it pushes into new countries it hasn’t exhausted it’s recruitment driven business model yet would be wise to educate themselves on what TVI does,  (or more importantly doesn’t do) at the first sign of regulatory crackdowns.

There’s a hell of a lot of members in the US, Australia and Africa who were left high and dry after their respective governments decided to investigate TVI Express for what it really is.

But of course you won’t get to read about that in any official 2010 fact sheets… That’s not good for business.

Do I need to sell any products?No. You don’t need to sell any products.