HBNaturals Income Disclosure

Before we get started, we must give credit where credit is due! Hats off to the smoke and mirrors department because they have successfully put out a very uninformative and confusing document which is, the HBNaturals Income Disclosure Statement.

They start off with a familiar MLM tone, telling us that this is an ‘exciting opportunity, that rewards you for selling their products’. Then quickly switches gears and reminds us, that success in any sales job, is the result of hard work (and of course a dose of luck). They even tell us that the opportunity is unlimited, but your results with HBNaturals will vary

HBNaturals even go the extra distance warning us, in their own words, telling us that if in the recruitment process, that any claims made about income from HBNaturals should be ignored. So what they’re trying to tell us is that if you join, you need to ignore everything that was told to you about this amazing business opportunity because in reality it’s just another commission based sales job.

Staying with the theme of surprising honesty, HBNaturals has given us what appears to be an honest pie chart representation of their income disclosure as shown below:

The pie chart is honest to the point that it leaves plenty of room for confusion. For starters, they are telling us that 86% of members are just customers. Yet when we read the HBNaturals Income Disclosure, they called all participants of their incentive plan ‘members’. Is this something we are misunderstanding, or are they telling us that 86% of HBNaturals Members earn nothing

Despite what they are trying to portray, we can safely assume that all those people became “customers”, when they signed up as members in the business opportunity. They just never climbed the ranks so they have stayed at the entry level or customer rank.

HBNaturals tells us the familiar MLM story about how most people join the business opportunity solely to buy the products at wholesale prices. We’re not sure what they mean by wholesale pricing because it includes all those levels of commission which go up the line to the people that convinced them to become HBNaturals Members

HBN then go through and give us a break down of how many members are at each rank, and give us the maximum and minimum earnings made for the year. They conveniently didn’t give us the average earnings, so it’s hard to know what the real figures are, but we made this table to try and make the information a little easier to read:

As we can see, HBNaturals has given us a very blurry representation of the member earnings. As we noted earlier, we can clearly see that 86% of HBNaturals members earned no income at all for the year

As they’ve decided not to provide us with the average income at each level, we’ll just focus on the worst case scenario and look at the minimums. After all it is possible that the maximum earner at each rank just happened to be one very lucky HBNaturals member.

For that reason we’ll focus on the minimum earnings at each rank, at least this way we can safely say that everyone who reaches this rank was paid at least this much or more.

We find it a little entertaining that under the description for the Executives rank, they tell us that these members have made a decision to build a HBN business. Here we were thinking that everyone who becomes a member of something called a ‘business opportunity’ had intentions of building a business. It could be we’ve missed something, or it could be that they want to downplay the fact that up to 87.60% of HBNaturals members made less than $6 after a year in their business opportunity.

But hey this is MLM, and they’ll tell us that most people don’t put in effort or do the work, but those who do, will make money. Let’s consider those HBN Members who reached Platinum rank. As we can see, members reached this rank and made as little as $2,585 for the year. This means it is possible that you will earn less than $50 a week with HBNaturals after achieving 6 rank promotions with them.

Interestingly the income really jumps at the next promotion. Once members reach the Pearl or Sapphire Director ranks, they earn enough commission to replace a minimum wage job. But let’s not forget that commission isn’t the same as profit. It doesn’t include all the time, effort and expenses put into building your HBN team. If we included expenses, we’d expect to see that even after 8 promotions, HBN Members are earning less than minimum wage.

It’s only when members reach the HBN rank of Ruby director or above that they could possibly earn more than they would in a regular job. Based on their income disclosure this group represents the top 1.42% of all HBN Members. In other words 98.58% of HBN Members still need to work regular jobs.

While they haven’t admitted it, we are assuming that HBN is following the traditional MLM approach and only including active members in their income disclosure. This is quite convenient for them because it means that they can leave out all the members who quit during the year. If they included everyone who was a member during the year, then we’d expect to see far more earned nothing. Based on our experience with MLMs, we’d expect to see that less than 1% of HBN members turn a profit from the business opportunity.

Reading through the fine print at the bottom of the income disclosure, HBNaturals made the following statement: Any earnings examples contained in this document are for illustrative purposes only and do not represent actual earnings or earnings potential. Is it just us, or are they telling us that their income disclosure should not be taken seriously because it’s all just made up?

If that is the case, then we are a little surprised, why would they make up an illustrative document which showed that you can get promoted 8 times and earn less than minimum wage. Maybe it’s because they just did their best to tell us as little as possible, and if we had all the information, things would probably look a lot worse.