| Comment Number: | 522418-10907 |
| Received: | 7/16/2006 11:57:31 PM |
| Organization: | |
| Commenter: | Douglas Dietz |
| State: | OH |
| Subject: | Business Opportunity Rule |
| Title: | Notice of Proposed Rulemaking |
| CFR Citation: | 16 CFR Part 437 |
| No Attachments |
Comments:
My wife, Summer, and I are Quixtar affiliated Independent Business Owners. I have been an IBO since July 1999, and Summer joined me upon marriage in November 2002. Since becoming an IBO, I have also graduated from The Ohio State University with a B.S. in mechanical engineering. Today, I am employed full-time as a Senior Project Engineer, and Summer is a full-time R.N. at a Pediatric Medical Office. We enjoy the extra income that our IBO business brings into our household. Many of our best friends are fellow upline, downline, or crossline IBOs. Summer and I were even introduced to each other by our upline! We look forward to early retirement from our jobs based upon the incomes we have been creating as IBOs. In my opinion, our experiences as IBOs constitute a great example of how a business opportunity should be. We have always had hands-on support, education, training, and motivation from our upline. We have always had great products and services supplied by Quixtar. We do intend to keep such an opportunity available to future generations. But how were we to know, in advance, that we could trust our upline and our servicing corporation? The proposed rules are intended to protect consumers from untrustworthy opportunity sellers. Trust is time-tested, and so new IBOs have a six month money-back guarantee on the IBO registration fee ($180) and on support materials. This policy makes a waiting period unnecessary and is a much better safe-guard than a waiting period. A waiting period is just not acceptable due to the huge challenge it would place on helping a new IBO organization grow. Quixtar shows the Average Monthly Income of an Active IBO, typically about $120, on any literature that profiles high income achievement, to emphasize that success is not guaranteed. Those who have achieved some initial success will often show a copy of the actual performance bonus checks that they have received from Quixtar. Those IBOs who have achieved large and long-term financial success refrain from quoting any incomes, but will allow visits, videos, or slide-shows revealing some of their lifestyle. Our educational support includes local weekly seminars, and quarterly large conferences. This gives every IBO exposure to crossline IBOs, who have nothing to gain from each other's involvement. These events eliminate any need for reference lists of local IBOs. Each prospective IBO is even encouraged to attend two local weekly seminars free of any ticket cost. For every business, there is the potential for litigation, particularly for large and profitable businesses. In the case of business opportunities, legitimate consumer allegations must typically be centered around unethical practices of the opportunity seller. And the same unethical seller that will wrongfully break terms with the opportunity buyer, is the one that will break FTC terms in presenting an opportunity. Whereas the opportunity seller that is ethical will follow the potential FTC rule of litigation listing, and yet that list will be irrelevant. Again, the six month money back guarantee provides a better safe-guard against an unethical opportunity seller. After reviewing the FTC proposed rules, I was happy to see that the rules have the intent of making sure that other opportunity sellers conduct themselves similarly to my upline and to the Quixtar corporation.