Engineering Calculus vs. Business Arithmetic

Back when I was a young impressionable Ambot, I prided myself on the fact that I had three semesters of calculus, plus differential equations, linear algebra and probability theory.  I was one smooth engineering dude.

But in Amway I only did the arithmetic they gave me permission to do. The sales and marketing plan? I had that math memorized.  But it took several years before I acquired enough common sense to sit in an auditorium or coliseum at a business function and do the math.

How many people here?

How much did each person pay for their ticket?

How much do they pay for the speakers and facility?

How much are they selling in the back of the room?

Where does all the extra money go?

How come they never say anything about that money?

And even more importantly, what was my arithmetic?  In Amway they taught you that the husband should always handle the checkbook, not the wife.  Why did they teach that?

Well it sure wasn’t because they wanted men to be better financial managers.  It’s because women add up the tape and book bill and object, but men don’t.  It was too depressing to look at my balance sheet, so I only did once a year, at tax time. (That was truly painful!)  Laura handled our checkbook, not me.

There is yet another kind of arithmetic.  What’s the big picture here?  If I’ve got 100 Amway Distributors in a room, how much are they all spending on tapes and meetings and gas, and how much are they all making?  That’s the most absurd comparison of all.

I eventually realized that Amway isn’t even a zero sum game, it’s a negative sum game.  For every one dollar the herd makes, they spend five.  No kidding.  Most people there made negative five bucks an hour.  Myself included.

The only industry in which that can continue to happen is “BizOp” – business opportunities, where profits all come from the losses of other people, and where it is not really even possible to make a profit selling the actual product.

A little arithmetic would have saved me from all that.

Didn’t even need calculus.

Still I must say, all this stuff I’ve talked about ultimately proved to be very valuable to me.  The selling skills I acquired in Amway still serve me today, and in the grand view of things, those lessons of foolishness weren’t as harsh as they seemed at the time.

I learned my lessons and today when I get out of bed, I can actually do pretty much whatever I want to do.

But my word to the wise: Do the math.  Numbers don’t lie.