Andrew J. Cass is one of the original founders of Carbon Copy Pro. It’s a funnel type of system for marketing Wealthmasters International products but could be adapted to other products as well. I was in a business with an almost identical model (they probably got the idea from Carbon Copy Pro, I don’t know anyone who’s been using that model longer) and I’ll go into some firsthand experiences later.

A “funnel” system is basically where you hit a landing page, it sometimes will let the person opt in for more information, which sends them through a series of timed auto responders (like with Reverse Funnel System, the one we did) and then they hit the prospect up for a $50 purchase, in the case of Carbon Copy Pro it’s a disk with Mike Dillard who goes into the details in a presentation. This step is done to weed out the tire kickers who don’t have any money, and also to finance advertising efforts to the people selling it until they can get some of the big package sales.

The next phase is where they hit you for the big purchase. In the case of Wealthmasters International, they have wealth management courses which cost $1,995, $8,995, or $19,995.

These are high end courses and the commissions are high as well. Also when you buy in with the larger packages, your commissions are higher as well. The problem with this kind of price point is courses like this were developed and priced during a period when many housing markets increased in value ten percent a year for ten years straight. We got hit with a housing bubble bursting and the double whammy of Wall Street banks packaging flimsy loans into mortgage backed securities and pressuring the rating houses to label them AAA when they should have been BBB. Of course you know how that all played out.

Andrew J. Cass is one of the founders of Carbon Copy Pro, he’s been very successful,  there’s no denying that. I do disagree with his view described in the Coffee House Letter in which he gives a pretty alarming view of MLM’s and that his G.P.T. (get paid today) method is better. This is where you make big commissions instead of signing people of for an MLM that pays more over time.

It’s true that some very flimsy or unscrupulous MLM’s have gone out of business like ITV Ventures (which went out of business due to mismanagement and then created an identical company) and people who built residuals with them were left out in the cold. From that point of view I can see his concern, but there are some very stable ones where there’s a lot more money to be made in the long term than $1,000 commission checks and having a downline struggling to sell very high ticket items.

Here’s the experience I had with Reverse Funnel System, which is a similar model to Carbon Copy Pro but instead the product is discount travel accounts with Global Resorts Network. We knew someone doing it and after signing up the first red flag hit, our sponsor said he’d signed up 17 people but none of them had gotten a sale themselves yet. We had poeple ready to sign up, but he said we had to wait or we’d be given to his sponsor as that’s the way the compensation plan is set there.

We did sign up plenty of people, but they simply ran out of money trying to market it before they could get any sales. It was a trend here, and it started to feel like a recruitment mill which put us on edge. The nail in the coffin was when the housing market tanked, and we discovered that people were buying into these high ticket programs typically using their home equity lines of credit. Well, when values dropped, the mortgage companies started to freeze  HELOs and Countrywide last June froze over 110,000 of them in a single month.

It got to the point where we had to throw so much traffic at this to get a conversion that we agreed it was time to bail and marketing something else. That’s how we got into the business we do now and couldn’t be happier with it.

With all that being said, it’s the reason why I wouldn’t do Carbon Copy Pro, and after doing what I’m doing I disagree with Andrew J. Cass on the big upfront payday approach. The top people at our company are making low six figures a month in residuals (granted, that’s after doing it for four or five years) and that’s my goal as well.
Chasing commissions of a thousand dollars or more is fine, but with all you have to spend on advertising to get that $1,000, for most people I can’t see good chances of them making it big in these times.

The economy will recover someday, but I think it’ll be a very long time until we see homes doubling in value over a ten year time span. It was the economic climate that very high ticket products like Carbon Copy Pro performed well in.

If you’re shopping for a business opportunity, you’re welcome to head to my Top Pick page and find out the only one I do. It’s not mentioned anywhere on the blog because of the SEC rule that holds parent companies responsible for the claims of their distributors.You can find out there though, and without the spam or sales pitch if you’re curious.