Network Marketing: What People Get Wrong – And What They Get Right
Most of what people believe about network marketing is wrong.
Some of it is completely right. And those are the bits worth talking about.
I’m a Utility Warehouse Partner, so you know where I’m standing before I start. But I spent a long time as one of the sceptics, and I don’t think you get to skip past that scepticism just because you’ve changed your mind. Most people arrive at this subject with a bad taste in their mouth, and usually for a reason.
So let’s take the reasons seriously.
Where the criticism has a point
“Only the people at the top make money.”
Let’s deal with the real version of this, which is that earnings are very unevenly spread. A smaller number of people earn well and a large number earn very little. That’s what the numbers show, and any company that won’t discuss it openly should worry you.
But I’d push back on calling that unfair, because the reason for the spread isn’t hidden. It’s effort.
There’s no barrier to entry here and no minimum commitment. Which means a lot of people sign up, do very little, and drift off – and every one of them sits in the figures forever. The gap between the top and the bottom isn’t a gap between the anointed and the rest. It’s mostly the gap between people who did the work and people who didn’t.
And honestly? I’d rather have that than the alternative.
I’ve spent my career in and around employment, and one of the things that quietly brings people down is working somewhere effort isn’t connected to reward. You take on more. You stay later. You cover for the person who doesn’t. And your pay is identical to theirs at the end of the month, because it was decided by a band and a budget before you got out of bed.
Here, the relationship is direct. Put more in, get more out. That’s not a slogan – it’s just how it’s structured, and after years of watching brilliant people plateau in jobs that couldn’t reward them, I find it refreshing rather than suspicious.
The caveat I’d add, because I want to be straight with you: effort is the biggest variable, but it isn’t the only one. Timing matters. Who you know matters. What else is going on in your life matters. Working hard tilts the odds considerably, but nobody can promise you an outcome, and you should be wary of anyone who tries.
So go and read the income disclosure before you take anyone’s word for any of this. Mine included.
“Some people do it badly and it’s excruciating.”
Also true. We’ve all had the message. The one from someone you went to school with, who hasn’t spoken to you in eleven years, opening with “hey hun!!” and getting to the point in paragraph four.
That happens. It’s real. It puts people off an entire industry, and honestly, fair enough.
I don’t do it that way, and the people I’ve chosen to work alongside don’t either, but I’m not going to pretend the stereotype came from nowhere. It came from somewhere. It came from a lot of somewheres.
The one I’d actually defend
“The culture is a bit much.”
The relentless positivity. The cheering each other on. The celebrating of things that, to an outsider, look small.
People roll their eyes at this. I don’t. I think it’s one of the best things about it, and I’ve come round to thinking most organisations could learn from it rather than sneer at it.
I spent years in corporate recruitment. The default setting in a lot of those environments is cynicism. You hit target and someone immediately asks about next month. Somebody has a genuinely good week and the room’s instinct is to find the flaw in it. Enthusiasm gets treated as naivety – something you grow out of, if you’re serious.
And underneath that, there’s a reason for it that nobody quite says out loud: in most corporate setups, there can only be one winner.
One person top of the leaderboard. One promotion going. One name on the board at the end of the quarter. Which means your colleague’s brilliant month is, in a small and unspoken way, bad news for you. You’re competing for the same roles, the same clients, the same slice of the same bonus pot. I’ve watched genuinely good people become quietly resentful of each other in that environment, and I don’t think most of them wanted to be. The structure just made it hard to be anything else.
Here, that structure isn’t there. Someone else doing well doesn’t take anything from me. There’s no leaderboard I get bumped off. If anything, when the people around me do well, it’s actively good for me as they are spreading the word about what an awesome company Utility Warehouse is – so being pleased for them isn’t performance, it’s just how the maths works.
That changes the whole feel of it. Everyone’s contribution gets celebrated, whether it’s someone’s first customer or someone building a substantial team. Nobody’s sitting there mentally ranking it. A small win doesn’t get dismissed because it’s small.
I never understood what the cynicism was for anyway. It costs nothing to be pleased for someone.
What I found here was the opposite of that, and it took me a while to stop being suspicious of it. Someone in our team gets their first customer and forty people are genuinely delighted about it. To an outsider that looks over the top. But most of those people are doing this around jobs, kids, caring responsibilities, illness, redundancy – building something in the gaps of an already full life, with nobody obliged to notice. Of course they cheer. Nobody else is going to.
Is some of it performative? Occasionally. You can spot it. There’s a difference between someone who’s genuinely thrilled for you and someone doing it for the algorithm, and you learn to tell them apart quite quickly.
But I’d rather be somewhere that errs towards encouragement than somewhere that errs towards flatness. I’ve worked in both. I know which one I got more done in.
More workplaces should lead with positivity first. I mean that.
The ones that don’t hold up
“It’s a pyramid scheme.”
This is the big one, and it deserves a proper answer rather than an indignant one.
A pyramid scheme pays people for recruiting other people. That’s the product. Money comes in from new joiners and goes up the chain, which is why it collapses the moment recruitment slows – there was never anything underneath it.
The test isn’t whether a business has layers. Lots of legitimate businesses have layers. The test is where the money comes from. If income depends on new people joining, it’s a pyramid scheme. If income depends on customers buying something they actually want, it isn’t.
With UW, the money comes from household bills. Real customers (over 1.4 million of them at the time of writing in August 2026), paying for energy and broadband they’d be buying regardless, from a licensed FTSE 250 supplier they can complain about to an ombudsman like any other. If nobody joined the business side ever again, the existing customers would carry on paying their bills and Partners would carry on being paid on them.
That’s the difference, and it’s not a semantic one.
“They’re all the same.”
They’re really not. The label covers everything from products nobody would buy at that price without the social pressure, through to household essentials at competitive rates.
The question I’d ask about any of them: would a customer still buy this if there were no business opportunity attached?
If the answer is no – if the product only moves because people are buying it to qualify for something – then you’re looking at the thing people are rightly worried about, whatever it calls itself.
If the answer is yes, you’re looking at a distribution model. Companies have to choose how to get customers: advertising, price comparison sites, high street shops, or people. Paying people instead of paying Meta isn’t inherently sinister. It’s a choice about where the marketing budget goes.
“You have to buy stock.”
Not here. I’ve said this before but it bears repeating because it’s the assumption I hit most often – there is nothing in my garage. Nobody is sitting on boxes of anything. The product is a utility bill.
“It’s not a real business.”
I run a recruitment company. I’ve done payroll, chased invoices, made hiring decisions, had the sleepless nights.
This is a different thing at a different scale, but the fundamentals aren’t fake. You have customers. You look after them or you lose them. You do the follow-ups or you don’t get the results. Nobody is going to do any of it for you.
The bit that’s genuinely different is that the infrastructure already exists. You’re not building a supply chain or a billing system. That’s not a lack of legitimacy – it’s a franchise-shaped arrangement, and nobody calls a franchisee fake.
“You’re left to figure it out on your own.”
This is the one I’d argue hardest against, because it’s the exact opposite of my experience – and because it’s where the comparison with a traditional business is most stark.
When I started Investing in Women, I had a £5,000 redundancy payout and no idea what I was doing. Every single thing I learned, I paid for. Courses. Software I bought and abandoned. Advice I took that turned out to be wrong. And the most expensive lessons were the ones nobody sold me at all – the mistakes I made because there was no one further down the road to say “don’t do that.”
Business coaching runs into thousands. Proper training programmes, the same. And when money’s tight, development is the first thing you cut, which is precisely when you most need it.
Here, the training is genuinely good and it’s included. Sessions, calls, people who’ve built the thing you’re trying to build, all of it there from day one whether you’re doing well or not. My mentor has taught me things that have made me better at my recruitment business, not just this one. I’ve joked more than once that I’ve had a business coach for free.
For anyone who’s tried to start something alone and hit the wall of not knowing what you don’t know – that’s not a small detail. That’s most of the reason people give up.
The one I’m still working out
Here’s the honest bit.
There’s a tension in any business where you can earn from building a team. It means the person telling you about the opportunity has a reason to want you to say yes. That’s true of a recruitment consultant filling a role and an estate agent showing you a house, and we cope with it fine in both cases – but we cope by being upfront that the incentive exists.
So: the incentive exists. I have one. You should read everything I write with that in mind, and you should ask anyone who approaches you about this exactly what they get if you say yes. Anyone who gets shifty about that question has answered it.
What I’ve settled on is that the incentive is only a problem if it makes me talk people into something that isn’t right for them. So I try quite hard not to. I’ve told people this wasn’t for them. I’ve told people to stay in their job. It costs me nothing to be straight, and it costs me a lot -reputationally, in a business where my name is the business — not to be.
Where I’ve landed
Network marketing has earned a chunk of its reputation. I’m not interested in defending the parts that deserve it.
But “some people do this badly” isn’t the same as “this can’t be done well,” and a business model isn’t disqualified by its worst practitioners – or every industry I’ve ever worked in would be disqualified too.
Judge it on the actual questions. Where does the money come from? Would customers buy this anyway? Is anyone being honest with you about the odds?
Ask those, and you’ll sort the real ones from the rest quite quickly. That’s a more useful instinct than a blanket no.
If you’ve read this and you’re curious rather than convinced – that’s the right place to be, honestly.
The role is listed on our job board, same as it was when I found it. All the detail is there.
And if you’d rather ask the awkward questions first, message me. I’d genuinely rather have that conversation than not.