If you've read my other hubs, you know that I'm a devout Ann Sieg evangelist and follower for the past year, and so, my opinion is obviously slanted. But I thought it would be fun to take a different view on the whole subject, and be a devil's advocate about the Renegade system. In this hub, I'm going to bring up all the areas where I disagree with Ann Sieg. While I highly respect her, I have to also acknowledge that she's human and isn't always right about everything.

Ann Sieg makes a lot of good points about the traditional MLM approach and why it only works 3% of the time. However, she poo-poos this approach too much and disregards the fact that despite its many shortcomings, it has worked very well for a lot of people for a long time. If the MLM strategies that Sieg trashes in her book really worked as badly as she seems to think they do, MLM would have ceased to exist decades ago.

She also seems to disregard that the people before her laid the track for her success with the Renegade system, and the fact that her foundation in the core principles of MLM took root in her initial training. In other words, Ann Sieg herself needed to learn MLM the old way in order to develop the approach that she dubbed The Renegade System. It would not have been possible otherwise. Learning the old way is, to an extent, a necessary step in understanding the Renegade system.

She focuses a bit too heavily on strategy and not enough on personal integrity. While it's certainly true that using effective strategy and working smart plays a key role, another crucial component that the Renegade system leaves out almost entirely is personal development and building relationships. Ironically, many old-school MLM uplines do a better job teaching these principles than Ann Sieg does. But, she doesn't represent herself as a personal development coach, so that may not necessarily be a fair comparison. At any rate, ongoing personal development is crucial to the success of any business of any kind and I feel that the Renegade system undervalues this.

Finally, Sieg talks about the concept of having a "Big Why" as though it didn't matter. Clearly, Sieg herself has a "big why" which keeps her in action from week to week building the Renegade system. It's also apparent from reading her MLM war stories that the degree of burnout she experienced in her old businesses served as gasoline on the fire. In other words, it looks from an outsider's perspective like the very people who advised her poorly on how to build a business ended up serving as part of her "big why" that gave birth to the Renegade system.

That's what I can come up with off the top of my head. I'll explore this in depth later in the hub.

One thing that my old upline taught me is that you need to be in action every day, whether you see the light at the end of the tunnel or not. They emphasized taking action consistently every day, logging the actions you took and the results you produced, and sending a spreadsheet with this information to your upline every week. This creates a structutre of accountability to keep you moving forward on your business. I find that the Renegade e-book does not do a good job emphasizing this.

Ann Sieg obviously recognizes the value of persistence. She persisted long enough to work her MLM businesses for 19 years, and I can only imagine how much persistence was required in order to make the Renegade system into the phenomenal success that it's become so quickly. But there's one problem I see with the way the book explains the new MLM approach: it creates the impression that you can build an MLM business without hard work, and that things happen instantly if you do it right and use a good strategy. Sieg may not have intended to create this impression, but it seems that this is what landed for a lot of her readers.

I say this because of the behavior I observe in a lot of Renegade affiliates. I see cut and pasted banners all over the internet, videos that don't add any new value, and desperation marketing strategies that are a rip-off of the Renegade approach. Don't take my word for this, just go to Google and type in "network marketing lead generation system" and you'll see page after page of garbage. Some of these pages are Renegade affiliates who obviously didn't do their homework and read the material, and some of them are people who heard about attraction-based MLM and thought of it as a silver bullet that takes the place of persistent effort.

I feel that Ann Sieg should emphasize in her book, e-mail list, and other materials that you still have to work persistently over time and go to work every single day to work this system. I also feel that she should qualify her affiliates more stringently. Allowing anyone to pay $67 and sign up as an affiliate generates a lot of garbage on the internet, and I don't see that this is doing her brand image any good.

If I had it my way, Renegade affiliate candidates would have to post a blog entry about why they want to use the Renegade system and what new value they intend to create, every day for 14 consecutive days and submit the blog URL in order to be considered for the affiliate program. That way, 90% of the people doing it now would be gone, and the other 10% would be solid quality affiliates who offer real value.

Ann Sieg disses on motivation in her Seven Great Lies of Network Marketing (yes, that is a gratuitous affiliate link that I threw in there just for the irony, but I do still think very highly of her book regardless of how critical I get on here). She takes a "work smarter, not harder" approach to MLM, which I wholeheartedly agree with. I myself have experienced working for incompetent bosses at my previous employers and found myself being ordered to do things similar to digging a hole and filling it back up again. Then, when results didn't get produced, they would have the gall to suggest that I wasn't working hard enough. But she makes an analogy that I take issue with. She says that you need lots of motivation to dig a hole with a shovel, but not if you're using a steam shovel. This implies to me that if you have sufficiently sophisticated tools, your motivation doesn't matter. This simply isn't true.

To learn to use new technologies an automated platforms, a significant amount of time and effort is required. If you don't have a clear focus and a clear understanding of the problem you're trying to solve, you will likely waste your time, regardless of how great your automation technology is. You may also waste your money paying for services you don't need, if you lack an understanding of the basic problem. The only cure for this is persistent effort, and the learning curve can be discouraging and frustrating. Regardless of how smart your approach is, you're going to start out doing it the dumb way. It's almost inevitable. There's no substitute for the school of hard knocks, including the Renegade system or any of the services that complement it.

No matter whether you decide to build your business the old-fashioned way and knock on every door in your neighborhood (which I would emphatically NOT recommend), or whether you want to do it by podcasting yourself playing the ukulele, it's going to take a sharp learning curve, and it's going to take a willingness on your part to experiment with approaches that don't work to find the ones that do. It's going to take you falling off your horse and dusting yourself off over and over again. You're not going to do that without a strong motivation. You're not going to persist through the embarassing moments when you get called out on your mistakes unless you have an inspiring vision and a firm conviction to make it work.

The ramp to success in MLM is not gradual. It consists of long periods of time where no results are produced before the flood gates open. You are not going to get past this point without a higher-than-average motivation. It doesn't matter how smart your approach is; it won't work if you don't have faith in it and you don't persist.

So, while motivation isn't the only thing you need, it isn't something you can do without.

Ann Sieg takes some liberties with her definitions of effectiveness and efficiency. As she puts it, "...being efficient just means being able to perform a certain job well, with a minimal amount of effort. But being effective means taking the overall objective into consideration..." Sieg goes on to describe a scenario where two people traverse the country: one person on a bicycle and another person in a car. She makes the point that no matter how efficiently a person can ride a bicycle, they still will lose by a long shot to someone driving a car, even if they're in much better shape. Her point is that efficiency, as she defines it, is meaningless if you're using an ineffective process.

Let's just say that this is not consistent with the way I've been taught to relate to efficiency. While I do agree with the conclusion that this line of reasoning leads to, I think that the process is a bit sloppy. The definition of efficiency that I learned in school DOES take the overall objective into consideration. The formula is output divided by input, both measured in the same unit, expressed as a percentage. For sales and marketing systems, I think of this as investment divided by net profit (similar to the formula for ROI, but not exactly). In other words, if I spent $100 on a marketing strategy that netted me $110 in revenue, it's 10% efficient.

Keep in mind that time is money. So, this requires estimating the opportunity costs involved, or how much money you could make doing something else in the same amount of time. Suppose you're a freelance artist and you know that you can work 10 hours doing this and earn $200. So, if you're doing any other marketing methods, you'll want to factor this money into it. In other words, any time you spend that diverts you away from your freelance business is costing you $20/hour in revenue.

If I were define effectiveness in this context, I would say that it's black and white. Anything at or below 0% efficiency is ineffective, and anything over 0% is effective.

So, let's say that you decide to put flyers on people's car windshields. The flyers cost $150 to have printed, and you estimate that you will spend 12 hours putting them out on people's cars. The total cost of this venture will be $390. Which means that in order for this strategy to be effective, you'll have to net at least that much money from the venture. However, now you also have to take into account that you'll have to spend time on the telephone with people who respond to the flyers, and there will be some manual follow-up involved as well. These things increase your costs and decrease the efficiency of the activity.

I think that the whole key to making this work is by defining efficiency in terms of the end result. In other words, measure the output by counting something you care about. If you measure your output units in terms of how many flyers you can stick under windshield wipers per calorie of energy expended in your body, you can make your "efficiency" look great, but it doesn't matter if you aren't getting the results you wanted. I think this was Ann Sieg's point.

You'll hear Ann Sieg recount numerous stories about cliches that she heard from her upline, such as "fake it till you make it." Indeed, I heard a number of those myself. It reminded me of my sales training in 2002 when I was first learning to sell kitchen cutlery. They had me believing, at least for a little while, that all I needed to do was pump myself up and say affirmations every day, and my sales would skyrocket. Now, I have to admit that I never really gave this approach enough of a chance to succeed (I only kept that job for 3 months), but I have to say that to this day, I remain skeptical of slapping positive attitude on top of an ineffective strategy. So, I agree with Sieg on that point.

But I feel that she really needed to emphasize the fact that your attitude and your belief system still are crucial in building a business, even if you're using the Renegade system. If you can't envision yourself as a success, you won't be. You'll continue to sabotage your success in one form or another. If you don't believe in yourself, other people won't believe in you. If you try to implement the Renegade system with low confidence, that lack of confidence will come across in the materials you put out there on the internet.

A negative attitude is a liability you can't afford. If you find yourself having disempowering thoughts, or feeling like quitting, you need to do serious work on yourself, and you need to make a priority of building a strong personal belief system into your daily activity. You're going to be assaulted on all sides in this business, by people telling you that you're wasting your time, that you need to get a real job, or that you've been suckered and bought into a pyramid scheme. You need to have a thick skin, and build up a strong psychological immunity to these assaults. Jealous people who don't have the courage to do what you're doing are going to do everything in their power to keep you down with them. Misery loves company, and the Renegade system isn't going to change that.

Also consider that the Renegade approach is cutting-edge and new. It's innovative, and it's still largely unproven. This will serve as ammunition for the nay-sayers who want to shoot you down. They'll point to the small number of successes thus far, especially the fact that YOU haven't succeeded yet, as proof positive that you've just wasted your time, money, and effort on a get-rich-quick scheme. And if you buy these cock-and-bull stories, your business is going to crash and burn.

While Ann Sieg makes many good points, I feel that she doesn't give personal development the credit that it deserves.