That job will not be at NR University. Yes, I went to their seminar and it was slick. They surely have incorporated every last trick I have seen before into that two hour presentation. I’ll give you the details in a moment, but first the reasons I say no for now. One, no matter how cleverly disguised, they are not real estate dealers, they are selling college courses. Two, you cannot disguise multi-level marketing. Three, although the people who invited me knew I was looking for a position with the school, they seem to have thought I would forget all that and buy up.It was no easy task to find out the true cost. Nobody would give a straight answer. Instead you got this rather half-baked circular response that you must not understand the dream or you would not be “so concerned about the cost”, so let’s go over the dream again. This went on a good five minutes before I pried the information out. The cost is $16,000. With the option to spend another $3,500. All the cash must be up front and no challenging the exams, the price is the same either way.
Who remembers Bernie Cornfeld? That’s the jackass that ripped off millions with his “Fund of Funds” investment scheme. Too few people remember that he also pioneered the method of paying salesmen commission on the total face value of a sale instead of commission on the money as it came in. For clarity, if a salesman earning a 5% commission sold a $10,000 contract with payments of $500 per month, technically he has only earned $25 when the first payment arrived. Cornfeld would pay him the full $500, thus breeding that sickly brand of salesman that plagues us to this day. Easy credit has blurred this scheme into acceptance by advancing the full amount to the seller, but it is still a scheme.
It seems that NR University has a 50% commission. So if these guys, who knew I was there to see if I could lecture for the University as they said was possible, stood to get $8,000 if they signed me up. Of course they wanted me there. I knew in the first ten minutes but stayed the full two hours just in case there was something new or substantial. There wasn’t. I was fascinated by how these seminars have taken on an exact pattern over the years. NR University has it down to a science which sadly seemed to be fooling the majority of people in the room.
Two hours later, we knew who had made $38,000 in one day, who quit their family business, who sold their tools, whose kids had birthdays today (again) and who makes more now than they did back at IBM. (Um, ladies on the lecture circuit, if you expect to be taken seriously, please don’t stand in front of a crowd and brag about being a “single mother”.) We heard about mentors, commission splits, residuals, statistics, honesty and how to write off snowmobiles to check your mountain properties. But we did not learn one scrap of what you had to do or how to do it, not even a vague overview. That info costs $19,500 you see.
So you’ll know and not waste your time, there is no information about buying and selling real estate at the seminar. It is geared to the lowest mentalities present, with lots of polished testimonials and the obligatory themes that this is hard work, that you have to believe, invest in yourself, fire your boss, how this plan is different, cruises for the winners, and a Monday “empowerment” class for women only. The company president naturally claims he didn’t do it for the money. Add some weird fascination with paying cash for BMWs that I appear to be the only person in the audience who didn’t cheer.
There was some new information, the best item of which is today’s trivia. We’ve all heard of Phoenix, the school that people laughed at when they offered degrees on line ten years ago. The trivia is that currently, Phoenix has more people enrolled than all of the traditional schools, colleges and universities combined. The bad news is the person who graduates with one of their degrees averages only a fifty-six cent per hour raise.
I’m saying I got more information about the competition than about NR. For instance, those late night infomercials sell $500 million worth of material per year. No wonder Trump is in on it. Americans spend $17.5 billion in adult education annually. One statistic that did not surprise me is that 47% of all millionaires made their money in real estate. That is likely a misleading statistic, because the only such person I ever met, Bob Lineham, well, his parents owned half the farmland in Midnapore, on what used to be the southern outskirts of Calgary, Alberta.
Upon chatting further with the neighbors, I may just show up at the next park meeting to ensure the crowd that I can help. The office seems to be telling people they have to take or leave the offer. Yeah? What if I file that this park is an historic site? The true loser is Pudding-Tat. This trailer has become her world and she has explored every last part of it.
Last, I often refer people here to see samples of my writing and I sometimes get feedback. Due to certain situations, I would care to point out that this journal is not even intended to be my best output. Good books are not written, but are rewritten and folks, these are daily posts. Not something I’ve had time to go over for a month and sharpen up. Obviously this is the quality of what I can write on the spur of the moment and I’ll challenge most blog authors to any contest on that issue.
