Would you pay $10K to $30K to become an MLS sales representative? Over the course of my years in the merchant services business I’ve come to believe that we are in one of the best industries ever. Residual income… WOW. The only place I had ever heard about the concept of residual was in Multi-Level Marketing, Prepaid Legal to name one of the better ones, and a host of other far less successful or legitimate companies. I always loved the concept but could never get in to the groove of calling my friends and family and getting them to come to the next meeting. All too often as I watched these groups I noticed that most of the selling was being done to bring in salespeople who either had to pay to get in or buy the products themselves. There was not a lot of what I’d call “retail selling” going on. That is, people had trouble going out and making a living simply selling the product or service without getting into the recruiting. One of the things that attracted me to merchant services was that I didn’t have to pay money to get started as an MLS, and I made sales and money my very first week.
    The electronic processing business has a great story “sizzle”, recurring income from your existing customers. It has some very legitimate names attached to it, Visa, MasterCard, JP Morgan Chase and the Federal Reserve, to name just a few. As most of you know it can be quite confusing and mysterious. What exactly is interchange and how does it apply? What is an ACH and exactly who handles it? Terminals to gateways to wireless to Prepaid, you really need to have a broad understanding of many different things to even begin to grasp the complexities of our industry. This makes the perfect mix for those MLM rejects who would sell you the dream. I have personal knowledge of no less than 10 people who paid between $10K and $30K to become an MLS sales representative. In many instances they were paying the money to another MLS, not even to a registered ISO. Now if any of these people had received what they paid for I wouldn’t even be writing this article. It’s just that, in every instance that I’m aware of, any of the better ISO’s would have given these people better pricing and more support for zippo, nothing, nada!
    What’s even more astounding is that most of the companies and people doing this are not even known in the mainstream industry. They’re Joe Nobody of XYZ merchant service. Yet, they must have some sort of great rap to get people to believe in them. Now I’d be the first to say that if you have are an established company with a track record of helping people create a profitable business, then it may not be out of line to receive some sort of payment for your expertise. If you truly trained a newbie and gave them top- notch agent support, marketing help, demo equipment and sales kits then you may be earning your money. At the very least you’d know that whomever you were working with was serious about the business. Maybe if you could show you were spending a substantial part of the of that money on making the agent successful it would make sense? But it’s amazing that some people can look at themselves in the mirror while taking a large piece of a person’s savings and giving them far less than what they could have received for free. Like so much in our great country it comes down to “let the buyer beware”.
    I do tend to notice that most of the people who paid to be an MLS have some things in common. First, they are former or current professionals with a corporate background. Second, the Joe Nobodies that took their money seemed to convince them that this business would be a lot easier than it really is. I sent away for a media kit from a company advertising the “electronic payments” business in Entrepreneur magazine. The cassette tape that came along with it almost had me convinced that if I just went out and talked to merchants about check services on my lunch break every day for one year that I’d build up a substantial residual income????? They only wanted $30K to introduce me to this GREAT opportunity. Boy what nice guys they were…NOT!
    To end on a positive note, some of these people have used this horrible introduction to our industry as a stepping- stone to success. They’ve found new companies and put the broken promises of the past behind them. I feel very fortunate to have worked with a few of these folks. I actually invited a new recruit to the BPS annual conference one time and he kept asking me how much it was going to cost? Every time we did something for him such as buy him a meal or give him some literature he was expecting to get a bill for it. Anyway, in hindsight I’d have paid money to get into this business. I’d especially have paid the money to start off knowing what I know now. But to pay the money to have someone give you high buy rates, lousy service and a bill every time they do anything for you is pretty crappy!