LLR Consultant Exit Letter
This consultant reached out to me and asked if I felt this letter she wrote should be published. She felt that she'd have better chances of Mark and DeAnne actually reading it if it came from my blog. After reading it, I can relate to her feelings, as I'm sure many of you can too. Read, enjoy, and let it be known that even though these consultants are coming forward anonymously (because I WILL protect their identities) they are still coming forward. They are anonymous because they are afraid of retaliation by their teammates and uplines. WHY should someone be afraid to leave a bad relationship- especially a business relationship. I think the fact that so much fear exists speaks volumes of the climate these reps are working in. LLR, I hope you're listening. Below: Deanna & Mark,
I decided to take the time to write down my thoughts on LuLaRoe as I prepare to exit your company. I feel the need for closure as I have sat and listened to your webinars many, many times throughout my short time with LLR and feel that the saying is true, you can’t fix what you don’t know (or acknowledge) is broken. Sadly, there is so much broken in your business, so it’s time for you to listen.
I first learned about LLR by being added to several sales groups on Facebook around August 2016. I must live under a rock because I had no idea about the infamous buttery soft leggings or Facebook parties and really wasn’t interested at the time. I sat in the background and watched as women literally went crazy over special prints, which I later learned were called unicorns. I didn’t actually consider getting involved until the end of September. You see, I have a full-time career. I have worked in corporate America for 15+ year but it was starting to drain me. I had just returned from a wonderful, relaxing vacation when I started paying attention to the LLR madness and poking around to see what all the fuss was about. My career is mentally draining and while I love the world of finance, I was looking for something less demanding. I reached out to a consultant I followed on Facebook and asked a bunch of questions. I did not want to jump into something a) that I didn’t fully understand and could not be successful at and b) something that was all hype and would fizzle out. After a few email exchanges and answers to my questions, I was interested. I’ll be honest, it was her profit claims that first interested me. I was told that after 3-4 sales, I could have my credit card paid off from my initial investment. Who doesn’t want to provide for their family while running their ‘own’ business selling clothing that is in high demand.
I was hopeful, like so many women. I wanted to change the direction of my life and have a less intense, less stressful, income producing job. I certainly didn’t expect to make money for little to no work. I am a hard worker and a leader within the organization that I work. I know what it takes to create a successful team. I know what is required to cultivate and motivate people to become independent, hardworking, customer focused – all requirements of a successful business. I scoured YouTube for information and found example after example of people claiming LLR changed their lives. But, what sealed the deal for me was when I found a video by Michelle Driver. Michelle put together a comprehensive 50 min video titled – Selling LuLaRoe-Everything you need to know and how to make GREAT money. I’ll be honest, Michelle is super intelligent, well-spoken and clearly is a successful leader. So when she explained that she and her husband had previously worked in Corporate America, I paid attention. Here is a woman that I trusted with the information she provided and who is able to support her family on LLR. That is when I finally signed up!
I entered the queue in early October and I had not even owned a piece of your clothing yet. Now it was a poor choice of mine now to reach out to Michelle or do a bit more research on the importance of a GOOD sponsor, so I ended up signing up under someone I didn’t know personally and who lived in another state. That was my first mistake and I take responsibility for my poor decision. My sponsor was literally zero help while in the queue, once I onboarded, and now even as I am exiting the company. The extent of her involvement with me and my business was to add me to the team groups and send me an occasional message on Facebook. We’ve never even spoke on the phone. You really should consider more training and requirements before sponsoring is allowed. It’s like kids having kids, they just don’t know what they don’t know and they represent your company whether you want to acknowledge that fact or not.
I was onboarded the week before Thanksgiving. I missed the Halloween madness but made it just in time for Christmas leggings. Except, I didn’t get any. That was my first disappointment with your company. Halloween leggings were in abundance and Christmas was a drought – it doesn’t make much sense to under produce the items that EVERYONE wants for the holiday, but hey – it’s your company and you know what you’re doing, right? Wrong. In hindsight, I am happy that I didn’t receive Christmas leggings. They were poor quality, had sizing issues and lots of holes! I consider myself lucky that I dodged that bullet.
I held my launch party and stayed focused on my business. I sat and watched the HO updates and training webinars and I did what I was told, by you and your team of leaders. I reinvested my profits back into my business to grow my inventory. Every coach, mentor and sponsor preaches that we need to put everything back into our business for at least 6 months to be successful. Hmm, that felt strange to me because while I knew that I was growing my inventory, I was essentially working for free. But, I figured if they were all successful with this formula, I would be too. Mistake number 2. I work in finance and I understand the value of my time. For every hour I was working my business; several hours in the morning before work, every evening after work and all weekend, I was not paying myself for my time and I wasn’t comfortable with that. So I started to take a little bit of profit, I’m talking about a few hundred dollars, a drop in the bucket for the thousands of dollars I was selling every month. I continued on, scheduling pop-ups, online sales, in home parties, giveaways (oh, the amount of giveaways) and my sales were consistent each month and I was happy with that. By February, I was exhausted. I had worked the last 3 months nonstop with both my FT job and LuLaRoe and it was catching up to me. I found myself depressed, emotionally drained and mentally unable to focus on anything. I didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning. But, it had to be because of me right, it couldn’t be LuLaRoe. Wrong again.
I was working non-stop based on your direction, mistake number 3. You and your coaches, mentors, sponsors all say that we must work our business to be successful and if I wasn’t successful, I wasn’t working hard enough. So I literally worked myself sick, but continued on. I soon found that I was not enjoying it as much anymore. I knew that I was not interested in growing a team as I did not have the time available to properly support someone at this point in my business. I also could not knowingly pull someone into this business knowing what a facade it is. There’s an aspect of this business that many people don’t talk about when trying to recruit. The requirement to be available to everyone, at all times. I found myself trying to balance customer PMs at all hours of the day and night, answering emails, responding to questions & comments, chasing down open invoices, ensuring I’ve been paid accurately from LLR, keeping track of inventory, ordering new inventory, photographing, engaging my group, getting out in my community, hosting sales and loads of shipping. You want to know what I didn’t do? ANYTHING ELSE IN MY LIFE. I literally stopped cleaning my house, stopped doing laundry, stopped grocery shopping, stopped taking care of myself and stopped paying attention to my family & friends. Now, don’t get me wrong – I take full responsibility for that BUT, it was based on direction provided by YOU! Hire a housekeeper or an assistant you said. Who has the money to hire anyone when we reinvest all of our profits and are not making money from the business? Order, order, order should be the tag line for LLR. The more you buy, the more you sell – I still hear it in my sleep. Do you want the truth about why that’s true? It’s because half of what we receive, at a minimum, is crap. It’s ridiculous prints, colors, patterns that nobody wants. So yes, if you continue to order, you’ll have fresh inventory that will sell but the rest just sits on our racks and accumulates. The concept of everything sells is a nice thought but its horseshit. We, the consultants working this business to support our family, scrape together funds just to place a new order so we do NOT have the luxury of sitting on ugly ass shit for months on end until it finally sells. You often say “Think like a Retailer” – well, retailers discount what doesn’t sell because shelf space costs money. We have to move the product in order to buy new product.
So, by early March, I found myself doubting my choice to join this business but I didn’t want to give up yet. I continued to trudge along until some major changes came in April. LLR was knee deep in multiple lawsuits and I knew in my gut we would be impacted by your poor choices, and it wasn’t long before that was proven correct. Just a week or so into April, I get a random email about the lawsuit with former merchant provider. It explains, very unprofessionally, that due to them withholding 20% of all debit/credit transactions, we can no longer pay for our wholesale orders or onboarding packages with debit or credit. Um, what? Funny, it only took a day or two for you to backtrack once again on what you initially communicated to 80k+ consultants. Now you decided to let new consultants in the queue use their credit/debit cards for onboarding. How sweet of you. I bet you quickly saw how that decision impacted YOUR bottom line. No concern for the rest of us and OUR bottom line. You see, the shit you send us doesn’t sell fast enough to be able to place the MINIMUM required order of 30 pieces regularly. So once I was unable to use my credit card to place new orders, I knew I was done. What kind of business sends out an email about a lawsuit and says in one breath “they are forcing us to do this” and the in the next breath say “we don’t want our consultants in debt” WHAT THE HELL?? Debt is what you preached to us from the start. YOUR coaches and mentors told us how to take cash advances, loans on our retirement accounts, borrow from family or friends – anything to get into this business and the proof is all over the internet, forever. And, as I said before, they represent you. So the thought that you give a shit about our debt is insulting at best. So, my last inventory order was April 8th. Immediately after I stopped placing new weekly orders, my sales stopped. My group has seen my ugly shit more times than they care to count. THEY DON’T WANT IT!! But, that must mean I’m stale, not my inventory, right? My final straw was when my customers, people I work with at my professional job, started to return leggings due to holes. It is incredibly embarrassing to represent a company and a brand when the product does not stand up in value. I have always taken care of my customers and replaced or refunded them for defective merchandise but this was becoming an integrity issue for me. I don’t know how you can claim the defect rate is as low as you state when there are thousands of customers that simply don’t report their product was damaged. The implementation of the Make It Good Program should shine some light into your eyes on that topic!
So, I started going out of business around mid-April. I started slowly by wholesaling what I could to other consultants. I was trying as best I could to prevent doing discounts to sell off the 500+ items still left sitting in my house. But, it didn’t take long to realize that even consultants don’t want my shit. They have enough of their own that they can’t sell. After many back and forth messages to us, you finally settled on a buy-back policy at 100% plus paying shipping. Sounds great, right??? WRONG! Do you want to know why that’s an insult to every consultant that is pressured, or bullied into sending back their inventory for a refund of WS cost? Because, that is OUR profit sitting in those items. That is the profit YOU told us to reinvest. That is our hard earned money that we never took to support our family because we had to continue to place orders. That is MANY, MANY hours of working our business without being paid, right down the drain. Listen, I mentioned before, I don’t work for free. You clearly wouldn’t as well. I know my worth and it isn’t found in your WS cost. I deserve profit for the hours I spent away from my family, the tears I cried when I placed an order and opened the box to find loads of UGLY duplicates and the effort I put into this business for the last 7 months. I refuse to take the hit because you can’t successfully run this company. So, I have been doing GOOB sales – at 30%, 40% & now even 50%. And you know what, people STILL don’t want this product. I am down to about 200 pieces and am practically giving it away just to recoup what I can and it’s a shame that you could care less. You don’t care about the consultants leaving in droves or the 3 hour wait times to speak to someone in HO or the 2+ weeks it takes to get someone to answer an email. You don’t care because you are onboarding more consultants as fast as we are leaving. You are lining your pockets with $5k of someone’s hard earned money, or highly financed money, with the promise that “it’ll change their life”. You should be ashamed of yourselves, and honestly, I hope you lay awake at night worrying about how we are ruining your business like you ruined our lives.
Before I go, let me give you some advice that you so desperately need.
Stop with the unprofessional webinars. It’s embarrassing to see you and your TEAM stumble over your words week after week giving out inaccurate information. At a minimum, invest in some training to learn how to prepare your thoughts and speak publicly. As a “billion-dollar company” YOU SHOULD NEVER FIND YOURSELVES AT A PLACE WHERE YOU ARE WINGING IT LIKE YOU CLEARLY DO EACH AND EVERY WEEK.
Fire whoever is responsible for your communications and hire a professional. They are clearly incompetent and poorly represent you as a company. There are multiple spelling errors in your emails and in the communications on your website. The messages are often unclear or unprofessional and it’ll be the best money you spend, I promise.
Listen to your consultants. Hear what they are saying and understand what needs to be fixed. Don’t assume we are a whiny bunch of bitches because I will tell you that we know what our customers want. We know what will sell and what will propel the company further. We also know what is preventing you from getting, and staying, on solid ground (loads of duplicates, ugly prints, poor quality fabrics, terrible public relations, the list goes on...) You can’t deny there are issues and just hope it all goes away. Pull up your big girl/boy pants and get this shit fixed.
Be authentic and stop being phony AF. It’s hard to believe in and trust you when all we see are dollar signs streaming out of your mouths with every word you preach to us. Care about the consultants and what happens to their family and their finances when they are being pushed to make poor business decisions (as described above)
You should stop with the monthly bonuses. Let teams be built organically. Let people recruit others into your company because they care about the business and want to see it grow. Stop incentivizing people to lure in unsuspecting woman with the promise of a life changing business. Let people earn their money, not make money on other people’s orders or sales. Remove the pyramid and you will quickly see who is in this business because they care about the wellbeing of the company and who is here doing you damage. The foundation of a solid company is those that support the business from the bottom up, not the top down.
There is a lot of bullying in this company that needs to stop. From both of you as well as the coaches and mentors. They follow their leaders like puppets, the kool aid is very strong and it’s sad to see the affects it has had on so many women because they aren’t successful enough in your eyes. Be decent human beings and encourage and motivate others simply because you want them to succeed. There is no honesty to be heard in your words when they are only tied to your financial profit.
Take notice, I haven’t even spent time discussing the move to New Bless. That is because I was adamant that I would NOT move to New Bless, regardless of the consequences. I watched multiple webinars and training sessions where it was explained how this new payment system would be a blessing for our business. It was confidently stated that there was no credit check as LLR was backing all applications. A phone call was even made DURING the webinar (refer back to bullet 1 for unprofessional and unprepared webinars) to check with someone at the new merchant company and again confirmed, no credit check. Only to be later told that there was a credit check but don’t worry, it was a soft check. Then, after consultants were seeing their credit scores drop by 10-40 points, it was FINALLY confirmed that it was in fact a hard credit check. You can’t claim ignorance when it comes to business and what impacts people’s lives. I saw red flags all over the merchant agreement, most importantly, the transfer of liability for fraud & chargebacks to the consultants! Funny how that was never discussed when explaining to us how this would be blessing our business.
As for me, I will be fine. I will attempt to sell off the remaining inventory I have and send back the uglies you sold me with my hard earned money. I will receive a full 100% refund for what I send back to you as that is what you have agreed to as your promise to us GOOBer’s. I will properly document every piece of clothing I send to you and if needed, I’ll involve the proper level of authority to ensure I do not lose one more cent as a result of your false promises. This was a life lesson for me. It has made me very aware of the greed and selfishness spread throughout this company. I am taking my life back from the mess of LLR and I will finally get back to taking care of myself and my family. I am thankful that I will soon be FREE of you, your company and your many “blessings”.