Comment Number: 522418-11347
Received: 7/17/2006 10:46:17 AM
Organization:
Commenter: Joyce Pinto
State: KS
Subject: Business Opportunity Rule
Title: Notice of Proposed Rulemaking
CFR Citation: 16 CFR Part 437
No Attachments

Comments:

We have been independent business owners for about 6 years and have gained a measure of success, but are still seeking to grow our business larger. Our business has made a huge difference in our lives and in the lives of the people we have sponsored. We want to continue to make an impact on others while developing an income. Independent business ownership is an excellent means for us to achieve our personal goals. We support the idea of the FTC proposal that prospects should receive adequate information about business opportunities. In fact, we attempt to provide all of our prospects with as much information as possible so that they can make an informed decision. We received that same kind of information when we were approached about the business, so we do the same and teach people in business with us to do the same. We make sure that our prospects understand that we are not offering a get-rich-quick scheme, but that what we are offering will take hard work and time. A person needs to spend just under $200.00 to get their business started and after they start they have six months to decide if they want to build a business. Anytime during the first six months they can receive a full refund of their initial investment. Although we do support the intent of the FTC proposal there are some provisions of the proposal that would be detrimental to the honest business owner, such as myself, who is already providing adequate information to prospects. One such concern is the seven-day waiting period. Since the prospect receives all the information he needs at the beginning of the process he should not need a full seven days to make an informed decision. Typically, by nature of our sponsoring process, our prospects have about three days to finalize their decision, knowing that they have a full six months to get their money back should they change their mind. Once the new business owner gets started he is anxious to get other people started in the business and a seven-day waiting period would definitely delay and hinder that process. Another concern we have is in regard to the requirement to provide a list of local references. This would definitely hurt our efforts because it is quite likely that a prospect would see someone on the list that he knows and then would naturally want to sign up under that person rather than the one who has expended all the effort to show them the opportunity. Likewise, we would not want our personal contact information to be shared by other business owners with people we do not know. The provisions that concern us the most are in relation to the sharing of personal financial documentation. It would be an invasion of our privacy to be required to reveal and substantiate the specifics of our income. We provide our prospects with statistics of average income earnings of other business owners. Those statistics are provided by and can be verified by the corporation (Quixtar) that we work with. We do share with the prospect our typical monthly earnings, but we should not have to substantiate that except to the IRS. Our biggest challenge in building our business has been the sponsoring process. If all the provisions of this proposal were enacted, then our task would become nearly impossible. It would definitely be a detriment to achieving success in the free enterprise system. Sincerely, Joyce and Arne Pinto