The title of Emily Lynn Paulson’s Hey, Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing stems from the kind of out-of-the-blue text or DM you might get from an acquaintance, especially if you fall into a certain (white, cisgender female, middle-class) demographic. But from that common thread, Paulson yanks back the curtain to show the workings behind it all are far more sinister than the pestering you might get from that one lady you used to work with ten years ago.
Paulson joined an MLM after an invitation to a girls night out turned out to be a bait-and-switch for a sales pitch. But the sales pitch was good enough to not only get her to sign up, but to get her to sign on a friend later that night. She was off to the races, and it didn’t take long for her to start rising up the ranks. Part of this was by design; she notes that the first level of advancement is easy to achieve because the accolades help suck newbies farther into the company. Still, Paulson does well, and is soon commanding a healthy fleet of sales reps beneath her. Her monthly paycheck and rank in the company rise, too.
But all is not well. Behind the uber-positive social media posts and markers of success like that shiny new “free” Mercedes, Paulson’s marriage was getting shakier, her time with her children was dwindling, and her heavy alcohol use was spiraling out of control. Neither a cancer diagnosis nor a DUI can stop the MLM party for Paulson, but her recovery and some current events eventually crack through her devotion to the “boss babe” life. But disentangling herself from the company proves to be harder than she expected.
I thought I was pretty well-versed in the ways of the MLM, both from brushing up against several at an old day job and from exposure to work like the first season of The Dream podcast. But this insider’s account from Paulson went into far grittier detail than I could have imagined. Throughout the book, she mainly relies on her own experience, interweaving testimonials from people who were in other MLMs and studies, lawsuits, and other documents from outside organizations and writers. Certainly, it’s impossible to tell the degree to which her experience reflects the entire industry, but her bottom line is that MLM companies sell a dream whose viability depends on selling others on that dream. Although Paulson’s is hardly the fault of the company, she also makes a case that her dependency was facilitated and exacerbated by the company’s culture and demands.
Paulson’s transparency extends to her authors note at the beginning of the book, in which she says the characters in the book aren’t specific people but composites of many people of that type that she knew in the organization. This makes sense from the perspective that I don’t think any of these women would be happy being included in this book, and it probably does make sense to reduce the wide cast of characters where possible. Some of them, though, occupy very specific roles in her account, which strikes me as an impractical way of maintaining anonymity, not to mention calling into question some of the details she includes.
That said, the most scandalous parts of Hey, Hun aren’t the people, but the financial dumpster fire that is an MLM. There’s the obvious flames of the recruitment model, and the month-end purchases reps make to fulfill sales goals, but there’s also the asterisks and fine print associated with “free” trips and even the “free” car Paulson eventually earns as one of the tippy-top earners. And don’t forget about the sunk cost fallacy, encouraging those who feel they’ve dumped too much time and money to a failing business proposition that success is just around the corner, or the fact that the major selling points of joining an MLM prey on the insecurities of women from the aforementioned demographic. Again and again, Paulson hammers home just how predatory the entire model is, at least in the company she was with. While social media, the pandemic, and general cultural change has altered the way MLMs do business, it looks like it’s an industry that has escaped being killed, even by us murderous Millennials.
When I finished this book, I logged on to social media to in a foolish attempt to decompress. The first post was a friend from high school asking her network for information about an MLM. Their ubiquity continues, and invariably, so will the messages saying, in essence, “Join us.”
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