It seems that everyone wants to be an entreprenuer these days, running their own online businesses from the comfort of their home or with the freedom to travel wherever they want, whenever they want. Doing this isn’t as easy as people often think it is though and many who want to be entreprenuers don’t know what product or service they want to sell or how to go about doing it.
This is one reason why Network Marketing, also called Multi-Level Marketing, has become so widespread over the past few deacdes. Instead of having to come up with your own product or service, pricing, and all the other stuff that goes into starting your own business, with MLM, everything is already figured out, you just have to learn how to sell. Sounds easy enough, I mean you really only have one job right? Unfortunately, it’s not.
According to a study by Jon M. Taylor that ca
n be found on the FTC website, 99.6% of people make no money in MLMs. Since most people will struggle to make sales, those who are good salespeople see monetary potential in creating training platforms which teach people how to sell. This way, when members sell a product to a person, they can also tell them that they could start their own online business too and this platform can teach them how to do that. That’s what separates Multi-Level Direct Selling from traditional Single-Level Direct Selling: you are not only selling a product, but you also have the ability to recruit others to join the biz and you can make money off of their sales.
Over the past few years, many training platforms have arisen for an MLM company called Enagic, whose water ionizing machines produce what they’ve dubbed “Kangen water” and cost upwards of $6000 USD. If you’d like to learn more about Enagic as a company, the claims made about kangen water versus the actual science behind it, as well as a more in-depth look at how the Multi-Level Marketing business model effects the way in which the products are promoted, I have a deep dive video on all that right here.
October 2021 Update: Enagic has posted a 2020 USA income disclosure statement which shows the number & percentage of distributors in each rank as well as the median income for that rank. According to this statement, 66% of all US distributors made less than $1,000 in 2020. The median income for all US distributors was $440 (median= half made more, half made less). Better than many MLMs, but still not a very promising “opportunity”.
In this blog post, I’m just going to go over all the platforms I could find that promote Enagic products because some of them are very secretive about their affiliation, meaning a lot of people come across them and have no clue what product they’re selling until they’ve already spent money to sign up.
There are 3 different Enagic “investments” these platforms typically promote to people.
The first is buying a K8 for $4890, which is one of their most popular water ionizers.
The second is something people call the “Trifecta”, which consists of purchasing a K8, an Anespa mineral ion water spa system for $2890, and a 4 month supply of Ukon turmeric supplements for $760 which will autoship to you 3 times a year. With taxes, shipping, and handling all added in, this comes out to an initial “investment” of around $10,000.
The final and least common is the “Quad” or “Quadzilla” which is a trifecta + an extra K8, that most attach to a bathroom faucet or loan out to leads (people they want to sell to). This would of course be an investment of around $15,000.
Something to note is that none of these platforms are created by or endorsed by Enagic, they are created by distributors/independent contractors. Some of the platforms also do not solely promote Enagic so you can be a member without buying a kangen machine, but they do strongly encourage it since that is how the founders made a lot of money, based on my research. And you signing up obviously means more money in your uplines (the person who sold the product to you) pocket. See this page if you’re not familiar with Enagic’s compensation plan and ranks, or I explain it in my video here.
This list I created is definitely not all platforms, and it’s of course limited to platforms in English-speaking countries. If you know of any others, please let me know so I can update it. One thing you’ll wanna look out for when researching and trying to find Enagic training platforms is if they say it “will do 90% of the work for you” or its “90% automated,” then they are probably promoting Enagic.
[All numbers and stats are as of summer 2020. Also I apologize for some faces being blurred and names being crossed out, that was in case I put them in a video in which case everyone was going to be anonymous.]
The furthest back I could find was a group called Project AWOL, founded in 2012 or 2013 by Keala Kanae and Kameron George. In 2015, they rebranded to AWOL Academy, and again to Fullstaq Marketer in 2019. I can’t find any info on if Fullstaq promotes Enagic so I’m guessing it doesn’t.
A litte bit about the founders: They had both previously been in an affiliate marketing company called Empower Network, which they left after it went bankrupt. Keala was mentioned as hitting 6A2-2 in Enagic’s 2016 Convention Recap Newsletter. Kendrick’s other platform, AffiliateLifeTV, lists water ionizers as one of the products they promote and has been listed in Enagic newsletters as well. Project AWOL placed 2nd and 4th in a 2016 Enagic contest. Those are some of the only connections I could find between them and Enagic. There were also a few members of AWOL that went on to create their own Enagic training platforms…
The first is Balazs Kardos, who created Global Prosperity Movement in 2013, which was rebranded to The Diamond Life earlier this year. The only connections I can find between him and AWOL is the second picture and on Bizapedia, AWOL is listed as a general partner for Global Prosperity Movement. He also has his company ‘Kardos Consulting’ listed at the same Utah address at AWOL even though he’s from Canada. I am not 100% sure his businesses are in the right place in the graph though due to many Breakaway Movement members saying he is far up in their upline.. which in the graphic he is clearly not, so I’m not sure about that.
From 2009-2013 he did door to door sales for a Canadian Telecommunications company called TELUS. He says, “I started making like $500 a week, $1000 a week, $2000 a week… And I got it all the way up to just under 10 grand a week before I left that.” He also dabbled in two MLMs in 2012, ViSalus Sciences and Organo Gold Coffee. He always knew he would be a millionaire, so this is what he had to say about his results with Global Prosperity Movement, (at 13.18) “I didn’t make that much money in my first 12 months you know, I’m a little disappointed. I was aiming for a bigger, higher number. I pulled in you know a couple hundred thousand dollars in my first year… disappointed.” Which is tragic to say the least, but it looks like things took a turn for the better as his Instagram bio use to say in early 2020 that he has made over $100 million in sales. (Says it here now… guessing he means he’s led to $100 million in sales, not that that’s his net worth)
He is pretty high up in Enagic, 6A2-4 but has been that rank since October 2018. So I don’t doubt that he’s super rich but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was lying about $100M. If you look on his social blade, this giant spike where he gains 85,000 followers in one week and then loses 28,000 combined with a very low engagement rate is indicative of an account that has bought followers, especially when he’s been continuously losing followers ever since. So if he’s willing to buy followers, it’s not unlikely that he would also lie about sales.
He is also a co-founder of The Freedom Era, created in 2020. I don’t think he’s super active in it though because he never talks about it while the other co-founders, married couple Kristie Ord and Clint Morgan from Australia, who are at least 6A2-3 (business names Freedom X Pty, Freedom Fest Pty) seem to have it more as their thing. The two of them also hold an annual event called Freedom Fest and both are listed in Enagic newsletters and what not. I am not sure if Kristie and Clint started from Balazs but I was not able to find out who they started through so let me know if you have any information.
Two other guys who were in AWOL are Mathieu Jang and Julian Sherman, who created Global Affiliate Zone in 2016, rebranded it to Affiliate Institute in 2019, both of which Kameron from AWOL also co-founded. Julian and Kameron also have something called Freelance Marketing Pros which says it’s operated by Affiliate Institute and it’s About Us page mentions AWOL Academy as if the trainings from that are being used, not sure if it has anything to do with Enagic though.
In Affiliate Institute, Enagic is just one of the companies they promote, while Global Affiliate Zone, or GAZ, seemed to focus more on Enagic. In the first 15 months of GAZ, 31 people were making over $100,000, out of around 9,000 members.
Mathieu and Julian are definitely very good at what they do which isn’t surprising as Mathieu started in network marketing when he was 15. Mathieu earned over $1.3 million in affiliate commissions in what seems to be the first year of GAZ. He was the youngest and fastest to ever hit the rank 6A2-4 in Enagic. In the first quarter of 2019, he had the highest unit sales of any distributor in the company. As for Julian, he first registered as a distributor on february 10th, 2016 and made it to 6A2, so 100 sales in just 19 days. For comparison, hitting 6A in 6 months is considered impressive. So the founders are pretty good salespeople. The GAZ platform must not have been as good though because less than 14% of the members in 2017 earned a commission by getting someone to sign up for GAZ. That doesn’t have anything to do with money made from Enagic sales, just affiliate commission for bringing people into GAZ. The average earnings were $78... for the entire year and less than 1% earned sufficient commissions to cover what they spent on GAZ which I think was $99/month. Considering this platform didn’t encourage people to talk about the water, but rather just the business and be kind of secretive about what they were selling until they sign up, I think it’s safe to assume that not many were out selling machines to people who didn’t join GAZ, so probably less that 14% of members made an Enagic sale that year.
Brandon Odom founded Team Phoenix Marketing in 2016 after meeting Mathieu, rebranded in 2018 to The ACE Initiative which was co-founded by Bryan Hodgson and Travis Fox. As of April 2018, Brandon is at least 6A2-3. Nowadays he has two new websites, Online Biz Masterclass and Online Business Mentorship which both have different webinars and intro videos but all connect back to Brandon and ACE and Enagic. The Online Biz Masterclass webclass shows that ACE made him over $2 million since 2016. It doesn’t mention Enagic but the Online Business Mentorship webclass talked about Enagic almost the whole time and it’s URL has Ace Initiative in it.
Digital Genius Lab, founded in 2016 by Chris Baden (at least 6A2) and husband and wife Sean (at least 6A) and Melissa Malone (at least 6A2-2), merged into ACE in 2019. Chris and Sean now run Sales Ascenders but I haven’t seen any evidence that that focuses on Enagic at all.
The most recent platform that I’ve come across is Build Your Empire University, founded by Ashley Taylor and Brodie SalNitro, likely in 2020 (based on when their website domain was created). You can get a week long trial for only $1 and then after that it’s $99/month. It’s not very obvious that this platform has anything to do with Enagic from, unless you scroll to the “World Class Coaches” part of the sites home page and see Balazs Kardos, founder of The Diamond Life. None of their hand-picked reviews mention the words ‘water’, or ‘kangen’, 'or ‘enagic’ but a review on Trustpilot mentions a kangen water demo from Balazs. Also, this page gives the tell-tale sign of an Enagic training platform by saying: “90% Done For You System For Your Traffic”. Not worded beautifully but it’s no different that the other platforms that say it’s “90% automated”.
I find the reviews on the BYEU website to be pretty weird, but in a subtle way. My speculation is that the leaders strongly encourage members to write reviews and give them some talking points that they want them to address and the members pick a few. Like “What was your view of BYEU before you joined and how has it changed?” or “What is your biggest takeaway from the trainings?” Someone writes, “Believe it or not I had No skepticism or hesitation, I just wanted to learn more and HOW and the 7 day trial gave me that exact opportunity!” I don’t think this is how the average person would speak in a review unless prompted with a question like “Were you skeptical of BYEU before joining?”
The responses do not sound as diverse as you would expect for a product/service. They’re all relatively the same length. They praise the leaders and platform way more enthusiastically than is normal. Multiple people start out the review by saying their name and where they’re from. One person says, “I have not been paid to endorse this or brainwashed in any way.” Encouraging people to leave an honest review is one thing, but it’s another to clearly persuade people into saying certain things. Just a little fishy to me.
I also think it’s a bit unecessary to try to trick people into thinking your servies are worth so much more than they actually are, espeically when you’re just pulling number out of thin air. They say their weekly live calls are work $5,000 and their private Facebook group is worth $2,000. Those are made up numbers, and sorry but no FB group is worth thousands of dollars.
I have not yet been able to find where this group branched out from or the group/leaders Enagic ranks.
Someone who started in GAZ was Rob Brautigam who is at least 6A2. His first platform was called Project Q1, which he started in 2016 then rebranded it to CEO Movement in 2018. If you’re wondering why all of these people have rebranded, I think it’s usually to escape the bad press the previous platform was getting. I mean so many people contacted Enagic Australia about GAZ that they had to put out a statement. CEO probably has the worst reputation of all of these. There are a lot of ex-members that have not had good things to say about it.
Many of the higher ups in a newer platform called The Breakaway Movement started with CEO and one of them called CEO a “whack place”. The founder of breakaway called her departure from CEO “emotional and unsettling”. Another said “it had almost a scammy vibe”. Someone else described the community as being “very masculine energy based in a way that I didn’t like which was very sales, sales, sales, money, money, money.” It seems that Rob has a bit of a bad attitude and only cares about making money from what I’ve seen. Someone who was in CEO and knew Rob told me, “His ego is twice as big as Alyse’s [his sister, controversial YouTuber Alyse Parker]. He’s one of the reasons why I left CEO, he’s not a very good leader, he’s more interested in making money.”
It seems that CEO Movement no longer exists and Rob has moved on from that (and Enagic, as his sister says in a YT comment from October 2020) to co-founding a new platform called Conversions.
In March of 2020, a group of about 3-400 people who were in CEO decided to leave and started Digital Prosperity Movement, or DPM, based in the UK and founded by Adam Gately and Ian Bailey, who is at least 6A, and I’m guessing Adam is as well. DPM topped EU sales may 2020. One girl told me that “CEO started off as what DPM is now but they kind of decided to go a different direction, did some stuff that many of us didn’t agree with, and many of us agreed to transition over and create a new platform.” She also said “CEO became very corporate.”
I only looked into DPM a little bit and didn’t get the best vibe from it. For their webclass, there’s a 4 minute countdown timer to get you to act fast but I let it run out and could still watch the thing. To me that’s insulting to peoples intelligence, I mean who falls for that anymore? Adam also has a website called Sally and Adam, which just leads to DPM. [If you look up ‘Digital Prosperity Movement’, you’ll see a Facebook post saying DPM is just CEO rebranded, that is not true.]
Around January 2020, Amelia Whelan left CEO and started Kangen Movement which she had to rebrand to The Breakaway Movement, or BAM. She was high up in CEO and friends with Rob and the other top guys and she has made it sound like they tried to sabotage her platform when she left and did something that forced her to have to change the name. Not sure how that would have worked though. Amelia is at least 6A2-3 according to her, I only have proof of her being 6A2-2 (business name Salt Sand and Smoothies). The Breakaway Movement was discontinued in December 2021, due to compliance issues. In April, Amelia created a new platform called Net(worthy), which caters to all network marketers, rather than just Enagic distributors.
From BAM, multiple platforms have been created and I’m sure many more will continue to be as it seems a lot of the higher ups eventually want to actually have a true business instead of just be in someone elses or they had disagreements with certain things taking place in BAM. Free Life Movement was created by Lacey Daunt and her fiance Steven Bahns who are both at least 6A2. Conscious Creators Ohana was created by Kelly Talavs who is at least 6A2, and Annie Davis who is at least 6A. Wake Water Co was created by Jillian Hight who says she is 6A2-2. Know Your Why was created by Taryn Davis who is 6A, according to her.
Moving on to the right side of the graphic, we have another branch off of GAZ, Darren and Mike, founded in 2016 by Darren Ewert and Micheal Dreher. They also have platforms called Wealth Achieved (x), previously called Work Shop Replay, It’s My Time Today (x), Achieve Freedom Today (x), and they used to have one called Better Life Buzz. These are basically 5 roads that all lead to the same place, the Dream Team- I think that’s what they call their members. That seems to be working out for them though as Mike is at least 6A2-3 and Darren is at least 6A2-4.
Darren and Mike both have years of experience in sales and marketing so it makes sense that they would do well in MLM. Enagic did a contest for each month of 2019 where you’d get points for your team sales which would be determined by which products you sold, how many, and then it was multiplied by your rank. I went through and wrote down all the people we’ve talked about who are in these lists and in the first half of the year, Balazs and his wife Margaret from The Diamond Life and Mathieu from GAZ were consistently in the top 11. If you look through these, you’ll notice that peoples ranks don’t fluctuate all that much, but then all of a sudden in June, Darren, who was not even ranked in May, is in first place and ahead of 2nd by over 6,000 points when usually 1st place is by a couple hundred. And then he holds 1st for the rest of the year. Darren said in a personal email to me that he won the sales contest every month of 2019 but GAZ got him disqualified… but also that it was a long story so he did not go into detail.
Apparently many people have been suspicious of their doings as the BBB opened an investigation into Better Life Buzz in late 2019.
Like I said, many of these platforms are very secretive about what they promote. They want you to sign up and then learn what product they’re going to recommend you start selling to achieve the life of freedom that they’ll spend an hour taking about in the webinar which will be like your introduction to the business and platform. A quote from a video called The Pyramid Scheme that Collapsed a Nation by Rare Earth that I think really demonstrates why they do this is, “Remember that a con man won’t sell you facts, but emotions. Because they know that you’ll fill in the rest and once you’re invested a penny, psychologically you’ll be in for a pound.” I’m not saying these people are con artists but many of their webinars are just fluff. They don’t describe how you will get what they’re saying you’ll get, they will just make emotional appeals to lure the most desperate and vulnerable people in. If they just came out and said you would have to “invest” $5-10,000 on a K8 or trifecta, not many would join. Platforms like Breakaway and the ones started under that are more transparent about Enagic and the investment, but they also break Enagic’s policy and FTC guidelines by talking about how much money they make from Enagic. The higher ups are always saying they just made another 5 figure month and the ones not making money are told to post about how much the higher ups are making. From my calculations, which you can see in my Breakaway Movement video, I estimate that only around 5% of BAM members are making at least 1 sale a month. So not the best business opportunity.
The members of these platforms lure you in with their amazing, picture-perfect lifestyles because it’s not about selling the product, it’s about selling the dream that, in reality, very few will ever achieve. I would not recommend joining any of these platforms because you do not have a high chance of making six figures like they want you to think you will… and if you do, you profited off the people at the bottom who will never make their full investment back. I have a deep dive video called I Joined The Breakaway Movement So You Don’t Have To which looks at selling tactics and how realistic it is to actually make money with the platform if you’re interested in that. Of course every platform is different but that can give some insight on what’s really going on behind the scenes.
You can email me at annasanalysis[at]gmail.com or DM me on Instagram @annas_analysis if you have any questions.
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