There are so many get quick rich schemes out there. Don’t believe me? Google it. Google it right now. Go to Google and do a search for “get rich quick”. See how many people are trying to sell you money? Even more telling, is if you look at the sponsored links section (brown box at the top and down the right hand side) you can really see that people are paying in order to appear for this. If they are paying to be there, you know that there is something in it for them.  So how do you know one from the other?

Well I’m looking at two examples right now that I have recently encountered:

Success University VS Enigin PLC

Succsess University claims to be a “university” that helps people achieve their goals. They say that through their help and their guidance, you can achieve the dreams you have always wanted. They don’t care want your field is, they don’t care whether your dreams are to be a plumber or a pop start, but they say that by entering into the programme their motivational and life changing advice will help you to become the person that you want to be.

Okay it all sounds a bit too good – but at this stage it still could be true. Perhaps their life coaching ability is enough to be able to help you get to where you want to be. I mean we all need a little help and guidance now and then. So far so good, they could be for real (if a bit pretentious).

Then the network marketing section kicks in. Once you are a member, for every member you sign up, you get a kick back of their monthly subscription. Not only that, for every person that the person you brought in adds to the system, you also get a kick back. This goes on indefinitely. What this means is that if you go out and recruit, you can be really succsessfull. All of a sudden this has gone from something about helping you to achieve your dreams, into something about selling success university as a product and making money from it. Worse than that, it is essentially a pyramid scheme. You take people on, encourage them to take people on, who take people on… and all the while if you are at the top of the pyramid you are making loads of money.

I am sure that there are people who have made a fortune doing this, I am sure of it infact. However, is this something you really want to get yourself involved in? The people you are most likely to be able to talk into this are “the damaged”, are the people who are week and vunerable and looking for help and support. What these people need is support and and good business structure. What they don’t need is a pyramid scheme.

So Success University, gets a damaged – THUMBS DOWN – IT’S A SCAM!

Enigin PLC

So onto our other example. Enigin PLC. Based in St Austell Engin PLC offers to allow people to buy into being Enigin Partners. What this gets them is a piece of the action.
Now unlike success university, alarm bells are ring straight away here. You have to pay for it? How much? The answer is a lot, I don’t have an exact figure, but it is in the thousands of pounds. Again, while with the success university the amount of money is £30-£50, here we are talking about £5,000 - £10,000. This is a lot of money and really does make you think that this must be a scam, right?
Here is where the tables turn though. As you investigate further though, you realise that they have been running a commercially successful energy conservation business for years. They have clients across the globe, and they have more potential customers that they can cope with in their current size. It seems that they have to grow… and this is their way of doing so. By making sure that everyone involved makes money directly dependant on their individual performance, they can be sure that everyone is giving 110%. It is not a bad idea at all.
They also have a product. The success university has no specific product other than their pyramid scheme, in this case they are into something very tangible and real that everyone needs. Energy.

Hang on a second, I ask myself though. Backup. What about the money aspect. It is a lot of money to buy in. What about that.
The reason there is good money in the energy field it seems, is because it is very specialist. Now I know nothing about energy and Enigin, so I can’t speak specifics, but it does seem logical that the tracking equipment is expensive, the skills to train up to using them takes time and a knowledgeable trainer. It does make sense to me that you would have to invest in it. More than that, if they are going to invest time training you up, I guess they need to know that you are serious enough about it that you are going to stick around long enough to make both yourself and thus also the company some money. The personal investment that you have to make covers both the costs of the training and equipment, and very quickly weeds out the window shoppers. Suddenly I’m thinking that whilst the investment is high, it is high because it is not a scam. Success University will take anyone, regardless of if they think that they are good enough to be a “success”. These Enigin guys seem a lot more picky about who they let buy in, regardless of if you have the money or not.

Verdict? Enigin Scam – MAYBE NOT A SCAM, Looks fairly reasonable.

Course, you’d have to be right for the business, but I think that I’d take my chances with Enigin over Success University anyday.

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Update

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Well it’s been a few months since I wrote the above article, and I thought it was important that I updated this with my latest thoughts on this.

Well I have had a chance to speak to a few more people about both success university and Enigin PLC, and I thought that I would add that to this post. Well as far as the success university goes, some of what I have written has been confirmed and some of it has been refuted. There are two clear reasons to join success university. For a lot of people they are sucked in by what I can only describe as a pyramid scheme – because the payment structure looks like a pyramid. They join in the hope of selling membership on to other people, and they work to try and sell that on in order to make money. The unfortunate reality of this is that the first place they start is with their friends and their family, and ultimately what we are good at selling is the thing that attracted us to it in the first place, which in the case of these people is the money. Trying to sell the package as a money making opportunity is probably easier to do in the short term, but in the long term does not necessarily deliver the results that it promises. I am not saying that it can’t, there are many people out there that are clearly making large amounts of money from their association with the success university people, but equally there are many people that have made no money and do not look like they are any closer to doing so.

The second part of the S U project is the actual tapes, Cd’s and lectures on self improvement. I now have it on fairly trusted authority that some of these are actually quite good. I have it that many of these are well done, delivered by genuinely successful business owners, and can really help and inspire you to strive for greater things. In the case of signing up for this and this alone, I think that perhaps you could then be onto something that is good. Beware the person who signs up soley to try to make money though, as this should not (in my humble opinion) be the reason for joining.

Enigin

PLC

Again I have had a chance to speak to a few people, and see the positive press that has come out over the past few months about Enigin and it all seems to confirm that they really are as skilled at energy mapping and energy saving as they say they are. Enigin seemed to have helped quite a few people over the past few months with their business, and the ultimate no brainer is that they seem to have saved their customers more than they have charged them in the first place. This is key,a s it means that they bring more value than they charge, and therefore you can only gain by using them.

So that is the update on Enigin and SC. If there are any more updates in terms of what Enigin PLC or SC are up to, I will be sure to post something here and let you all know.

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Website Updates:
Enigin have completely updated their website, altering the look and the feel. The site is really quite beautiful, much easier to use and actually looks really nice. I have had a look across at the succsess universtity site and it is pretty much the same. The big change there is that lots of people are building their own websites based around the succsess university but with trackin codes on all the links so that should anyone make a purchase via their website, they get the pyramid scheme kick back from it.

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Update 30/11/09
So as you all may have noticed, I have put this discussion on the back burner for a little bit mostly because I have forgotten about it somewhat. So why am I writing an update about this now? Well, the other day I was looking at Earth Times which is this newsfeed that I subscribe to and I noticed that there was an article about Enigin on it. It is called Cutting Carbon Cutting Costs, and upon seeing this I dug a little bit deeper into the online life of Enigin. I found that they are getting a ton of really amazing press lately, it seems that in the last few months their reputation has skyrocketed. This makes it all the more evident that Enigin is not just interested in getting money to join their training program, but also genuinely care about the environment and the carbon footprint that various types of industries are contributing to it. Meaning, more bonus points for Enigin!
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Update 07/12/09
Apparently the government is looking as installing Smart Meters in all UK households by 2020. I was reading the newspaper the other day and discovered this fact, not only that but the accompanying picture showed the Enigin Smart Meter. And not only that, they were reading it on a handheld device, how amazing is that?
After reading that I looked a little bit into what the research and development over at Enigin were doing and it turns out that they are working on a real-time meter right now! The data is displayed after only a moment or two delay, so it is extremely current and accurate, this revelation totally amazed me. It is meant to be realised under Enigin Eniscope, watch this space for more exciting news

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Enigin Update 14/12/09
So for all of you who are waiting for my final decision on Enigin Vs Success University and which is the scam and which is the investment, I think I have reached a consensus. Although most of you are expecting me to say that are both rubbish in my normally pessimistic way, I have to say that I really do respect Enigin. After having watched them for a few months now and turning on my Google alerts, I have found a lot of really positive articles about them, not only from the company’s point of view itself, but also all of the partners that have invested in them and the product. I have also done quite a lot of digging, and realised that that many people who are putting Enigin down are corrupt companies themselves, and not worth listening to anyway. Success University on the other hand, well I will save that for another post…

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