Sell the Dream

I was sitting in an office lobby reading Cosmopolitan,
surrounded by fresh-scrubbed twentysomethings in nice suits, waiting to
be interviewed for a job I knew nothing about. That’s when the manager
came out to change the music—skipping from “Don’t Stop Believing”
to “Any Way You Want It.” Now, I like Journey as much as the next terminal
ironist, but that soundtrack, combined with the presence of so many
milling hopefuls, made me feel like I’d stumbled into Rush Week
purgatory.

A few days before, I’d sent a resume to Hyphire Solutions in Tigard.
Twenty minutes after hitting the send button, I received an email
response claiming I seemed “really, really qualified,” and asked me to
dress nicely for my interview. I’d first heard of Hyphire several
months previous, while in earnest search of a job. Googling the company
yielded a weird mix of job ads, vague corporate websites, and pages
that implicated Hyphire as a scam connected to the multilevel marketing
giant known as DS-Max. I could’ve taken their word for it. But I
figured… why not find out for myself?

THE INTERVIEW

While Oregon unemployment rates continue to shrink, many new jobs
don’t pay well, entry-level employment is tough to find, and Portland
is still experiencing an influx of young, creative college
graduates—resulting in a nearly desert-like job market. For those
new to Portland, an “entry-level marketing job” with lots of openings
looks like an oasis. So I did my best to sound like an eager jobseeker
on the phone, bought some cheap pantyhose, and drove to Tigard for my
interview. I didn’t tell anyone I planned to write about my experience,
but I used my real resume (which outlines my experience as a
journalist—I was surprised no one asked), my real name, and my
real number.

The Hyphire office was noticeably bare, with a single desk and PC in
the lobby. The two managers’ offices were separated from the lobby with
sliding-glass doors and blinds. I was whisked off to one of them by a
twentysomething assistant manager with deep visible cleavage and
perfectly manicured hands. The interview was quick. I mumbled,
slouched, said I’d rather work with computers than people, and tried to
hide the fact that the skirt I’d worn that day had a tiny rip. She
congratulated me on making the cut to the second-round interview, and
told me to come back the next morning. A former recruiter told me
later: “They don’t care. They just want warm bodies.” Warm bodies in
professional dress and comfortable shoes.

IN THE FIELD

The second round is a “day of observation,” shadowing someone in the
business. In this case, I went out with a distributor (entry-level
sales rep), who I’ll call “Martha,” and a team leader (one higher up on
the food chain), who I’ll call “Jill.” I liked Jill almost
immediately—she was in her early 20s and a recent college
graduate who said, not 20 minutes out into the field, “I want to be
really rich. I want to retire young.”

The field, that day, was outer Burnside and Gresham. We left
Martha—who was younger, maybe a year out of high school—to
go off and sell on her own. We were selling “golf passes” door to door
at businesses, ignoring “no soliciting” signs, and marching unabashedly
into schools (where we actually made a sale). If it had a functioning
door, we went through it. The one exception was the neighborhood police
station.

Some of the people we talked to didn’t speak English. Very few
golfed. Many of the roads we walked on had no shoulders. We sold no
more than eight golf passes between 9 am and 5 pm. Over lunch, Jill
asked me to get out my notebook, so she could explain how the business
worked.

The cards Hyphire sells (that is, the golf passes, or sports
tickets, or pizza coupons) are printed cheaply, and the client, in
exchange for free marketing, provides the inventory. The money from
each sale is then shared between each rep and the two managers above
her. So for each $40 coupon sold, the sales rep may get $15, with the
team leader manager taking $15 and the manager taking $10. Many of
Hyphire’s clients are, as the ads boast, Fortune 500
companies—and you’ve heard of them: the Portland Trail Blazers,
the Seattle Mariners, Pizza Hut. They get people in the door at no
cost, the customer gets a discount, and the sales team pockets the
change. Jill called it a win-win-win.

The point of the job, she said, was not to sell stuff, but to
train people to be managers. They get promoted fast, and they retire
young. Jill had been with the company for less than two months, and was
already a team leader. Once you become a manager, you open a different
office—a completely different business, of course, with a
different merchandise mix, and a different name. Each office is
independently owned and operated, though merchandise will still come
from Smart Circle, or another company that has a distribution and
licensing deal with companies in Hyphire’s family: Cydcor, Innovage,
and Nu-Life are the names to know and search for in the United
States.

An investment of $10,000 is recommended to open a new office (each
manager rents the office space, pays a salaried receptionist/recruiter,
and assumes the cost of advertising), but one former manager
told me this isn’t required. Another advantage of having offices
operate individually, under different names and owners, is that it
makes it more difficult for prospective employees to run Google
searches, do the math, and balk. And the ability to own your own
business—the opportunity—is the key thing these companies
sell, along with the possibility of retiring young. Jill asked me,
“Would you shovel manure for six months if you knew you’d get the
chance to own your own company?”

DO YOU REALLY, REALLY WANT IT?

After lunch, as we walked the territory, Jill began peppering me
every few minutes with a strange rotation of questions and statements.
“Does this seem like something you could do?” Ten minutes later she’d
tell me, “You know, people usually have more questions for me. I want
to get you in for a third-round interview, but you’ve got to show me
that you really, really want it.” That is, ask more questions, show
more drive, and exhibit more enthusiasm.

“I sense you’re a bit skeptical,” she said later, “and I’m willing
to address your concerns. But if you want this job you have to show me
that you want it.”

By 5 pm, I was exhausted. I was hungry. I was cranky. And I was
processing a tangle of contradictions: This wasn’t a sales job, but we
were selling stuff nonstop. All Hyphire reps are self-employed, but a
supervisor determines their hours and territory. When we got back to
Tigard I decided I’d seen enough for one day, and waited for the
evening meeting to end. (These meetings involve a lot of chanting,
ringing bells to signal successful sales, and, of course, lots of loud
music… though they’d switched from Journey to recent, Top 40 stuff.)
To find out if I qualified for a third-round interview, I was asked to
fill out a questionnaire about what I’d learned that day. I filled in a
bunch of snarky answers, such as, “Why am I being made to believe these
are such hard jobs to get, when you advertise all the time?” Then I
pretended to go to the bathroom—which was across the outdoor
courtyard in the same office complex—and bailed.

BEHIND THE CURTAIN

One person I spoke to for this story, Oliver, said during his
third-round interview the recruiter got angry when he said he couldn’t
start right away. The next day he received an email from the same
company asking him to write a one-page statement about why he thought
he was good enough for the job. I’d seen enough of this kind of
“build-break-build” psychology on my day of observation that I halfway
expected to hear from Hyphire the next day.

I didn’t.

But I started reading up. The history, at least the way most in the
company hear and retell it, is this: DS-Max started in 1980 when a
26-year-old Torontonian named Murray Reinhardt lost his sales job and
needed a way to start over. He started by buying cheap goods from
wholesalers, selling them door to door, and recruiting salespeople. Two
other large companies operating under a different, but related model
came along later: Cydcor and Granton Marketing. Granton is now called
Smart Circle, and is Hyphire’s merchandise supplier. Only one of the
big three—Cydcor—has a public relations representative
whose contact information can be found on its website.

Gail Michalak, Cydcor’s PR director, would only tell me that Cydcor
has no offices in Oregon and is no longer affiliated with DS-Max. She
claimed to know nothing about Smart Circle. As for business
practices—well, each office is independently owned and operated,
so she couldn’t speak for them. While clients have their own specific
requirements for how they can be represented, that information could
not be released to the press.

In fact, trying to follow the name trail, or establish a connection
between individual offices and their parents, can feel like a game of
Whac-a-Mole. But their modus operandi, right down to the music in the
lobby, are nearly universal: the vocabulary (“Let’s get juiced!” might
be the signature catchphrase of DS-Max culture —”juice” being an
acronym for “Join Us in Creating Excitement”), the business model
(multilevel marketing with some significant differences), and the
schedule (work eight hours a day—not including mandatory
meetings). DS-Max culture is saturated with the rhetoric of personal
responsibility and accountability—it’s your dream, but only if
you really want it—but there’s no accountability for the high
turnover and failure rate. Those who “toast” (DS-Max speak for
quitting, or washing up) are blamed for their failure, even if after
years of working hard in the field, they find themselves bankrupt and
nearly homeless.

“DS-Max: the Aftermath,” an MSN group devoted to former DS-Max
employees, and their families, is peppered with messages from people
who say they haven’t seen their children, siblings, or significant
others for months. Many have been transferred to open new offices,
while constantly trying to satisfy the company’s aggressive us vs. them
mentality.

Some people leave after deciding they’re being ripped off, but
others—particularly those who ascend rapidly within the system,
and stick around for a long time—don’t make that judgment call
until later, if at all. “Todd” (name changed at request), the moderator
of DS-Max: the Aftermath said he left because he was bankrupted out,
not because he stopped believing, and he continued to defend the
company for months.

IN NEED OF A DREAM

Several months after my day of observation, I found Jill’s MySpace
page and inferred (from comments made by her friends) that she left the
company a couple months previous. I wrote her, informed her I’d
actually been working on a story, and asked if she’d be willing to talk
about it. Initially, she seemed upset (claiming I had wasted her time)
and wouldn’t tell me why she had left the company—though she
admitted the practices were probably “shady.” I wrote back explaining
my motivations and what I thought of the company, and this seemed to
calm her down. Jill responded that she was naturally defensive of
things she’d been attached to. She still didn’t want to talk to me, but
no longer seemed upset. As Todd wrote me later, “It can be a terrible
thing to admit that all you did, for however long you were in the
company, has now come to nothing.”

I don’t know what would have happened if I’d represented myself
honestly. I also don’t know what would happen if DS-Max represented
itself honestly: if the ads said “straight commission, door-to-door
sales, multilevel marketing with limited chances for success.” Plenty
of people would read no further, slam down the phone or walk out the
door—but plenty of people already do. The “build-break-build”
recruitment, the contradictions, and slow release of information make
it easier to ensnare people—but it’s the dream of
against-all-odds success that makes the company tick. In a job market
where the odds already against entry-level workers, maybe the dream is
all they need.