Passport Perspective

Previous Post here on M.O.D.E. Bo Short's Passport will dissolve MLM component.

M.O.D.E has been linked from Qblog, under the link - "A Passport Associate's perspective on the company's changes." Even though I think that it is clear to most that I am not promoting the Passport brand, and have not done so -- for about 2 years now.

Anyhow, I giving the circumstances, I felt the need to post some of my perceptions as to what I think happened to bring Passport to it's current decision to dissolve the MLM component.

I knew that something had to change, and I knew it would happen very soon.

Here is the email I sent to Ty Tribble - Passport President as my official announcement to him that I would be promoting MonaVie. Notice the date on my email to Ty, October 30, 2005.

Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 01:43:14 -0800 (PST)
From: "Jerry Giebeig" View Contact Details Add Mobile Alert
Subject: Hello Ty...
To: "Ty Tribble"

Hello Ty,

I wanted to check in with you and tell you I enjoy reading your blogs and have been really enjoying the ones where you and those other 2 guys post headlines, and clips, and snips. I actually pass through those, daily. Now that I have started blogging I am finding that I need to start adding something to those I visit often. I have been the quite troll I guess for a long time watching things develop. I don't cause any trouble, so I guess it is okay to be a quite troll...LOL Anyway!

Looks like you have become a Seth Godin fan. I remember referring that book to you during one of our first conversations. That is awesome, Seth is a pretty neat writer.

Ty, it seems that you have a lot going on. I read from MLMblog, I think -- that you were moving into a office, and were doing some ebaying, that is what I think I understood?

What is your main direction? I am not sure what all you are doing, but know you seem to be very busy. What are your plans with Passport? I appreciate your efforts and know that you have tried to get Passport business going, and maybe it is doing well for you? I hope it is. I know you must have learned a lot from your experiences so far. I enjoy learning from you.

Well, I wanted to just give ya a heads up, that I have most recently gotten involved with Brig Hart, (do you know of Brig?) I tell you that, only to ask you if I can link to some of your posts on MLMBlog from time to time? I have started blogging, although I need some tips, I am horrible at the tech side of the web. You seem to have that part figured out. How is the Semma Blog Project going, I would be interested in chatting about that project.

I would appreciate your time Ty, and would like to join up with you in some other capacity online possibly.

Look forward to hearing from you -- maybe we can chat on the phone sometime when you have a sec.

Jerry Giebeig
386-984-6259

Some of my personal perceptions of Passport and what led me to pursuing another opportunity with MonaVie;

Bo Short the founder and CEO of Passport, recently returned to his profession of Motivational Speaking, and focused his attention to hosting a syndicated Leadership -- Radio Show.

Bo’s public involvement with Passport had become minimal and transparent after the initial seasons of Passport, other than his monthly leadership conference calls.

Bo then appointed a President of Passport (Ty Tribble) and a Vice President(Dave Stone.)

Ty launched "The MLM Experiment" registering as a Vemma Associate and hosting a blog representing Vemma. (Vemma is a functional fruit beverage MLM. The experiment was/is supposedly established to test whether a business could be built using only a blog to build a business with Vemma. As of today, it is still live -- last post November 11, 2005.

Passport University was launched, and nothing really ever happened there, other than posting conferences calls.

Ty announced recently that he was going to re-launch his online Passport Community, which did not happen for some reason.

There was announcements of updating the Passport back-office, with new features, which never happened.

Another puzzling event, was that Ty also partnered with Dane Carlson and started a Business Opportunities Blog -- BOB Blog posts headlines and posts from other blogs, press releases, etc. including headlines of multiple home based business opportunities and varying topics.

Lastly, Passport has been using several different third party motivational speakers, and MLM gurus to appear as guest speakers on their conference calls.

From my perspective, these events were signs of the struggling attempts by the company officers to get some form of a system established within Passport. I respect their ongoing efforts. However, in my opinion they were never able to consistently secure an image of stability and directional leadership image for Passport.

It seems that I was not alone in my skepticisms. There also appears that there were just too many inconsistencies , to build confidence among the other Passport Associates, to justify keeping the MLM component afloat.

My main concern is -- What happens to the persons volume, who built an organization with Passport?

Hopefully, for the sake of people that did invest their time and energy to build a Passport Sales Organization (business) with Passport -- Bo will be place them in a favorable position within his line of sponsorship within Oasis.

I feel very confident that Bo Short will continue to do the right thing in spite of having to make some very difficult decisions in regard to dissolving Passports MLM component and current business model.

I also think that Bo and his leadership team deserve great accolades for trying their best to rid the Network Marketing Industry of the tool schemes -- by providing free training and at-cost or free support tools for building a Passport Business.

I guess one could make the case even stronger now, that you have to have motivational systems within a MLM Business Model, for it to work.

What is your take on this, please leave a comment?

Passport is hosting another conference call tonight (Tuesday 11/22/05). I am sure thatmore questions will be answered during that call.

Stay tuned~