Simply Rich by Rich DeVos

Author:Rich DeVos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Howard Books

CHAPTER EIGHT

Exporting the American Way Worldwide

JAY AND I HAVE often been credited for being men of vision. But if that were true, we might have foreseen when we started Amway in 1959 that the desire to own a business was not limited to the American way. That may still have seemed true when we crossed the border to open for business in Canada in 1962—when we opened our first overseas affiliate, in Australia, nearly a decade later, we still had the mind-set of operating in a country with ideals very similar to those in America. But soon thereafter, with the opening of each new international market, the concept was clear: people around the world share a desire for an opportunity to have a business of their own. Seeing the AMWAY logo on signs accompanied by Japanese or Chinese characters was a bit of a jolt to me—a guy who once served overseas in a war to defend American democracy and came home eager to prosper within the blessings of freedom I’d felt only were available in our country. Today, we know differently. The dream of what we described as the American way cannot be contained within borders or limited by nationality.

We decided to go into Canada as our first international attempt. Jay and I were naïve at the time, thinking that in an English-speaking country we would not have to reprint our U.S. literature. We forgot that there are a lot of French-speaking people in Canada—which required us to print separate literature and product labels in French. We originally intended to open in Canada as a separate company contained within the Canadian borders and with no cross-border sponsoring, but it soon became obvious that starting all over was a bigger job than we were prepared to deal with. We concluded that we had a lot of people in the United States with connections in Canada and that we simply needed to figure out a way that where Amway grows, distributors grow; where we go, they go. Future overseas affiliates were started as brand-new companies, but we also developed a system allowing distributors to sponsor in all of our markets.

We opened in Canada within three years of starting Amway because distributors in the United States had friends, relatives, and business contacts there and wanted to take advantage of new markets. Ada is only about 150 miles from the Michigan border with Ontario. Except for Quebec, there was no language barrier, and Canada’s economic and government structures and culture were very similar to ours. So it was easy for Amway to quickly take advantage of an expansion opportunity and become an international company. In comparison, our next international move was a giant step—an overseas market halfway around the world in Australia. The joke at the time was that by us choosing such a distant country, no one back home would ever discover if our first overseas venture failed. That, of course, was not true, and it also was not fully true that we chose Australia because of the same commonalities we shared with Canada.

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