Over the last couple of weeks, two good friends have told me that their husbands have been made redundant.  In the road where I live, two of my near neighbours have been out of work for over a year.  Redundancy is nothing new.  I experienced my first redundancy in 1975 and then in my career in HR spent many years dealing with redundancies.  Some people experience it as a relief, some as an opportunity to change track, may be do what they have always dreamed of doing, increasingly few leave with very good early retirement pensions.  But for most of us, redundancy poses a real threat to our income and lifestyle, and job security or the idea of a career for life is long gone.

So what does any of that sad news have to do with Melaleuca?  Well, when I started out with Melaleuca 7 years ago, I wasn’t actually looking for either safe environmentally friendly products or for an additional income stream.  I was one of those who finally left my corporate career with one of those gold-plated index linked early retirement pensions, and went on to build a thriving executive coaching business.  But the down side was that I was still working very long hours, often away from home.

I was curious about the idea of “safe” products and wondered whether they would really do the job.  And my thinking was that IF (a big if) they did work, then there had to be a business here, because “green” was becoming a big issue, the big supermarkets were not everyone’s friend, people were increasingly suspicious of their power and also because people were beginning to think about their future – how to pay off the mortgage if they had been miss-sold endowments, how to pay for the kids; education, how to get the kids on to the property ladder, and of course, how to boost their pensions.