Castle In The Sand - Building A Sales Empire
Michael Pollick
Staff writer-Sarasota Herald-Tribune

It was a slow night in 1983 at the expensive Longboat Key restaurant where Jeff Roberti worked as a waiter. Roberti, only three years out of high school, was sent home early.

Instead, he decided to attend a meeting in town by a multilevel marketing company with a hot new line of diet pills. "I got affected," said Roberti, as he lunched on grilled salmon recently in the Siesta Village, his red Ferrari parked nearby.

Roberti found he had a flair for the multilevel marketing, or MLM, approach to sales in which he could profit not only from selling products but also from convincing others to become involved.

Within three years of signing up with the first company, Herbalife International, Roberti says he was pulling down $10,000 a month as he feverishly followed the MLM "three foot rule": explain the product and the plan to anybody who gets within three feet of you.

But that's chicken feed compared with what Roberti has done since then, selling water and air filters and now a food supplement called Juice Plus at his second company, NSA Inc. of Memphis, Tenn.

Every month for the last eight years, the distributorships he built, receive checks from NSA averaging over $250,000.

The "downline" or network of distributors, he has created in the United States, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Taiwan and Hong Kong, etc. is worth millions of dollars.

Now, a few blocks south of Siesta Village on the beach, construction crews are completing Roberti's $2 million bachelor pad, which towers four stories above the sands and features a rooftop swimming pool and hot tub.

Elsewhere on the island, his business manager, former Touche Ross accountant Gordon Hester, works full time to keep track of the growing investment empire of Roberti International Inc. Hester estimates its value at $25 million to $30 million.

Roberti, 33, is known for paying cash for properties. He has snapped up two of the three homes directly north of his on Siesta Beach, and has made an offer on the third. He has between 35 to 40 tenants in 16 other properties, mostly on Siesta Key. He recently acquired the Siesta Key Fitness Center and is interested in buying more commercial property in the Siesta Village. Even so, real estate is only 20 percent of his globally diversified portfolio, according to Hester.

After 14 years of selling, Roberti is an undisputed multilevel Kingpin.

"His story is credible and believable," said Scott DeGarmo, publisher and editor- in-chief at Success Magazine, which has led business publications in covering MLMs. "It is astoundirtg in terms of growth."

Getting started
Roberti was 21 and attending classes at Manatee Community College as well as working as a waiter when he got the MLM bug. A hometown boy, he grew up in Glen Oaks Estates, attended Tuttle Elementary School, Sarasota Junior High School and graduated from Sarasota High School in 1980.

When he attended the meeting sponsored by Herbalife International of Los Angeles, he said, he already knew he wanted to get involved in sales.

For three years, he built up his own Herbalife sales network buying the company's nutritional supplements whole sale, selling them retail and persuading others to become a part of his network.

While he was making $10,000 a month, he says, "I saw guys who were making $100,000 a month."

Meanwhile, Herbalife received bad publicity when the Food and Drug Administration raised questions about products containing the herbs mandrakand pokeweed. The company thought the trace amounts of those herbs in some of its products presented no risk to consumers, but it agreed to reformulate its products to eliminate concerns.

Herbalife has since recovered and does hundreds of millions of dollars of sales each year. At the time, though, the news reports scared away potential clients, according to Roberti, and he decided to drop out.

In 1986, while Roberti was licking his Herbalife wounds, a friend got him to buy an NSA counter-top water filter using a sales technique Roberti calls the "puppy dog close."

You get somebody to take the puppy home for a week. At the end of that time, they've fallen in love with the puppy, so they keep it."

Momentum
NSA, short for National Safety Associates, had been around since 1970, sellling home fire protection equipment on a door to door basis.

The company added water filtration a products to its mix in the late '70s. It didn't turn to the multilevel marketing approach until 1986, a year and a few months before Roberti hopped aboard in early 1987.

As the company achieved momentum, so did Roberti.

"It was the timing," said a fellow Sarasota MLMer, Charles Looney, who is now working to build his own MLM kingdom at a newer nutrition supplement company called Starlight International.

"I got in in 1990," said Looney "I was in Jeffs downline, way down. I wasn't far enough up to make the money."

"The best formula for a company," said Looney, is "two years old, less than 50,000 distributors, and they're debt free."

Roberti acknowledges some good luck, but attributes most of his success to hard work.

"In the beginning I worked seven days a week, 16 to 18 hours a day," he said."I worked in the U.S. and Canada for three years at that pace. And then I went over to Europe and did the same thing for two, three years in Germany and Switzerland."

NSA was selling residential water filters when Roberti came on board as a distributor in 1987. After that it was air filters. While it still sells both, the company is now riding high on the anti-oxidant boom with its own nutritional product, Juice Plus.

NSA estimates that over half its active distributors are in the distributorship built by Roberti. NSA sales total have been in excess of 3 billion dollars worldwide.

Like Herbalife, NSA has had its bad years.

NSA had to settle with distributors in Florida in 1993 after the Attorney General's Office said it received complaints the company was "deceptively enticing individuals into making huge up- front product purchases when signing them up as distributors" for the company's water and air filters.

In Florida, each of about 32,000 distributors bought an average of $7,000 worth of water filters, and many of them were then unable to unload them, the Attorney General's Office said at the time.

NSA has since eliminated the possibility of dealers accumulating excessive inventory simply to boost their spot in the company's commission structure, according to marketing vice president John Blair.

In 1993, he said, "Our business was growing by leaps and bounds and we had 20,000 distributors a month coming into the business. It got overheated, and too many people bought inventory they couldn't sell."

Blair also said NSA was in the process of reorganizing its procedures when some of the over-extended dealers made complaints to attorneys general.

The MLM Lifestyle
A fancy lifestyle is considered appropriate for an MLM heavy hitter, and Roberti is no slouch when it comes to displaying wealth.

He showed up for an interview and photo session in a billowing red silk shirt and a $60,000 diamond-studded watch on his wrist.

When he goes for a drive, he has to decide whether to take the Ferrari or one of the Mercedes Benzes.

"Part of the lifestyle is... advertising yourself to future recruits,"said Scott DeGarmo, publisher and editor-in-chief of Success magazine.

The home he is building on Siesta Beach is a monument to lifestyle. There is only one bedroom - the entire fourth floor.

A commercial elevator can be programmed to deposit guests at the rooftop pool or the party floors of two and three. A balcony on floor three opens onto floor two, where the kitchen is located.

"The house is a statement to future recruits that they can follow in that path and achieve the same thing," he said.
Since NSA and his business manager keep track of the money, Roberti's primary job is being a motivational speaker. He doesn't need much space to do that.

His office, in fact, is one of the smaller rooms in the new house, 10 by 15 feet.

"The three F's are all I need," he joked. "Phone, Fedex and fax."

Roberti keeps himself in shape with more than Juice Plus, working out regularly with weights at the gym that he just bought.

One promotional piece featured Roberti holding a water filter and standing between the Ferrari and a red Mercedes roadster, with the beach and the Gulf in the background.

The point was, he said, that he paid for both cars with one month's paycheck.

Working
The phone schedule tells a lot.

At 10 p.m., when he is not on the road, Roberti is on the phone to Asia, where it is morning, to discuss what is going on with dealers there. In the afternoons, the calls switch to Europe, where the work day has ended. In the early evenings, the phone is alive with Canadians and Americans.

It's often like being on stage: at the other end the NSA distributors will have a speaker box and 500 people in the room.

Later thIs month, Roberti will leave on a six-week-long around-the-world business trip with stops in Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Israel, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

When Roberti is doing something else, like traveling, it is Foran who keeps the troops psyched on the long-distance conference calls.

Like virtually all modern MLM companies, NSA uses computers to keep track of the commissions due each distributor and their multileveled networks, sometimes called genealogies.

Roberti simply waits until NSA obtains governmental clearance to sell its products in a given country. Australia and New Zealand now loom within NSA's sights, and Japan will happen sometime later. Once the doors are open, Roberti sets up shop.

When NSA expanded into Germany, for example, Roberti spent half his time there, and made the round trip to Germany two dozen times in two years.

Why many consumers discount MLM companies as legitimate business opportunities, Roberti and NSA demonstrate the potential of this booming industry.