Customer Reviews

The Excel Phenomenon (audiocassettes): The Astonishing Success Story of the Fastest-Growing Communications Company-- and What It Means to You

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I picked this book up (for free), hoping it was a regular business book. The kind that describes the pluses and minuses of the business. Instead, its almost entirely a marketing tract for Excel. Nowhere are some of the hard questions asked

-- How competitive are Excel's telco products compared to other Long Distance companies ?

-- How many reps earn more than $30,000 a year from Excel ?

-- What % of reps drop out ? What % of people reach the higher levels shown in the book and how much money do they make ?

-- How much time does this entire activity take for a rep ?

-- What % of Excel's revenues come from Long distance service, and what % from rep fees ?

By covering only the successes and none of the failures, the book gives a distorted version of the truth.

This book seems like a clever way to get around the FTC's regulations about network marketing (which requires more disclosure) by having a supposedly independent book.

I can only conclude that anyone who's given the book 5 stars is themselves an Excel rep in some fashion, because theres no other logical reason for praising this book. Don't even read it, let alone buy it.

The Excel Phenomenon is a very well written history of Excel, It's founder - Kenny Troutt, and mostly - the Excel opportunity. It is probably slanted at being a recruiting tool for Excel reps. Which is actually a brilliant idea but, it takes away from the book also when readers finally realize that they are being recruited.

Robinson does a fine job of profiling Troutt, and many successful reps. Excel appears to be a tremendous financial opportunity that Robinson clearly articulates.

I would reccomend that everyone reading this review to diversify your income, through Excel or through another source (actually several). When you have a few small streams of income coming in from various sources the final result is financial security. You'll never be trapped if one of the streams of income stops.

This book is the tip of the iceberg, for several of Excel's reps, Kenny Troutt, and possibly you.

If you're thinking about joining Excel, give it a read. It's a well written eye opener.

Many of the reviews seemed to consider more the network marketing aka MLM in general than the book itself. I think that the Excel Communications was a very well timed and well implemented business idea that worked.

Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about this book. Especially the first half of the book is painful rhetoric about the glory of Excel Communications. Somehow I had a feeling that the author was a professional writer, maybe a journalist. I could not believe that any journalist would write as one-sighted text as this book, and I checked the background of the author: a veteran speech-writer and political communicator. Well, that explained a lot.

The book repeats over and over the same positive claims of working for Excel: Be your own boss, be with your family, and with the hypocrisy of a Miss World candidate the story that although I make a lot of money, the most important for me is that I can help the others to succeed as well.

When you open the book on an arbitrary page, you get the feeling that the book includes facts as there are so many numbers and dollar signs. By reading the text, the reader notices that 95% of the facts are irrelevant like how much the person earned before joining Excel or how much one can gain by saving 20 years with 8% interest rate. The latter fact got 3 pages in 225-page book. The other facts were mainly related to the environment or society, not to Excel. The book had also some relevant facts like how many percentage of the Excel representatives succeed or fail, but those facts have to be dug out from a lot of noise around them, and in those cases the facts are not statistical from the Excel book-keeping but individual opinions.

What I was missing are the facts:
How much of the Excel income come from the telecom services and how much of it comes from training and other MLM supporting services.
How many customers Excel has compared to the representatives.
How Excel is sharing the customer revenue between the person who sold the service, the person who recruited that sales person and Excel.
How a typical representative income stream is composed, how much comes from getting customers, how much customer calls, how much recruiting others, how much from recruited persons recruiting new ones, and how much of training and managerial tasks.

There's a great business story about a young man who grows up on the wrong side of the tracks, begs, borrows and steals his way through college and several failed business ventures, yet goes on to found one of the largest telecommunications firms in the world and take his place among the billionaires on the FORBES 400. If you're interested in reading about that story...THIS ISN'T THE BOOK FOR YOU. This is a 200 page brochure for the Excel Business Opportunity without the color glossy pictures. If you're interested in learning how you can join the American Dream, start your own business, work from home and live the lifestyle of the rich and famous by selling long distance service to your friends and neighbors, buy the book. Or save yourself the $20 bucks and attend their next pep rally coming soon to your hometown

This book is a logical, in-depth review of the company, the marketing plan and several reps. Read between the lines and you will see yourself... someone who wants more out of life.... not necessarily money, maybe time freedom. Understanding how simple the EXCEL strategy is will be the hard part for most people. It is simply a team of people who have decided to work together rather than struggle in isolation. EXCEL may or may not be for you.... but if it isn't, what will you do to hedge your life against insurmountable odds that you will be downsized, right-sized or simply capsized by "Corporate America". Buy the book, invest some time and you could reap the rewards hidden between the covers.

As a brand new Excel rep in Canada, this book sums up a common sense opportunity about basic services that everybody uses and can profit by. This book really sums up the tip of the iceberg phenomenon which will sweep the globe thanks to Teleglobe. Now people say "This makes sense" and especially dealing with "conservative Canadians" like myself, what a refresher from what I've seen in the past. You haven't seen nothing yet!

James gives a good background of the company and how this can benefit you. He talked about the past, the present, and the future. He also wrote alot of other books about MLM & other subjects. With any opp you should fine more than one source like the BBB & the DSA. Fine a company that you believe in, because no matter what you do in life there will be people that won't like what you do.

Excel has a very high amount of drop outs because of the very high annual renewal rate.

There are other telecom opportunities that offer much more then Excel does. Excel gets a lot of press but the high renewal fees are rarely discussed. Past unethical practices are what keep people away from Amway. Something Excel should have learned from.

This is a good book for anyone interested in learning more
about NM and how Excel has grown into a global communications
company. For those that say the company "keeps your investment",
you get your "investment" back if you actually work. The problem
is most folks that join a NM company, they expect to get paid
for doing nothing. This is a business! And it's yours...you
reap the rewards for what you put into it. And for those that
say Excel products are over priced,etc, not true. They are
competitively priced with the larger carriers. Check it out
yourself. Yes, you can find bargains, but that's true with
anything you buy/use. The one review that mentioned market
saturation? Excel is a 2Billion company on what? A 2% share
of the 100B long distance industry. And now there's local! Anyone that bashes this book obviously
has failed at NM (maybe with Excel), but I bet they never put
forth any effort to really build a business.

The Excel Phenomenon certainly has had its detractors. Doubtless, there are handfuls of people out there in Bookland who have been through the rigours of "Excel U" but not fared nearly as well with the product and the "system" as some of the prominent personalities featured in this book, proud of them as we are. Lookit, I'm slightly skeptical about this read, ok? The author makes a clearcut attempt to distance himself from CEO Kenny Troutt and the people at the top of the Excel Communications foodchain, yet (and for this, folks, you'll have to give it a solid concerted read) he waxes majorly poetic on the merits of the company, how it functions, the nitties-gritties 'n all, and this book appeared to me to basically be a primer on all things Excel-like. A posterior-smoocher.

I'm not saying that I minded it. I'm also not saying that it's unacceptable. It's just that if an author's going to state his bona fides, and then masquerade his copy as shilling for the principals of the company he writes about, I'd have to say that mightily stretches the bounds of belief just a wee too much for this reviewer's taste. Just be forthcoming. If you're going to boink me, then boink me properly is where I'm going with this.

Okay, so enough about the demerits of this book. On the positive side of the ledger, I enjoyed the "slice of life" portraits of the people whose lives were changed by Excel. It's heartwarming to read about real people going through real economic day-to-day crow. This isn't a rags to riches sort of thing. Some of the people described within these pages toiled at Excel for a long time and didn't necessarily see a profit return for, like, well...ages! It took them YEARS to build up a steady business and clientele, and in the meantime, like the rest of the working-stiff population, they had to take on menial jobs to make ends meet. Many of these profiles described were two-child families, with spouses who **both** worked. To read about how they ultimately managed to triumph and make it boldly back to the black is quite a remarkable achievement.

Will this encourage other people to emulate their successes? Hard to say. I recommend--at the very least--reading this book in order to, at first, glean some of the feel-good cream which will get you thinking differently about your lifestyle. I'd reckon to say that many of the people who get through Robinson's book will be jazzed up enough to want to go out and make a mega-change in their lives, and what's more, the bulk of the people who are reading this are typically in a "I wanna change my life mode." (Sure, there are people just reading it for reading its own sake...though not too many of those, I doubt). I hazard to recommend any one given book at the "silver bullet" solution as a source of motivation for readers. THE EXCEL PHENOMENON is precisely the same. Don't look to it as a "Bible" of sorts to glean all possible inspirations for the direction you think your life should be going. DO, however, look to it as that, perhaps, **final** book you're going to read that will propel you once and for all on that path through life which will ensure that you've got a steady stream of income which will prevent the need to have to alternately scrounge around for it constantly in dead-end jobs, working for "da Man," or possibly even getting stuck in an earn-spend lifer trap that nets you little in the way of positive net worth.

Robinson, through the device of Kenny Troutt and his cronies' Excel, shows you at the very least that a way certainly **does** exist in order to remove yourself from this dead-end matrix of taking out of your pocket what you toil and labour hours to earn.

The book's written in a no-nonsense style, easy to read, and I found myself liberally jumping between sections as a way to spice up the read. That's my indicator of a good piece of non-fiction, I'll have you know.

What the author is basically positing here, I believe, is that business phenomena like the "Excel phenomenon" are going to become increasingly more important in the early 21st-century. With the explosion of telecommunications products, and as more and more data gets pumped down that line, like TV and other wireless services, there will be many more people getting rich off of these products.

I didn't award this book the top ranking, only because I think that the author wasn't entirely forthcoming about his connection to the relevant Excel brass. It's hard to believe with something this seemingly rah-rah that there wasn't some kind of clever artifice and assorted payola in the mix here. Sorry, but just my $0.02.

Otherwise, it was a rather spirited read.

--ADM in Prague