Part of the guide: Affiliate Marketing
People still ask me what happened to Empower Network, usually in a lowered voice, like they’re not sure they’re allowed to. I’ll answer it straight, because I’m the one who built it. I co-founded Empower Network in 2011, watched it go from nothing to one of the loudest companies in this industry, and then watched it close its doors in 2017. This is the honest version of the rise and the fall, and the one lesson that cost me everything to learn and now sits at the center of everything I build.
Reviewed and updated June 2026.
If you found this post through an old link that promised you five reasons to join, I owe you the truth instead. There is nothing to join. Empower Network is gone. So let me give you something worth more than a pitch: what actually killed it, and what you can take from the wreckage so it never happens to you.
In this guide
Where it started, before the money
Before Empower Network, I was living in a van. Not as a metaphor. An actual van, in Hawaii, broke, with a wife who had every reason to leave and didn’t. I had spent years failing at this business. I had read the books, bought the courses, worked the warm market until there was no warm market left. And I was still parked on a side street wondering when the next dollar was coming.
So when David Sharpe and I started Empower Network in 2011, it came from a real place. We had both been the person who works hard and watches the results refuse to match the effort. We knew that feeling in the body. We built the thing we wished someone had handed us when we were stuck: a blogging platform that was already set up, already optimized, with training loaded in, so a beginner could create content and get paid instead of spending six months wrestling with WordPress plugins.
And the hook, the thing that made the whole industry turn its head, was 100% commissions. You sold a product, you kept the whole sale. No company skim. At the time that was close to heresy. It worked. It worked faster and louder than anything I had ever touched.
The rise was real, and so was the noise
For a stretch there, Empower Network was a phenomenon. We filled ballrooms. Our Live the Dream events in places like Orlando and Atlanta drew thousands of people who had driven across the country on credit cards because they finally believed it could happen for them. The culture was deliberately wild. “Don’t be a wussy.” All in. It pulled people who were tired of being polite about wanting more.
And here is the part I won’t sand down, because the avatar this post is written for can smell a sanitized story from across the room. A lot of that energy was me. I was on stage, on fire, and privately falling apart. Over those years I leaned on alcohol, on Concerta I’d been prescribed for ADD and kept taking for three years, on testosterone. The man selling freedom from the front of the room was not free. I’ve said this publicly before and I’ll say it here, because the personal collapse and the company collapse were not separate events. They were the same story told in two ledgers.
What actually happened to Empower Network
Here is the mechanical answer, the one most retrospectives skip because it isn’t dramatic enough. Empower Network did not die because the products were bad or because people stopped wanting it. It died because of math.
From 2011 to 2013, bad accounting quietly broke the engine. We were paying out more than 100% in commissions. Read that again. We were sending out more money than was coming in, and nobody on the inside caught it in time. When our CEO at the time, Jonathan Cronstedt, surfaced the problem in 2014, the hole was already enormous. On top of that, roughly $1.4 million was wired off to Vietnam and never came back. The company that had been doing around $7 million in sales fell to roughly $300,000, and we still owed money back to our own members.
By August 2017 it was over. We filed for bankruptcy and closed. You can read the outside account of the bankruptcy here if you want the version told by people who didn’t sign the paperwork. I lived the version where you have to tell tens of thousands of people who trusted you that the thing they believed in is gone.
The five lessons I’d actually stand behind now
The old version of this post promised five reasons to join. Fine. Here are five reasons, the honest kind. Five things Empower Network taught me, paid for in full.
1. “100% commission” is a marketing line, not a guarantee. We genuinely paid 100%. The problem was never the percentage. It was that the company sat between you and your money, ran the books in a back office you couldn’t see, and could get the math catastrophically wrong without you ever knowing until the checks stopped. A commission you can’t verify is a promise, not a payment. Most people in this industry have never once been handed the difference.
2. The dashboard is not the truth. Our members watched healthy-looking numbers tick up on a screen while the actual finances were hemorrhaging. The screen said one thing. The bank said another. If the only proof you have that you’re getting paid is a graphic the company controls, you don’t have proof. You have faith dressed up as data.
3. Incentives that reward recruiting over real customers always drift. Like nearly every program built this way, our own income disclosures showed what these always show: the large majority of affiliates earned little or nothing. That isn’t a moral failure of the people. It’s physics. When a plan pays more for enrolling than for selling to a real customer who just wants the product, it tilts toward enrolling, every single time, no matter how good anyone’s intentions are.
4. Your income cannot outrun your identity. I built a company about freedom while quietly losing my own. The income was downstream of the man, and the man was running on substances and adrenaline. If the business requires a version of you that’s falling apart to sustain it, the business is going to take the fall with you. That’s not a poster. That’s a thing I watched happen to my own life.
5. Control of the money is the only thing that was ever really for sale. Everything that sank Empower Network came back to one fact. We controlled the money. The accounting, the payouts, the wires, the ledger. When the people in the middle control the ledger, every other promise is only as good as their competence and their honesty on their worst day. That is the lesson. That is the whole lesson.
I learned the hard way that a commission you can’t verify is just a promise. So the thing I run now pays 100% on a public smart contract you can read yourself, settled in the same block as the sale, in about twelve seconds, before you trust a word I say. Drop your name and I’ll send you the walkthrough.
Show me a comp plan I can actually read →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
What I’d build now, and did
For a long time after the bankruptcy I didn’t want to touch any of this. Then I realized the lesson wasn’t “the model is evil.” The lesson was narrower and more useful than that. The model failed because trust was placed in the wrong spot. Everyone had to trust the company in the middle. Take the company out of the middle of the money, and the single thing that killed Empower Network can’t happen again.
That’s the whole reason what I run now settles commissions on a public smart contract instead of in a back office. Same 100% commission idea I loved about Empower Network. None of the part that destroyed it. There is no dashboard you have to believe in, because the contract is the dashboard, and anyone can pull it up on a block explorer and watch the money move. No one can quietly pay out more than comes in. No one can wire $1.4 million anywhere. The math is public, and it’s enforced by code instead of by my promise that I’ve got it handled.
Notice how different that feels in the body. The builder who can hand a skeptic their phone and say “go read the contract yourself” carries himself differently than the one praying the upline doesn’t change the rules next quarter. One is calm. The other is braced for the email that says the plan moved. I have been both. I would not go back to being the second one for any amount of money.
If you want to see how the rest of it fits together, I keep the systems and tools I actually recommend in one place, and if you’re new here, start here and I’ll walk you in from the beginning.
So, what happened to Empower Network
It rose because it answered a real hunger and it paid people honestly while it could. It fell because the people in the middle controlled the money and the books broke before anyone caught it. I’m not bitter about it. I’m specific about it, which is more useful. Tens of thousands of people learned something real inside that company, and some of them are still building today. I’m one of them.
If you came here looking for a door into Empower Network, the door is closed, and I’m glad you didn’t waste a dollar finding out the hard way. What’s worth your attention now isn’t a company. It’s a question. Who controls the money, and can you check it yourself? Get that one right and most of the ways this industry breaks your heart simply can’t happen to you.
I already built the company where you had to trust me with the money. I’m never doing that to people again. This is how I generate leads, make sales, and build a team, with every commission settled on a public contract you can verify before you trust me. Enter your name and I’ll send you the walkthrough.
Show me the system I run now →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Founder’s retrospective and opinion, not legal or financial advice. Empower Network ceased operations in 2017. As with any opportunity, most participants earn little to nothing and no income is guaranteed. Facts are accurate to the best of my recollection and public record as of June 2026. Outside reporting: BehindMLM on the Empower Network bankruptcy.
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I spent years in field development at a company built along similar lines, so I recognise this pattern from the inside, even though I can’t speak to what happened internally at this specific company. The dashboard-versus-bank-account gap he describes isn’t unique to any one brand, it’s what happens anywhere the compensation math isn’t reconciled against actual cash daily instead of monthly or quarterly, and where the people running the field side aren’t the same people with visibility into the ledger. The lag between ‘the numbers look fine’ and ‘the numbers were never fine’ is usually measured in months, and by the time field leaders notice something is wrong, the hole underneath them is already too deep to quietly close.
Renata’s observation about the lag between the numbers looking fine and the numbers being fine matches what I watched happen to my own pension fund, from the other side of the desk entirely. Nobody malicious, mostly, just nobody whose job it was to ask the uncomfortable question in time. I am sixty-one and starting again, and the lesson I take from this account is less about the specific company and more about how rarely ordinary people are given the tools to check the math themselves before they commit years to something.
The retrospective is honest about the accounting failure, which is more than most founders manage. What it doesn’t really address is the culture that got built around ‘all in’ and being loud on stage. That part isn’t a math problem, and no amount of transparent bookkeeping fixes an environment that pressures people to project certainty they don’t actually have.
Anneke, agreed on the culture point. I don’t have the energy for ‘all in’ anything, working nights and building something on the side leaves no room for stage energy or ballrooms. The honest lesson buried in here, that a business shouldn’t need a version of you that’s falling apart, is the one part that actually applies to how I’m doing this.
I think what’s being missed in some of the reaction to a post like this is the difference between explaining a failure and excusing it. He’s not asking anyone to feel sorry for him, he’s naming the mechanism plainly: money controlled by people you can’t independently verify is always a promise, not a fact. That’s true whether the company is a household name or a garage startup. The part I’d push back on is treating that lesson as new. Anyone who has run a business with partners has learned some version of it the hard way.
The mechanical explanation is the only part of this worth trusting, and to his credit he gives one. A commission structure that pays out more than it takes in isn’t a moral failure, it’s an arithmetic one, and arithmetic failures compound predictably. What I’d want to know that isn’t in the post: was there no reconciliation process at all for those first years, or was there one that simply wasn’t being read by anyone with authority to act on it?
Raj, that’s the right question to ask and I don’t think this post answers it either. Somebody was supposed to be watching that reconciliation and either wasn’t, or was ignored.
Who was actually responsible for catching that the payout math didn’t balance, and for how long?
Twenty-two years in corporate and I never once saw a finance department let a payout imbalance run for two years before someone senior asked the obvious question. That’s not a network marketing problem specifically, it’s what happens in any organisation without proper financial controls and a board asking hard questions on a schedule, regardless of what the org chart looks like above the person actually doing the selling.