Another Month of Remarkable Growth

November represented another strong month for our private company tracking set. Of 50 survey respondents, 32 (64%) grew revenue as compared to October. This now represents 8 of the last nine months during which the majority of our tracking set has grown revenue sequentially, month-over-month. Further, 16 (32%) respondents grew revenue by 10% or more as compared to the prior month. As a reminder, our survey includes private, primarily domestic, direct selling companies with revenue of at least $5 million monthly.

The compounding effect that is occurring with many of these companies growing month, after month, after month, despite an ever-increasing baseline, is exceptionally unique. Yes, it often happens in isolated cases with companies in a hyper-growth phase, however, to witness it happening across the industry feels unprecedented. These results are particularly impressive when considering the typical holiday slowdown that generally impacts the last weeks of both November and December. As we all know, this year has been anything other than typical.

With a likely record-setting 2020 coming to an end the question becomes: what’s next? Are these results an intermediate-term pop, or does this represent a longer-term shift in worker and consumer behavior? We believe it’s both. Newton’s law tells us that the growth the industry is currently experiencing can’t go on, unabated, forever. What goes up must come down, or at least level off at some point. However, as we sit here today, the market dynamics that have driven the last nine months of results remain unchanged. We do not believe there will be a line in the sand moment where circumstances will all of sudden return to a pre-COVID environment. Instead, we believe there will be a slow, gradual shift back towards what we used to know as normal with the needle never moving all the way back to where it was. The fact of the matter is that, by the time COVID has been eradicated, we will have been living and working in a pandemic environment for more than a year. This is not, and will not be, just a blip on the radar. People will not forget. This period will have a long-term psychological impact on the world-wide population, which will result in long-lasting changes in the way work, eat, shop, recreate and live, in general.

As a result, we believe that at least the first half of 2021 will continue the current trend of strong growth across the majority of the industry. Short-term, we believe December will produce strong relative results to past periods, but project a holiday associated slowing towards the end of the month and into early January. We would expect December’s results to lag November, however, in this year of firsts, we wouldn’t be surprised to see additional growth over the course of the month. We continue to project domestic revenue growth of approximately 7%, resulting in record domestic direct selling revenue.

Stay well,

Stuart Johnson
CEO & Owner | SUCCESS Partners