Beth Dornan, an emloyee of Quixtar offers the first public Amway – Quixtar corporate explanation (to my knowledge) of the tools business:

You may not know this, but Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel created the first business support materials (BSM).

 

When Amway’s co-founders started the company, they personally sponsored and trained many then-distributors. They held meetings, they gave speeches, they did product demos and they taught others to do the same.

 

Soon, they couldn’t be everywhere they wanted to be. So
they got a mimeograph machine and started doing print communications
that were mailed to distributors to help spread information and share
ideas. Jay Van Andel’s old typewriter used to be in the old company Visitor Center.

Those
of you old enough to remember when schools had mimeographs rather than
copiers can probably practically smell the ink and see the blue smudges
on your fingers.

 

But as the business grew and “company business” demanded more of their time and energy, Rich and Jay simply couldn’t do it all. Distributors who had established themselves as leaders began holding meetings and creating communications. So there was a stream of information coming both from the company and from distributor leaders. You’ll
note that I’m going to use the term "distributor" in a historical
sense, since the term Independent Business Owner (or IBO) didn’t exist
until just before Quixtar’s launch in 1999.

 

While
many leaders began to charge to cover costs, some realized that they
could be compensated for sharing their business-building ideas and
insights – not unlike other motivational and business consultants.

 

Which led to a couple of widely reported and speculated upon communications from the company in the early 1980s.

 

The
reality is that Amway Corp. did become concerned when books, tapes, and
meetings became significant businesses for some distributor leaders…

Continue reading and check out the comments as well.