AdvoCare's Guiding Principles By Founder Charles Ragus

Charlie Ragus, the founder of AdvoCare, promoted 10 guiding principles that are said to be the direction and foundation for Advocare, it’s distributors, and the success of both.

Those 10 principles are:

- Honor God through our faith, family and friends.

- Respect and strengthen the family.

- Believe in the dignity and the importance of the individual.

- Create a standard of excellence recognized by the direct sales industry as superior.

- Believe that honor, integrity and principles are the foundation of a great life and company.

- Commit to mutual loyalty and trust between AdvoCare and its Distributors.

- Establish and continually improve the vehicle of opportunity and the pursuit of financial freedom for all AdvoCare Distributors.

- Commit to ongoing personal growth and development through professional training and educational programs.

- Build self-esteem by promoting a sense of personal worth among all people.

- Continually expand our market by providing the most effective and highest-quality products and service available.

Lets take a look at a few of the above guiding principles:

Number one, “Honor God through our faith, family, and friends". The first question we need to answer is, which god? Since the “g” in “God” is capitalized we can safely assume that we are talking about a specific deity as all names are capitalized. Mr. Ragus was most likely not referring to the Jewish god as Jewish tradition dictates to avoid writing the name of God because doing so creates a chance that the name could be treated disrespectfully. For this reason, it is common in Jewish documents to see the name written “G-d.” Considering that the vast majority of Americans identify as Christians, and that most every other religion has a specific name for their deity/s, it’s probably a safe assumption to say that Mr. Ragus had in mind the Christian god.

What does it mean to “honor God through our faith”?

Without going into a long bible lesson, there are indeed a few major points that need to be made.

The closer we get to God the more intense our longing for Him will be, and should be. David wrote, “One thing I have asked of the Lord this is what I will seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.” God created us to serve Him and glorify Him forever. God offered His life completely to us (Jesus’ crucifixion). He offered His life totally, shouldn’t His followers do the same? The bible says to do just that.

To have a faith that honors and loves God means the surrender and refusal to allow worldly ambition to occupy first place in our hearts. The bible never said that life would be easy, in fact, it says that our life here on earth will be difficult. Jesus taught a lot of things, but never did he ever instruct His followers to desire wealth or it’s trappings. Jesus taught us to love our neighbors as ourselves and to be sacrificially generous to those in need.

Does this sound anything like what is so often seen in Advocare?

No.

If Advocare followed it’s number one principle it would never allow their distributors to cut family and friends out of their lives because they are deemed to be “negative influences”. Distributors would never use and abuse (via high pressure and outright deceptive tactics) another human being in order to gain a profit; especiallyclose friends and family members.

Advocare and it’s distributors, would never place profit, sales quotas, or pin levels above the health of personal relationships.

But Advocare does exactly that.

They encourage their distributors to remove they naysayers from their life. They teach distributors to avoid answering questions by employing the “Bullet Proof Shield”. They promote the fallacy that celebrity endorsers are not paid, even though their Policies and Procedures forbid it. Advocare makes claims of being “the best” nutrition even though their products are full of un-natural chemicals and has never published a large, long term, human clinical trial representative of their customer base supporting any of their product claims.

Sadly, Advocare also leads people to the false hope of money and fortune if you only “work hard enough” yet their Income Disclosure Statement proves that very few people are ever able to support themselves, let alone a family, by selling Advocare products.

An often quoted line uttered by Advocare distributors is, “I want to help people. I want to help people by showing them how to live a health life and eliminate the worries of money from their life.” If you were to actually honor God – as the bible dictates, and you really believe that Advocare helps people, you would gladly buy the products with your own money and give them away to those in need because thatis helping people.

Earning a profit is helping yourself.

What you wouldn’t do is look at everyone around you as a “prospect”, or potential down-line member for your benefit.

Of course, this now brings us to “Guiding Principle” number two, “Respect and strengthen the family.”

If you have turned your back on a single person because they didn’t follow your lead with Advocare, or worse; spoke out against it, then you have failed at not only honoring principle number two, but also number one!

You’ve also failed at number three, “Believe in the dignity and the importance of the individual.” If you cut someone out of your life, how can you believe in their importance? Where is the dignity?

The same goes for guiding principle number nine, “Build self-esteem by promoting a sense of personal worth among all people.” If you have turned your back on one single person, as Danny McDaniel so often asks you to do, you have to ask yourself this question, “How much worth does that person believe that they have in my life?”

Cutting people out of your life kills self-esteem.

If that person had any value in your life, you would have never pushed them away.

If a business can’t, or won’t, follow their own “Guiding Principles” – the very principles they claim to be their foundation and reasons for success – what kind of integrity does that display?

If you have any faith in God, if you at all believe in the teachings of Jesus, then you certainly know that if there is a god at the heart of Advocare, that it’s the god of money.

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