The American Communication Network, or ACN, was founded in 1993 in Concord, North Carolina. It was started by a bunch of guys who had ‘countless years of direct sales experience’. Based on their own dissatisfaction with other MLMs, (possibly caused by trying and failing), they decided to start one themselves.

ACN now has a global network of Independent Business Owners (IBOs), who promote their services through their network marketing system. They are now the largest direct seller of telecommunications in the world. We’re not sure who is the 2nd largest or if there are any others using MLM to sell these services.

Here at The Finance Guy, we believe that you can't make money with network marketing, but let’s see how they go. In this full review of ACN, we’ll find out if you can make money, or if this just another network marketing scheme.

What Does ACN Do

ACN services include phone, internet, gas, power, tv, security, and more. ACN doesn’t limit their services to residential, they also supply their services to businesses. To us, it looks like ACN offers most of your monthly home and business services.

These are services which are used in almost every home in the modern world. There’s no doubt that there’s a huge market for these services, the only question is, can ACN capture a significant market share.

What is the ACN Opportunity

To find out more about the ACN opportunity, we watched a short video, which has since been taken offline, so we’ll just share what we learned when it was available.

The video explained that this is your opportunity to earn an income from the essential services that everyone uses. It’s a ready made online business. There’s a global market of almost $2 Trillion, this is your chance to be a part of it.

We all use at least one of the ACN services, so if you join, and find just 5 friends to also join, you might get these services for free!

The ACN opportunity doesn’t end at free services, you can also earn residual income with ‘your own online ACN business’. Every time one of your referrals pays a bill, you’ll get a commission. It doesn’t end there though, you can also earn from their referrals. This is what MLMs call a ‘downline’.

The video ends with some information about the charitable work done by ACN in feeding hungry children. While this is a worthy cause, we still want to know more about how this opportunity works.

We decided to look through the official ACN opportunity page. Along with the above video, they also give us some information. We found out that ACN gives us a chance to be part of ‘the you economy’. It then repeats what we heard in the video. If you refer people, you get paid every time they pay a bill. If they refer their friends, you get even more.

The opportunity page then tells us that if we join ACN, we will have the support of our upline. Even though we are building our own downline, we don’t have to do it alone. This is a purported benefit of joining any MLM. We still need to understand how ACN is going to make us wealthy.

How do You Make Money with ACN

To find out the answer to this question, we looked at the 2019 ACN compensation plan. This document explains all the ways to earn commission as an ACN IBO, as well as what you need to do to earn it.

The first thing they tell us, is that ‘your goal should be to work through the earned positions’. To help us understand how to do this, they provided this diagram: