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Non-Tech : E4L, Inc. (NYSE: ETV) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Marty who wrote (955)	2/28/1999 2:42:00 PM
From: out_of_the_loop	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1080

Marty: While I respect your opinion and your right to post it, I do not think you understand marginal gains. Marginal gains are gains that require little or no expended energy or costs, but return profit. Since you brought up my profession, I will give you and example using it and I hope you will see how it applies to E4L. Let's say I pay someone $15 dollars an hour to stain slides. Let's say I charge the people who submit them to me $5 per slide read. If the person employed by me stains no slides, I lose $15 per hour. For me to break even, he/she must stain at least 3 slides per hour so my labor cost equals my billing cost (let's forget reagents, supplies, and administrative costs for this illustration). If more than 3 slides are stained, I make a profit. Each new slide stains gives me a marginal return of $5. Let's say I discover that person who stains my slides can stain 500 slides in an hour but I only have 400 slides sent to me. above the profit I make on 400-3=397 slides, I can now have that employee do something else so I make additional profit on his/her time. For example, I will have him/her file reports that take 45 minutes a day to file, but I used to pay someone for 8 hours. That employee was going to be there the whole day anyway, and I have gotten extra utility or profit by having them file reports instead of paying someone else to do that. My friend across the city could pay the employee for the other time, but the employee would then lose benefits by not having a full-time job and would then quit so it is to my advantage to use that employee's time better. I am leveraging that employee's time to more efficient and profitable use for my business. That is what E4L is doing. Keep in mind that you are suggesting they sell the time rather than try to sell their 6 million customers and potential customers the services of a popular website. They think the latter is worth a try since it is based on their ability to sell (marketing). Keep in mind that, after one-time charges, they are turning this company around. Wall Street will recognize it sooner or later by the good old bottom line. * E4L buys time for infomercials they produce. That is their business. They do not sell time they buy to others. If they only wanted 27 minutes of each 1/2 hour they bought, they would let the stations they buy time from sell their own time. They are not in business to sell commercial time. They do not employ people to do that and doing so would incur additional costs in areas that are not their forte. Using the above example and applying it to E4L, for each informercial aired, there will be a certain average number of callers who buy and a certain number of callers who ask questions. Once the callers' purchases exceed the cost of production and air time, E4L makes a profit. Any purchases above that are their profit. If they find they can sell as many doodads in 27 minutes as they could in 30 minutes, then they can do something else for additional marginal benefit. Based on NM/E4l's 2 million customer sales and 3-4 million nonsale calls, their new E4L business model has them trying to sell memberships into an already successful platform business called netmarket. Through a contractual agreement, people who enter netmarket by going through E4L will get E4l profit. There are 2 ways for E4L to get money through this. One is through membership fees. E4L gets 1/2 of all Netmarket memberships purchased through E4L. THE SECOND IS ONE NOT PREVIOUSLY DISCUSSED HERE BUT MENTIONED AT THE STOCKHOLDER's MEETING. Sorry for shouting here but this is a new point and addresses concerns about peole who may not join as members. If people enter netmarket from E4L but do so as nonmembers, E4L gets a cut of their purchases. * I cannot disagree that the stock has not performed well lately but that does not mean that a business plan that has been in place for a few weeks, and put in by a group of investors/directors who have managed the company for less than 120 days is doomed to failure. If there was no such thing as a bargain investment, many stocks would have long since died because of poor performance. Look at the recoveries of Cendant, Ciena, IBM and many, many others. There are business cycles that companies have. That is the basis for value investing and the Dow Dividend strategy, but the point here is that E4L has been taken over by people who are changing the sources for their products, resulting in cheaper production costs. They have cut millions of dollars off their budget and the savings will be seen in quarters to come. They have already shown that they can get people to join E4L. Whether they can keep those members is truly their charge and will test their marketing skills. Marketing is their business, though, and the people in control here are very successful. I can go on and on, but the process and business plan is so well explained in the www.vcall.com conference call that I urge everyone who considers buying this stock or selling it short to listen (http://www.vcall.com/static/startframeset.asp?companyid=170). You will have to register, but you do not have to give any personal information. It takes less time than trading these posts. Best of luck, Howard