Pros
Your meetings commence towards the end of the day. Your evenings are ALWAYS busy with meetings. Downtime is in the morning when you should generally get your admin done. You will spend alot of time on the phone sorting out SNAFU's with head office in the morning. If this is your idea of a lifestyle with "flexibility" (that's how they sell this job to housewives) then good! At least in a corporation your day ends... the average rep makes around $24000 per YEAR. Check out payscale.
Cons
It is not a great time to be new in this business, and particularly not with Sun Life. Propeller heads at head office have figured out how to transfer much of their business risk to the new recruit, and most reps don't truly understand the liabilities they are taking on. Recruitment practices SHOULD be monitored at branch offices, true, as another poster said. Here is one of their onerous practices that most new recruits don't get and which could cost them thousands of $'s. HERE IS A REAL LIFE EXAMPLE OF ONE OF SUN'S PRACTICES: when a rep leaves, they leave their clients behind. All the good clients are snapped up by managers and experienced reps. The remainder go in a pool and one of the manager's jobs is to offload these garbage clients to new reps. I say garbage because everyone in my millieu at Sun who took these ended up paying back SUN LIFE the commissions that a previous rep earned ... costing them thousands more than the miniscule monthly cash flow stream they generated. Would you assume a potential debt of $THOUSANDS of dollars to assume a shaky income stream of $4 or $5 per month? They DO NOT MAKE THIS CLEAR TO YOU. They tell you they are gifting you an opportunity to cross sell the client with other products. Most of these clients are pissed off as they've been assigned to TOO many different advisors in a short period of time... and all these advisors want to do is sell them new policies.
