Sweet grumpy Persian face ! <| sep |> No . A referral or finder ' s fee , like I said . It ' s a fairly standard practice in many industries . In car sales , for example , they used to call it bird dogging when someone would refer a potential customer to them and , if a sale was made , they would pay the person who made the referral a fee for making the referral . An MLM , as the image shows , is generally considered a pyramid scheme whose sole purpose is to sign people up to multiple levels hence its name with each level feeding money to the level above it . The person referred to you , in my example , is not being paid anything and is not being offered to join anything and is not required to buy into anything other than to pay for the dog walking service if they ' re interested in it . I ' m really not sure how you would consider what I suggested to be an MLM .