Being a Director After Seminar
Written by SuzyQ
Welcome home from Seminar!!! It was wonderful wasn’t it? The best one ever! AND you received the gift of hearing exactly what you needed to hear, exactly when you needed to hear it. If you had lots of consultants attend from your Unit, well, then… You go girl! Not so many? One maybe? Well, that’s okay. She caught what was taught, and off you go on the new Seminar year adventure!
The classes were awesome! Such great unit building ideas! Different ways of doing consistency clubs—recognizing sales—wow, you needed to hear that! And off you go! Been to the negative site, yet? Whew, glad that is out of your system, now you can set your course, and there will be NO negativity permitted this year. I am so glad you were able to buy motivational tools at the vendors, (not to mention the unit prizes)… saves the shipping charges! And they will turn it all around for you! This is truly your year! Top director trip, here you come! On to NSD! THIS year is your year!!!
Except. Just a little except… the production is down. Nobody orders in July, because you sucked them dry in June, and there’s nothing much to order in August and everybody is busy getting ready for back to school or last minute vacations. You did remember to tell your unit members to recruit and book and sell when they were at the family reunions, didn’t you? THE BACK TO SCHOOL SALES. There we go! You can run one of those sales and get some extra money and maybe even a class or two on the books because everybody wants a new look for a new school year. Except that your hostesses are not willing to book a class. It’s too hot, too humid, too something… and the plan you wrote down at Seminar is not working. All you need to do is Gold Medal, and your business changes. That’s all there is to it!
You have Gold Medaled before, in DIQ, remember? Everybody Gold Medals in DIQ! You were told, again, that you are the best consultant in your unit and you know that is true, and the speed of the leader is the speed of the gang, you can’t follow a parked car, so you are MACH THREE WITH YOUR HAIR ON FIRE! You are a booking machine and a recruiting magnet! You heard this again, over and over… it’s in your notes. PLUS… you are the one who recruits directors! You remember, directors recruit directors! Please, God, send them your way.
Has the guilt started yet? The fear that immobilizes you? Are you making new tracking sheets instead of making new contacts? Running out of names? Hostesses? Designing new contests for your consultants? Updating your social media with new pictures from Seminar? Changing your voicemail? Redoing your newsletter? Sending out different emails and text messages? You did send some messages from Dallas to your unit members who didn’t attend Seminar didn’t you? Is your NSD planning some new promotion to help you directors out? Did you have a “Power Up Day” to keep this seminar momentum going? Do you have one planned for the Holiday product intro?
It’s awfully hard to throw the ball or row the boat by yourself, isn’t it?
Have you noticed that your hotshots have cooled down, and you have a unit of dead reds, or personal use consultants? They obviously don’t get it. Your job is not to revive the dead, but to give birth! Except, there aren’t that many women out there who want what you can offer. Big change.
The internet leveled the playing field and women are as likely to find a “negative” site when they are checking this amazing opportunity out as they are to find a “pink” site. What to do with that? Easy, shoot the messengers! These disenfranchised women are just that… negative, lazy and unwilling to do what it takes to be successful. Sour grapes. Bad apples. Full of negativity. Examples of demonic possession.
Thank goodness you know how to deflect these objections! Get yourself on the unit’s website, and you’ll find scripts. Common objections and the responses are listed! Whew.
But. There is always a “but.” Have you noticed it is not as easy as it used to be? Your hostesses are not willing to be hostesses any more? Your models know what happens at meetings, and don’t want to be a model, or be in your portfolio, or have a computer generated make over guide they can print out and take home. The gift certificates are not redeemed, and all of time you spent promoting some contest or another is going to be a loss this year, too. You can’t offer as much “bang for your buck” as you used to, because that cuts too deeply into your profit margin. This leaves you with the young girls who are very enthusiastic until they talk to their moms.
So here you are. Post seminar, ready to go, loaded for bear and not only are the bears gone, you can’t even find the forest anymore. If you have been pursuing the dream of NSD for 5 or 10 years, and it’s not any closer, take a look at the numbers. I mean, really, take a look at the numbers.
Look at your own areas, and count the directors who come and go. Look at your own units and count the consultants who come and go. This is like Vegas, Baby, and the odds are not in your favor. Mary Kay Inc. always wins. The House always wins, and you have been gambling with your life.
Visit the
Examples of demonic possession.
Stops head spinning long enough to laugh at this absurdity.
“This is like Vegas, Baby, and the odds are not in your favor. Mary Kay Inc. always wins. The House always wins, and you have been gambling with your life.”
Well said! Interestingly, research for the FTC shows that casino roulette actually has BETTER odds than involvement in product-based MLMs like Mary Kay.
Yep, this was me after every Seminar as a director. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. Reality would hit and nothing changed. Nothing was different. I found the negative site right about the time I gave up my unit and director position, and I stepped away entirely barely three months later. I had had enough. Enough of the negativity and backstabbing from my senior director. Enough of the hamster wheel and trying to do things the right way. Enough of the thinking I was making money but in reality, the income was a pittance. I REALLY did take a look at the numbers. This MK “dream” was a nightmare.
Right there with you! I left with more pressure on me than arriving in Dallas. Pressure to Gold Medal, read a self-help book to fix myself, spawn off new Red Jackets every month, and happily hand out dozens of business cards to strangers everywhere I went.
And then it was time to promote Fall Retreat to the unit members that just got home from an expensive Seminar trip. And time to start talking Holiday Open House and all that hoopla.
Exhausted!
Those clichés and slogans—they’re relentless. SuzyQ has captured the onslaught perfectly. You don’t need to attend Seminar; you’ve just read everything you’re likely to hear.
Here’s the thing about so-called thought-stopping clichés: they’re intended to make you feel dumb for asking questions. You don’t even have to voice an objection before they shoot it down (they’ve heard them all before). Are you uneasy with that half-answer? Too bad, they’ve moved on to the next slogan, you’d best nod and clap like everyone else. They all get it, why don’t you?
Spoiler Alert: they do not all “get it.” Some have put their brains in neutral. Others are tamping down their own unease because they think they’re the only ones who feel that way.
The worst part of this fiasco is that it’s the victims who are paying for their own brainwashing. It’s just shameful.
“Others are tamping down their own unease because they think they’re the only ones who feel that way.”
And this right here is the real danger of “toxic positivity.” The majority of people feel this way. The majority are struggling. The majority DON’T hit production minimums in July (thank you, June push!). But no one is allowed to talk about it because you’re “just being negative.” This mentality isolates you and makes you feel like YOU’RE the crazy one when it’s really the system that’s broken.
You’re not crazy. The system is broken. RUN AWAY! And find peace.
“Here’s the thing about so-called thought-stopping clichés: they’re intended to make you feel dumb for asking questions.”
I’d just make one minor correction, Nay. Those thought stopping cliches are not so much intended to make you feel dumb, as much as guilty for lacking faith and guilty for actually trying to be smart. Either way, the point is to get you to shut up. 🙄
You’re right Kristin. “Intimidated” would have been a better word choice.
This week’s articles have been an absolute gold mine of snark, fun, and hopefully food for thought for any disillusioned consultant, director, or NSD who’s come home and started wondering, “is that really all there is?” Brava to our excellent team of authors!
All this fluff is to cover up you are the customer. Order more…..now is the real theme.
If a person was to get to NSD, it is about extracting and locating new customers, being the best at it consistently.
MK corporate sits back while these women do all the work,
What a great thing they have going, except their bathtub is now draining faster than they counted. NSDs’ leaving and replacements not as quick.
So how much do they product need to make now at the plant? Storage has got to be expensive.
Overhead is showing up in reduced starter kits reduced warehouses etc.
1992 had a heck of a starter kit, like a picnic.
Makes me think of poor ol’ Cleta, Krystal Walker Hunsucker, Cindy Mac, Krystal Downey Shada…..relentlessly striving for NSD but how many directors do they have? 5 at the most? It’s sort of like a train wreck you can’t look away from but it still makes me sad that they likely will not meet the NSD goal. It’s all so pointless..,
Heather Daniel Kent. Rachael Marlow Bullock. Rita Townsend. Taylor McKnight. Sherrie Purvis. None of them were million dollar directors either.
Cindy Machado is now only a Sr Director with 1-2 offspring. So many of these women have worked their tails off for DECADES and aren’t getting anywhere. The odds are way against any of them.
When you think of the thousands of women who have been lied to in the recruiting process under her watch, it’s hard to feel sorry for her, isn’t it?
28 years as a director where I worked hard for not much for about 19 and coasted for the last 9 before retiring. The clincher was Sean Key’s Ready Right Now program. Stop training and coaching people and just get them to recruit and move up the career path. That was the beginning of the end for me! I felt like a complete failure even though I had lots of bookings and was on a profit margin with my sales for years. I was never a pushy person, just someone who made people laugh and had fun and never talked them into buying more. In most other businesses you wouldn’t have to struggle to grow after 19 years but I was. This post decribed my unit to a T! I never bugged people for production even in June because I wanted them to sell and have a profit. They were content with where they were at and I was TIRED of the PUSH to grow so I stopped pushing and coasted until it was difficult to make production and then I retired. Just typing this gives me anxiety because at first I was so happy and relived to be reitred but now I feel like these emotions and thoughts are still there and causing me stress. This post was me after Seminar for so many years. What a waste of my life, waste of time.
I treated my unit the same way, and that’s why we both felt so much anxiety. The pressure to achieve was unbearable, especially after Seminar and Leadership. Although I wasn’t a Director as long as you were, I can only imagine how much more wasteful it felt to you.
The good news is—we’re out. We’re away from that toxic, comparison grind. No longer do we have to read another self-help book to fix ourselves (since we were told we were the problem), and no longer do we have to watch production to see who kept their word or what our commission check or title was going to be after the 1st.
Kudos to us!