MK Dreams Will Not Come True
I can’t help but feel sorry for this Mary Kay consultant. She is somewhere below Red Jacket level, but appears to really believe she’s going to be a national sales director in 5 years. She’s decided that she will have commission checks of $7,500 a month starting six months from now.
Almost no one has been able to do this, no matter how hard they try or how closely they follow all the advice given to them. (There are sales directors who have literally been trying for DECADES to get to NSD without success.)
The handful of women who have done it (out of the millions who have filtered through Mary Kay over the decades) have typically had some sort of advantage or serious luck that allowed it to materialize. But 99.99% of women will never make something like this happen. I was in Mary Kay 20 years ago. At that time I had a sales director and a senior sales director who were both on the 5 year plan to become NSD. Neither of them made it. One of them dropped out a few years ago, and the other is still spinning her wheels as a senior director (never making it to Cadillac or Super Special Almost NSD Director). And they worked hard!
All of our former directors on Pink Truth… I know your heart aches for a woman like this who really believes this is going to happen to her.
Leap of faith…when you think of that phrase, what scares you about your life? What’s your BIG DREAM? What is it that you’ve never had? What are you willing to do to get it?
Well, I’ve received and cashed, and spent a $6000 check with MY name on it. I know what it feels like to open an envelope and see my name with money that is MINE. I know what it’s like to open an envelope and see $9,000 with my name on it.
I can do it again. I know I can. But I have never had a Mary Kay commission check with more than $100 on it. I want a consistent commission check of $7,500 a month for a yearly commission income of $90,000 at the least beginning six months from today. That will be February, so let’s say that my Valentine’s Day gift in February, from me to me, will be reaching my goal of that commission level. What will be your gift to yourself next Valentine’s Day?
So let’s play it backwards from then to today. It will take approximately $60,000 in unit wholesale at 13% to have a check that size. Divided by 45 consultants that equals approximately $1,335 dollars in wholesale a month per consultant.
That’s a very small number. It comes out to about $1,068 take home per month, which is only $246 a week. Now that’s not bad if it’s in addition to what one takes home from one’s day job.
Let’s break that down some more. It equals 20 hours of sales at $133.50 per hour. 20 Hours a month! 5 hours a week extra work per month. $53.40 per hour take home for each of the Hope Builders who works her plan!?!
Hope Builders, don’t let anyone limit your dreams! Do you want more? Ask your Director to mentor you to the top! Don’t wait for any one’s opinion but God’s.
Picture me bopping myself on the head. God I thank you that you grant me the grace to find and add to my personal sales team with Mary Kay Cosmetics the creative, harmonious, loving, spirit-filled type D, excited women who will be so empowered by this opportunity that they take it and run with it. Amen.
Note: This was written by a consultant years ago. She never even made it to sales director, but she’s still spinning her wheels as a consultant.
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I do feel bad this consultant. She was sold a load of bullshit and dazzled with Mary Kay Math into thinking this crazy idea was possible if only she tried hard enough. She probably truly believes that her failure to pull off the impossible is her fault. She doesn’t realize that the whole MLM system was rigged against her from the start and she’ll never be able to make any kind of living from it, let alone 90 large per annum.
However…
Maybe it’s because I was never in MLM, but WHAAAAAAAT?! She wants 45(!!! She’s got to know how hard it is to recruit even one!) recruits spending the “very small” amount of $1335 (that’s over half my monthly salary!) every single month so that SHE can have what SHE wants. She’s got to know that no one sells that much a month. Electric companies don’t accept lipstick; your kids can’t eat eyeshadow; cars don’t run on hand lotion. It’s really no different than our favorite target Jamie Taylor, whose underlings got rode hard and put away wet to the point that some of them were letting bills go unpaid in order to buy her a place in the sun while they got nothing out of it for themselves.
It’s obviously too late to reach this consultant, but I do hope her story opens the eyes of some random consultant or DIQ who passes through and allows them to see the greed and conflation of religion with one’s own selfish desires (after all, no mortal can know the mind of god) for that they are, and take a good serious look at what they’re doing to themselves and the others around them.
Oh dear…
“What are you willing to do to get it?”
We know what many do to get it. They manipulate their downline (like she did in this post) making the dream look achievable in bite-sized chunks. Except…
“So let’s play it backwards from then to today. It will take approximately $60,000 in unit wholesale at 13% to have a check that size. Divided by 45 consultants that equals approximately $1,335 dollars in wholesale a month per consultant.”
The chances of this happening is as much as a golden unicorn flying across the sky dropping glitter over my house. She truly thought 45 consultants would order $1335 each and every month? She is right though with one thing when she said it was a BIG DREAM.
“What are you willing to do to get it?”
Well, Monique Anthony had some ideas! Just fraudulently acquire lots of money and high-end cars, and pretend she got them via her MK National Sales Directorship. Recruits will see these and believe it!
That unicorn better be pooping BitCoin!
Irony alert: For OP it is a dream, for her downline it is a nightmare.
So have I, and it was a PAYCHECK from my job! “I’ve received and cashed, and spent a $6000 check with MY name on it. I know what it feels like to open an envelope and see my name with money that is MINE. I know what it’s like to open an envelope and see $9,000 with my name on it.” I’ve had bigger checks with profit-sharing bonuses from my evil “CorporateAmerican J.O.B.
Same here. Travel nursing last year was incredibly lucrative for me. I had great paychecks and kept my expenses down. Receiving a bonus at the end of my contract was awesome and timely — it hit my account the first week of December. I paid cash for Christmas and Hannukah prezzies.
“I want a consistent commission check of $7,500 a month for a yearly commission income of $90,000 at the least beginning six months from today…. So let’s play it backwards from then to today. It will take approximately $60,000 in unit wholesale at 13% to have a check that size. Divided by 45 consultants that equals approximately $1,335 dollars in wholesale a month per consultant.”
So, if there’s really a market in her area for $60K (wholesale) worth of Mary Kay products every month, why doesn’t she just order that much and sell it herself? Instead of $7500 every month in commissions, she would have $60K a month in net earnings (if she’s selling for 2x her wholesale cost). For that matter, if she’s content with only $7500 a month, she could just order $7500 worth of inventory and and sell it at twice the cost. Why hand over control of her financial future to 45 consultants who may or may not follow through?
These are rhetorical questions, of course. But potential recruits need to give some serious thought to the answers before they spend a penny on inventory. Is your recruiter really *that* generous, that she would give up her potential sales to you and settle for a mere fraction of what she could have earned? What’s really going on, that she’s not telling you?
I’m late to this party, and everyone has made excellent points, as usual. I do want to add a couple of things, though. First point — Tracy, along with the rest of us, are often accused of belittling and making fun of women who fail in Mary Kay. (Heck, we get accused every Friday, like clockwork). So I want to make it clear that when Tracy wrote this about her former upline:
One of them dropped out a few years ago, and the other is still spinning her wheels as a senior director (never making it to Cadillac or Super Special Almost NSD Director). And they worked hard!
…she was NOT making fun of them. She presented them as examples of what happens to good, hard-working women who get caught up in the Mary Kay scam. That’s all. Naming and shaming is reserved for the con artists, not their victims.
Second and last point — If anyone reading this has any illusions that $1,335 per month per consultant is an achievable goal, consider this: Mary Kay’s gross revenue (which primarily comes from wholesale orders) divided by the number of consultants comes to less than $100 per month. In other words, the average consultant spends less than $100 per month ordering product. To build a team of 45 who each order about 15 times the average amount isn’t just a dream, it’s a pipe dream. Just say “no” to Mary Kay.
This reminds me of intermittent reinforcement. You do well one time and think it will happen again. In this case it’s a $6000 check. In my case it was a class that I sold over a $1000. Then you think it will happen again. This happens with gambling as well. This happens once which is a fluke and then you think it will happen all the time. I’m wondering what is the average of all your checks? I know with my classes I had some good ones and lots of $0 ones.