Working Hard and Still No Profits
Written by ThinkPinkThinkAgain
The SD who wrote this letter says all the same things my director did for my five years as a consultant, and all the things I parroted and believed. And there is definitely truth to the idea that consultants who do not work do not see earnings. But it is also true that consultants and directors who DO WORK…. who work hard, who sacrifice time and money and emotional bandwidth… those hard workers also profit very little, if at all.
It’s entirely possible for a consultant to earn money selling Mary Kay, even if she doesn’t recruit many people. But it’s unlikely the majority, or even a significant fraction, of that money will EVER make its way out of her “business” and back into her personal life.
For example, I worked my butt off earning money to pay the balance on my wedding ring (and my husband’s) a few years ago. It took a lot of time, and also so many discounts, to tempt my clients to buy right when I needed them to (which discouraged them from buying at full price in the future, and of course made it necessary for me to work harder and contact MORE people since I was selling below suggested retail). In retrospect I also wonder how many Facebook friends stopped following me as a result of my constant updates about this project. So, did I earn the money for the rings? Yes. I was so proud! Mary Kay was working!
But… I also went to Seminar that year, and I paid for my plane tickets from my PERSONAL bank account. There just wasn’t enough money in my MK account, you see, because I’d just paid for PCP and bought lots of foundations to replace newly expired ones in my inventory. While in Dallas, I stopped at the vendor booths and bought supplies with my PERSONAL money. A few months later, I had to settle up with my postage supplier and pay about $100 toward postage costs (why I ever started offering free shipping to my customers is beyond me). Did that money come from my MK checking account? No, I had to borrow it from my husband (and couldn’t pay it back until I got a bonus from my real job months and months later).
Poor money management? No effort put into my business? Maybe I didn’t need those supplies, even though every MK order is supposed to be nicely wrapped. Maybe I didn’t need to go to Seminar (sacrilege!). Maybe I should have stopped offering free shipping for orders $50+ (it used to be $25 but I couldn’t sustain it). Maybe if I’d just held “one extra skincare class on top of what I was already doing” every week for the year prior, I could have had “enough money to pay for Seminar and then some.”
Never mind that I was already spending two nights a week away from my new husband. Never mind that I was shoving profit from reorders back into more inventory because brand new products had just come out, and I couldn’t NOT buy them.
I did my taxes one spring and WOKE UP. For some reason, looking at the numbers with my new husband was different from looking at them with my dad. I saw, more clearly than ever before, how little income my business was generating after expenses. “It really IS a hobby,” I thought to myself, horrified. “I didn’t make any money at all last year–in fact, I lost money!” Why was I giving up 5-10 hours after work and on weekends for a “business” that didn’t provide what it said it would–money toward my life? Our lives? Our home?
The Mary Kay line is that I wasn’t working enough.
My response, five years in? I’ve already worked too much.
Visit the
This is why an running ledger is so important. MK reps may indeed have a good month here or there, especially in the beginning, where revenues exceed costs. But it is the aggregate that counts. Having a “profitable month” is great, but what’s the aggregate P&L?
This is what MLMs do. They hype the revenue, but ignore the bottom line. If you “made” $10,000 for the year, but your lifetime cost still exceeds your aggregate revenue, you are still losing money. Your upline will encourage you to hype that “big check”, or talk about that “big month”, but you will have spent more than you earned by the time you quit.
MLMs like Mary Kay depend on those losses. I can assure you that the accountants at Mary Kay Corporate are keenly aware of how much more is coming in than is going out at the corporate level. That’s their margin, which comes from consultant losses. But they can’t share that at the consultant level, or the big lie would be revealed.
And they gaslight you into believing it’s your fault. “Need more training. Don’t have the right ledger. Your WHY isn’t big enough. Increase your deserve level. Listening to the wrong media. Spend more time in your Bible. Reach up for help, not side to side. Don’t ‘should’ on yourself. Not enough product on your shelf. Skipped a company event. Go to a success meeting.”
The endless number of “reasons” why your lack of success is your fault. No mention of the fact that 99% of people LOSE MONEY with their MK “business.”
Quit now, if you’re still in The Pink Game!
“…because I’d just paid for PCP…” Intriguing.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… the Preferred Customer Program (PCP) was called Direct Support. You had a separate form to fill out that was mailed where you “signed up” your customers to receive a catalog or Look Book, often with some sample. That is also where you ordered your GWPs (spend $40 and get this gift!). It was a separate cost from inventory orders and other supplies.
Fast-forward to when the name changed to PCP and everything could be done online. The catalog mailings were a separate cost (they still are, I believe), and you could order your GWPs with your inventory orders. It wasn’t a cheap program, yet the cost of mailing the catalogs was cheaper per person, with MK doing the bulk mailing instead of putting a stamp on yourself. The costs could be significant depending on how many customers you signed up. In the early-to-mid 2000s, I spent around $150 per quarter for this program, not counting the GWP costs.