Mary Kay Is Not Magical, It Is Mathematical
Written by Parsons Green
Retired national sales director Tammy Crayk (now Smith) created this “bubble sheet” for her consultants to use. The idea is that you can profit $3,000 to $10,000 in the next six months if you just put in the work!
Now you’ll notice that the intention of he sheet is clear in the heading though: “Help our Unit have the biggest year ever!” It’s all about Tammy’s paycheck.
So how do you get to this massive success? Each sheet has 56 bubbles, representing one attempt at booking a facial. It should take thirty minutes to an hour to call the names on your sheet. Tammy promises that if you fill in one sheet a week, you will get 10 yesses and $1,000 in sales!
Six months of sheets will then equal 240 appointments! But that really means you will only see 120 cause half will cancel. This will lead to 12 recruits, 9 of which will become active by placing an inventory order.
Tammy is so confident in the success of the bubble sheet that she says if you complete three a week you will become a director in six months and earn a free car.
Of course, Tammy pulls these numbers out of thin air, and can’t substantiate any of this will cold, hard data. One bubble sheet a week equals 2,912 booking attempts for the year. Do you know that many people? Your chance at Mary Kay success is one bubble that quickly pops when you look at it critically.
What Tammy puts out there as “just one hour a week” is not anything close…. You’d have to spend hours just trying to find people to ASK to have the facials. They’ll tell you that if you play the games at skin care classes and get everyone to give you names and numbers of their friends, then you’ll never run out of people to call.
But just ask anyone who has ever been in Mary Kay: The names dry up fast. Then you’re back to the loser strategies of facial boxes or trolling aisles at Target. Again, hours of effort to try to find willing victims, and NEVER as easy as they make it seem with little gimmicks like the bubble sheet.
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And to make matters worse, the mathematical limitations of human hierarchies keeps the average number of people directly under another to less than one. This means if one person has 10 directly under them in their downline, another 10 people in the same downline must have zero under them.
There is no way around this. Those who say “sign up 5 who sign up 5 etc.” are ignoring this limitation. They are either lying or they are perpetuating a lie.
It is mathematically impossible to make pay-to-play endless-chain recruiting schemes like Mary Kay profitable as a whole. But the founders of these schemes know this quite well. They also know quite well where all the money really comes from: Not from outside customers, but from the churn of suckers in the downline.
I HATED the bubble sheet! Here’s how it works out if you start it as a brand new consultant.
Week 1: Easy peasy! It’s full of your friends and family. Calling Mom, Sis, 5 best friends, and Aunt Sue is really simple, they all book a party (most of them with each other, so you end up with 3-4 parties total), and they all hold. This Mary Kay thing is a breeze!
Week 2: A little harder than last week, but not too bad. You got referrals from a couple of those parties your mom and best friends held, so you’re still in your warm-ish circle of acquaintances. You may book a few facials who are doing a favor for your bestie, who’s doing a favor for you.
Week 3: You only get halfway done because that second set of parties was less willing to give you referrals–they don’t know you, they’re not giving out their contact list! Hmmm… Well, always reach up for help, so you call your director. “Go warm chat at the grocery!” she says. “Remember, to always shop backwards of the flow, that way you run into everyone who’s shopping!” Ok… So that gives you three more names, but one gave you a fake number, one won’t pick up, and the other booked a facial but ghosted you. And you’re still 20 names short of completing your bubble sheet.
Responses from your director:
“You’re just not working hard enough.”
“There are baby girls being born every day!”
“Talk to everyone within three feet of you about your business!”
“Make a list of 150 families you’d invite to your big, elaborate wedding. That represents at least 450 people!”
“There’s no excuse to not have 5 parties on your books at all time. Find a way, make a way!”
In short, it’s all your fault if you can’t do this. Ignoring, as Data Junkie already so eloquently pointed out, the limitations of math and the human population!
Did I mention I hate the bubble sheet? Ok, good. I thought you may have missed that point.
“There are baby girls being born every day!”
I’d feel obliged to point out that there are also women dying every day but I don’t think that population statis is a conversation they want to have.
Director response: “No one else in our unit is struggling to book. You’re the only one having trouble.”
It’s cute how she pretends that bubble sheets are her very own original idea. Pretty sure every director/NSD has created one of these since Mary Kay began.
And shocker Tammy passed her unit down to Nikki
https://i.imgur.com/aVJodUm.jpg
This must be all the “new math” I keep hearing about. Works on different concepts/principles.
One of them must have heard that there are such things as imaginary numbers and irrational numbers, and ran with the concept.
lolz… The Bubble Sheet. I was obsessed with these. I would write detailed notes on them, wonder why I couldn’t keep track of them better, be mean to myself because they weren’t producing enough results for me, listen to other people talk (lie) about how amazing they were doing because of these bubble sheets… I kept them in binders, kind of like a scrapbook of my (wasted) time. How awful. Truly awful. I feel so embarrassed (off and on) about how obsessed and committed I was to this company. I was In It to Win It. All the way to the top. Or at least all the way to the top of my credit cards’ credit limits!!
Now I recognize the theme within MK is rampant in our culture – the system & people at the Tippy Top feast on the ones at the bottom doing tons of work. It’s everywhere. I work in public schools now… my days of staying til 6pm and getting here at 7am are done. I’ll work my contracted hours, and that’s it.
Peace!!
“There are baby girls being born every day!”
Gotta get those baby girls while they’re newborns! Once they’re a month old, it’s too late!
“Remember to always shop backwards of the flow, that way you run into everyone who’s shopping!”
That’s a new one to me. Thinking about the grocery stores where I shop, there is no one flow. People go whichever way gets them to what they need faster. This isn’t IKEA. (If you haven’t been in an IKEA store, once you go in the entrance, there’s a path you have to follow that takes you all through the store, though there are some shortcuts.)
Oh, man, IKEA makes me crazy. I don’t know how people can find the same thing in there twice because there are no landmarks to navigate by. It’s like a neverending tunnel through another dimension where time and season become meaningless. I have a fairly low tolerance for shopping (10 years in retail does that to you) and situations I can’t escape easily upset me. And I can make my own gosh-darn meatballs, thanks.