Written by Frosty Rose

Spoiler: Almost no one.

March results are out for Jamie Taylor’s Verge Area top consultants (Red Jackets). I love these newsletters because they put real numbers on the fluff that nationals and directors promote. And the numbers? They ain’t great. Keep in mind, these are the top 5-10% of consultants, those with 3+ active team members. (In other words, if these ladies aren’t making any money, the other 90-95% of the area isn’t either.)

Four of the top five March teams are led by women who also appear in the Red Sellers section. This gives us insight into what their teams ordered versus what they ordered personally and lets us calculate their commissions.

Heather Burke is at top of the charts on both “sales” (orders) and team production. Her team total was $4,163, but she personally ordered $2,880 of that. If she had five personal recruits ordering at least $225 in March (likely, given the totals), she would have earned a 13% commission on the balance of $1,283 for a grand total of $166.79 for the entire month’s work. Definitely executive income right there!

Using the same math, Andy Jo Watson’s team only ordered $1,080. Since there’s no way that 5 team members ordered $225 with those numbers, she earned 9% for a  total commission check of $97.20.

Anna Duke’s team ordered $1,442, so her check was either $187.46 or $129.78.

Despite ranking fourth on the leaderboard, Shenika Bowles did a bit better, only ordering $1,096 personally. Her team ordered $2,767, so her commission was $359.71.

Before the Kay Bots come at me with “but they’re making money on the sale of the product!” They’re not. You know they’re not, we know they’re not, they know they’re not. Mary Kay pretends these consultants sold all the product they ordered and sold it all at full price. Neither happens.

Also…. Many of these women are in DIQ, so they’re “stretching” their personal production and their credit card limits to the max.

For Heather Burke to have sold everything she ordered, she would have had to sell $5,760 in the month of March. That’s $1,440 per week or $186 per day IF she worked all 31 days in the month of March. That’s a successful party every single day of the month. Which she did not do.

But let’s give her the benefit of the doubt. What if she had sold all that product, and earned the fictional 40% profit that consultants claim? She would have profited $2,304. That’s not chump change. But it’s also not the executive income that consultants and directors sell to new recruits. And, again, to achieve that, she would have had to hold a party every single day in March without giving away or discounting any product.

Can you imagine the amount of work it would take to earn that $76 per day? Because it’s not just that one party per day… it’s the hustling to find people to hold parties, booking twice as many as you want to hold, coaching the hostesses to make sure they get their friends to show up, getting to the party early to set up, breaking down afterward, cleaning your materials and replenishing supplies, and the list goes on….

Back in the real world, Heather likely sold a small fraction of that and ordered the rest to “top up” her production and stay in DIQ. And the fraction she did sell, she made maybe 10-20% profit, not the lauded 40-50%.

I do have a few questions for Heather, Andy Jo, Anna and Shenika:

• Was your pittance of a “love check” worth selling out the women who trust you to offer them a way to earn money?
• Were you honest about how much you sell, and how little you profit from those sales?
• How does it feel to profit from the losses of your recruits?
• And how long will you continue churning before you do yourselves and your recruits a favor and step off the hamster wheel?

None of these questions will be asked or answered. Because all of these women in DIQ are telling themselves that *they* aren’t making money yet because they haven’t done the right things. And once they get to director they *will* be making money. And they don’t want to ruin things for potential recruits who *surely will* make money, so let’s not tell them the hard truth. They’ve fooled themselves into believing that this is a real business and that they’re actually selling an opportunity to the women they recruit.