Winning When Your Downline Fails
Written by Raisinberry
It’s time to share one of the most self serving and diabolical aspects of National Sales Directorship in Mary Kay Cosmetics. While you may have thought you had heard it all, you have not. There’s more.
To highlight the aspect I am about to share, we need to be reminded about what we have been sold in regards to making it to the pinnacle of success in Mary Kay. These women are the crème de la crème. They model all that is good and right and noble about Mary Kay. They are executives, who allow you to sit at their feet, gleaning all that you should know to follow in their footsteps. Such generosity of spirit! They are in your amen corner, praising you to success and rewarding your integrity and work ethic, with the main goal of raising up new leadership in the “Mary Kay way”. That is of course until they figure out they can make more money if they just let you fail.
After 60 years in business, there are a ton of ethical directors who are sick about what has become of this dream they believed in. Many could never bring themselves to ruthlessly recruit a new consultant’s “perfect start” faces out from under her, as so many of the fast start NSD’s have done. There are veteran senior directors and executive directors out there that by now are starting to grasp that they know too much to press on for the family security program. They have grown a conscience about all the women who have come in and flushed out, doing all that they were told, but still unable to get real results without cheating.
When you know a lot and have seen a lot, it has demoralizing effects and soon these units sputter and wilt on the vine. With so much time in, you would think that the NSD would race to the side of that dedicated veteran director and help her re-energize her Unit and her dreams.
Not so! Many long term directors have huge downlines. They may not have had the required 12/8, 11/9, and other variations of the NSD requirements, but they can have large second, third and fourth lines that make up a large commission base, with only one thing standing in the NSD’s way to making more money. Director Connie Conscience.
Imagine being a 20 -year veteran with 15 or 20 or 30 offspring that just don’t fit the NSD lineup. Your existence puts a level between them and the NSD. If you no longer existed, those levels would all move up and double her income! So the NSD who has an offspring dairector, who isn’t pushing production, or a recruiting maniac is barring the way to a huge pay increase for zero work. When Connie loses her unit, guess what happens? Connie’s offspring become 1st line to Ms. NSD, and everybody moves up a level.
In tangible terms that means since Connie’s gone, all of Connie’s 1st line become Ms. NSD’s 1st line at 9% commission. When they were second line they only paid her at 4%. All the third lines that paid out at 2% are now moved up to second line and pay out 4% to the NSD.
If Connie Conscience just dries up and dies, Ms. NSD stands to just about double her commissions for doing nothing…. and I mean doing nothing! And with Connie out of the way, maybe Ms. NSD can burrow in and re-manipulate all those 2nd and 3rd lines into greater commitment.
Once again, it is apparent that the Mary Kay marketing plan is at cross purposes to its stated goal. Any time an offspring unit is reabsorbed into the parent unit, it benefits the senior. How hard is she really going to work to help that offspring excel if she can smell blood in the water? How many seniors were happy to gain 30 to 60 plus members in the hopes of finding a few race horses to take the pressure off? Lose an offspring but gain car production? Yea for you!
No matter how noble you think you are, Mary Kay has a way of putting you in the darkest scenarios where your survival is pitted against the best interests of another… a place where you have to do a lot of rationalizing to justify your behavior.
And at month end, there might be one or two or ten seniors or execs who just don’t want to play the game anymore and will step aside, only to have their national ecstatic with her newfound pay increase. She’ll receive the flimsy, “Are you sure you can’t stretch” call designed to give the appearance of compassion. And as they hang up the phone, resolved that this budding national area will be no more, how tempted will Miss NSD be, to rapidly figure her new commission schedule for the upcoming month?
NSDs get compensated in so many ways. There’s a $3,000 bonus for 100 star consultants, another $1,000 bonus for a “on the right track” winner, another $1,000 bonus for a Cadillac requalifiers, another $1,000 for a fab 50 offspring, another$1,000 for a honor society offspring, and another $1,000 bonus for a higher circle of achievement. Most of this work to achieve these levels was accomplished by the Directors below her.
And if this wasn’t enough, after everything that veteran Director had done to keep her unit going for all those years, helping teach and train at Seminar, all the “stretching”, business counsel, ethical practices and company loyalty, all of it washes down the drain with her MK debt unpaid, and her NSD rewarded.
In product based pyramids, all things work for the good of the tippy top. And apparently, that doesn’t bother them a bit. You can easily see how trapped the 1st line Director is, when she no longer can parrot the Mary Kay rhetoric. She knows if she steps away, she ends up rewarding a person least deserving of it, and who would financially prefer she depart anyway. Crème de la crème sure fits. It’s actually the richest, fattest portion of the cream, known to clog arteries. All MLM product based pyramids, like Mary Kay Cosmetics continue on because the top dwellers are positioned to always receive the fruits and even the “failures” of the bottom dwellers. How’s that for Golden Rule living?
Visit the
Like video games: kill them off and loot the corpse.
In the immortal words of Opus the Penguin, “Even their Uzis are pink!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_of_the_Mary_Kay_Commandos
New thought of it quite that diabolical way
“So you die and we all move up in rank.”
—Sulu, Star Trek TOS episode “Mirror, Mirror”
The aforementioned episode was a classic Star Trek “what if?” look at a dystipian alternative version of the Federation as an evil imperialist empire instead of a peaceful alliance. What an awful existence life on The Enterprise would be if everyone were just out for themselves, right? And how fraught for Kirk, Scotty, McCoy, and Uhura, struggling to survive without becoming the very evil they find so distasteful.
The parallels write themselves.
“ That is of course until they figure out they can make more money if they just let you fail.”
How evil. Yes, this happened to me. I was one target for my car and lost the last month. At the time, I had this feeling of wondering why my director didn’t help me more. I’m on this site for a few years and constantly learning new things. Yes, it was okay for me to lose. Maybe it was better for her that I lose.
We’re so glad you’re out. Hopefully someone who is currently where you were might see your comment and decide that by “losing” her recruits, she’ll actually be winning in starting anew without Mary Kay. Hugs to you ((( )))!
What an AMAZING, eye opening article. I had no idea! Thank God for this site, which spreads information. The entire MK philosophy is to churn through people, as if they were a paper plate or something, that you toss once you’ve used it for the one, sole purpose: to get an inventory order. This piece made me realize that even the most successful directors are kind of disposable to the NSDs because the main purpose is to get that next consultant, that next initial frontloaded order and move on.
IMO, the absurdity of the MK “business model”* becomes ridiculously clear very early on, when a consultant is strongly encouraged to recruit her paying customers and thus trade in that fifty percent profit for a paltry tiny percentage of the customer-turned-recruit’s wholesale orders.
Frankly I’m shocked, disappointed, and confused as to how many hundreds of thousands of women don’t question the logic of this. I mean, I know everyone in MK pushes “sharing the opportunity” relentlessly to every** single consultant, and I understand that many women will nobly do whatever they can to “enrich the lives” of other women. But at the cost of giving up whatever profit they’ve worked so hard to achieve?
So when such behavior and mindset makes up the foundation of the pyramid, it’s not shocking that upline individuals sabotage the success of their own recruits in order to profit.
* the MK “business model” for the independent contractors (consultants, directors, etc); NOT the Mary Kay CORPORATE business model (what doesn’t make business sense for the independent contractors makes PERFECT sense to MKC)
**including those oh so many consultants, usually the ones who show up here on Fridays, who vehemently proclaim that they don’t want to, and will not, recruit; choosing to not recruit is labeled by Mary Kay as refusing to share the opportunity, and others (competing IBCs, their own uplines, etc) are strongly encouraged to recruit those customers right out from under the “I-don’t-want-to-recruit-I’m-just-selling” consultant.
I completely understand that this article is exposing valuable information about the NSD position and how they operate. The article is another great one by Raisinberry.
The context is the leap between Director and NSD, but “ethical director” is an oxymoron just like “ethical NSD” or “legitimate or ethical MLM”. A director would not have achieved director status without selling the dream/opportunity to willing-victims and creating their own downline for profit.
I doubt that a director who has devoted many years to recruiting a MK downline — and if she herself was on the heels of becoming an NSD — would walk away due to ethics. I suspect *most* directors only walk away when FIRST the money and results haven’t met their expectations. It is then they start to develop a conscience, focus on the lies, maybe start researching…..and find PT. Better late than never, for sure.
Are there some unwitting directors? That would be hard, but maybe???? But that still doesn’t make them ethical. No one should be recruiting someone else’s money into an “opportunity” (for a commission) without thoroughly doing the research themselves first, disclosing all information, and encouraging the new recruit to also research. (I get it. Brainwashing makes people do stupid things.) BUT, the encouragement by recruiters to NOT research, which is almost always suggested by MLMers aka MK consultants, is definitely unethical. It’s one thing to deny yourself information and facts, but it’s not okay to impose that on others and direct them away from the facts. Demonizing doubt and encouraging mere faith is all part of the con game.
Maybe some directors are too ethical to become an NSD once they discover the tactics Raisinberry exposed today, but let’s not forget they were unethical enough to become a director in the first place.
Great comment Char!
(I’ll admit I’m surprised that you haven’t yet earned a Ridiculous Downvote ™ since you are the downvote legend that the rest of us aspire to be.).
Obligatory /s
True Char. That has to be faced, I’m afraid.