Written by Raisinberry

Here we go again. July numbers are always dismal, mainly because everyone ordered so much in June to “finish a goal.”

It’s August. The company sets up another promotion based around ordering, and your prize is a silly pin, charm, or something of the sort. Another push to add new customers to your Preferred Customer Program. Some sort of consistency club if you place an order each month.

It never ends. And of course there’s more. More contests, more ordering opportunities, more promos from your national to do FACES this year. Yep, they all want you to FOCUS on building your customers! But do they really mean it? Or is it another ploy to line the pockets of your upline and corporate?

It’s all lip service. The company HAS to pretend that their mission is customers and selling. If it’s not, then Mary Kay is a recruiting company and they would be on the verge of being an illegal pyramid scheme.

Nobody wants to have their consultants to peek at Pink Truth and see something that describes their directors “antics” to a tee. Once you know that what your director says is just about 90% scripted, it’s hard to get enthusiastic.

Directors who visit Pink Truth and follow their conscience start to back off anything that appears like frontloading (i.e. big initial inventory orders) and so the unit numbers plummet. NSDs with pangs of guilt try to back step and appear more concerned about training and salesmanship, etc… knowing full well that production comes from new recruits. Those are the only kind of “new faces” of which they are really concerned.

The biggest hope from corporate and those at the top of the pyramid was that Pink Truth would die out. They hoped our discussion would run its course and we’d go away, just like every other website dedicated to exposing the MLM industry. They tried to look like the focused on selling, but in the background really honing in on the more productive frontloading of new recruits. But 15 years and counting, and Pink Truth isn’t letting up.

If Mary Kay relied on orders from selling alone… 500,000 consultants ordering once or twice a year would put a serious hurt on. All the directors know that a unit (and therefore the company as a whole) is not sustained via orders from consultants who are simply selling. Units are kept based on the large initial inventory orders, and the orders from selling consultants are just a little extra.

So, it’s no wonder you are feeling the letdown after Seminar. That is… if you understand the reality that the same old recruiting and frontloading game is on, and no matter what the hype or the promotion, nothing has really changed. Absolutely nothing has changed in the core business of Mary Kay since Pink Truth has launched in 2006. Let that sink in.

So why are we even here? Pink Truth hoped to change things at Mary Kay. We knew that wholesale change at corporate was unlikely, but that we could reach consultants and directors one by one. We’re STILL getting over 1 million visitors a year to this site. We’re reaching people and educating them, and ultimately saving them from Mary Kay.

So you over-extended yourself placing that sizeable order in June. Now you are into August and all those unsold products are smiling back at you from the shelves. Holiday season is rapidly approaching, and you still have to unload thousands of dollars worth already collecting dust. How many boxes do you have that you didn’t even open yet? I’d be depressed too. I was many times, this time of year.

You sell better than anyone in your Unit and your sales are meager. Your expenses are high. You have plowed money into this “opportunity” for years and you get one step ahead and two steps back. Your recruits go inactive, your unit wilts and falls, you are once again topping off production with resources you do not have, asking your hubby if he has any “space” on his card, and now here comes September. Year after year you have walked through this cycle and year after year you compare yourself to the ones your NSD highlights and fawns over.

You know what you do to survive. You just don’t know that all the others are doing the same thing and pretending all is wonderful in Mary Kay. This is theater. Academy Awards stuff.

Any company that works this hard 3 times a year (Seminar, Career Conference, Leadership… not to mention the 3 or 4 more intermediate NSD events) to pump you up is telling you to your face that they know your business doesn’t produce enough excitement to sustain itself. Would even one Seminar be required if you were making the kind of money that’s been promised? Cash motivates… but this company is all about Credit. Your credit.

You are feeling the letdown from Seminar because you are going to once again work to pay off what you charged in June. Then you will be working to pay off Holiday ordering, then you will be working to pay off Leadership. Round and round and round it goes, with all your efforts doing nothing more than buying you a ticket on the MK roller coaster.

You are hunting for your replacement and you don’t even know it. As you slowly tire out, or refuse to add production out of your own pocket, you will lose your unit and those new red jackets of yours will drop safely into your senior’s unit, and be pumped for whatever you didn’t have the heart to extract from them. She will salvage one or two and push them up the career path to replace you. And they will work it for 4 to 6 to 10 years, until they tire out… or figure it out. And on… and on. (Have you noticed how many directors now crash and burn before they get even a year into this?)

Seminar is a pump-you-up celebration of fraud at a fever pitch, designed to be that “big picture look” that will drive your goal setting and activity till you have had just enough smacks in the face by reality to re-evaluate. Then it will be time for January Retreat and Leadership!

And as long as Pink Truth is here to get the word out, your recruiting efforts will meet opposition. You have to understand our motivation. We don’t want any more of you. We don’t want any more women suckered by lies. We don’t want any more women publicly manipulated to lie because an “ intro sheet” asking them to reveal their high check stares back at them from a hotel podium. You are feeling a letdown after Seminar because you KNOW the truth. You just don’t want to face the truth.

It’s August, and here you go, all over again. Can you really go through all this one more time?