No “Right Way” to Do Mary Kay
When you start to become awakened to the truth about Mary Kay, you may double down on the idea that there is a “right way” to do Mary Kay.
Especially if you are a sales director, you need to justify why you have stayed with MK as long as you have. You need a way to clear your conscience. Distinguishing between the “right way” and “wrong way” to “do Mary Kay” may seem like the answer.
Oh, you may try to ignore Pink Truth and the hundreds of articles here which document the experiences of former consultants, directors, and NSDs. But these stories can’t be ignored.
As sites like Pink Truth, YouTube channels, and other social media accounts continue to reveal the truth about multi-level marketing, these companies keep selling hope. It’s the only truly effective weapon in their arsenal. People want to believe that hard work gets results and achievement of the American dream. If one woman can do it in Mary Kay, any one of us can do it!!!
But when we apply that work ethic to a flawed business model we always come up empty. MLMs feature the top people and brag about their results. This gives you hope. But at the same time, Mary Kay will transfer responsibility to you for your lack of results. You didn’t work hard enough. Except they don’t tell you that the top people did unethical things to get there. It’s the only way to get there.
As long as you bear responsibility for your low numbers, you still have hope. You still believe that it is POSSIBLE because LOOK AT HER. She did it. I could do it too if I just did the right things.
Mary Kay will tell you that the “right way” is by focusing on sales. A selling consultant is a happy consultant. You can make money without recruiting!
They will pretend that sales directors are ethical. That they didn’t add various family members (and pay for their inventory orders) to finish DIQ. That they don’t randomly reactivate consultants when they need more numbers. That they don’t frontload new consultants with thousands of dollars of inventory that they most likely won’t be able to sell.
When you believe the bogus “I story” from someone at the top of Mary Kay, there is hope. You can change. You can work harder. You can fix things.
But you can’t change things by being a selling consultant. Sales of the product will always be low and inconsistent because you get ahead by recruiting and loading them up with product they inconsistently sell and won’t return because there is still hope. (We don’t want to close the door on Mary Kay forever, do we?)
Quite simply, there is no “right way” to do Mary Kay. If you want to make anything more than pocket change, you have to recruit. In order to recruit, you have to tell lies. (At the very least, you will be guilty of omitting important information.) In order to make any money as a recruiter, you have to frontload new consultants with a bunch of inventory. They “right way” might seem to be teaching consultants to sell consistently, but that is just a pipe dream.
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I think most of us who were sales directors in MK before we came to Pink Truth had a moment of realization. We read an article here and it resonated. Or we looked around at our consultants and saw that they weren’t making any money. We took personal responsibility for our faults (incorrectly, since we were doing exactly what we were taught to do!)
We vowed to turn over a new leaf. No more orders on credit cards! No more front loading! Teach our consultants to keep a business ledger! Only order what they sold, and only attend events when there’s money in your business account!
And, invariably, within 3-6 months, we crashed and burned. Because without front loading newbies and getting established consultants to order more than they sold, without “topping up” the month on our own credit cards, without lying or omitting important info, it’s simply not possible to sustain a unit.
The fact that no Mary Kay downline can be profitable as a whole reveals the flaws of MLM as a business opportunity. If hard work was all that was required, it would be at least possible to build a profitable downline. But this is not possible because of the nature of MLM. All MLMs are built on taking from the bottom to give to the top. There MUST be losers (and lots of them) in order for there to be winners (few as there are, relatively).
To sell these products the right way (where no one gets victimized), you need to transfer the risk from the consultant to the company. Such as;
– Eliminate pay to play (allow consultants to sell without personal purchases, eliminate start-up and recurring fees)
– Pay all the commissions only to the consultant making the actual sale to an outside customer
– After eliminating the high overhead of all the upline commissions, drop the wholesale price by 80% to allow consultants room to mark up the price and remain price competitive with products of similar quality
– Limit the number of consultants and provide territories to minimize consultant competition for the same customers (thus eliminating recruiting)
– Allow consultants to sell their MK products as part of a broad range of products from multiple companies, where their “brand” is their own, but they happen to be “an authorized Mary Kay retailer”
– Eliminate restrictions on how consultants can advertise and sell the products, so they can have their own branded store (brick-and-mortar and/or online, pop-up or mobile)
MKC will never do any of this, as the corporate gravy train is funded primarily by consultant purchases (initial inventory and/or qualifying minimums), not retail sales.
MLMs are already doing things the “right” way…but only from a corporate perspective. The downline minions carry all the risk and provide the upline cash flow. In Mary Kay, the consultants pay for everything. There is no magic pot of cash. Everything MKC does is funded by cash/credit from the pockets of the consultants.
If you wish to start a profitable retail business, steer clear of MLM.
Interesting changes … not all can be applied at once but we’ve seen some MLMs go this route:
Become an affiliate marketing model!!!!
“– Eliminate pay to play (allow consultants to sell without personal purchases, eliminate start-up and recurring fees)
– Pay all the commissions only to the consultant making the actual sale to an outside customer”
Become a true “direct sales” company:
“– Limit the number of consultants and provide territories to minimize consultant competition for the same customers (thus eliminating recruiting)”
Become just another manufacturer … fighting it out with Revlon and L’Oreal:
“– Allow consultants to sell their MK products as part of a broad range of products from multiple companies, where their “brand” is their own, but they happen to be “an authorized Mary Kay retailer”
– Eliminate restrictions on how consultants can advertise and sell the products, so they can have their own branded store (brick-and-mortar and/or online, pop-up or mobile)”
“ Mary Kay will tell you that the “right way” is by focusing on sales. A selling consultant is a happy consultant. You can make money without recruiting!…….Quite simply, there is no “right way” to do Mary Kay. If you want to make anything more than pocket change, you have to recruit. In order to recruit, you have to tell lies.”—
Yep. That happy consultant needs to recognize that she is a recruitee. She is not a sole entity starting a retailing business. And, the person who recruited her was recruited too, as was her upline. They are all recruitees.
What makes the consultant think she will be different and stop the system in place? Answer: The con job suggesting that this is her own retailing business instead of a recruiting business. Hellooooo. We have a recruiter…who was recruited herself…by a recruiter…who was also recruited…telling recruitees… that this is a product sales business.
What’s in it for the recruiters? Recruitee is not ordering inventory for her product sales business, although the scam will lead her to believe that. Nope. Recruitee is buying products so her upline can make a commission on the inventory purchase, and the company will generate revenue as the direct seller.
Just in case happy, feeling special, confident, energetic, found new besties, sugar-sharp consultomer still thinks she can change the system, listen to Director Frosty:
We vowed to turn over a new leaf. No more orders on credit cards! No more front loading! Teach our consultants to keep a business ledger! Only order what they sold, and only attend events when there’s money in your business account! And, invariably, within 3-6 months, we crashed and burned. Because without front loading newbies and getting established consultants to order more than they sold, without “topping up” the month on our own credit cards, without lying or omitting important info, it’s simply not possible to sustain a unit.
How many ways can we say it? Sigh.
MLM = Endless-chain recruiting pyramid scheme. Mary Kay consultants could quite literally never open a MK box full of products. As long as they recruit enough people to order boxes, one can make money. The fact that you *can* retail is insignificant. It’s that you don’t have to that matters.
“The fact that you *can* retail is insignificant. It’s that you don’t have to that matters.”
Bingo. If no one sold a single MK product to an outside customer, the upline MK cash flow would not change. Outside retail sales play no role in the Mary Kay Corporate business plan.
Thank you, Tracy for layering the process to destruction of self and family clearly.
There is one and the same downfall in all human endeavours which you have pointed out – “ when we apply that work ethic to a flawed business model we always come up empty.”
May I extend that to when we apply aspirations to self-serving, avaricious of that one individual entity, every one else MUST come up empty.
Unequal distribution of wealth is a great social injustice. The tools to that are lies and deceptions, smokes and mirrors.
The great conundrum is – how to pierce through those layers of lies and brainwashing? I am still thinking….
It has taken me a while to understand the mathematics of why MLMs can never work, but I think I have finally grasped the final piece that, to me, was missing. I saw a great article on Reddit (copied here and sometimes cited) regarding the mathematical impossibility of why no MLM down can ever be profitable as a whole. People are essentially passing money up the pyramid by purchasing product from the company and having most of the money from that sale get distributed among the upline, with layers farthest from the sale receiving the most money. I always see this described as the downline “losing money,” but part of my brain had trouble accepting that “loss” was guaranteed. If everyone in the downline really did sell 100% of their product for more than they paid for it, then they wouldn’t be “losing” money. They might not be making very much, but it wouldn’t be a loss, per se. As I have been reading more, though (including some of today’s great comments), I have come to understand that this scenario just doesn’t happen in the real world. Without protected territories, the constant influx of new sellers (and the existence of a sizeable number of ex-sellers) ensures that no one can build a customer base that would truly provide a livable income. The “wholesale” prices are far too high, so consultants can’t mark up enough to turn a profit (50% is not nearly enough of a margin), and the pressure to recruit customers ensures that not only will they lose a customer, they will also gain a competitor—probably already in their social circle, so the competition will be particularly intense. Add to this an all-around uncompetitive product, and you have an environment in which even the hardest-working woman will not be able to succeed.
A director who manages to spend her way up to that level can fool herself that she is making money because she is able to use today’s commissions to pay down some of yesterday’s debt, but this is the financial equivalent of musical chairs. A bad month or sizeable chargeback will demonstrate the fragility of the illusion.
It’s really too bad. If the huge amount of effort these women put into the Mary Kay hamster wheel was directed to an actual productive activity, think how much better off they and everyone around them would be.
My mother grew up during the Depression and only had a sixth-grade education. I bet even SHE could see through this pink nonsense. I can just hear her asking, “But where the hell is the MONEY!?”