It never ceases to amaze me how recruiters, sales directors, and NSDs make up numbers and pretend they’re reality. This piece has circulated for years. It seems to have originated with retired NSD Cheryl Warfield who made it about 20 years ago or more. (I saved Cheryl’s original chart in my files in November 2006!!! Who knows how old it was at that point.)

The chart is still being published today, and the same exact numbers are used as from way back when. I guess the MK directors are forgetting that what was impressive 20 years ago is not so impressive today. I know $100k still sounds like a lot, but when you factor in all the expenses that have to come off that… there is not so much left over. Certainly not the “executive” income they brag about!

It was NEVER easy to make $100k per year as a new Mary Kay sales director. It was never easy to make $100k a year no matter how many years you were a director. It was a monthly grind of trying to make production by coning new recruits into buying big inventory packages and guilting the rest of the unit into “helping the team” with an order of any size.

Never mind how most directors struggle to make minimum production each month. Minimum production is $4,500 wholesale per month, which gives a director around $1,000 a month in commission income…. or in other words $12k per year!!! Where is this $100k per year as a brand new director???? The reality is almost no directors make $100k a year, much less new ones. Out of the 9,000 or so directors, probably about 25 are making over $100k.

But here’s the fiction they’re selling selling. First is the current graphic they use. And below it is the one from 2006.

They use a little Mary Kay math to come up with the $100,000 figure, and of course, we should pay no attention to the fact that the sales director has expenses that must be paid out of that fictional income!

It’s also crazy to think that with price increases and wage increases and general inflation over the last 20  years, they’re still assuming the exact same retail sales each month.

They claim that you can earn $113,280 as a sales director if you’re willing to work Mary Kay full-time. Here’s how it works:

1. Personally sell $1,000 per week, which is 7 to 10 faces and 10 reorders = $2,000 profit per month. Forget discounts and other expenses, which means the gross profit on your product sales is probably $1,500 or less.
   
2. Do 30 faces and 30 interviews each month, and 10 customer calls per week = 2 to 5 recruits per month w/ average initial order of $1,000 = $5,000 production. Yikes! Interview everyone? And continuously pester your customers to recruit? And that average initial order is completely made up.
3. Get your unit to do 40 interviews per month = 7 to 10 recruits with $1,000 order each = $10,000 production. 15% to 25% of people interviewed will sign up and all will order $1,000? Doubtful.
4. Work with 5 to 8 key people and the new people to squeeze $8,000 wholesale production out of them each month.

Add up all the production $2,000 personal + $5,000 personal recruits + $10,000 unit recruits + $8,000 ongoing unit = $25,000 total wholesale per month.

Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Add up all the commissions, volume bonuses, and recruiting bonuses and that sales director would have gross income of $9,440 per month (according to the chart) or $113,280 per year.

It doesn’t go unnoticed that the chart uses “best case scenario” numbers. (i.e. 7 to 10 recruits with $1,000 wholesale each equals $10,000 production rather than $7,000 to $10,000.)

Could a new director, in theory, gross $100,000 in her first year? Sure. It is possible, but almost completely unlikely. No matter how hard she works, the numbers and the MLM structure are not in her favor. There are very, very few sales directors in Mary Kay grossing more than six figures. And once you take out business expenses, the personal, spendable income is far below that.

A unit at $25,000 wholesale per month would do the $600,000 unit club. How many units are doing that much or above? Very very few. Do you think it’s because those sales directors don’t work hard enough? I’d be willing to bet that there are plenty of sales directors in Mary Kay who put in 40 to 60 hours a week religiously, yet never achieve these levels of success.

I know there are many directors who are using handouts like this to help recruit. This is the type of false income claim that is pervasive in Mary Kay. I say that these claims are false, not because they aren’t real for some. But they are false because they aren’t real for the vast, vast majority of Mary Kay sales directors, and they know it. Yet, recruiters are making their victims believe that this is reality for many.

Let’s make up some numbers with the belief that they could possibly be true someday, and flaunt them as reality. That’s dishonest, and they know it.