Finding Unit Production in Mary Kay Cosmetics
Mary Kay nsd Pam Shaw teaches that ordering lots of products is the most important thing for any new consultant. Directors will have the most production when they coerce new consultants into these big orders. $3,600 is best!
Finding Unit Production! There is a Win-Win way!
When investing your time as you strategize your month, you must prioritize your hours by designing your day most profitable to least profitable. I recommend using a yellow STICKY pad from the DESIGN BOOK to track your every half hour so that you are not losing time. Design this ‘slice’ of your weekly plan sheet each evening along with your ‘6 most important things to do list’ before you go to bed, so that when the POWER HOUR (first working, proactive, income-producing hour of your day) arrives, you don’t lose time in making lists.
Philosophy #1 – We lose people for two reasons.
1. Time Management challenges
2. A wrong perspective of the value of FailurePhilosophy #2 – Most Beauty Consultants need $3600 on shelf. All Working and aspiring Star Consultants need $3600 on shelf. If they do not begin with $3600 or get there within their first 90 days, they never get there.
Why do I believe this?
- The EMERALD Star level of 3600 has been around for many years. Prior to TimeWise, prior to an increase in powders, foundation formulas, lipsticks and glosses and new shadows and cheek colors. We have added multiple products since we determined $36oo was ‘Profit Level’.
- If a Consultant orders $600 initially, she feels she has ordered A LOT OF MARY KAY. She goes to her first class, sells $400. $200 of it she doesn’t have in her trunk. Now she has to reorder and redeliver to FIVE different homes. TIME. She is feeling overwhelmed, busy, disorganized. This leads to borrowing product, comprised relationships with sister consultants and guilt. This leads to mismanagement, no profit, and frustration. This leads to “Mary Kay is great, and I love it, but I am going to need to put it on the shelf for now”.
- With $3600 on shelf, she:
- Gets @ $800+ Retail value FREE! This is profitable!! Pays for her Showcase, personal products, business cards, etc. Figure it out!
- Gets the highest STAR on her ladder, setting the pace to excellence in her future (Once the mind has expanded, it can never return to its original form).
- Gets a private $ Management training from you. (I never did group Money Management training with consultants. One on One after ‘on profit’ to show her how to pay down her investment and handle 60-40. Prior to profit, all they need t oknow about $ management is to make the min. payment on their cc or loan and invest 100% of all they have collected into product so that they can GET TO PROFIT).
- Receives a ‘Profit Pin’ for her Red Jacket (or business suit) sleeve in CELEBRATION in front of your Success Meeting.
I believe you can promote this with confidence IF you have a good product Money Management habit yourself, are willing to support her Business Debut, follow up with her Power Start booked and coached, support her with adding her first 1-3 recruits (= a commission check which can pay down her loan also), and make HER MONEY YOUR BUSINESS.
I believe I first heard Top Director, Lisa Ann Harmon say it, “With a 600 she is frustrated and scared; with a 3600, she is only scared.”
GO TO YOUR PRINTOUT!!!
The AREAS to add production high to low:
1. New Consultants. Get the agreements; Get the STAR order.
2. New Consultants who ordered last month who need to place the MOST IMPORTANT order—the 2nd order!
3. New Consultants from the past 2-3 months who have not placed their Initial Orders.
4. Base Consultants who are working but who are not at Profit. Make suggestions and stay on top of it.
5. Base Consultants ON Profit who are re-investing based on Sales and ordering New or Seasonal Products. Show them how to increase their sales
6. Hobby and Personal Use consultants. Always keep them informed about new products. Make sure they know your personal shopping website so they can look often at those products and looks. AT THE END OF A CHALLENGE OR END OF A YEAR, make sure you allow them the fun and privilege of being a part of a TEAM. Placing $200-$400 orders is something they may WANT to do!
7. Former Consultants. Treat this group as your BEST Customers! Seriously! Send them mailings, email promos ( Do not overdo it). Remind them via email or snail mail when mo. 13 is coming so they do not have to order a $20 Second- Chance package.Now you need a game plan. Who are your RECRUITERS??
P.S. You are the BEST one, and the Company pays you 26% to
personally recruit. Where are all those new consultants going to come from? PRIORITIZE YOUR TIME AND BOOK YOURSELF AND SET YOUR EVENTS WITH THIS PRIORITY!!!How good is your Orientation Process? Are you using Next STEP audio/cd as a layer for an Inventory Decision? I am told daily that people get STAR orders, EMERALD orders by using that tool. Are you using a Color Brochure to show the sample packages and FREE bonus products as a ONE TIME, Initial Order offer?
When will you PHONE follow up with NEW, New last month, New in the last 90 days to pace them along? Do you have a chart for this communication?
How are you increasing the SELLING skills of your BASE? [NOTICE WHERE THIS COMES IN ON THE ORDER OF PRIORITY AS TO HOW YOU INVEST YOUR TIME?] Are you ‘upping’ their STAR goal? If they are the same star repeatedly, something is off. Either their Customer Service is poor or they slowly begin to sell to fewer NEW clients. Their wholesale orders should be on the increase if they are increasing their Customer Base.
Are you teaching them to sell Completes at SCC? Not telling, teaching! If you don’t SHOW and TEACH them to put together Complete Collections for each CLASS guest, they will never HAVE that amount of product. And they will eventually, even if subconsciously, sell ‘CONVENIENTLY’, not putting themselves in a bind by selling what they don’t have on shelf. If they PUT A COMPLETE SET together for EVERY GUEST, they may not sell completes to all guests, but they will sell more to each guest than they would have. (I teach this principle on the PERFECT 10 tape. Although the products have changed, the principles have not.)
THOUGHT: How many of your consultants could hold 10 Classes this month and put together Complete Sets for an average of 4 guests per class? How many of them could hold 5 classes in 2 weeks without running out of product? (20 Complete Sets?)
Opinion: If you don’t have this kind of product and Roll-ups on hand, you are working from SCARCITY and poor time management.
Do you keep your Hobby, Personal Use and Former Consultants informed AS CLEARLY as you would your best Customers? I hope so! After 6 mos. of not ordering, they are not receiving APPLAUSE. So they don’t know about new products or discounts or promotions, etc.! Make sure you send them samples, look books, sample $200 orders and love “I appreciate you” notes.
Remind them to use their MK discount for shopping to order Bridal, Mother’s Day, Christmas, Birthday, etc. gifts. What is your SYSTEM for communicating this?
[NOTICE WHERE THIS FALL IS IN THE PRIORITY ORDER OF YOUR TIME INVESTMENT.]
‘WHAT YOU TALK ABOUT, YOU BRING ABOUT’.
Make Getting to and remaining ON PROFIT a consistent and repetitive TRAINING! Make it special. Make it elite. Your consultants cannot reap the ABUNDANT rewards of this opportunity if they are working from scarcity. REWARD and RECOGNIZE what you want to create more of.
* to have a consultant verify her PROFIT STATUS, I would ask her to take a paper inventory on an order form and hand it in to me so I can see the $3600 wh. Excluding Limited Edition products. Once she has done that (if it is after her initial order), I will award her the Profit Pin, host the Success Meeting Celebration, and have my One-on-One Money Management Training over coffee with her.
So how sick is it that Pam only gives new consultants “money management training” AFTER they’ve racked up $3,600 or more on their credit cards?
Visit the
“make HER MONEY YOUR BUSINESS”, indeed! Unless you want to buy your unit’s monthly “production” all by yourself.
“all they need to know about $ management is to make the min. payment on their cc or loan and invest 100% of all they have collected into product so that they can GET TO PROFIT”
I’m not an economics person so I may not understand this very well, but if you put $3600 debt onto a credit card/loan, is it really wise to only pay the minimum while taking 100% of your profit and buying MORE product? That doesn’t seem very smart. Buying more product doesn’t seem like it would help you “GET TO PROFIT,” it seems like it would just get you more product that isn’t selling. In order to “get to profit” you would need to be holding lots of classes/parties and selling a lot, all the time. Which doesn’t work since no one actually wants to attend parties or buy $200 skin care packages. Buying lots of wholesale product doesn’t help the fact that no one wants to actually spend such ludicrous amounts on sub par products.
Also, is that really “all they need to know” about money management? That doesn’t sound like very good training to me.
This is something I thought from the get-go but somehow managed to get sucked into the pink fog anyway!
I started with a star ($1800) order. I had NO IDEA what a star was. In the next few months that followed I was absolutely stunned to see how much they promoted orders at those meetings! Why, why why, why would I ever buy more products when I hadn’t sold the stuff I had (or paid it off) yet?? I seriously felt like MK just wanted my money (which they did).
This is one of the biggest embarrassments for me because I KNEW and ignored it. Ugh.
Don’t feel bad, J,…we all fell for it. It is a real wake up call to realize how susceptible we are to expert and crafted manipulation. We get the gut reaction- and then say, “nah… can’t be, they aren’t tricking me….”
Yes they are.
All Mary Kay directors portray “Profit Level” as if it’s the point where the consultant can start expecting to make a profit. WRONG! “Profit Level” has no relation to the consultant making a profit, because when you buy that much inventory before you have customers, you wind up with a bunch of nasty expensive junk no one wants to buy.
“Profit Level” is about the Director’s profit. It’s the point where the Director gets enough commission from your purchase to make the arm-twisting worth the time she spent.
It’s just another Mary Kay lie, brought to you by a woman who has made her living from cheating women out of their money.
Let’s also look at the income earned by Directors in the Circle of Achievement.
$300,000 Unit Club = $12,500 wholesale/month = $2,875 commission
$350,000 Unit Club = $14,583 production = $3,354 commission
$400,000 Unit Club = $16,666 wh/month = $3,833
AT ONLY THIS POINT WOULD YOU BE A CADILLAC DIRECTOR WITHOUT MAKING CAR PAYMENTS.
$500,000 Unit Club = $20,833 production = $4,791 commission
AT THIS POINT, A DIRECTOR WOULD BE GROSSING ABOUT $50,000/YEAR IN INCOME. TAXES AND EXPENSES WOULD THEN BE SUBTRACTED FROM THAT.
$550,000 Unit Club = $22,916 monthly average production = $5,270 comission
$600,000 Unit Club = $25,000 production = $5,750 commission
$650,000 Unit Club = $27,083 production = $6,229 commission
AT THIS POINT, THIS IS A “TOP TRIP” DIRECTOR EARNING $74,750 IN GROSS COMMISSIONS FOR THE YEAR. THEN, SUBTRACT HER EXPENSES.
So, what all consultants and directors need to realize is how FEW people make it onto the trips and how little money they actually take home. This was using pure averages, not considering chargebacks for their commissions or monthly/yearly expenses.
The elite of all directors with gross income of < $75,000/year compared to women working as, for example, Administrative Assistants/secretaries who also have full health, dental, and vision benefits, 401K, disability, and paid time off and clearing over $55,000/year. And those ladies don't have expenses to subtract from their income, either. I personally know a nurse who is earning well over that, has all those benefits, and works just 3 days a week!
Top Trip Director = secretary pay. Pretty "elite"! Wake up!!
“This was using pure averages, not considering chargebacks for their commissions or monthly/yearly expenses.”….
Don’t forget, that also doesn’t include how much they had to buy themselves to top off their production. How much of those commission checks were used to buy more product to keep their unit going?
“THOUGHT: How many of your consultants could hold 10 Classes this month and put together Complete Sets for an average of 4 guests per class? How many of them could hold 5 classes in 2 weeks without running out of product? (20 Complete Sets?)”
What a convenient way for them to buy more and more and MORE crap to sit on their shelves… God, the manipulation is so obvious with the pink glasses removed.
Perhaps back in the 1960’s, bored housewives were thrilled to be making any money on their own, and that’s why MK celebrates these incomes as ‘elite’? I’m not in some silly ‘club circle’ or ‘grand achiever’ at my job. We just have consistent paychecks and benefits. Even FREE lunches at our FREE corporate training events where we actually have TRAINING! No hugging, sobbing, or homemade glittery posters with cut-out pictures of Cadillacs and bees–we have a dignified, professional culture at my J-O-B. Women have been wanting REAL opportunities for better pay and respect for decades. MK is not the way to get either of those.
I notice she talks about selling products and holding classes. I notice she does NOT talk about finding people interested in attending classes or buying products.
Who ya gonna call? Don’t worry about it.
You see, all those customers are just going to magically appear. Tell your friends you’re selling Mary Kay and they’ll come find you. Holding five classes a week will be easy-peasy because your friends will tell their friends, who will tell more friends…
NOT!
And when they don’t it has NOTHING to do with the company, or the products, or the prices, or the marketing, or the recruiting, or the fact that people will go out of their way to avoid anyone selling the stuff. No ma’am. Those are no problem at all. Your failure is YOUR OWN FAULT!
(End sarcasm)
BestDecision’s analysis is probably exploding some Lurker’s mind. Nice piece.
I had one of my AH-HA moments when I did some Applause Magazine math. I counted up the women making 5K a month…it was something like 300. Suddenly it dawned on me. Out of 14,000 Directors, 300 were making 60,000+ a year before expenses…and 13,700 WERE NOT!!!
Out of the entire sales force, the top 2%ers, of THEM, 0.01% were making the “executive level income” we were told we would be making when they lined-up at the guest event and shared their high check! I never did the math…I never figured out that the vast majority of Directors are no where near the earnings they pretend to make, or try to make you believe they make…and Best Decision’s simple approximation of income shows that reality.
I did the math, actually, and then I got out. I couldn’t deal with painting such a wealthy picture to my unit when I knew, and, most importantly, they knew very few made it to anything worth all the hype.
My favorite part of my piece? Cadillac Directors who aren’t making payments are only grossing $45,000/year in commissions. That means everybody else is making way less than that. Do these people realize that’s about $22/hour? Before taxes and expenses. Crazy!
I’m not in MK but I used to be. I pop on here now and again just to read. Thought you might like this. Well, not like but you know.. Total front loading. Like sell your parents stuff to buy inventory front loading. http://www.voxer.com/v/b72413eb1d
Well, that was just creepy. Sell all the “junk” in your house (and your parent’s house) that’s just collecting dust, so you can buy $20,000 of MK “junk” that will collect dust on your shelves! Yeah, right!!!