Written by Raisinberry

“Mary Kay-isms” abound in every Unit, everywhere, USA. The problem is, since they are repeated without analysis or corroboration, these little gems are the backbone of the fraud that keeps recruits coming in and “kaybots” from getting out. Sooner or later, you find out just how conned you were, but by then, you usually HAVE to make it to Director to pay down your credit card debt. How many of these were you told?

1. The product sells itself. No it doesn’t and you cant sell it at all if you don’t get bookings.

2. There are no quotas. Of course there are quotas! There is no discount unless you order every 3 months, a minimum 200 wholesale. That’s a “quota.” Cars have quotas, Units have quotas. There are quotas.

3. It takes $18,000 and 12 team members to win your car. The numbers are right, but you will find yourself having to continue $4,500 wholesale a month to keep it, so while you may have “earned” it with 18,000, but to keep it you’ll need $4,500 every month or have a co-pay.

4. Stars drive cars. No, stars have ordered $1,800 wholesale and up. There is no telling if they ever sold anything, much less whether they will ever drive a Mary Kay car. There is no basis in fact for the Stars Drive Cars lyric.

5. You need a business plan. The Mary Kay inventory options worksheet is not a business plan. A worksheet is a veiled smokescreen to make it appear you have thought about what activity you will do. The worksheet is a tool to get you to buy, not a tool to help you really plan your business.

6. If you don’t recruit you are being selfish. If you don’t recruit you will build a customer base. If you are “unselfish” by recruiting your cusomters, you will have no sales income and will place orders on credit without sales to back them up.

7. Reinvest until you hit profit level. $3,600 wholesale inventory is a made up number that has no bearing on a Power start or perfect start. Profit is when your income exceeds your outlay-usually not known till quarter end. Having lots of inventory on your shelf just costs you money, and doesn’t mean you’ll have any profits.

8. Mary Kay has 10% of the market. We have 1 million active consultants supplying themselves and friends in a large network as hobby consultants. Mary Kay doesn’t keep retail purchase figures. We have no idea what are retail market is, but were know it’s not much

9. More women in Mary Kay make $50,000 a year and up than any other company. Less than 3% of the Directors (who are 2% of the sales force) make over 50,000 a year… 97% make less.

10. You can do it too! A multi-level marketing plan like Mary Kay prevents the majority of consultants from achieving the top 2%, because attrition collapses the unit beneath them. Mary Kay Ash called it filling the tub with the drain open. So it is very unlikely that you can too!

11. The Mary Kay marketing plan has been taught at Harvard Business School. This has never been true. The closest they ever came was a case study discussing Mary Kay, which is used in some business schools. That is far from “teaching” the marketing plan or in any way endorsing MLM.

12. Fake it till you make it. Faking it generally causes a lack of personal integrity, and blurred boundaries which ends up backfiring on the consultant. It is one thing to walk with confidence, and quite another to inflate your income and success when trying to recruit others into the company.

13. Find a way or make a way. Ways exist, but getting the goal at all cost usually means some pretty unethical stuff was done to accomplish it.

14. Cream rises to the top, but has to float on a lot of milk. The milk of MK is the thousands upon thousands of consultants and Directors churning out production. If you can look away from the fact that you make your money loading up other women in credit card debt, by all means… be cream.

15. 20% of your Unit will do 80% of the sales. According to statistics and NSDs, production comes from new recruits. Nobody expects to make money training consultants.

16. Seminar Year-to-Date Sales Leaders. Since no retail sales figures are generally known, the top ten of Seminar have no relationship to retail sales. They are actually awarded for “wholesale ordering” with a ribbon.

17. Show Up to Go Up. Showing up means you help pay for the room rental for your Director or NSD. Many people show up and show up again, looking to hear that magic statement that will make them Go Up. If you are ethical and honest, all the showing up in the world wont put you in a Suit or Car. You still have to sign women up to become competitors inside your market.

18. Never miss an event. Never missing an event means you have to take any meager profit you have and use it to pay airfares, hotels, registrations, meaning you will lose money. Events are motivational brain washing events filled with hype and fraud, and are absolutely necessary in order to keep you on the treadmill. Miss even one, and the fog starts to lift. This Mary Kay fears above all things.

19. The Secret to Success is “book, sell, book, recruit”. No, the secret is how to get a booking to hold, how to disengage caller id, how to make women want the product, how to violate the Temporal Prime Directive and get women back to 1965 when they didn’t work and held home parties, how to de-saturate the market, how to erase the negative perception of the typical Mary Kay consultant, how to find an honest to goodness business training class within Mary Kay. These are surely secrets!

20. You can do everything wrong in Mary Kay with a good attitude and succeed, and do everything right with a poor attitude and fail. Doing everything right produces exactly the same results long term as doing everything wrong. In the end, you represent a product and business that still functions as if it is 1963 and no one has heard the word PYRAMID SCHEME. You will purchase product for arbitrary goal designations that have nothing to do with retail sales, pressured by the production ploys of your Director and NSD, working many more hours than you ever dreamed trying to establish a customer base while recruiting same. You will move up the career path, which will require you create the illusion that you are becoming increasingly more successful, meaning you must maintain STAR STATUS, Unit production, or Courts of Sales and Recruiting at various levels.

21. The only way you fail in Mary Kay is if you quit. The only way to win in Mary Kay is to quit! If you continue, you will build debt trying to get all the new product, trying to achieve a fabricated dream, while the stuff you have on your shelves goes obsolete and formulas change and packaging changes and you wait for women to buy what you have, but they always want something you don’t, so you order again and again. Add the “events” tab, and in a few years you are buried.

22. Mary Kay works when you do! Mary Kay works in dribbles. Just enough to keep you in the game, believing it will turn around. You are hanging on to that $500 class you had 6 months ago… or that $1,000 week when you first started, thinking that will someday be the norm. Your family and friends bought to help you. Once out of your warm market, you see the real results. Any business that wants you to recruit your customers is after THEIR money, tricking you into appreciating 4% of wholesale, and creating your own market saturation and competition.

This concludes orientation on the PinkTruth Website. You owe us nothing, we don’t get commission, and there is no prize for joining the board. This moment of clarity is brought to you by all the women here who bought the “dream” and realized that’s exactly what it was. We woke up.