Written by Queen of Section 2

Once the decision to do it is made, one’s start-up in Mary Kay couldn’t be made easier. From ordering business cards and purchasing a personalized website and other sales aids, to sitting down with your director to purchase your first inventory package. It’s easy.

Even if you feel uneasy about plunking down a few thousand dollars in skin care and make-up, Mary Kay makes that decision easy, too. They offer you a 90% buy-back guarantee on Section 1 product, which is valid for a whole year.

I have always been a big Dave Ramsey fan, and believed that his financial advice for consumers is first rate. But today Dave Ramsey got it wrong in a big way. On his blog, he published an article about making money in multi-level marketing.

The article failed to acknowledge the fact that over and over again, it has been proven that 99% of people involved in MLMs lose money. Front and center in the article was this lie:

Truthfully, if you have a go-getter personality, and you can follow some basic business and personal etiquette, you can make a lot of money in an MLM. The trick is to avoid all the potential pitfalls along the way.

Truthfully? No, there is no truth in what was said.

Written by Raisinberry

I’ll have to admit I bought into this hook line and sinker. Anybody with a Sales Training background is conditioned to believe that sales is a numbers game and so it requires more calls, more leads, more effort to make the numbers work. Striving is success. Never quitting. Press on. It’s all about being that one who goes forward with laser like focus on the goal. Who wouldn’t want to be this person? Aren’t we part of a greater society that rewards the champions? Don’t we love the “beat all odds” stories that supposedly show our greatness?

In Mary Kay, we are bathed in “if it is to be it’s up to me.” Teachings like these are part of a very dark environment that I really did not realize until years after I got out. At first blush you might think I am exaggerating.

Each of us are influenced by those around us, and sometimes we take in and trust people who have limited knowledge or depth. Many times people just grab an idea and take it in without even processing its ramifications, and then pass it along…particularly in this arena of sales, sales trainers and motivational speakers. It’s a world of quippy sayings and feel good platitudes that can really camouflage what’s irrational and downright wrong about the actual environment of Mary Kay.

We get the same comments from Mary Kay supporters over and over: Mary Kay works when you do, don’t steal someone’s dream, it’s not a get rich quick scheme, it is a business and you have to treat it like one…

The sad fact, however, is that Mary Kay is NOT a business opportunity. Even those who are making money at the very top of the company are not doing so because they are running a business. They are “making money” because a scheme (often called a pyramid scheme) takes money from those at the bottom and transfers it to those at the top.

Those hugely successful women (and a couple of men) are “succeeding” only at duping people into joining Mary Kay Cosmetics and spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on products they have almost no chance of actually selling for a profit. More than 99% of people who participate in multi-level marketing lose money. So all these “successful” women are doing is luring others into an “opportunity” to part with their family’s hard earned money.

The Direct Selling Association (DSA) promotes itself as a trade association that ensures ethics and integrity among the multi-level marketing companies that are members.

The real truth about the DSA is in this clip of my appearance on HuffPost Live:

I love it when Mary Kay national sales directors make up new words. Especially when they’re so fitting for a company that wants you to load up on product and get access to as much credit as you can so that you can keep ordering. This NSD refers to the “creditability” that you get from being a star consultant in Mary Kay. I think she means she wants you to have the ability to get credit…

This document is nothing more than a simple ploy to get you to order more than you need at the beginning of the seminar year. Remember that July is a rough month for most sales directors. They’ve just squeezed every bit of life (and money) out of their consultants by begging them to order non-stop to “meet the unit’s goal.”

One of the common “defenses” of multi-level marketing and the fact that 99% of people lose money in it… is that people just joined to HAVE FUN! They didn’t really want to make any money. They just wanted to meet people and have fun.

In this clip from my appearance on HuffPost live, I debunk the myth of joining to “have fun” with the help of Robert FitzPatrick, founder of Pyramid Scheme Alert.

A Mary Kay sales director surveyed sister directors to see how much they paid their office assistants. Check out the responses she got…

•  $8.50 per hour is what I pay my assistant… she updates my unitnet site, mails “I” status postcards, “T” status letters, and sends birthday/anniversar y emails. Her avg pay is about $30 per month….She makes more if we are doing a “campaign” and need to mail out letters to all consultants in unit…I do this about 3-4 times per year.
• $10/hour. Me and three other Directors share her so she gets close to full-time b/t the three of us.
• DFW, TX:  $8/hr & 30% product discount 

The concept of “playing ball” in Mary Kay is simple. It’s a fancy way to say that if you aren’t ordering, your director won’t help you. It doesn’t really matter if you have a ton of inventory that you’re working to sell off. All that matters are your current orders. No new orders, no help.

Here’s how one Mary Kay nsd explains it:  

One of the common statements made by people in favor of multi-level marketing is that it is just like corporate America. We call MLM a pyramid scheme, and corporate America is a pyramid too! That’s simply not true.

While the SHAPE of the hierarchy of people looks like a pyramid in MLM and in corporate Amercia (one person at the head of the company, a few below, managing several below them, and so on)… that is where the similarities end.