Tips For Growing Your Unit
This is a piece that is supposed to teach new directors how to really “work” Mary Kay and grow their numbers fast. Unknowingly, she gives a glimpse into the truth about MK: that the numbers work against the director. After that initial order, so few will continue to order or be able to sell their products. So the director desperately needs new unit members who make large inventory orders.
The whole reality of these numbers is sad.
Unit Size Matters!
One Third of your Unit will order and the average order is $200 so if you have a unit of 40 then expect 13 to order and that will be $2600 base production. How to increase the average? Teach them to sell. How to increase your base production? Increase your unit size. Simple Math!
10% of your Unit will work…the other 90% will be Hobby Consultants. Love them but don’t devote your time to them. With a unit of 40, you will have 4 working Consultants and one of them is YOU.
How to Manage your Time!
Be a Director one hour a day for every 50 Unit Members and the rest of the time you should be holding appts, selling products and primarily recruiting to increase your Unit Size…see above!
Maintenance should get only 20% of your time or delegate to your Assistant. Good average is hire an assistant 1 hour a week for every 20 unit members.
Create Systems in your office with tasks that are done every month or every week.
How to Manage your Money!
My recommendation is to put your Directors Check directly into your family account and all your sales into your MK account. Pay for all your MK from your MK account so that the profit on your sales pays for your expenses…trips and everything. If your MK account is low, then sell more.
If your sales profit is going into your household account then you will start to value your sales as more important than your Director’s Check and this can be dangerous because you start to value selling more than recruiting. If your Director’s Check pays for your business then you will lose your mo-jo for being in the suit.
Working with your Working Consultants!
Accountability is vital…showing up at meetings with weekly accomplishments and contacting you through out the week.
Be a VISION CASTER NOT A TASK MASTER. Fine line between accountability and over tasking them. A woman will do what she needs to do if she knows the pay off is big enough and worth while! Help her to visualize why she wants the Red Jacket, the Car, the suit.
Be willing to travel to see them. She will be believe that you believe in her if you are willing to spend your time and money to see her…talk can be too cheap.
Visit the
“…and this can be dangerous because you start to value selling more than recruiting.”
Wow, she actually says the quiet part out loud!
she just admitted recruiting is more important than selling, so products are a moot point. pyramid scheme
“…you will start to value your sales as more important than your Director’s Check and this can be dangerous because you start to value selling more than recruiting.”
Valuing sales in a business is dangerous?
“BE A VISION CASTER…”
Sell the dream.
“…if you have a unit of 40 then expect 13 to order and that will be $2600 base production.”
So on average, it takes 40 unit members to prop up one director, with a monthly “production” (ordering) volume of a measly $2,600. That “elite 2%” level is sounding more like below-minimum-wage level, isn’t it?
“If your MK account is low, then sell more.”
Oh, well, that sounds easy. Short on cash? Simple: earn more cash. Must I think of everything?
“If your sales profit is going into your household account then you will start to value your sales as more important than your Director’s Check and this can be dangerous because you start to value selling more than recruiting. ” (Emphasis added.)
And there it is. This suppisedly retail-oriented company is revealed as an endless recruiting machine. There’s a simple reason for that: maintaining a significant retail volume level is nearly impossible. It’s a lot easier to front-load inventory onto a recruit than it is to sell bits and pieces to people outside the pyramid.
Without the pretend income opportunity, Mary Kay sales would drop by 70-90%. They have to keep roping in new victims and convincing them to buy a chunk of products on the false premise that inventory = income.
Former directors can correct me, but I think that 13 ordering each month out of 40 is HIGH. In a unit of 40, I’d bet that an average of 5 place an order each month.
But what do I know? I’m just a lazy loser who left MK to start a wildly successful forensic accounting practice.
Thirteen consultants ordering is high for a unit size of 40. From what I remember back in 2005-2008, five consistently will order each month (usually around $500-600), 2 or 3 will order $200 to stay active (because they were coming up on their T status), and MAYBE one new consultant with a star order — if you were lucky. It was BARELY enough to maintain unit production for that particular time frame.
Yep. All the wisdom and all the incentives are built around buying and recruiting, with no help or incentives for actually selling in a competitive market. They can’t publicly advertise their own “business”, open their own store front or sell on popular retail platforms. MK has taken away the most important tools that sales organizations rely on to move product.
But that assumes the point is to move product into the hands of outside customers. Once you remove that assumption, you can then accept the reality that Mary Kay is actually in the business of selling to their own reps, with no dependency whatsoever on selling to outside customers. Given this, the only way to gain customers is to recruit.
And once your business profitability depends almost entirely on recruiting, you have yourself a pyramid scheme.