Sherry Sat Out a Year to Get a New Director
Pyramid schemes like Mary Kay have lots of rules for how the downlines work. Who gets paid commission on whose orders. How many levels deep the commissions are paid. Whose upline you’re in…
One of those picky details is who your director is. Once you sign up and you fall under a certain Mary Kay sales director, you’re stuck. If you hate your director like Sherry Lacks did, you can’t switch to a different unit. Your only option is to stop ordering products for a year so that you sit in inactive status. Then after the year has passed, you will be automatically terminated by Mary Kay and you can sign up under a new sales director.
Sherry says her agreement expires on October 31 and then she’ll be ready for a new director!
Who was Sherry’s director? It was Kathy Benitez, but there’s no word on why the relationship went south.
Since at least 2024, Sherry has been trying to become a sales director.
And just last year, Sherry was soooo ready to become a sales director. She was a DIQ in May 2025, but it looks like she didn’t finish. In November 2025, she said she was close to being a sales . And yet she hadn’t ordered any products that month? (To have her agreement expire on October 31, 2026, her last order would have had to be in October 2025.) The entire past year, Sherry was posting on social media regarding product sales, so she must have been selling her inventory on hand and trading with other consultants.
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Sherry is excited about the opportunity to get a new sales director, but not everyone is excited for her. Cindy Smith-Bierema says Sherry is being like a spoiled child with divorced parents.
Now… Cindy may live her life hopelessly in a delusional pink bubble. But she’s got one thing right: It does not matter who your sales director is.
Almost everyone fails in MLM. Whether your director is “good” or “bad,” you’re almost guaranteed to lose money in the scheme. Sherry can change directors all she wants, but she will most likely fail in DIQ again. Or if she does make it to sales director, she’ll most likely lose her unit in the first year, as so many do.
It’s interesting that Mary Kay is all about “go give,” but Cindy Smith-Bierema tells Sherry that “karma is a bitch” and suggests that it’s somehow “ugly” to seek a new director. WOW! How kind of you, Cindy.
But Sherry is undeterred. She had the right answer for Bitter Cindy Bierema, “thanks for the feedback.” But Cindy won’t let it go. Stacy James says!!!!
My goodness, Cindy. Maybe mind your own business. If you don’t like people changing directors, then don’t change directors. But let Sherry do whatever she wants. Yes, she’s misguided because she thinks that getting a different director will change her outcome in this business. But she followed the rules, so leave her alone.
Visit the
The real reason Cindy is angry is the potential chargebacks, the loss of production, one less peon, and the loss of income from Sherry’s orders. And a bruised ego. “HOW DARE SHE LEAVE ME?!!?”
The way C-word Cindy goes from “Karma is a bitch” to “you can’t out-give God” in the same breath is a masterpiece of unconscious irony. Makes me wonder how she made director in the first place with an attitude like that, unless she’s one of the Jekyll and Hyde types. There’s no hiding the Hyde now, anyway. Any potential recruit can now google her and see her true colors.
My advice to Sherry is to think back on this past year of not buying MK stuff: How are your fiances now? How’s the clutter in your house? How are things with your family and friends? What have you been doing during this year of not climbing the ladder that you’ve enjoyed? How were those things that year you went into DIQ? Do you really want to put yourself through that again?
Cindy had one more comment she shared before Sherry turned off comments.
https://i.imgur.com/bSULIpc.jpg
Good catch. What a (moldy, rotten, maggot-infested) peach.
My former NSD told a room full of Directors that I wasn’t allowed to go to a different NSDs training because she was ahead of the other NSD is commissions, so that means she was doing it “right.” How dare I think that going somewhere else to find a teacher that more matched my DISC style would be the right thing to do?! Who cares if it actually help me grow, my NSD was right and no one else would be. Ick.
“What you decide between your 2 ears will determine your success!”
Not exactly, unless you decide to leave Mary Kay! Success in MLMs like Mary Kay is not determined by effort (but effort is required, of course) or even outside product sales. If you cloned the most successful MK participant and filled the sales ranks with these clones, the high loss rates would remain the same.
Pay-to-play endless-chain recruiting schemes like Mary Kay have built-in failure rates. It is the downline losses that fund the upline profits…by design! Outside product sales play little, if any, role.
How to succeed then? Recruit and front-load baby! Squeeze every last penny out of your downline, and replace (or ignore) stale consultants as soon as they stop ordering! Consultant churn becomes the name of the game. Spend your time and effort recruiting and then maximizing the initial inventory (front-loading) purchases of your new recruits (before discarding/ignoring them) to pave your path to riches!
The ends justify the means, don’t you know? And it never gets any easier, so buckle up and start the grind! And try not to dwell on the growing list of discarded losers left in your wake (there will be many). They are no longer useful to you, except maybe to help with a possible panic order to meet an arbitrary goal.
Doesn’t this all sound great?
Yes, Mary Kay sucks no matter which director you choose.
I’m just appalled, but not surprised, the other consultants/directors would tell a consultant to stay with a director she wasn’t happy with (and who might have been abusive), then tell her the problem isn’t the bad/abusive director but she herself for not working hard enough.
It exposes that these are not women helping women if they encourage women to stay in bad/destructive relationships.
So she has no product that wasn’t ordered at least a year ago?
I’m surprised no one told her what I heard at Seminar: If you don’t like your director, become one! (As if it were that easy).
So do we think her inbox will be absolutely innundated with messages from directors eager for another warm body or will it be crickets because directors know money comes from INITIAL orders, and the last thing they need is another experienced consultomer who only orders sporadically?
I can’t wait for next year’s post when she finds out her new director has the same tired ideas as her former one. (If Mary Kay still has consultants then- unlikely.)
They’ll want her the same way Rachel wants Kelly Green. She’ll order a crapton of product to buy her way to a directorship and they can scoop her second line recruits when she falls out of DIQ.
It sounds like Sherry has noticed that the Mary Kay hustle isn’t working, and she has the self-esteem to know that she IS working, so she’s concluded that the problem must be training and leadership. That would be a reasonable conclusion in a legitimate job, but I wish she and the other participants would understand that it’s the “direct selling” business model that can NEVER work, not anything a director is or isn’t doing. I honestly wish her the best, and hope she doesn’t rejoin!
My friend who is a Mary Kay consultant did this. She went inactive by not ordering new product for a year but still had customers, one on one appointments and shows. The difference is she had already chosen her new director and that director helped supply her with current Look Books and limited edition products to get her through the year ( she purchased from the director at 50% off plus retail sales tax). We all know this is totally against the consultant agreement but if it is kept just between the two of them, who would know? I knew of course, but I am no longer in the company so it didn’t matter right? I told my friend “ You claim MK is not a pyramid scheme, yet that is exactly what you in by purchasing from your future director!” She said “ it’s only for a year, then I can place my own orders”. She just didn’t get it. And I’ll bet this happens more often than not.
*you are in