The phone calls kept coming. "Four!" he'd say, "I heard you made cookies. Where are my cookies?"

Eventually I'd stop answering and then it would be text messages, all from Gary, all demanding cookies.

And so one day I headed into my kitchen. "I'll give him cookies. Paisley, rainbow-colored, HIPPIE COOKIES!"

I made up the most beautiful dough, swirled with tie-dye colors and baked to perfection. I packed them in a special box just for him and dusted them with my own special sugar mix.

To: Gary
With Love: 4

My daughter, Lillian Idol, came into the kitchen and asked to lick the bowl.

"Oh no honey. Those are special cookies for Gary, and the dough will make you sick."

Indeed.


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This very strange Idol Entry is in honor of agirlnamedluna, who tragically died this week. Her favorite type of Idol Entry to write involved killing clauderainsrm in a number of creative ways. agirlnamedluna will be sorely missed.

Hello is this thing on?

I have done some friends list trimming. Very light. Mostly people who don't have journals anymore, plus some people whom I would like to not read my stuff anymore.

So does anyone hang out here anymore?

I'm going to post something of substance. Soon.

Oh and this post is public. If you think I have defriended you in error, please let me know.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay about just having a party--forgetting about the sales parties and inviting people over to buy things, and just having a party. Drinks. Food. Celebrating being alive.

My friend Maggie decided to take me up on this idea. She had been planning a Scentsy party, and instead of holding it, she cancelled the sales party and turned it into a party for her friends. Thus was born the Homemade Pizza Party with Colin Firth movies.

I volunteered to make the pizza dough, because I am good at it. Maggie bought sauce and cheese. Maggie's friend Penny volunteered to bring toppings. Maggie invited 19 people, 9 responded "yes" and, this is huge, all 9 people who responded "yes" arrived at the party. People brought gifts for the hostess, and drinks to share. Maggie spent about $25 on the party in total.

I arrived early with my bread maker, flour, yeast, corn meal, and pizza stone. Maggie donated sugar, salt, and olive oil, as well as her breadmaker, to the cause. We started up 2 lbs of dough in each of the bread makers, and by the time the party was about to start, the dough in the first bread maker was ready. Throughout the night we made a total of four pizzas, and fed everyone including Maggie's kids (who were watching movies in the basement away from the grownups).

Friends brought alcohol and mixers, and drinks were had by all. Conversation was wonderful. And when everyone had eaten something, we moved to the living room (from the kitchen/dining room naturally) to watch Bridget Jones's Diary. We made good use of the remote control, stopping to talk, share stories, and get to know each other a little better. 

And in the end, no one dropped any money on candles, or makeup, or kitchen supplies, or stamps, or scrapbooking supplies. The only money people spent was for pizza fixings, or drinks, or gifts for the hostess, and believe me, not a single person resented that kind of spending. No one feels pressured to eat pizza or to watch a movie or  to have conversation. And people thanked Maggie profusely for inviting them. 

And we're pretty sure we're going to make it a trend. 

This is part of my continuing tirade against Mary Kay. Only, this time, it's a little different. It's pretty much about most of the home based MLM businesses out there.

When I was a consultant, I used to say that a perfect client for me was someone who loved to hold parties. Since Mary Kay was supposed to be all about parties, it seemed perfect. If you had a lot of friends, why not invite them over? We'll play with makeup. And you can get free products, too!

See, the problem happens when that is the only kind of party you have.

For me, even my holiday party became a Mary Kay event, with the main party happening in the living room and the sales going on downstairs in my basement. That's right. I missed my own holiday party selling Mary Kay stuff to my friends. WHAT must they have thought of me? It's just awful. I look back and am so entirely embarrassed that I actually did that, and treated my friends that way.

But in Mary Kay, and in a lot of other MLM businesses, that is exactly what we do. We start with our friends and get them to hold a party. Then they become our customers. And they become our team members. And then, we don't have friends anymore, not really. We have clients. Customers. Team Members. People who earn us money. And eventually they stop taking your calls, because for goodness sakes, woman, I have enough makeup.

Not a week goes by these days that I do not see someone having a party of some sort or another. One has a Pampered Chef party and another has a Stampin' up party and another has a Creative Memories party and another has a 31 Gifts party. In all of these cases, as a consultant, you are setting up your hostess to be resented by her guests. Because no one really wants to buy all that stuff. Really. We are living in a terrible economy right now, and no one wants to spend a ton of money on stuff that they got to see at a "party." Oh sure, some people get into buying. But for the most part, people are getting to resent being invited to parties to spend money.

Do yo know that the last time I tried to have a party for a home based business, I invited 75 people? Do you know how many came? 4. And one of them was my neighbor who only came so that I wouldn't have the most unattended party ever. No one wants to go anymore.

You want real girlfriend time? Invite 6 of your girlfriends over for drinks and a movie. I guarantee you'll get a better response than inviting them over to play with makeup. The best party I attended in recent memory was a girl's night around Christmas time. We had cookies and hot cocoa and watched Love Actually and exchanged gifts. And everyone who was invited came. Because would you rather sit through a sales presentation or watch Colin Firth? Yeah, I thought so.

So have a party. Invite your friends over and open a bottle of wine. Watch a movie together. Play board games. Cook something together. Just don't ask your friends to buy anything. Your friendships will be better that way.

Today in Self deprecation theater, I present:



Yes, that is me, and the inspiration for the subtitle to a book: "How does an intelligent woman end up walking around the Dallas Convention Center looking like a deranged South American General?"

Aah well, if you can't laugh about it, you'll just cry about it. This picture was actually taken in my hotel room at the Adolphus, where Ann and I got to stay during Seminar 2005. It was the Seminar right before I went into DIQ, and it was supposedly an accident that we got a suite. Who knows? Doesn't the look on my face say, "OK Ann, you can take the picture, but I don't have to like it!"

I have a friend from college who first did a Kickstarter and is now completely open for business. She makes custom shift dresses that are to your exact measurements, using vintage and/or eco-friendly fabrics. Best of all, she has you do a ton of measurements so it is sure to fit you! 

I can't wait to get mine! GO look!

www.weartheshift.com 

Current Mary Kay consultants, take heed: it's tax time! It's that time of year when you are going to prove to the world that you're making money! If you're making a living at Mary Kay, then on April 16th, I invite you to post your schedule C right here. Blank out your identifying information (name, social, etc) but post it or a link to it right here.

Or perhaps, you'll do your taxes and say, "Oh my God, what am I doing with my life?"

Maybe this year, you'll be surprised. You'll do your taxes and will actually have made money for the year. Don't forget to take into account how much inventory is still on your shelves. Have you finished paying for it? Or are you making giant interest-only payments on it every month? If you made money, how much? Did you net $1000? $5000? even $10,000? If you're working full-time or even working only 20 hours per week, is $10,000 a full or even half-time salary?

When you hear the Mary Kay business plan for the first time, one of the things you'll hear is all about the "tax advantages." Write off your computer, your printer, your office supplies, your office space. Write off the cost of traveling to Seminar and Leadership conference and Career Conference and your Fall Advance/Retreat/Summit. Write off the cost of your weekly meeting. Write off the interest on your credit card that you're going to use for all of your Mary Kay inventory and expenses. Write it off, write it off, write it off! Many directors will even tell bald-faced lies, telling you that you can write off the cost of your clothes, your manicures, and your pantyhose. (If you have been told this, or if you are telling it, you need to stop because it's not true.)

How many people know what a write-off is? I had one top director tell me that if you used a credit card for inventory and didn't use it for anything but Mary Kay, you could write off all of the interest, and that would make it just like an interest-free loan from a relative! Now, I am a generally smart person, and I not only didn't question it, but I repeated it!

But the thing is, it's completely wrong! A write off or deduction is NOT the same as a tax credit! A tax credit is something that takes money off of what you owe in taxes. For instance, people who qualified for the first-time homebuyer tax credit last year were able to take $8000 off of what they owed in taxes for the year. If they would have had an $8000 tax bill, that would be reduced to $0. A deduction or write-off only reduces your amount of taxable income. So if you spent $1000 on Seminar fees, airfare, and food, all that does is reduce your amount of income by $1000. So if you miraculously made $5000 in Mary Kay, that $1000 would reduce that amount to $4000, and only the $4000 is then taxed. If you paid $500 in interest on your credit card, you don't get that $500 back; you only reduce that $4000 that you netted to $3500. You'll pay fewer taxes, sure. But you still SPENT that $1500 on Seminar and interest payments, and you're NOT getting that money back.

Put another way, Mary Kay will try to convince you that spending money is good because you can "write it off." They make you think that you're going to get all of that money back. The fact is, you'll spend the money, and you'll see that your bottom line has gone down. So you might not have to pay taxes on your MK business. That means YOU DIDN'T MAKE MONEY.

If you've done your taxes and seen that you've once again lost money, or made so little money that you would have been better off working part-time at McDonalds, it is time to seriously consider quitting. You can return any inventory that you purchased in the last 12 months for a 90% buy-back. You will never be able to do Mary Kay again, but hey, that's not such a bad thing.

Oh and by the way, I write this about Mary Kay, but it goes for any multi-level/dual-marketing/network marketing business. Are you doing one? And are you being honest with yourself when you do your taxes? Is the effort you put into your business being reflected in your pay? Be honest with yourself, and save your finances before it's too late.

 It's been a few years in one style, and although I loved my cherry blossoms, it reminded me way too much of being in the Pink Haze. I have switched to another of my favorite things: coffee! Haha.

Anyway, working on another Mary Kay post. Hoping to have it done sometime this week.

I meant to come back here and continue my information about Mary Kay and how it manages to ruin so many people. Then I got busy with my actual job that earns me actual money, so my writing went by the wayside for a while. I actually wrote this one for Pink Truth last week, so apologies if it references anything strictly from PT or appears to be self-referential to my LJ. I tried to edit but I'm also trying to get to a real estate closing on Friday.

--


How is it that a Mary Kay consultant ends up with thousands upon thousands of dollars in unsold, outdated inventory? You would think that there must be some smart women in Mary Kay, so how can it be that so many of us ended up with ridiculous amounts of products?

I was a consultant for about six years and a director for two, and my own inventory story ran the gamut of lessons learned.

When I started my business, I had very little room on a credit card. I did a $1200 order because that is what I could afford. After visiting my director's house and seeing how much she had on her shelves, along with hearing her explanation that you have to have it to sell it, I managed to find another $600 to bring my inventory level up to $1800. It seemed reasonable for a part-timer.

Six months after I started my business, the foundations changed. Of course, I tried to continue selling the ones I had, but when all of the company materials have the new products listed, when the old products are no longer available on the web site, everyone figures out pretty quickly that you're selling them the old stuff. So a few hundred dollars in foundations went into a box while I spent a few hundred more dollars on new foundations.

But then there always seemed to be a reason to order. Order limited edition stuff because it's going to sell out! Order this stuff that's being discontinued because you won't be able to get it anymore! Order new lipsticks in new colors! Order new lipsticks in new packages!

For me, probably the most awful moment (outside of my directorship woes that I have already written about) came when they decided to change to mineral colors. There I was sitting on $600 in eyeshadows and probably another $400 in blushes, and they were no longer going to fit in the compacts. I actually bought extra compacts in hopes that I could sell off what I had before the changeover. I held color parties constantly! I offered colors for listening to the business plan. I offered a discount on colors. The more popular colors--Orchid, Sunny Spice, and the like, I could sell with the "Going going gone forever" line, but try selling an Eggplant blush that way. Not so much.

A few months after the mineral colors came out, I could no longer get away with selling old colors to new customers, so yet again, I was stuck.

Stuck stuck stuck, with color after color that I would never be able to sell.


So until this point, I had bought inventory for a number of reasons: new consultant, building a store, products coming, products going, and limited edition. You see, you can say all you want that you are just going to replenish what you sell. But if you have to add new products all the time, you're not doing that. You still have to replenish what you sell, see? You can't sit there with no cleanser on your shelves. But you need the limited stuff (no you don't), and you need the new stuff (no you don't) and you have to have enough to cover demand, or your customers will go to someone who can (no they won't).

Well, then I became a director. And there is the number one biggest way that people end up with thousands of dollars of extra inventory that they will never sell. Because as a director, you can take all of the above and multiply it by 4 or more times. I was not a "successful" director by MK standards. I was constantly struggling to make my unit's $4000/month production, because after all of the inventory insanity that I went through myself, I could not bring myself to ask anyone else to front load inventory. It just made no sense to me! How could I be an honest person and say that someone really needed all of that on their shelves?

So I didn't, and I ate the difference. Between $1000 and $2000 every two months just to keep up my directorship, and all of that product went unsold. And you'd think I'd have learned my lesson and spent it all on Timewise cleansers and moisturizers! Instead I took the opportunity to stock up on the things I'd never had much of in the past, like perfumes and spa products. Of course if you sell one perfume, that's a nice profit, only, not really. A $40 perfume, as we know, is $20 in profit, but there is no profit when you're sitting on a mountain of product and debt.

A couple of years ago, I started off the year having a giant 50% off sale, just to get all of the discontinued stuff off of my shelves (it didn't work very well, but I brought in a couple thousand dollars to go toward the debt). At the end of the year, when we did our taxes, I was sure that I had made money that year. I was SURE of it! But there it came back... I had once again lost money in Mary Kay. HOW? I asked my husband, when I didn't spend anything on inventory that year and only sold what I had on the shelves?

Well, of course, I was selling it at a discount, and I was still sending out Look Books and I went to a couple of conferences. It's the great Profit Myth. I fooled myself with Cash Flow. I saw cash coming in and assumed I was making money, when, in fact, I was so far behind that there was no way I could ever show a real profit. Plus, by selling product at my cost (just to recoup my lost money), but by continuing to do all of the advertising and conferences, I was yet again spending money I wasn't earning. But that year, I was still truly surprised when the taxes were done and it showed that I had lost so much, yet again.

I've often said that I take all of the blame for what I did to my finances. I'm not a dumb person. But the culture of Mary Kay, the constant product line changes, and the rules for directorship is one where more and more people find themselves in the same situation I was in. That is why the system is broken. Recognition is always based on Retail, which puts you in the mindset of believing you have made more money than you have. And not just at Seminar. At your unit meeting, you are recognized for sales numbers, and even when they tell consultants to split 60/40, they tell all of the guests that it's 50% profit. They Remind you that it's 50% profit. When you have a large inventory, they tell you that you are operating at a "profit level," only no one reminds you that you're not actually making a profit if you have not yet paid for that inventory. You begin to think in terms of cash flow and not profit, and it is not until you see those numbers out in front of you on your Schedule C that you realize what you have done to your finances.

As I said, it is broken, and it is insidious. 



(Final note: I have been posting these to my facebook and I assume some MK people will come over here to tell me what a Negative Nelly I am, and how I just didn't try hard enough. I would ask them to please post their Schedule C for us to look at. They are all welcome to black out name and Social Security number, but if they really want to argue with this, they need to pony up the Schedule C to prove it)

A few years ago, I wrote an entry for LJ Idol writing about giving up my Mary Kay directorship. I really did feel like a failure, and my friends were all so wonderfully supportive that it really made me feel better. I had not yet announced my intention to go into real estate training. It's hard to believe it's been three years since then. 

At the time, I believed that I would take a break and then aim for directorship again when I had more time and both kids were in school.

Three years later, I have finally made the decision to quit Mary Kay entirely. As of the end of this month, I will begin "T" status with the company, which stands for "terminating." I'm going to give up what remained of my personal team (all 5 of them), and in another 6 months I will be completely terminated. I might actually decide to just call the company and have them terminate my consultant number completely before that time; for now I need to be able to log into the system to do my taxes.

I am going to write some things about Mary Kay. Some of them are unsavory. If you've ever seen my old LJ page, it said, "Living in the Pink Bubble," but in reality it was more of a Pink Haze or a Pink Fog. I know that there will be MK people on here who will defriend me, perhaps over on Facebook, too, for being negative. I assure you that this is not being negative; it is being truthful. That is something that most people deep in the Pink Haze cannot do.

Here is my truth: I came out of my Mary Kay directorship with more than $15,000 in debt. I never made money. I will repeat, I never made money. I had cash flow, but that is not the same thing. Let's talk about this.

When you start in MK, you are told that there are no quotas. This is not, strictly speaking, true. In order to be a consultant, you must place a $200 order once per year. If you have a team, you must maintain Active or Inactive status to keep your team, and that means placing an order approximately every 6 months. If you want to be able to order any amount of products, you must order approximately once every three months (You are active the month you place an order and the 2 months following, so depending on the time of month you order, it could be only every 2 months.)

When you become a director, you and your unit must maintain a $4000 per month minimum wholesale production. If you miss this quota one month, you have the following month to reach it, otherwise you are terminated as a director.

The first time you are about to miss for the 2nd month in a row, I nearly guarantee you that someone above you in the hierarchy is going to say to you "don't worry about it; just buy it and you'll be able to sell it. Have a great month next month and you'll make it all back in commissions anyway."  And thus, you get on the hamster wheel.

As a director, there are two ways that you can get up to your $4000 per month unit wholesale quota. The first is to have a huge team of people who sell like crazy and order like crazy. Only, most people don't do that. The company will tell you that it's all a numbers game. One third of your unit is coming in, one third is working, and one third is on its way out. So the other way to meet your wholesale quota is to recruit a ton of people and have them place very large initial orders of $1800 or higher. When as a director you go to your training sessions held by the company, a huge amount of time is spent teaching you to "pull inventory." $1800 is chicken feed. They're teaching you to get people to place $3600 or higher initial orders. I could not do this. Even three years ago, we were living in a recession. The one time I convinced someone to place an $1800 order, she pretty much disappeared nearly immediately, and I personally felt like I had done her a huge disservice. The one time someone placed a $3600 (I was still a consultant at the time and my director had done the inventory talk), that person returned the product a few months later, and I experienced my first charge-back. Oh yes, if you get a commission check and the person returns product, you have to pay the commission back. Big surprise that was.

 So, because I could not bring myself to ask anyone to place these huge orders, I was left with what people would order based on their sales. And I taught selling. I was a great seller. But I was an unusual person. When you listen to your recruiting interview, they will tell you that they don't want people who are good at sales (because most people will say they are not good at sales) but in the end, it takes a good sales person to sell the stuff. Most of my team and unit had other jobs, and were selling a lipstick here or there to make some extra cash. There was only one in my unit, not a personal recruit, who consistently sold products and placed orders to support them. One. And not a personal recruit, which meant that if I lost my directorship I would lose her.

In all, you are made to believe that if you just stick it out and work harder, your biggest month is just around the corner. Just work harder. Sell more product, recruit more people, frontload inventory. Get lots of other women into big debt so that you don't have to. And once you are sitting on all of that inventory of your own, you feel that you can't quit, because your next big month is just around the corner, and you'll get a huge commission check and be out of debt.  You're in a pink haze, and you can't see that you're just digging a giant hole. Every other month you are supplementing your own production in order to keep that directorship, to have the next big month.

In addition to the inventory insanity, there's more debt to be incurred when you are a director. For instance, you are highly discouraged from holding your unit meetings in your own home, so you need to rent a space. There goes $50 per week. You are encouraged to have a huge debut to announce your directorship, so there goes about $300. There are prizes to be bought for consultants. As a director, you must buy the Director Suit, which, depending on your options, is approximately $300. Because of the timing of when I became a director, I bought three of them over 2 years. Seminar officially costs $175 but you have to get there ($250+), get a hotel room ($300), eat ($200+) and pay for transportation ($50) so in the end it's $1000 to go. Rinse and repeat for Leadership conference. Rinse and repeat for your Fall Retreat and Career Conference. And when you first become a director, you get to go to "free" training in Dallas, where you still have to pay for airfare, hotel, and some of your food. You BLEED money as a director. 

And by the way, if you happen to be very successful at recruiting and front-loading inventory, and you happen to earn a car, your monthly quota goes up. For Cadillac drivers, the monthly quota goes up to $16,000. If you miss it, you have to make a payment on the car. Up to $900 per month. Ever wonder why I never even tried for a car? If I couldn't meet $4000, I sure as hell wasn't reaching $16,000.

As I said three years ago, when you start MK they tell you that it's part time work at full time pay. It's not true. If you become a director, which is really the only way to make full-time pay, you absolutely have to work full-time to make it work. Oh and I don't mean 40 hours per week. The women who actually make the money will tell you that they eat, sleep, and breathe Mary Kay. They will tell you that you absolutely must have child care to be a top director. They will tell you that there is no such thing as taking a break. And there is not. There are no breaks. Because if you have a $16,000 month one month, you still have a $4000 quota the next. 

They will tell you that one in four people whom you share the business plan with will recruit, and that you need to recruit five per month to maintain a unit, and ten per month to grow. They also tell you that only one in three selling appointments will hold. Assuming that everyone you meet books an appointment (which does not happen, because by now everyone can see the Crazy Mary Kay Lady coming), and you share the business with everyone you make an appointment with, you have to MEET 60 people per month just to maintain a unit (Meet 60, 1/3 will hold, which is 20, and 1/4 will recruit, which is 5). 

Are there successful directors? Sure! They march across the Seminar stage every year in their unit clubs. They become National Sales Directors. Many of them, in my opinion, lose their sense of right and wrong in the process. When I started in Mary Kay, we used to show the Applause magazine to get people to see how much money you could make if you made it to the top in Mary Kay. It was a great recruiting tool, back when those Nationals who were in from the very beginning of the company, were still on the books. Nancy Tietjen making $75,000 per month was a big thing to sell. Only now, those checks are not quite so big, and MK does not publish the commission checks of those Nationals making less than $10,000 per month anymore. Prior to that change, some of the Nationals were shown as making less than $5000 per month. Not such a great recruiting tool anymore if the top of the top are not clearing $60,000 per year.

Perhaps the most telling is this. I did a quick search to see where many of  the local Directors were who were Directors when I became one. I looked up around 10 of them. Of the 10 I looked up, two are completely missing from the roster, so we know they quit completely. Two lost their directorships and then did DIQ again. One, who was an Executive Senior Sales Director (which meant she had 5 offspring directors) is now a Senior sales director, which means she has 2 or 3 offspring. We were sure she'd make National in just a few years. The rest are Consultants. 

And then there is me. I take full responsibility for what I did to myself and my own finances, and we have, for the last three years, been climbing out of the hole I dug. But what I have come to find is that the system was broken. I have met a lot of other women now, some in person and some online, who had the exact same thing happen to them. When the system is broken, and when you are told to keep your blinders on, just look toward the goal, just do what you have to do, short-term pain for long-term gain, it is hard to see what everyone around you sees. It really is. That is why I am hoping that someone else will relate to this, and I might save someone else from the mess that I got myself into.

In another article, I will write all about how Mary Kay is really a Multi-Level or Pyramid, even if they will swear up, down, and sideways that they are not. If anyone wants you to join a Multi-level, I highly suggest you use this phrase: "Show me your Schedule C." The tax man knows the truth. This past year, I did my taxes late for various reasons, and it is no coincidence that it was October when I figured out that I was going to quit for good. I did my taxes, lost money yet again, and looked at the $10k+ of wholesale inventory on my shelves that I would never sell. Even if the company does not require inventory or even suggest it, ask to see the tax forms. Because someone who is truly making money will show it to you, and someone who is not will continue to brag about her biggest check, her National's salary, or the fabulous Girlfriend TIme you'll get. 

Thanks for reading.