Mary Kay Ash

“In their first full calendar year, however, 1964, they brought in 198,000 dollars, enough to prove that the concept worked. But by the end of year two, that 198,000 dollars had turned into 800,000 dollars, a four-fold increase. And Mary Kay's impossible predic…”

“The tanner had no interest in turning it into a business, so now, in 1963, sitting at her kitchen table with her tulis, she remembered this cream. So she contacted the tanner's family. The father had passed away, but his daughter and son-in-law still had the f…”

“Dallas, Texas, August, 1963. Mary Kay Ash is sitting at breakfast with her husband, George, going over plans for their cosmetics company. They're one month away from opening. She's put her entire life savings into this.”

“We finally concluded that we would not break the basic set. We decided we would rather face a customer's initial ire than having her fail to get the desired results.”

“Her older son can't leave his job. He has a family, but he pulls out his checkbook and writes her a check for 4500 dollars. Every penny he saved since he was a kid, he hands it to her.”

“Your success as a recruiter depended entirely on your recruit success as sellers. If you recruited people and abandoned them, then they'd fail and quit, and you'd earn nothing. But if you genuinely helped them succeed, then everybody in this system made money.”

“And years later, when she designed her own company's compensation structure, she eliminated geographic restrictions entirely. Consultants could move anywhere and keep their teams because Mary Kay remembered what it felt like to lose everything just for changin…”

“The best-run companies develop their own managers from within. They rarely seek outsiders. In fact, it's a sign of weakness when a company goes outside too often for management personnel.”

“In response, Mary Kay took the company private again in 1985. In one of the largest leveraged buyouts by a woman led company at the time, she and Richard borrowed to buy out all public shareholders, and the price Three hundred and fifteen million.”

“She established competitions with prizes, not cash. Cash tended to disappear into household budgets, but prizes were visible, permanent, constant reminders of achievement. They were status symbols.”

“Mary Kay stepped back from operations in the 19 nineties, and she died in 2001 at age 83. And by then, Mary Kay Cosmetics had over 800,000 consultants in 37 countries, generating over two billion in sales.”