Mary Kay Ash
American entrepreneur (1918 - 2001)
- || At The Bottom
1963 -- Mary Kay Ash had spent more than two decades building a career in a world of business dominated by men. She was a tough woman, having endured a heartbreaking divorce after World War II, when her husband returned from the war and left her with three young children to raise. After the divorce, she entered the world of sales and became quite good at it -- so good that she was eventually hired as a trainer. For the previous ten years, she had been working as a training director for a Dallas-based company and had grown increasingly frustrated by the treatment she received from her bosses. For years, she watched as new male employees -- men she'd trained herself -- vaulted over her in the company hierarchy, where they were offered salaries that were nearly twice what she earned. "What really angered me," she wrote later, "was when I was told that these men earned more because they had families to support. I had a family to support, too." Even worse than the lack of equal pay was the lack of respect she received for her ideas. On numerous occasions, Ash presented new marketing plans that were dismissed with the explanation that she was "thinking just like a woman." When she was passed over once again for a promotion in favor of a man she'd trained , Mary Kay Ash could no longer stifle her frustration. She resigned. She didn't know how she'd earn a living, but she was determined not to give her best effort for a company that didn't value it.
- || At The Top
1987 -- By the time Mary Kay Ash retired from the cosmetics company she'd founded in 1963, she had become one of the great entrepreneurs in American history. Her company, Mary Kay Cosmetics, had grown into a business that sold more than $400 million worth of wholesale beauty products and utilized the services of more than 200,000 sales consultants who marketed the company's cosmetics to customers in the US, Canada, Australia, Germany and a handful of other countries. By 2008, Mary Kay had expanded to more than 50 nations, with sales worldwide of roughly $2.6 billion. Kay herself was a respected entrepreneur who earned numerous honors in her lifetime, including the Horatio Alger Award as well as an induction to the US Business Hall of Fame. Her charitable foundation raised money to support women suffering from domestic violence as well as to provide support for cancer research.
- || The Comeback
Though Mary Kay Ash was bitter about the treatment she'd received as a saleswoman, she knew she'd get nowhere if she dwelled on the negative. To turn her attitude around, she sat down and made a list of all the good things that had taken place over the 25 years she'd been working in business. As she wrote in one of her numerous books, "Forcing myself to think positively did wonders for my spirit." She composed the list partly as a therapeutic exercise, but also because she had a notion of writing a book for women in the business world. When she finished, she wondered if she might not just go ahead and launch a business of her own. Using the $5000 she'd managed to save up over the years, she financed the purchase of a skin-care products company and opened a store of her own in Dallas. "I was middle-aged, had varicose veins, and had no time to fool around," she wrote later in her life. She quickly recruited more than 300 "sales consultants" and developed a business that utilized all the lessons she'd learned from her early experiences. She insisted that her employees work hard and set high standards for success, but she also believed that people were motivated to succeed when their accomplishments and ideas were recognized and valued. She tried to treat her employees as she wished she had been treated by her former employer.
