Mary Kay Ash (1915-2001)
Mary Kay Cosmetics Inc, founded in 1963

"Don’t limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve."
-- Mary Kay Ash

Arguably, no woman has played a more important role in the advancement and empowerment of women to be their own boss than she. Mary Kay Ash was the cosmetics executive who built from a mere $5,000 into $1.2 billion business empire with over 850,000 consultants in 37 countries peddling her products.

Facing and fed up with glass ceiling at her workplace where she didn't receive her due recognition and promotion, Ash went into a semi-retirement mode to write a book to help women thrive in the male-dominated business world. She envisaged a "dream company" where women could really take charge of their own lives, a company without glass ceiling, a company where the earning potential is unlimited, a company where women could be rewarded according to their efforts and pace while giving them the flexibility in juggling between work and family. Voila! She found herself a working recipe for Mary Kay Cosmetics, a multilevel, direct-sales cosmetics company, which has given women round the world the opportunities Ash herself was denied.

Born in 1915, in Hot Wells, Texas, she was youngest child of Edward Alexander and Lulu Vember Wagner. At an early age, she learnt to shoulder the responsibility of maintaining the household. Her father was disabled by tuberculosis, while her mum had to work long hours to bring in the beacon, so Ash was left with the household chores and her sick father to care for.

Like most women in the 30s, Ash got married early, in her late-teen, and settled to be a housewife. But destiny had another plan for her. The young housewife and mother discovered her natural talent as a saleswoman. She stumbled upon that when a door-to-door saleswoman offers her a deal that if she could sell 10 sets of encyclopedia, the saleswoman would give Ash one set free. The young mother took the challenge and sold all 10 sets. If that was not impressive, she accomplished that within just two days and 10 sets was a month quota for any salesperson.

She shortly joined Stanley Home Products to work selling household products part-time. The crucial point in her life occurred in 1938 when her husband run away with another woman. With three children to care, she turned full-time and soon rose to become the top sales producer. She was very successful and stayed at Stanley for the next twenty-five years, from 1939 to 1952. However, she found herself hitting the glass ceiling when men of lesser abilities bypass her in both paid and promotion. Moreover, she felt her ideas for the company were ignored and laughed at.

In frustration, she left. In 1952, Ash took a position as the national training director for the World Gift Company. Again, she was extremely successful by earning herself a seat on the company's board of directors and expanded the company's reach to to 43 states. Again glass ceiling appeared in the early 1960s when a man that she trained, was promoted to her supervisor and was paid twice as much as her, she decided to retire early.

She set out to write a book detailing her unpleasant experiences, offering advice on how women could thrive in a male-dominated business world as well as envisioning a dream company tailored for working women that would be women-friendly, promotion based on merit, and choose products based on their saleablility and marketability rather than profitability. Reviewing the draft, she realised that she had inadvertently created a workable direct-sale company and thought, "Why am I theorising about a dream company? Why don't' I just start one?"

But before that, she needed a product, a good product that women could easily relate to, something not too costly, and something whose usage is frequent and need constant replenishment. Well, she didn't look too hard to find it because the product that was going to take the world by storm was all these while sitting on her dressing table.

Ash had been buying a skin softener from a daughter from a local hide tanner who had developed the special cream from tanning solutions. With her $5,000 life savings, Mary bought the recipe for the skin softener and created a line of skin care products based on the hide tanner's formulation.

She also assembled a sales team of nine women and her husband from her second marriage was handling legal and financial matters. One month before the inauguration of the new company and products, a tragedy occurred, her husband died from cancer. Ash's accountant and lawyer urged her to abandon her plan for he thought she would not succeed without her husband. Fortunately, Ash, like all entrepreneurs, ignored the advice of the so-called experts, and went ahead with her vision. With the help of her 20-year-old son Richard Rogers, she launched Mary Kay Cosmetics on Friday, September 13, 1963.

From then onwards, she did not look back and the small direct sales company grew to become the largest direct seller of skin care and colour cosmetics in the United States.

To motivate her sales force, which she called consultants, Ash rewarded them with diamond, five-star vacations and the pink Cadillacs. The results surpassed her expectations. And the pink car was since synonymous with Mary Kay Cosmetic. Finally, Mary Kay's dream had become a reality for her and the millions of women across America as well as the world.

Notable Quotes from Mary Kay Ash

"Don’t limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve."

"Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says 'Make Me Feel Important.' Not only will you succeed in business, you will succeed in life."

"I think the biggest legacy we are going to leave is a whole community of children who believe they can do anything in this world because they watched their mamas do it."

"Don’t limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve."

"Every failure, obstacle or hardship is an opportunity in disguise. Success in many cases is failure turned inside out. The greatest pollution problem we face today is negativity. Eliminate the negative attitude and believe you can do anything. Replace 'if I can, I hope, maybe' with 'I can, I will, I must.'"

"I always greet our employees with a warm 'Hi! How are you?' When a new employee answers, 'Uh, pretty good. How are you, Mary Kay? 'I’ll say, 'You’re not just good, you’re great!' Each time I see him or her afterward, he or she will say, 'I’m great!' and the smile will get bigger and bigger. If you act enthusiastic, you become enthusiastic – and it spreads like wildfire!"

"Do you know that within your power lies every step you ever dreamed of stepping, and within your power lies every joy you ever dreamed of seeing? Within yourself lies everything you ever dreamed of being. Become everything that God wants you to be. It is within your reach. Dare to grow into your dreams and claim this as your motto: Let it be me."

"We must have a theme, a goal, a purpose in our lives. If you don’t know where you’re aiming, you don’t have a goal. My goal is to live my life in such a way that when I die, someone can say, she cared.”

"When you reach an obstacle, turn it into an opportunity. You have the choice. You can overcome and be a winner, or you can allow it to overcome you and be a loser. The choice is yours and yours alone. Refuse to throw in the towel. Go that extra mile that failures refuse to travel. It is far better to be exhausted from success than to be rested from failure."

"The definition of successful people is simply ordinary people with extraordinary determination. You cannot keep determined people from success. If you place stumbling blocks in their way, they will use them for stepping-stones and climb to new heights. People who succeed have a goal, a dream and make their plans and follow them."

"I was taught to put my best effort into anything I did, and I can honestly say I've always done that. Still, there were many times when I failed, many times when I was disappointed. We didn't set the world on fire from the first day: disappointments, setbacks and work have created the Company as it is today. I envisioned a company in which any woman could become just as successful as she wanted to be. The doors would be wide open to opportunity for women who were willing to pay the price and had the courage to dream."

"My priorities have always been God first, family second, career third. I have found that when I put my life in this order, everything seems to work out. God was my first priority early in my career when I was struggling to make ends meet. Through the failures and success I have experienced since then, my faith has remained unchecked."

"Hope is wishing for something to come true. Faith is belief that it will come true. Believe that for every problem God gives you, He will also provide you with a solution."

"Behind every success story in Mary Kay, you will find a simple explanation of great faith. I believe that every person has a capacity for greatness, that God planted the seeds there, and it is up to us to make them blossom forth with patience, guidance and belief. It is up to us to discover the multiple talents that we possess and bring them into fruition."

"Many women have made the mistake of changing their beliefs to accommodate their work. It must be the other way around. No circumstance is so unusual that it demands a double standard or separates us from our faith. No matter how fast the world changes, exemplary values must remain constant."

"People are definitely a company’s greatest asset. It doesn't make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps."

"A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one."

"We need leaders who add value to the people and the organization they lead; who work for the benefit of others and not just for their own personal gain; who inspire and motivate rather than intimidate and manipulate; who live with people to know their problems and live with God in order to solve them; and who follow a moral compass that points in the right direction regardless of the trends."

"If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can't, you're right."

"I have learned to imagine an invisible sign around each person’s neck that says, 'Make me feel important!' I respond to it immediately, and I never cease to be amazed at how positively people react. If I were to teach a first-year management course, I would instruct every student to wear a make-me-feel-important sign for the entire semester. By the end of the term and for the rest of their lives, they’d imagine seeing the same sign hanging from the neck of everyone they met. What wonderful relationships they would build with their spouses, friends, co-workers and customers!"

"Our Company was begun with only one objective ... that of giving women the chance to succeed, an opportunity that simply did not exist in the early ’60s. I just couldn't believe that a woman’s brain was worth fifty cents on the dollar. With all my heart, I wanted to change that."

"Listen long enough and the person will generally come up with an adequate solution."

"Sandwich every bit of criticism between two layers of praise."

Read my other essays under the Chutzpah series.

Leo Kee Chye

Sunday, March 13, 2005