Mary Kay Ash was born in Houston, Texas in 1918. When she was a young child, her father became ill with tuberculosis and could no longer work. Her mother had to work full time to support the family. While her mother was busy working fourteen hours a day, Mary Kay took on many of the household responsibilities. She learned to clean the house, make dinner, and care for her sick father. Whenever she felt uncertain how do something or felt overwhelmed, she would call her mother at work. Her mother would tell her how to do something and provided her daughter the encouragement to do the task. Her mother would tell her, “You can do it!” Her mothers words inspired Mary Kay and would later become the motto of May Kay Cosmetics. While she was growing up, her mother would tell her again and again, “Anything that anyone else can do, you can do better.” Mary Kay developed a competitive spirit as well as a sense of hard work and fair play. She excelled in her studies at school, which included public speaking and debate. She could articulate her opinions so elegantly that her teachers were very impressed.
When she was seventeen she married, but soon divorced and found herself a single mother of tree. She also had to work to support her children. She wanted a job that would allow her to work around her children’s schedules, because she wanted to be able to take care of them and raising her family was very important to Mary Kay. She found work selling products door to door. She found she had a gift for selling and excelled at the company as far as she could. In those days, women had limited success in the workplace. She would train the men in the workplace that would later be promoted to be
her supervisor. Frustrated, she began her own company, Mary Kay Cosmetics, in 1964, where women would not be limited reaching their full potential. She wanted her company to provide women in the workplace the same opportunities as men. She also wanted women to have the flexibility to work hours that best suited their families. She invested her entire life savings of $5.000 in her company. Mary Kay now exceeds more than $1.7 billion dollars in annual sales.
Mary Kay overcame so many obstacles in her lifetime. The hard things she had to do as a child and young woman became valuable life lessons for her. They built character and resilience into Mary Kay. She also developed important business skills like hard work, persuasiveness, adaptability, competitiveness, management skills, and people skills. She also inherited her mother’s ability to motivate others by telling them they could do anything.
Mary Kay’s principles, upon which she built her company, guided both her business and personal life and helped to make Mary Kay Cosmetics a multi-billion dollar business empire. She wanted people that worked for her to love their work and she wanted them to feel good about their work and themselves. She called them beauty consultants and set up a pyramid style business that would reward her hard work. She especially wanted women to be able to directly benefit and reap the rewards of their hard work. They could work as much or a little as they wanted to. They could be their own boss and set their own hours. Her company also has annual sales meetings that reward top sellers with wonderful prizes like diamond rings, vacation packages, and pink cadillacs.
Mary Kay Ash gave women the unlimited ability to succeed. She was a pioneer of women in the workplace. She paved the way for women to have the same opportunities as men in the workplace without sacrificing being wives and mothers. I think her mother was instrumental in Mary Kay’s success as a businesswoman. I’m amazed and inspired by the effect a mother can have on her children. We can give our own children the same tools to succeed that Mary Kay’s mother gave her. We can inspire our children by telling them, “You can do it!”
Sources:
1. Wikipedia Contributors, “Mary Kay Ash” Wikipedia.
