Mary Kay Ash, one of America’s great entrepreneurs, died Thanksgiving Day at 83 in Dallas.
She was 45 when she started a company (with just $5,000) to sell cosmetics through home and office demonstrations by sales reps – the best of whom were awarded pink Cadillacs.
Last year, her company had sales of $1.2 billion through 850,000 representatives in 37 countries. (Even the U.S. Postal Service employs only 798,000 people.) Mary Kay mastered the art of incentives, pushing her reps to higher and higher sales. In addition to Cadillacs, she gave them vacations, jewels and furs worth about $6 million a year.
The New York Times said in her obituary: “Her unique public popularity engendered such enthusiasm during the company’s annual seminar, a three-day multimillion-dollar extravaganza, that she often had to use little-know passageways to elude her fans. More than 35,000 sales representatives and directors and, in some years, professors from the Harvard Business School, paid to attend the education sessions.”