In this Ask Evan episode, Evan Carmichael responds to Jacqueline’s Facebook query about stagnating sales in her three‑year‑old Mary Kay business while juggling two other jobs. He outlines a three‑step framework for growth: (1) provide far more value to customers by tying personal passion and story to the products, educating them, and positioning yourself as a trusted beauty expert; (2) overdeliver on service—guide clients on product use, offer encouragement, and create a superior experience that drives repeat purchases and referrals; (3) model success by studying top Mary Kay consultants, historic entrepreneurs like Madam C.J. Walker, and asking successful peers for practical insights. Throughout, he stresses the importance of daily, part‑time action, persistence, and authentic storytelling to differentiate yourself and build momentum.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm answering a question from one of my Facebook readers, Jacqueline, who wrote in asking about her Mary Kay business. So she wrote in saying, "I want to succeed at my Mary Kay business, which I've been doing for 3 years. I feel like I'm at a standstill. I work 2 other jobs." I'm a clerk at UPS, been there for 17 years, and I'm a supervisor at a clothing store for 12 years. I barely bring home $500 a week and I need to change. I need to make more than somebody's employee. Can you help me? What do I do? So thanks for the question, Jacqueline. Really tough situation. I know a lot of people go through that and a lot of entrepreneurs struggle to get their business off the ground. And it's great that you're sticking with it. I think a really good way to start off a business is to do it part-time so you're still making some money. From part-time jobs so you can make sure you're making forward progress every day on your business. And that's really key that you're taking steps every day to do something for your business. Now, for your Mary Kay company, the biggest thing for you and for any entrepreneur, if you want to make more money, you have to provide more value. And that's rule number 1 for, you know, making money as an entrepreneur. You have to provide a lot of value. You want to make more money quickly, provide more value quickly. Quickly, right? That's gonna be the key. So if you're not making a lot of money with your business yet, you're not providing enough value to your clients or potential clients. So they're not signing up with you or they're not buying repeat orders from you because they don't see the value. So that's where you have to overcome with education and service. And you need to provide amazing value to them and hopefully it's with the Mary Kay business because there are people who have had success with it so it can be a model that works. Hopefully it's one that works for you and you have to tie in your passion and your story into the business. Why do you love Mary Kay and why do you use their products and how have they helped you become the person that you are. Why are you so proud of using it? And that story will help encourage people, I guess, to use it as well. When I do my promotion and marketing, it's all about my story and everything that I talk about in these videos and all the work that I do is based on stuff that I've used and I find value with and I say how I use it and people tune into that. If I try to pitch something to say, "Hey, this is great, it's going to change your life," but I don't have any personal connection with it, then people won't buy it, right? People have a pretty good BS detector, and you know, they see somebody promoting something that they don't actually use, that they don't find value in themselves, then you're not gonna convince them to buy it, right? If you don't really love it, then they're not gonna love it. It's not gonna show, and people are gonna, you know, say that it's BS. So again, you gotta find ways to stand out with the value. You gotta provide more value to your potential clients so that they'll want to buy more from you. Second step here then is to overdeliver. Think about the service you provide. So with Mary Kay, you always have your specific products that you're selling. You wanna go above and beyond that and overdeliver like crazy on the service, especially at the beginning to get people used to using the products and support them through any challenges they may have with using a product. So they may buy something that, you know, you say is gonna, you know, solve whatever problem they're facing. They may not understand how to use it properly. They may be applying it incorrectly and they get frustrated with it. You want to be there to provide encouragement, help, support, and be the person that is the, the beauty expert, right? You want to make them feel confident and proud and look good. And that goes above and beyond just selling them products. And so you want to be that person who provides that extra service. So what happens then? They're going to want to buy more products from you. Right? If they really like how you've helped them with one product, they're more likely to wanna buy more products from you. They're also gonna tell their friends about you. If they start looking really good, their friends are gonna say, "Oh, you know, why do you look so good?" "Well, I started using these Mary Kay products from you." Right? And so you start getting some referral business. And so that happens from over-delivering on the service. So you get people to buy more, buy more frequently, and get more referrals. And it's not immediate, it's not a quick snap and here you go, you've got, you know, a ton of new business, but it does come in and it builds and it keeps building. And you wanna incorporate that into every customer relationship that you have. So that's 1 and 2. The 3rd thing I would suggest is to model success. I'm a huge believer in modeling success, that's why we created the website. The start was modeling famous entrepreneurs. I think there's a lot of lessons you can learn from modeling success. You can look at the story of Mary Kay, we have it on the site. You may also want to look at Madam C.J. Walker, who was the first woman billionaire in America, and she started similar beauty kind of products and built it through a multi-level marketing network. So that may help you, but I'd also look at people within your own organization. So Mary Kay has a lot of people who are successful, and is there a way for you to be able to pick their brain? And, you know, ask them a couple questions. When you approach these people, you don't wanna, you know, say, "Will you be my mentor?" because that's implying a huge relationship that people aren't willing to jump into if they don't really know you. So you wanna just say, "Can I pick your brain? Can I ask you a few questions?" If there's somebody local, can you take them out to coffee? Can you, you know, ask them just to answer a few questions while they're walking to a meeting, while they're walking to their car? Just try to get on their radar screen and sit down with them and they'll tell you a little bit of the ins and outs and what worked for them. And I find that by modeling success, it gives you two things. It gives you specific strategies to say, here's what I did that was successful and hopefully will work for you too. But also gives you the motivation to keep going because a lot of these people, it was hard. Like the beginning was really hard. If you look at any successful entrepreneur, it wasn't just made overnight. There was a lot of hardship and pains that they had to go through. And just hearing about that, at least for me, I found gives me the motivation to keep going, right? So if you go through, you know, really dark days, you find that you think you're never gonna make it through, knowing that others before you have had to face those similar challenges and they got through just gives you the extra motivation to keep going. So hopefully that helps. Again, we're looking at how do you provide a lot more value to your customers, how can you overdeliver like crazy, and then how can you model success both within the Mary Kay franchise and then also outside to other famous entrepreneurs and other entrepreneurs who you respect. Hopefully that helps you get, you know, to where you want to be. Keep going, make sure you're taking those steps every day. For those of you who are watching the video, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It makes me want to do more of these videos for you. And if you have a question about this video or a question about your own business, feel free to leave it in the comments below. I always read those and I try to respond to as many as I can. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode.
