Shane Parrish

So most dealers ignored this because the percentages were so tiny.

But Mary Kay understood the mathematics of scale.

If she recruited 10 people who each sold $500 a month, that was $5,000 in sales generating 100 to 150 in commissions for her.

But if she recruited 50 people or 100, those small percentages compounded into real money.

So she started recruiting systematically.

She wasn't aggressive about it.

But at the end of successful parties, when women asked, could I do what you do?

She'd say yes and then share everything she'd learned.

Over time, she recruited about 150 women as salespeople.

She was building a huge network.

Each of those 150 women had their own customers.

They threw their own parties and they had their own recruits.

And Mary Kay earned a small percentage from all of it.

And this is where she learned the fundamental architecture of multi-level marketing.

Nobody called it that yet, of course.

Your success as a recruiter depended entirely on your recruit success as sellers.

If you recruited people and abandoned them, then they'd fail and quit, and you'd earn nothing.

But if you genuinely helped them succeed, then everybody in this system made money.

By the late 1940s, Mary Kay had become one of Stanley's top performers in Houston.

She could sell, recruit, and build.