Shane Parrish

And the company started to take notice.

Stanley Home Products wanted to expand into Dallas.

The market was underdeveloped and full of potential.

So they promoted her to manager and told her to move.

But there was one problem with this.

Stanley refused to continue paying her commissions on sales from the 150 women she'd recruited in Houston.

Talk about a penny-wise, pound-foolish decision.

She'd spent years recruiting and training these women and now because the company was transferring her to Dallas and giving her more responsibility and more authority, they wanted to cut her off from all those override commissions.

She'd have to start over from scratch while someone else inherited her entire Houston network and collected commissions on the relationships she'd spent years building.

So Mary Kay protested, of course.

Moving cities shouldn't mean abandoning everything you created.

But Stanley's policy was clear.

Commissions were tied to geography.

If you left the territory, you left the commissions.

So she was faced with an impossible choice.

Refuse the promotion, stay in Houston, or accept the promotion and abandon her income stream.

Frustrated, but seeing no other option, she moved to Dallas and started from scratch.

The experience left her bitter.

And years later, when she designed her own company's compensation structure, she eliminated geographic restrictions entirely.

Consultants could move anywhere and keep their teams because Mary Kay remembered what it felt like to lose everything just for changing cities.