“If I have convinced one more woman today of her greatness and helped her believe in herself, then it has been a great day!!”

It is with this spirit that Mary Kay Ash, the founder of Mary Kay Inc., drove her company to be the preeminent skin care and cosmetic company in the world. I came into the orbit of this great woman 25 years ago as a hippie musician who never wore a lick of makeup. I had just had my first child and was looking for a business opportunity where I could make terrific money, be independent, and stay at home with my son. Never in a million years did I ever believe it would be selling—and selling lipstick at that!

But Mary Kay had imbued this business opportunity for women with everything I was looking for and more. Forty-five years ago when the company was founded, she felt that women were the greatest untapped resource in the United States. When Mary Kay was 50, she retired from Stanley Products. She left because she was sick and tired of training the men who all got promoted ahead of her.

One day she decided to make a list of everything a “dream company for women” would have. That list included great pay (not just great pay “for a woman”), flexible hours, lots of recognition for work well done, a career path that everyone could climb and reach the top, a job that would rebuild the damaged self-esteem that women tend to have, a company where one person’s success was everyone’s success, where we could all climb together, where helping each other was critical to the success of the enterprise. She wanted to sell a product where top dollar would be spent developing the very best and a product that would continue to sell regardless of the economy. But more than anything else, she wanted to have a company where the greatness within each woman was tapped and developed.

From that beginning she built Mary Kay Inc., a company that has won nearly every accolade a business can win from being the #1 skin care and cosmetics company in the U.S. for the past 25 years to being named by Fortune Magazine as one of the 10 best companies for women to work for. Our company has more women making over $100,000 a year than any other company in the world. Mary Kay believed in sharing the wealth and as such has also created more female millionaires than any company in the world.

But the key to the success of Mary Kay’s dream has been that every woman can achieve her greatness and that we will help each other do it. We are all taught to praise people to success. What a novel concept! All of the men laughed at her and said it couldn’t be done, but she had the last laugh. She always said that women were like bees—aerodynamically a bee shouldn’t be able to fly because its wings were too small for its body. But the bee goes ahead and flies anyways. And so it is with women—we go ahead and do all of the things that we are told we can’t—and we’re great at them!!!!

Long before the woman’s movement, there was Mary Kay blazing a path and bringing women along with her. Now that’s worth putting lipstick on every day!

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The New Agenda invites our members to submit a piece about a special mentor in your life:  another example of Women Who Help Women.