Mary Kay Ash invested her $5,000 life savings to start a Dallas cosmetics company; after her husband died before its launch, her son took over the administrative work

In business, founders can often lose partners, suppliers, and financing, but very few dare to rebuild everything, especially after losing the person who stood with them through every moment. Something similar happened with Mary Kay Ash. After her husband died of a heart attack, Ash went ahead with her plan anyway. On 13 September 1963, she opened Beauty by Mary Kay with $5,000 of her life savings, her 20-year-old son, Richard Rogers, and nine independent beauty consultants, according to the company’s press kit. Her business began in a 500-square-foot storefront in Dallas and is now sold in more than 35 markets around the world.How the business workedAsh did not step into the system without having any knowledge. She spent most of her career in direct sales, starting as a dealer for Stanley Home Products, a firm built on home parties, according to the Horatio Alger Association. At that firm, she was named ‘Queen of Sales’ after her first year. In the 1950s, she became national training director at another direct sales company, World Gift. The sticking point was that she kept training young men who were then promoted over her. By early 1963, she had retired with the idea of writing a book to help women build careers in business.Shift in the projectWhile planning the book, Ash made two lists, one covering what her former employers had done well and the other covering what they could have done better. After making the list and analysing it, she realised that she had accidentally created a marketing plan for a company of her own, where one woman could earn as far as their efforts would carry them. And that's how the book turned into a business plan. She put her $5,000 into the project and used it to buy formulas for skin care products and pay to have them bottled and packaged for shipping. Then came the launch part, which was quite hard to implement.The darkest day Her husband died even before the launch of the business they were both working on. The Horatio Alger Association, which also praised Ash with their award, noted that he was meant to run the administration. Ash was quite affected by the death of her husband and later labelled that day as the darkest day of her life. According to her autobiography, Mary Kay, her accountant and her lawyer both advised her to cancel everything she was working on. The advice seemed reasonable on paper because she was risking every dollar she had saved. Even through these obstacles, Ash didn’t give up, and her son Richard Rogers took over the administrative work his father had been due to handle. That’s how he also played a big role in growing the business.How the business grew Independent consultants bought products from the companies at a set wholesale price and sold them directly to customers at a justified retail price, which means that what each woman earned depended on how many leads she got and how much she was able to sell. A woman could start by buying a starter kit, but what she earned from there depended on her effort and circumstances, and individual results varied.Access to credit mattered too. In 1963, federal law did not stop lenders from turning applicants down because of their sex or marital status. That changed with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which was signed on 28 October 1974 and took effect on 28 October 1975, according to the Federal Reserve. When it put the law into practice, the Federal Reserve said the Act forbade creditors from discriminating on those grounds and covered banks, finance companies, department stores and credit card issuers. In the years before that, a selling model that a woman could join with a starter kit offered a way in that did not depend on a bank’s approval.Returns on investmentThe results were worth noticing. According to the company’s press kit, Mary Kay’s worldwide wholesale sales stand at $2.5 billion, and the company has been listed among the 100 best companies to work for in America several times, as the Horatio Alger Association notes.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.