Q. How did the DCMS come into being?

The easiest way to describe my program is to tell you how it came about. I was the husband of a Director struggling to get herself re-established in a new city that I had dragged her to, 1,500 miles from home. Feeling guilty about the predicament she was in because she followed me, I asked her how I could help in my new-found free time. I was in the Navy at the time and had just been posted to a land posting for the first time, so I had the new experience of having weekends free to spend with the family.

I wasn't much of a homemaker, but I noticed that while she was wonderful at holding classes and motivating and selling, paperwork de-motivated her. So I volunteered to do the administration for her and she was only too happy to give it all to me. I mean all of it - customer records, inventory, taxes, unit recognition, letters and notes and almost everything involved with paper that a Consultant and Director needs to do. 

Angie is one of the best trainers in the Company and taught me everything I needed to know, in order to help her. I started out like everyone else did in 1985, with a piece of paper and a stubby pencil and I started doing Angie's paperwork and typed her newsletters on a typewriter. It wasn't long after I started helping her that I noticed how repetitive everything was, and my experience with computers was anything that is repetitive lends itself to computerization - and hey! I had a Commodore 64 that I had taught myself to program. So I started writing little routines that helped me accomplish those things I did to help my wife.

In 18 months, my wife had built her business back up and earned the Top Director Trip for that year. On the trip, I learned that other Directors were curious as to what had happened to Angie's business. The next Seminar. 1989. my wife broke world-wide Company records with Unit production of $1.6 million (The first Director ever to exceed $1.5 million) and at Seminar she credited me with some of the success because I had computerized her. The truth is that Angie's talent with people was what created the success. All I did was to afford her more time to get out and meet the people. But the word was out and I became an overnight computer guru.

I was inundated with requests for copies of my program. There was just one thing. There wasn't a program. It was a bunch of routines, batch files and macros that I had developed over three years that did what I needed to do to help my wife's business in her Unit, in our city. I was convinced, however, that there was a need for something. I also knew that I was about to arrive at a decision point in my career to either retire with a pension, or continue in the Navy and risk another posting, perhaps even one overseas, and further disrupt Angie's career or even bring it to a halt.  It was an easy decision to make, however,  since Angie's Mary Kay income more than tripled my Navy officer's salary and she was paying less taxes.

So I set about to make a user interface for other husbands to be able to help their wives. It may sound chauvinistic, but back in 1989, few people had computers in their houses and you almost never saw a woman interested in them. So I set out to write the interface for computer novices and Mary Kay novices (Husbands). Within 3 months of Seminar 1989, the first DCMS version was released. It had outgrown the Commodore 64 a year previously and the new DCMS was a full blown DOS program. Angie travelled extensively that year and on a trip to Australia in 1990, a transplanted Canadian Director who knew of the DCMS while in Canada, convinced me that the Aussies and New Zealanders also needed something like that and that all that was needed to be changed was sales tax and inventory.

Well, I am now about 10,000 programming hours, five countries and 11,000 users from that point and the DCMS has grown organically. It has kept pace with the changing nature of computers, the Mary Kay opportunity, changing National tax schemes, and the needs and desires of my users literally around the world. The DCMS is so much more than it started out to be and it is designed to be the one program that will answer all of your record keeping needs wherever you are in the world or in the Mary Kay career path. It covers everything you need in record keeping whether you are a new Consultant or a National Sales Director. 

How do I know? I still use the program every day to help organize my wife's business. In 1991 She became the first to earn National Sales Director status outside of the US, the first international Mary Kay Millionaire (currently working on her 4th million in commissions) and has been the top National Sales Director in Canada consistently since debuting. I am proud of my wife and I am proud of my program. Perhaps you now know why. 

I am sure that the DCMS can help anyone increase their business in Mary Kay, if you only use the tools it gives you. Moreover, if you have someone who can help you by doing a lot of the administration, the DCMS will give him or her the tools needed to make a significant contribution by freeing you from the paperwork and giving you more time for the people-work. 

And that's what you get paid for, isn't it?
 
 
 

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