The actual doctor who held the patents on the stem cell-based serums was this beautiful man from the United Arab Emirates.
He was very calm, and kind of allusive…but to me, he was a full-on rock star! I spent many, many hours with this doctor after I started writing for the company because I wanted to understand the science behind his serums so I could help the distributors speak about them accurately.
There were several of his products that the MLM company would be selling under a private label name, while the doctor sold a different version of the same products internationally under his own label. Every product he developed did exactly what it promised to do — and it was so exciting to write about something so legit and fascinating.
The doctor mostly split up his time between Orange County and Dubai, but when he did happen to be in town, Lou and I always tried to catch up with him for dinner. We loved this man — and his wife eventually became one of my closest friends. The doctor was always kind, and I know he believed in Lou’s ability to make his products the “Mary Kay of the anti-aging beauty movement” in America. That was always Lou’s goal.
But the doctor had given Mr. Kimchi the exclusive rights to market and sell his products in the U.S., so technically, Mr. Kimchi was always going to be Lou’s boss. However, Mr. Kimchi already had one false start against him.
About a year before Lou came on board, Mr. Kimchi attempted to launch the MLM on his own, and it failed miserably. (That was why Mr. Kimchi decided to hire Lou.) So Lou and the doctor did spend quite a lot of time discussing what new steps could be taken to prevent any further slip-ups.
I remember leaving more than one of our lovely dinners with the doctor feeling a little mystified about why he had chosen Mr. Kimchi as his go-to guy for marketing his products domestically. The two men seemed so different, and Mr. Kimchi didn’t seem to appreciate what this doctor was offering him. It was a huge opportunity to sell this level of product, and it often felt like Mr. Kimchi didn’t care about this doctor and his reputation as much as Lou and I did.
In the days and weeks after my first private meeting with Mr. Kimchi, I had countless more meetings with him where Mr. Kimchi insisted that the doctor’s patented serums were not as important as the “sysssstem” he was building. So, I would usually leave my meetings with Mr. Kimchi confused, and slightly insulted on the doctor’s behalf.
Lou was experiencing his own series of relentless meetings with Mr. Kimchi about his “sysssstem,” but Lou’s meetings were much more difficult than mine. Lou actually understood how flawed Mr. Kimchi’s ideas would be for the company, and so he often had to choose his battles with Mr. Kimchi on the spot.
In MLM especially, you simply can’t mess with how you pay people.
You have to be completely clear about how the distributors will make money. If you change things after people buy-in, it’s fraud, and you’ll never recover from that reputation in such an insular industry. Lou felt like Mr. Kimchi’s constant adjustments to the compensation plan were detrimental to the company’s success, so he took on that battle over and over again for the months leading up to the fall launch.
But the way Mr. Kimchi would respond to Lou’s objections would be to draw a new set of circles on his legal pad, and then repeat himself over and over again until Lou would simply have to leave the room. Lou was starting to lose his patience, and there were days when Lou would have to rally pretty hard to get up for a meeting with Mr. Kimchi.
But for me, I was determined to make it all work for everyone.
So I wrote my fingers to the bone, creating charts, presentation decks, and animated flow charts to express Mr. Kimchi’s system, while still featuring how amazing the products were going to be for the people to use and resell. I spent so many hours hunched over my computer, trying to strike the right tone, and the right “
I never wanted to have any direct connection to any of the distributors. (I was just a “temp,” remember?) I didn’t want anyone to count on me to be there for long because very soon, my plan was to jet. I really just wanted to set up everything for the company to be successful without me.
But I always knew that stepping away from the load I was carrying was going to be tricky, and it was incredibly clear that the entire staff had started looking to me for just about everything. I had taken over nearly every project, and I had more personal knowledge of every working element of the company from top to bottom than both Lou and Mr. Kimchi in many ways.
I was becoming too important to the success of things, and that started to make me panic at times — but I still couldn’t give up, and, I still believed I could figure out how to eventually leave.
Inevitably, people got my phone number — and my email address — because they needed some help! And these people were incredible. They were earnest, and hard working, and so many of them are still my friends today. They would fight that hideous SoCal traffic to be at every training or event we hosted at the offices, and all of them would spend an hour every Monday night on a conference call so they could hear Lou talk about the future of the company.
(So whenever Mr. Kimchi would tell me the people weren’t important, my resentment toward him would only grow stronger.)
It didn’t take long before I started to feel incredibly devoted to the distributors, and even though I wasn’t paid a penny for a minute of my efforts, I was totally committed to what we were trying to build.
But on Labor Day, Mr. Kimchi called Lou and said he needed to meet with Lou and me at a restaurant to go over the compensation “syssstem” (again). Lou and I reluctantly showed up, but within minutes, it became clear that Mr. Kimchi didn’t want to discuss anything. Rather, he was telling us that he decided to change the comp plan!
He had printed out the slides that I created for the big call the next night, and he’d taken a pen and drawn circles and squares all over the pages. He had also added new numbers, new rules, and new parameters for everything.
I couldn’t believe my eyes… The guy was honestly insane, and driving himself mad with all of these numbers and circles! I remember feeling my body go numb with frustration.
How could Mr. Kimchi make changes to the comp plan again?
Lou was outright angry, and he told Mr. Kimchi he wouldn’t support the changes. He believed it was going to harm the company if we didn’t settle on one final version of compensation right then and there, and, he told Mr. Kimchi that another change in the 11th hour was not only wrong, but it was going to kill any momentum Lou had already created for the launch of the company.
But talking to Mr. Kimchi was a maddening experience.
But Lou fought hard. He couldn’t walk away from this battle — not now. So by the time we left the restaurant, Mr. Kimchi and Lou finally agreed to one “minor” change, but nothing more.
