A Gift of Scentsy changed our lives – for real!

I received a call from a gal in Arkansas yesterday who was interested in Joining Scentsy. A lot of times people call or email us but don’t ever commit – which is par for the course. Anyway, we were having a great chat and getting to know one another when the conversation turned to money. She wanted to know if it was feasible to think that she could come earn enough money with Scentsy monthly to pay for her Son’s car insurance (which was pretty steep) and to put some money away for his college. This was a really good question. In trying to give her an honest answer I ended up telling her where we were financially 1 1/2 years ago when we joined Scentsy. I don’t tell this to most people who we speak with but I really felt comfortable with her so I began blabbing:

OUR STORY: 1 1/2 years ago we were financially ruined. I had to close my national legal staffing business, 6 months prior, because the economy hit me very hard and we had to use up all of our savings (which we had saved as a down payment to purchase our first home) just to meet our bills which was quickly depleted. My business was the source of 80% of our income and it was gone! Then, we got into credit card dept and we owed the IRS a nice chunk of change. I was the PTA President of our children’s elementary school in December 2008 and ran the Holiday Store event. I had Direct Sales Vendors come in as a way to earn extra money for the PTA and one of the people who contacted me to have a booth was a gal from Scentsy. I’d never heard about this company before but hey, if they wanted to give us a donation I was happy to give them a booth. Anyway, Shawn was supposed to be watching the kids while I ran the event. Instead, he was at the Scentsy booth the whole time – falling in love with not only the scents but the concept and the online marketability aspect of the company. He wanted to join badly but it was Christmas and we just didn’t have the $99 to spend. The Scentsy gal, Katie, insisted on Sponsoring us because she could see our potential and knew that we were too broke to join.

Honestly, I felt horribly humbled by Katie’s gesture – as did Shawn – so we vowed to make sure to not only work this business hard for ourselves (and dig ourselves out of our debt) but to also make good for Katie! Again, Shawn joined mostly for the online marketing potential of Scentsy so he started building a website to go along with our Scentsy site. Shortly after joining we we even more broke than before. Our heat was turned off and…our internet was too – all because we couldn’t pay the bills. In case you don’t know, it isn’t very warm in the Seattle area in March. I learned how many Pots & Woks of water it took to heat up a bathtub – 8 was the lucky number! We told our kids that the heater was broken and the part had to come from somewhere in Europe. Thank goodness they were young enough to buy our story! Anywho, Every other day one of us would have a little pity party for ourselves and the other one would be there to perk us up and keep us going. Instead of giving up, which would have been easy, we instead drove to the Library every morning (where they had heat) and brought our laptops (for the free WiFi) and worked all day long. We brought our lunch and only left to pick up our kids from school – sometimes bringing them back to the Library with us (they love reading). After about a month of this, we had enough money to pay our bills and work from home.

Fast forward to today. We’ve built our Scentsy downline to 197 consultants in the USA, Canada, Puerto Rico and Guam, have been making a few thousand a month consistently with our Scentsy business and Shawn had earned a new promotion at work which brings in a lot more money. We are still paying out the kazoo for our debts incurred from our financial breakdown but are definitely on the road to recovery and financial freedom.

Now, to get back to on topic. When I was speaking with Ms. Arkansas yesterday and went over our story, she related that she and her hubby had had a financially devastating year as well. She was really struck by how we were so broke that someone’s act of kindness to sponsor us had changed our lives. It really hit me, when she’d said that. Where would we be right now if it weren’t for Katie’s gift? Would we still be in the same situation or in a worse one?

We were given a business as a gift! While $99 seems a very cheap price to start your own business-in-a-box, if you will, it was more than we could afford at the time. We worked our butt’s off to take advantage of the opportunity Katie gave us and to turn our lives around. We’ve sponsored some people as a way to give back but none of the people we gave this same gift to has ever done anything with it – nada! Why is it that we’ve made something of this business but those we’ve sponsored haven’t? The simple answer is that none of them really understand what they’ve been given. Have you heard the expression, “You can bring a horse to water but you can’t make him drink?” The same applies here. Katie didn’t have to force us to drink the water…we saw that big lake and galloped straight to it and drank our fill!

Scentsy now has a policy against sponsoring (paying for a business for someone else) and I think that it’s actually a good thing. I don’t think that most people will do anything with a business they’ve been given as a gift. I think that ‘You’ have to find a business or product that you are excited about and be ‘ready’ when that opportunity comes around. We were lucky that we were ‘ready’ for Scentsy when it came to us.

We also just returned from a trip to Hawaii, last week, that we earned as an incentive trip from Scentsy. Shawn and I haven’t had a vacation together, where we actually flew on a plane, in over 5yrs. We had a 5 night/6 day, all expense paid trip to a 5 Star Resort on the big island of Kona. We were given gifts upon arrival (Visa gift cards, bags, Scentsy flip flops, etc.) and every night when we returned to our rooms. Scentsy sent us on a Snorkeling trip where we saw hundreds of dolphins jumping out of the water…amazing!

I’m writing this post partly has an homage to Katie and partly to let you, our readers, know that you CAN turn your life around – if you are ready and are willing to work hard. Click HERE to find out more information about Joining Scentsy.

Here are a couple of pictures from our trip…