Joni Rogers-Kante, Founder of SeneGence: What It Actually Took to Build SeneGence

Joni Rogers-Kante joins Richard to talk about how SeneGence actually got built, starting well before the company existed. She grew up on a farm in Oklahoma, was sent to California at fifteen, and spent her teenage years working at Sav-On Drugs before finding her way into Mary Kay in her early twenties. She quit her day job as soon as her commissions matched her paycheck. From there, Joni and Richard walk through the early years in detail: 1,200 women recruited personally and $1.7 million in sales in her first year, selling out of a baggie of product with a homemade price sheet and a fax machine for orders. She talks about what it took to get SeneGence to a point most people would call a real company, thirteen years, including a stretch where a packaging shortcut caused $10 million worth of product to be destroyed after lip color started leaking in customers' purses. Her approach through most of it comes down to a few things: tell people the truth, take the harder option when it's the right one, and if something isn't working, change how you're learning instead of waiting for circumstances to change on their own. Guest Bio Joni Rogers-Kante is the Founder, CEO, and Chairwoman of SeneGence International, the direct-selling beauty company she launched in 1999 with its flagship product, LipSense®. Raised on a farm in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, she began working at Sav-On Drugs at sixteen and spent thirteen years in direct sales before starting SeneGence to build a long-wear lip color that could survive being a hands-on mom. SeneGence now has offices in five countries and hundreds of thousands of independent distributors worldwide. Joni is the founder of the Make Sense Foundation, a nonprofit supporting women and children in need, and is the author of Million Dollar Lips. She and her husband split their time between Orange County, California, and their home near Tulsa, Oklahoma.