Where there's muck there's brass

May 2001 - Edinburgh Evening Post
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A gleaming £42,000 Mercedes C-class convertible sits in the driveway of Lynn Macdonald's comfortable 4 bedroom home in a smart area of Livingston.

That, plus the fact that she's packed in no fewer than five holidays over the past 12 months and thinks nothing of spending £400 a time during a jaunt to the shops, seem to suggest that she's doing pretty well for herself.

Yet it's not so long ago that she was a single mum-of-two, scraping by in a pokey one-bedroom flat. As the bills piled up and the money, food and electricity threatened to run out, she was forced to pawn her jewelry to keep the wolf from the door.

Today she earns around £300,000 a year from a business which has a £30 million annual turnover - and she reckons there is potential for more.

She is one of a growing band of people who are raking in the benefits of direct selling. So how do they do it?

There are a few things more annoying to many of us than the pile of junk mail which clogs up our doorway every day. From election leaflets to superstore price pamphlets, most go straight into the bin unread.

Then there's the Kleeneze catalogue, usually offering plastic lunch boxes, wonder cleaning fluids and a selection of household nick-nacks.

The Kleeneze phenomenon has been a godsend. It's transformed her life from that of a hard-up, despairing single woman with joint custody of the kids to go-ahead, wall-off businesswoman.

"I was living in a one-bedroom flat with my two children," she says."My partner at the time and I had been working down south in direct sales but we weren't happy. We wanted to start up our own business and came back to Scotland, but every business plan we did got rejected."

"Basically our money just ran out. We ended up selling the car, and then I pawned my jewelry. I had to get a crisis loan when we ran out of food. Our financial situation was drastic."

Her troubles were compounded when her partner at the time developed Chron's Disease and had to have a major operation. They were hard days.

Then Lynn came across a company called Kleeneze which needed catalogue distributors in her area. She collected her first 20 catalogues, marked out her patch on a map and set off.

Her area and sales quickly boomed. Before long Lynn had encouraged others to join her and now the business has grown to more than 7000 distributors.

A money-spinning formula which provides bonuses and payments in return for sales and attracting new distributors meant her earnings quickly mounted up - and she turned over £1m in the first year.

"While we weren't poor before, we were broke. And I think when you've been into that situation you really appreciate it when you do have money."

"I love the feeling of not having to worry about money but I'm still the same old person who'll hunt for bargains."

"I recently went to Karen Millen in George Street during the sales. I loved the buzz of getting a bargain, although I did end up spending £400!"

Lynn insists there was a lot of hard work involved in the building of her business. But now there is plenty of time - and money - for holidays.

Over the past year, she's spent six weeks in the Canaries, popped over to Paris to watch Robbie Williams in concert and she'll soon be heading to Marbella and then the South of France.

"I own my own life," she says. "I can't believe how it has changed.

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