Over on my public awareness site Pink Truth, we’re often asked about whether someone can make money with Mary Kay Cosmetics. After all, they’ve got a product that you can retail, and you don’t really have to recruit, do you?

In theory, you can make money with Mary Kay. In reality, most women (upwards of 99%) actually put more money into MK than they ever get out of it. There is a tiny fraction of women (something like five one-hundredths of one percent) who make an executive income with Mary Kay. There’s another fraction of one percent that make a little money…. typically in the neighborhood of $20,000 to $25,000 a year.

I’m quoted in an article on TheStreet.com about identity theft and the risks to small businesses. The bottom line? Most small businesses don’t take the threat of a data compromise seriously enough. They forget that their reputation is on the line, and they could lose customers with a data breach. And it’s much more expensive to find new customers than it is to keep existing ones.

Adds Tracy Coenen, a forensic accountant and certified fraud examiner for Sequence Inc., “I get scared for small businesses because they are not thinking about this issue. I think they are more vulnerable because they’re not taking any basic steps.” Too often, businesses hire her to deal with fraud, not to prevent it.

So while all the attention has been paid to consumer identity theft, small businesses have become more attractive to identity thieves because the rewards are greater.

I feel like I’m playing Where’s Waldo… Does anyone know where Bradford Richardson went? He is the former VP of Asia Pacific for Usana Health Sciences, and he recently resigned. Rumor has it that he “went to work for a competitor.” I’m just dying to know if my November 14th prediction that he was going to work for Shaklee was correct…