Coming and Going

They were driving to the airport, through a blizzard, dodging boulders and downed trees. Welcome to Keith and Andre West-Harrison’s life: an unending and futile quest to avoid bad weather.

“It was like driving in a video game,” sighs Andre, days after the incident. They had left their mountain home and office to get to the airport in San Jose in order to fly out to Connecticut to do a seminar. Because it was an early flight, they had left their house at 3 a.m. But because of a freak, late-winter blizzard that hit northern California that night, the two were wondering if, instead of presenting a sales seminar the next day, they'd be stuck in a snowdrift on the side of a mountain or worse, lying somewhere in the gulf below.

“There was a boulder in the road,” says Andre, “and rocks and dirt from landslides. Living in the mountains is full of surprises.”

Of course, life is full of surprises. Just a year ago, Keith and Andre were the owners of three businesses in New Orleans, living casually, working hard and on the verge of making a lot of money. At the time, they never would have guessed that a year later, they’d be hurricane-refugees-turned-day-spa-consultants holding a seminar in the affluence and opulence of Hartford, Connecticut.

Hamming It Up in Hartford
Keith and Andre are a little like a comedy team when they do their shtick, but at the same time, like all good consultants, they more than manage to impart a serious message when they put on a seminar. In this case, they'd been hired by Lypossage, a company that makes a line of cellulite reduction and skin-care products and also provides specialized skin-care treatments. Lypposage is looking to branch out into the day spa industry--they'd like spa owners to carry their products and offer their custom treatments to customers--so they hired Keith and Andre to help their company learn how to infiltrate the market.

“Up until recently, they’ve been dealing solely with individual practitioners,” says Andre, “training and sending them out, but now they’re trying to sell to day spas, and train day spa employees, and supply them with retail [products], and teach them how to do the retail.”

So Keith and Andre put together a seminar for Lypossage's two owners and nine of their employees. Their primary goal? To teach these people how to break into the spa market.

It's critical, Andre says, for people to understand the personalities of the prospects they’re trying to sell to. That means getting insight into the specific issues that affect people in this industry. For example, Andre says spa owners commonly complain about always being busy and overwhelmed with work. And they worry that they're not making much money--if they're making any money at all. Knowing their primary concerns, says Andre, helps you personalize your sales techniques so you're offering compelling reasons they should purchase your products and services.

For instance, if a day spa entrepreneur is money-driven, says Andre, someone trying to sell them on the idea of a cellulite reduction product should talk up the profit that can be made by adding this product to their retail line. On the other hand, if a day spa entrepreneur is quality-driven, the salesperson should stress the positive results customers will see when they use the product.

The seminar lasted just one day, but it may have been a turning point for Keith and Andre. “Have you ever found yourself doing what you want to do and it turns out even better than you thought it was going to?” Andre asks. “And then you realize this is something you're going to be able to do again and again and again? That’s how this was for us.”

Keeping the Momentum Going
Keith and Andre are going to be doing this sort of thing more and more: In the next month alone, they have business trips planned to three different cities around the country: a trade show in Miami, a trip to one of the labs that makes skin-care products for their business partner, Douglas Preston, and then a journey to Seattle to see some clients. In some ways, they’re finding themselves just as busy as they were when they were running three businesses in New Orleans.

Uh-oh, thought Andre, I sense a pattern here. With so many business opportunities presenting themselves, Keith and Andre just can't say no. So they tend to take on too much work--so much, in fact, that their personal lives almost disappear.

“At some point, there has to be a cutoff time in the day where there’s no work, it’s just personal time,” says Andre. “There has to be a separation between work-life and personal-life.”

But instead of ignoring the problem, they decided to do something about it. They hired a life coach.

Life coaching is an industry that’s been thriving for the past decade or so, and it's received a lot of attention in the media lately. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart recently did a send-up on life coaches, and Jane Seymour plays one on the badly reviewed Modern Men on the WB, and life coach Martha Beck, a columnist in O, The Oprah Magazine, just signed a two-book deal to follow up her 2001 bestseller, Finding Your North Star.

Keith and Andre's life coach, Jaya Schillinger, is the owner of Inspiration Inc., and she specializes in working with practitioners in the wellness industry. In fact, Keith and Andre found out about her through their business partner, Douglas Preston. And just a week and a half into hiring Jaya, Keith and Andre are already preaching her virtues.

“It can hard to be discuss things with your peers, and they’re not always forthcoming,” says Keith, “so it’s nice to have someone neutral to talk to, someone sort of outside of what you’re doing.”

As Andre puts it, “I have a whole lot of extra pep in my step after talking to her.”

Blueprint for the Future
What Keith and Andre are trying to do now with their life coach is a variation of what they feel they were doing a year ago…and two years ago…and three years ago. They like to plan ahead, laying the groundwork for their future, and they find a lot of value in hiring a professional to help them coalesce their thoughts. That’s just what they were doing for their clients in Hartford, so getting someone to do the same for them makes sense.

And you can’t argue with success. Keith says that even in the short week and a half they've been working with Jaya, after employing her suggestions, he's been getting much more accomplished.

“I’ve been amazed at how much more productive I am,” says Keith, who feels that he and Andre have already made back their $595 monthly investment in the coach. While that may sound like a lot, depending on your budget, Keith says it's all worth it if the benefits outweigh the expenses. For Keith and Andre, whose day rate is anywhere from $2,000 to $8,000, improving their productivity is certainly worth it.

When they left Hartford, just days before hiring their life coach, both Keith and Andre felt positive about their future, but they started wondering how much more their business would be able to expand without any major problems cropping up. In the end, they decided to hire Jaya for the same reason they hope clients will hire them. As Andre puts it, “We want to work smarter, not harder.”

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