Husband and wife team Steve and Andraea Douglass have opened ActionCoach Solutions in Tucson, after he retired as chairman and CEO of Payless ShoeSource.
Steve Douglass led Payless for a decade. Andraea Douglass worked as a business consultant, training Fortune 100 executives.
Their new venture is a franchise of ActionCoach, a Las Vegas-based business-coaching company with 1,000-plus offices.
They sat down for a Q&A:
Q: Why Tucson?
Steve: I retired from Payless in 2005 and then we looked around for a place where I could play golf 12 months a year and she could continue her career. It's hard to convince people that this town has a metropolitan area of a million people because it has a small-town feel. We just loved that.
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Q: Tell us about your experience as Payless CEO.
Steve: It was a job I loved; very hands-on working with people. And you get lots of exposure to all kinds of stuff with 23,000 people reporting to you.
Q: Why coaching?
Steve: I flunked retirement. It was fun, but I was missing the interaction with people. So we started talking about what we could do together that would help us give back to the community. We have over 50 years of business experience.
Andraea: For the past 15 years, I've been working in a boutique-consulting firm out of California where I primarily coached the senior executives.
Q: What's the difference between a business consultant and coach?
Steve: Consultants might come in and evaluate what's going on in a business to help you understand. Typically they do reports and presentations and then leave. They don't implement it. Business coaching is a process. We stay and work with the owner of a business to effect change.
Q: How much will it cost to hire your firm?
Steve: There's two different ways we work: One-on-one coaching, where we coach the owner of the business, is the most effective. The minimum rate is $2,000 a month and goes to $3,500 per month, but we'll do a custom quote for a larger business, or more complex set of problems. We also do group coaching through a series of seminars. Our seminars go from $40.99 to a series of seminars called Action Club, which has seven seminars over a 14-week period for $2,100.
Andraea: It can take at least a year to establish a firm foundation, but we believe that by looking at the business we can find our fee within the first 90 days.
Q: How will the recession affect your business?
Andraea: Mostly what happens in a recession is people dig in and they don't want to change much. You can hold on, but if you really want to grow the business, let us test and measure and try new advertising and new training methods for your people ... little things that can make a huge difference in the bottom line.
Q: For example?
Steve: One of things that we work on are scripts.
Andraea: We teach people who answer the phone (at a client's business) to respond to customer questions with questions that look for issues beyond price, to issues that people really think about.
Steve: For instance, a tire shop shouldn't just tell the price of a set or tires, but also ask the customer questions getting to issues of safety or convenience, towards a unique selling proposition. "I'm going to sell you a tire that performs better, that has the best safety record in America."
Andraea: "And by the way, I'm a local business owner and I'm going to be around."
Paul Ingram is a UA journalism student and apprentice at the Star. Contact him at starapprentice@azstarnet.com