a day of motivational speak

Goldie Hawn????

USA TODAY reported MONEY SECTION, MARCH 5, 2002 Success Companies finds fate at opposite end of spectrum By Kevin McCoy

Peter Lowe of Tampa saw his real troubles begin when he agreed to join The Success Companies in August 2000. A year later in September 2001 in Chicago Lowe ran into serious trouble that painted him as a fraud and he has never recovered. Since then and has amassed a lot of unpaid creditors. Lowe had become a partner with a crook who conducted your typical American pyramid scheme. So by March 2002 Lowe resigned from the company and as a result he gave no more money to others. Lowe is now a big fraud as reported by USA TODAY?S MONEY SECTION, MARCH 5, 2002 Success Companies finds fate at opposite end of spectrum By Kevin McCoy USA TODAY

Take a century-old magazine noted for its inspirational business success stories. Add a well-known motivational-speaking business. Mix with a nationally popular tennis tournament. To organizers and investors, it sounded like a recipe for a multimedia business bonanza. Instead, it made for a financial disaster, leaving scores of creditors with unpaid bills topping $5 million and radically altering the fortunes of the three organizations:

Success magazine, the financial bible for small-business entrepreneurs that began publishing in the 1890s, no longer exists. Success Events International, the firm that Florida entrepreneur Peter Lowe used to stage speeches by former presidents George Bush, Bill Clinton and other political and business figures, is out of business.

Lowe, the self-styled “America’s Success Strategist,” during the ’90s, emerged as a star on the self-help entrepreneurial circuit, a rival of motivational guru Tony Robbins. He headlined events at which thousands of wannabe successes paid up to $200 to hear big-name speakers, product sales pitches and religious exhortations
But the company, in need of at least several million dollars of new venture capital to grow, faced a suddenly tanking economy. Moreover, says Van Etten, personality, financial and management problems were emerging. In an April 2001 Success story, Lowe wrote that “in my business, organization is everything.” But his new company seemed disorganized at best. Vendors weren’t paid. Contracts with top speakers were canceled — though their names still were used to sell seats.

Last September, “Peter Lowe’s Success 2001″ sold thousands of tickets for speeches by Clinton, TV show host Montel Williams, Mrs. Fields Cookies founder Debbi Fields and others in Chicago’s United Center. But the star attractions were no-shows. And the event was shifted to the smaller Odeum Sports & Expo Center with little advance warning. The result? Angry ticket buyers and a major traffic jam. “They had canceled all the speakers, but they didn’t tell anybody,” says Jim Keppler, whose Virginia-based speaking agency is seeking arbitration over more than $1 million in alleged contract breaches by Success Events. “That’s when it became clear to me that there was unprofessional, if not fraudulent, conduct.”

Jack Bohlken is typical of the disillusioned. He says he paid $165 for tickets to a Lowe-organized event in Atlanta that was canceled last year. He says he’s also owed $35 for motivational tapes he never received. When he sought a refund, he says, he was told he could only get credit for yet-to-be-scheduled seminars. “The way this is being handled, with no communication with people like myself, is just the opposite of the values they espoused,” says Bohlken.

The Better Business Bureau of West Florida has logged dozens of complaints against Lowe’s old and new companies from customers seeking refunds for arena events and motivational tapes they say weren’t worth the cost.

p.s. While Lowe and Ziglar have their passionate followers, they’re not taken all that seriously by management experts, said Robert E. Kelley, adjunct professor of organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon University’s business school.

“If it motivates you to get on the phone and make some more calls, maybe it’s worth it to some people. But I’ve not seen any data showing a real rise in productivity,” said Kelley.

“You can look at these seminars as a form of entertainment. People go to these and come away feeling good, and if they don’t mind paying the money, there’s no harm in it.”
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05236/558961.stm