The Inside Story on 3Leaf Group
Meet our president.... Stuart Newman!
Back in October of 1995 Stuart was sitting in a room, staring at a wall full of bookshelves. He was out of a job and out of luck and the only thing he had to show for himself was a room full of audiobooks. "Fat lot of help that will do me," he thought to himself. "What can I use a room full of audiobooks for?"
He decided to find out.. They were good books, to be sure, and had to be useful for something. So he began to travel around and interview training directors. He asked them one, simple, straightforward question: "What are your biggest challenges as a training director?"
He interviewed 31 training directors and each one had multiple challenges.
Interestingly enough, most of them boiled down to the same five problems:
- A lot of people to train
- Many different locations
- Many different training needs
- Training directors have no time
- Budgets are tight.
A light bulb went on in Stuart's head and he began drawing plans for a business.
3Leaf Group was born: A company that could train thousands of employees, in all different places, on all different topics, at a very reasonable price, without wasting any of the training directors' time. The five big problems that plagued the training industry were to be no more...
Stuart had a paper catalog printed up and began doing business. Early in 1996 he landed his first big one - Michigan National Bank with 5,200 employees. He walked into the training director's office and handed her a catalog of 2,000 titles and told her to sift through them and decide which ones she'd like to include for the company.
She handed the catalog right back to him and said, "Why don't you just put together a list for me based on the competencies that I give you and I'll just check it over and cross out the 10 titles that I don't like and ask for anything that I do like that I don't see on the list? That should be part of your service."
"Oh! Great idea!" said Stuart and that's exactly what he did.
The companies were happy and Stuart was happy. He was making money and filling a need. Every employee would get a paper catalog, including the names and short synopses of titles that were approved by their training director. Every time someone was interested in borrowing an audiobook, they would call up and have their book sent out. When they finished it, they would send it back. If they wanted another rental, they'd simply peruse the catalog once again, choose another title, call in to order it and wait for the mail to arrive.
In the winter of 1999 a client asked Stuart, "Why don't you computerize everything? It will make the process quicker, easier and smoother. Employees will be able to select multiple titles at once and automatically get new audios once the old ones are returned."
"Oh! Great idea!" said Stuart and that's exactly what he did... and has been doing ever since.
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