George Brazil

We had worked with coaches before; we’d done three-day programs before. And you come back, and you’re all excited, but you don’t have real concrete tools, right? My business partner and I both knew we needed to do something. We knew we needed to make a shift, and not just a small shift. We really needed to make a really big shift in our business to inspire ourselves to get ourselves over that hump and to propel ourselves into the next chapter of what we really wanted our business to be. It was during the pandemic that Gail did a series of free webinars. After I had met Gail, I knew she was probably the perfect match, and we had interviewed several different business coaches. It was during these free seminars that my business partner was on, and she got to see Gail and she was like “Oh my god, we have to talk to Gail!” I knew that that connection was going to be there.

To have somebody on your team that has the knowledge, has the experience – she’s been there, she’s done that – plus she has a financial background… We’ve worked with other coaches or we’ve done other seminars, but nothing that is so laser-focused on interior design. And any designer will say, we have the most unique and bizarre business. It’s like no other business with the way it bills, with client relations and all that stuff. To have somebody that is a designer but has a finance background to be able to help us look at our finances in a way that makes sense, that’s also in a way to help us look at they key indicators of when we want to grow the business, when we want to bring on another employee, when we want to grow to a larger office, that kind of thing.

The thing with working with Gail that I’ve realized in comparison with other people, is that it’s not just telling us what we need to do, it’s also showing us how.

The “How to Create Procedures” I think is really huge because it’s something that over the 16 years of having our business, we’ve never written down. We’ve really never known how or what to write down or what that looks like. It’s not enough to just set goals and put them to the side and to hope that they’re going to come true. You need to find somebody that’s going to help you get those goals, that’s going to show you the way to get them, and is going to be in your corner. That’s definitely what we found working with Gail.

Doing the VIP Day with Gail, it’s like drinking from a firehose. There’s so much information coming at you and there’s so much information that you’re taking away from the experience that we get to use. We have this manual, we have this “bible” of information, that we get to use. Granted, we’re just in our first year of working with Gail, but even going along we’ve been able to see where we need to make changes. It’s been so valuable to have this guidebook. It’s such valuable information.