Today we’d like to introduce you to Ryan Bailey.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I was the little kid who knew everyone’s secrets. Two friends would be arguing and neither would know that the other was talking to me.
I went to the second largest high school in the country. There were 1487 students in my class. So you never got to meet everyone. My name got around as the guy to talk to if you were having girlfriend/boyfriend problems or parent problems. My mother who is a surgeon and goes by her last name Dr. Paoli, used to jokingly answer our home telephone line, Dr. Bailey’s line.
Everyone thought I was going to be a therapist and that scared my parents. Both grew up poor and feared that if I became a therapist then I was going to lead the hard life they faced. So they pushed me towards business.
As the dutiful first born child, I embraced it.
At age 16 I got a job on Wall St. working for a stockbroker at Lehman Brothers. He eventually became a venture capitalist and I followed him there.
In the process of doing Due Diligence work for him, I was told that I sound like a therapist, ask questions like a therapist and was asked, “Are you sure you are not a therapist?” At that time (1980’s) no one knew what an Executive Coach was or else I may have gotten those questions.
I then wrote business plans for a living and found a similar set of questions.
Then decided to join Merrill Lynch as a financial consultant. Although, I was number one in my training class globally I did not find that I could go deep enough into people’s lives.
This led me to go to graduate school for counseling (had I known what I coach was I may have just headed straight to that profession).
I started a practice that was doing fantastic. My wife kept saying that it was a crime that I was not using my “expensive business degree from NYU for anything other than the counseling practice.”
Truth be told I was missing the faster tangible results that I saw in business.
Then she read an article on coaching and she exclaimed, “Ryan this is you… This is really you…”
However, at the time counselors were “pooh poohing” coaching as a profession so I did not read it. She persisted. I relented. That same day I hired a mentor, found a book on coaching and sought to get trained.
I added coaching to my list of services and things took off starting with former counseling clients whom I had not worked with in years.
I absolutely love what I do. I get to have coaching sessions where clients want to go for deep character change, tackle performance issues, work on interpersonal struggles, develop their teams, etc. I also do a fair amount of training which I absolutely love.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not at all… The recession of 2008-2010 was especially rough. I had to rebuild my practice four times in 14 months as entire company divisions were being eliminated regardless of my clients’ specific performance. I became way too spread out- basically coaching anyone with a pulse.
After that, I got busy again and it became tough to maintain a busy schedule and adequately perform business development functions.
Expanding my team has helped tremendously with that.
Ryan C Bailey & Associates – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
We call ourselves an organizational effectiveness company. We develop leaders and their teams.
We use assessments (i.e. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, StrengthsFinder and the EQi-2.0).
We are best known for laser coaching. These are 30min highly focused sessions. Clients have shared that they get way more from the 30min meeting than they have from previous 60min sessions with me or with other coaches.
We are in the process of acquiring another coaching company. Both our teams get along so so well. We both have a family feel so it feels in some ways more like a marriage than an acquisition. I am very proud of that.
My clients sense that I am fully in it with them. Both my head and my heart are engaged when I take on a client. This helps me get to the heart quickly. Getting to the heart and the head/heart engagement are what set me apart from others
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
I did a training on Myers-Briggs for a team of just over 100 two years ago. It was the best training I’ve ever done. Leaders who attended still thank me for that training and they share how they’ve been using what they learned with their teams.
Contact Info:
- Address: 2310 Parklake Dr.,
Suite 140, Atlanta, GA 30345 - Website: www.ryancbailey.com
- Phone: 4044218120
- Email: info@ryancbailey.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ryancbaileyandassociates
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryancbailey
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-c-bailey/
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