Our History
Alex Alexander
Author
History of the
Full Spectrum company
by Alex Alexander
Our roots trace back to Michael E. Gerber, of E-Myth fame, who was the foremost pioneer in the field of business coaching.
Alex was the author of Michael E. Gerber’s E-Myth Mastery Business Development Program and is the author of the Full Spectrum Business Development Program.
He is a Co-Founder, Chairman of the Board of Directors and CEO of the Alliance for Enterprise Leadership Inc (AEL).
AEL is the global owner of the intellectual property of the Full Spectrum Business Development Program.
- Coaching
- Academy
- Company Development Program
He was the first business coach to systemize coaching and thus make a true business of coaching itself.
In the early 1980s Michael formed The Michael Thomas Company, which was the first group business coaching practice that we know of.
Until the Michael Thomas Company, business coaching was done by individual practitioners based on their own personal experiences, and in a completely problem-driven way, reacting to the pressures and needs of their clients’ businesses.
Michael innovated, creating the first “Programmed Coaching” process, based on his belief that any small business could be “turn-keyed” if it adopted a set of basic business practices, which were set forth in writing in a library of “business processes.”
The Michael Thomas Company created a wide variety of these processes and was highly successful in helping thousands of small business owners improve their businesses and also improve the quality of their lives in the bargain.
Michael’s book, The E-Myth (published in 1986), and later revised in 1995 as The E-Myth Revisited, is even today, more than 20 years later, still carried on the Business Week and Wall Street Journal lists of all-time best selling business books.
Let’s jump forward a bit.
In 1995, Michael engaged me (Alex). I was an independent consultant at the time – to do an objective evaluation of the Michael Thomas Company, and suggest ways to accelerate its growth.
Michael was impressed with my work and offered me a full-time job, working with him to move the company forward, toward the 21st Century.
I jumped at the opportunity and joined him immediately.
That’s the “back story,”
and… how does it relate to Full Spectrum Coaching?
Let’s jump forward a bit.
In November 1995 in Australia, as he tells it, Michael was launching his new book and making a presentation to an audience of several hundred Aussies and Kiwis on the subject of The E-Myth Revisited and the many secrets of developing a successful small business.
He’d been thinking of yet another innovation, (possibly as a result of conversations with our enthusiastic Aussie friends, Leanne and Don Farnden) and on impulse, during his presentation in Sydney, he asked the audience if any of them would be interested in becoming “Certified E-Myth consultants,” (CEC) a term he made up on the spot.
As CECs they would become E-Myth business coaches, take advantage of the prestigious E-Myth brand, and use the E-Myth program and materials in their coaching practices.
The response was immediate – more than 300 Aussies and Kiwis gave Michael their business cards with “CEC” written on the back.
Imagine our surprise when Michael came home shortly before Christmas and announced, “Beginning January, we’re going to create a worldwide coaching practice, and we’re going to introduce it in May 1996,” or words to that effect.
At that time, there were no external Certified E-Myth Consultants, no process for certifying them, no supporting materials suitable for sustaining a large-scale, global coaching operation, and no examples for us to imitate because there were no global coaching networks yet.
As far as we knew, ours would be the first.
Well, that’s what we did, and it happened like this…
In January 1996, Michael formed a team to get the job done – he called us the “Brainbusters”.
We had to create an entirely new set of coaching materials – that became my job and the result, after four years of development, was the E-Myth Mastery Program.
We also had to create a process for training and certifying CECs, and all the administrative and management systems had to be created and put in place in 5 months.
We took a deep breath, jumped in and, somehow, got the job done.
In May of 1996, the first 9 CECs were certified in Sydney Australia, and we were on the way.
All-in-all, over the years, the network of CECs spanned 8 countries and numbered more than 300, and the E-Myth Mastery Business Development Program became the acknowledged best in the world, bar none.
Fast forward to 2005.
Michael’s E-Myth Academy shifted strategy.
Apparently, their purpose was to focus more on Internet-based business education, and to grow faster and have a wider impact than they felt was possible through the labour intensive, person-to-person coaching model.
As part of that shift, they decided to terminate their worldwide network of coaches.
They announced that by the end of 2008, they would stop supporting the network of independent CECs and that the CECs would no longer be able to use the E-Myth Mastery Program, which was the foundation of each of their coaching practices.
According to the suddenly disenfranchised CECs, the E-Myth Academy (by then renamed E-Myth Worldwide) had pulled the rug out from under its independent coaches and said, in so many words, “You’re on your own.”
And that was the beginning of the Full Spectrum Company.
Here’s what happened next.
I had left the E-Myth Academy in 2000 after completing the development and writing of the E-Myth Mastery Program.
I was feeling justifiably proud of that achievement, and I wanted to continue to work at the forefront of business management, so I went into academia for five years, teaching leadership and strategic management at Menlo College and at Santa Clara University, both in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.
In 2005, after E-Myth Worldwide had announced the termination of its external coaching network, I was approached by one of the CECs who wanted to continue his coaching practice, but needed a coaching program to replace what was being taken away from him.
We talked.
It became clear that there were many other CECs in the same position.
One thing led to another and I decided to create an entirely new coaching business, this time in the form of an alliance of coaches.
I contacted all of the existing and former CECs I could identify and invited them to join our alliance, which we called The Alliance for Enterprise Leadership Inc.
More than 40 of them were “highly interested,” so it looked like we had a winning proposition.
In January of 2006, ten of us held a three-day strategy meeting in Walnut Creek, California.
At the end of that meeting, we had the outline of a basic strategy and a unanimous vote to create a new coaching business.
We incorporated in March 2006 as a California corporation, raised our seed capital over the summer of that year, and thus came into existence as a business entity.
Our first task was to create an entirely new business development program, which would not only replace, but leapfrog the aging E-Myth Mastery Program.
Our intention was to create the most up-to-date and the most user-friendly business coaching program anywhere, as well as a process that would enable us to stay ahead of competing coaching methodologies.
It took us almost four years, but we did it!
The Full Spectrum Business Development Program is everything we hoped it would be.
We have many business clients who’ve used both the old E-Myth Mastery Program and our new Full Spectrum Program, and they all rate Full Spectrum as far superior.
On a ten-point rating scale they typically rate E-Myth Mastery a strong 7, and, to our delight, rate Full Spectrum Program a maximum 10.
This phase of our strategy also called for recruiting a team of coaches.
We had a great pool and selected from the most successful of the E-Myth CEC’s to become the foundation of our global coaching network.
These coaches were to also serve as our “Foundation Coaches” and to play a major role in the further development of the Full Spectrum Program.
Our Foundation Coaches also serve as mentors – the best in the world – to help in the development of the new coaches we’re recruiting into our network.
In 2015, noticing that the coaching model wasn’t affordable to many small business people, we decided to diversify our business model and widen our target markets.
Online education was an emerging trend, and it didn’t take much foresight to see an online coaching and education opportunity.
It was right for us, and certainly a major emerging trend.
Don Farnden, Master Coach and one of our “founding fathers,” discovered our path forward, and Don is our primary mover and shaker in this effort.
First off, he identified the partner we needed to move into this new “industry.”
GEM College of International Business (RTO 0366), headquartered in Adelaide, Australia with its internationally recognised and highly accredited qualifications.
From its roots in government and industry supported business training, GEM was in the process of branching out into online training and education and was looking for a “business” partner.
We were that partner.
GEM was creating a sophisticated online educational platform and needed a great educational business program to deliver.
Full Spectrum was perfect… it’s a real-world business education, built on decades of results, rather than a theoretical academic process.
It took a few years of development work, and we now offer four outstanding, fully accredited, Advanced Diploma programs in alignment with GEM College…
BSB60120 Advanced Diploma of Business
BSB60420 Advanced Diploma of Leadership and Management
BSB60320 Advanced Diploma of Human Resources Management
BSB60520 Advanced Diploma of Marketing and Communication
While the business owner is implementing Full Spectrum Inside, the managers and team members can study the exact same material, utilising the Full Spectrum Curriculum. This is built on faithfully and in alignment with the same videos and lesson Topics and other material the business owner is implementing.
They both speak the same language!
This will give the business owner More Life!
Whilst his managers and team members can collect parchments accumulating credits toward higher education.
Australia’s accreditation standards are demanding, and the result gives us bragging rights to one of the world’s foremost business educations.
A student can earn a top-notch education, on his or her own schedule (usually around eighteen months), and for a fraction of the cost of traditional educations from brick-and-mortar colleges.
The future looks bright for us.
We’ve created the “Full Spectrum Academy” to support our extension into online education.
We already have the best coaching program in the world, and now our online business education program is poised to quickly become the best of its kind.
It’s been a long and richly rewarding path from the early pioneering days of business coaching in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and now in 2024 we are striding forward with the global launch of the time-proven 6-Module Entrepreneur Tool Kit.
“the best in the business”
however…
that’s our claim,
and
we’re up to the challenge.