| Phone: | 301/317-6657 | Fax: | 301/317-9697 | Email: | Image101@aol.com |
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Rookie finishing school DeNita L. Turner launched Image Builders to teach business etiquette and social graces to clients ranging from young tech execs to NBA recruits Last month, 75 athletic and extremely tall young men gathered at Lans-downe Resort in Leesburg. They wore matching red T-shirts and shorts that grazed their shins. All were rookie players in the National Basketball Association, and DeNita L. Turner had a thing or two to teach them. "My job is to help them be as good and proficient off the court as they are on," said Turner, founder, president and CEO of Laurel-based Image Builders. "Basket-ball is a business. You can be the best at your game, but if you're known as the one who never smiles or who has a bad attitude or ignores fans, where does that leave you?" In her workshop with the NBA rookies, Turner teaches everything from the proper handshake (firm) to how to show respect for your coach (listening) to how to let your family know that you're thinking about them on the road (pick up the phone). "At the end, we do an evaluation, and they say they've never heard some of these things before," Turner said. "Like to look someone in the eye when you're talking to them." Tom "Satch" Sanders, NBA vice president of player programs, who spent 13 seasons with the Boston Celtics, believes Im-age Builders is an important part of the rookie training. "We try to help them increase their social skills," Sanders said. "The players are geniuses in their game. The problem is that in far too many cases, other parts of their training have been neglected. Image Builders has become awfully important to this program. We know it`s helpful preparing them for the pro level, when they will be entertained and will need to know how to carry on a conversation." Outside the sports arena, the same scenario is common: A young founder of a high-tech start-up company finds himself way above his head; he knows his business, but what about business etiquette? Or how about college graduates trying to figure out the nuances of the corporate world? Turner realized the need for personal enhancement training when she was at Marriott International, developing and implementing brand training for the company's international lodging divisions. She founded Image Builders four years ago, starting with athletes and then expanding to include corporate clients and private consultations. Today, Turner's clients include the NBA, WNBA, Unisys, National Restaurant Association, University of Connecticut, Howard University and several divisions of Marriott. She teaches 90 percent of the workshops herself and has a six-person staff, including her brother and her father. When Turner started thinking about the business concept, she sought advice from executives at Marriott, where she had worked for 13 years. "I met with Mr. Marriott. `It's a great idea,' he said. `I'm an entrepreneur myself.' He was very supportive," she said. William Tiefel, vice chairman of Marriott International and chairman of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, said he was a mentor to Turner while she was at Marriott. "In that role, you have a dual responsibility -- the company responsibility and the individual responsibility. I didn't like to see her leave -- selfishly -- but I became convinced that she had a real desire to do this." Tiefel said he told Turner the door would always be open if she wanted to come back. "But based on her success now, I don't think that will happen," he said. As Image Builders started its corporate work two years ago, Turner was able to go back to Marriott with her product. Now she holds customer service training sessions for Marriott Reservation Systems and Marriott International Worldwide Sales offices. Workshops range from "How to Chit-Chat" to "The First Three Minutes," which in-cludes role-playing and shows the importance of verbal and nonverbal communication when creating a first impression. "The core module is why you need to care about your image," Turner said. "That's the basic piece. From there, it's customized to what the client wants." Some clients want to review table settings and telephone manners, others want to stress office politics. Turner covers anything and everything from appropriate skirt length to the policy on making personal calls from the office -- things people are usually uncomfortable talking about, she said. Turner has enough confidence and style to impress Miss Manners, but she also knows her background in sales has been invaluable in the success of her business, which has grown 60 percent in the last 15 months. "Training as a rule is pretty boring, so I approach it from a sales perspective," she explained. "This is why you need to care about your image, I tell them. We're all selling ourselves. I get people to look at the whole sales perspective, and they realize that these things are important." Turner said about 85 percent of her business is referral, and repeat business shows that her sales pitch -- and her training -- are valued by clients. After all, she teaches things that people are afraid to ask, such as, what's the correct way to eat a dinner roll? "You break off a piece and hold only that piece. Then you take butter from your dish -- on a knife --and butter the piece. It's not a two-handed maneuver, there are no community butter dishes," Turner said, emphatically, "and there's no swiping the roll through the butter." |
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