Arkansas franchisee buys into Springfield region

Jerry Wilson and Associates LLC, based in Little Rock, Ark., bought the rights to administer the Carnegie training courses in southwest Missouri. The purchase, finalized June 1 for an undisclosed price with seller Ron Moore & Associates Inc. of Oklahoma City, adds the Springfield-Joplin-West Plains region to an area covering all of Arkansas and parts of Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana and Oklahoma.

Seth Mohorn is market manager for the southwest Missouri region. He said the new ownership will focus more on lengthier classes rather than the one-day seminars.

“We’ll offer one-day and half-day seminars, but most of our training is done through what we call time-space learning,” he said. “For example, the flagship Dale Carnegie Course is a 12-week program, meeting once a week. Time-space is really where you begin to see habits and skill level increase – you develop new habits and new skills.”

The company also offers on-site training with curricula that can be customized to meet the needs of individual clients.

Mohorn said the company’s purchase of the southwest Missouri region will allow it to take advantage of an underserved area.

“While Dale Carnegie Training has had a presence here the last few years, we don’t really believe (Springfield) was a market that was fully tapped into,” he said. “We believe there is a huge amount of potential here, especially with the number of course graduates that we have from the past, the ability then to come in and offer other courses and services that meet their needs.”

Mohorn estimates that more than 15,000 people have completed Carnegie courses in southwest Missouri since they were first offered more than 20 years ago.

Jeff Barclay, a sales representative for trucking company Peterbilt of Springfield, is one of those former customers. He said the course was invaluable for helping him deal with people in his job.

“In this business I can be dealing with the guys that own Prime Inc. and then the same day deal with a guy that owns one truck and lives in rural Missouri – a real country boy,” Barclay said. “I took away from (the training) a better attitude toward people and how to deal with the diversity in types of people that I encounter on a daily basis.”

It’s that kind of confidence that Dale Carnegie was trying to inspire when he wrote “How to Win Friends and Influence People” in 1937.

But he probably had no idea that it, along with the follow-up, “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living,” would have more than 50 million copies in print, in 38 languages, some seven decades later.

The training is based on the Dale Carnegie Course, first taught by Carnegie in a New York YMCA in 1910. The course and training system that bear his name now have more than 12,000 instructors in 75 countries. There are four instructors in the Springfield-Joplin region.

That success is a testament to the universal message of the course, according to Barclay.

“If you will objectively deal with things head on and not let problems bother you and eat you up inside, what’s the worst that could happen?” he said. “That’s what it teaches you – dissect the problem, deal with it and move ahead. Look past it and realize that it’s not the end of the world and see that things will be OK.”

The only scheduled seminar in Springfield begins Aug. 8 at University Plaza. Those interested can contact Mohorn at the Jerry Wilson and Associates office in Springdale, Ark.