BIRMINGHAM — While Chester County and most of the East Coast endured a two-fisted Snowmageddon punch in late January, consultants for a local training and leadership development company were in sunny southern Florida instead, helping a long-time client raise over $20,000 for Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation.

RC Taylor Group principal Stuart Brooks and consultant LaFran Horn organized a team-building and charitable event for this large client’s 250 managers, who then fanned out to lemonade stands the pair orchestrated at 25 local businesses to sell lemonade and raise money and awareness for childhood cancer.

A technology company focused on improving health and safety for people and the environment, the client chose Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation as its charitable recipient at the RC Taylor Group’s suggestion, based on its potential for a “great team-building exercise that encouraged collaboration, innovation and ingenuity to raise money for an important cause,” said the client’s Vice President.

(Alexandra “Alex” Scott, who lived in a Philadelphia suburb, was less than a year old when doctors discovered a tumor wrapped around her spine. When she was 4, she told her parents she wanted to sell lemonade and donate the proceeds to curing childhood cancer. Though Alex died in 2004, at the age of 8, her foundation has raised more than $35 million and issued 150 research grants.)

Brooks, who spent 19 years at Calico Corners, first as director of stores when the East Marlborough-based company had 38, and left in 2007 as vice president with the store tally at 105, bought the privately held RC Taylor Group in late 2008.

The company focuses on leadership development, corporate training and executive coaching.  Founder Rosanne Taylor and husband Jeff Taylor, who reside in Pocopson, continue to work part-time for the company, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in April.

From the company’s airy digs in a three-story stone business condominium in the 1300 block of Wilmington Pike, Brooks works with a small staff of full-time consultants, including LaFran Horn, who focuses on corporate, service and sales training, and Pamela Canning, a specialist in executive development and coaching, and an office manager and several part-time associates.

Buying a healthy company in the midst of the larger train wreck that was the U.S. economy in 2008 and 2009 was “certainly a challenge,” admitted Brooks, who lives with wife Mary, Westtown School’s archivist and curator, and their three children in Thornbury, Chester County. “It was a tough time to buy a company, that’s for sure. But things improved in 2010, and promise to be better still in 2011.”

Before acquiring the RC Taylor Group, Brooks devoted a year after leaving Calico Corners to evaluate just what he wanted to do. He thought about, then rejected, buying a store or a small chain, given that he had spent his entire career in retailing since earning his undergraduate degree from the University of Vermont (he’s a native of the Green Mountain State) and his MBA from Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University.  “What I really wanted to do,” he reflected during a recent visit to his office, “was to help many clients do what leaders really need to do:  learn to build a truly great workplace.”  He discovered the RC Taylor Group through a friend’s introduction.

He describes one branch of the RC Taylor Group’s expertise as “one-on-one executive coaching with emerging and senior executives. When you work with someone who wants to grow at a company and in their job, you sense energy and see results.”  He says that Pamela Canning likens it to “holding a mirror up to the client’s face, so they can see what others see.”  The company’s work almost always begins with assessments of self-awareness, and then they guide clients to grow with that knowledge.   

Today, Brooks and his colleagues notice that, two years after a punishing U.S. economic contraction began and led to serious job losses in Chester County and across the nation, businesses are now hiring — albeit slowly. And once again they’re investing in their employees.

“As the economy continues to wake up, companies are realizing again that they must invest time and money in developing their people,” he asserted.

Among recent RC Taylor Group projects:

• Development and training for a new customer service process for a large international client. It rolled out to five European countries last year and is now being expanded to others.
• A strategic planning and team-building retreat with top execs for a major media company that recently snapped up a former competitor. Their burning question, of course, is how to merge two divergent corporate cultures as they blend into a single identity.
• Employee engagement and leadership development work for a California-based chain of rehabilitation centers for in- and out-patient therapy and education. Over a period of seven months, the RC Taylor Group helped several units of the company redefine and sharpen its purpose, and then the focus and expectations of its staff.

Client programs are tailor-made, rather than pulled ready-made off a shelf like a can of soup. Payment is project-based, Brooks said.

As for what he’s learned as a new business owner, Brooks chuckled. “Fortunately, when you enjoy helping people build great workplaces and find their own growth paths, good results follow.”

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