12 Years of Wonderfully Hard Work
From the beginning, we started Priority Learning with the suspicion that business was more than making money. 
In 1995 and 1996, Lorraine and I decided to see if others felt the same way. Anyone who has ever run a business realizes the value of making money. Most people who have had great success will tell you that making money is only the by-product of having great people doing great work for a great reason. Having spent our entire lives working in the “for profit” business world, we realized early on that discussing change with business people and changing business practices was going to be a hard journey and that many business people would discount our work as “touchy/feely” or “optional/luxury” for their business plan.
That being what it was in the beginning, we offered public workshops for people from a variety of companies as a way to get to know people in the business community and for them to get to know us. The result was that more and more people began to think of us as learning partners and we embraced the role. We expanded our offerings of public programs to include skills such as Coaching, Conflict Management, Negotiations and Change and the business began to grow. People would join us for a two-day experience and, as a result, they would ask if we could do this with their people at their location. We offered personal coaching to all of the people who attended these public programs so they could integrate the skills learned from the workshops into their jobs. Personal coaching was a big hit and we were known as, not only good trainers, but also good coaches. Soon we were asked to facilitate and train new processes that would also be valuable to their organizations. It was great fun and, with each relationship we built, we found we were learning more from the clients than the clients were learning from us.
In the late 1990s we had a breakthrough of sorts when a client asked us to help them grow their organization from a “Cultural” level. This “Cultural” angle included tangible and intangible business assets, including people and a better process, which resulted in a better product. This Cultural Process was so important to the client that they became a great advocate for cultural change and a great example of the benefits of those changes. People were listening.
As you might imagine they also became a great advocate for Priority Learning. This began a journey that included clients seeking us out for cultural help and all the related activities, such as people development, better process, stronger service, sales delivery, and the growth of leaders throughout their organizations. Ironically, businesses started to seek us out for precisely what we felt we were trying to avoid in the beginning - making more money. Joel Stevens (the former President and CEO at Kennebunk Savings Bank) once said to me that after 40 years in banking “I finally found a way to have it all, a Bank that makes money and where people love to work." In many ways, I think we all knew we could have it all and we were the lucky ones to work with gifted leaders like Joel Stevens, who had the vision and perseverance to make it happen. Along the way we also learned from Joel that leadership was and is always the key to success. Finding, building, and keeping the best leaders always builds the finest teams, and the finest teams always win the battle for customer loyalty, pride, and professionalism.
Since that first cultural experience to today, we have tried to build the kind of company that people can turn to for solutions to difficult problems. We have settled in our own building at 176 Main Street in South Portland, Maine, and continue to build our public workshops. Today, we conduct 22 very different and, we hope, fascinating workshops geared toward business and leadership. We have workshops that cater to budding or aspiring leaders and for people in the workplace who want to make a difference. Our cultural business has also grown in spite of recessions and turns in the market, and our personal coaching work is more important today than ever before. On top of all this, we are beginning to figure out how to reach people with our on-line diagnostic services.
The wonderful thing about working at Priority Learning is that the future looks even brighter than ever in these trying economic times. More and more businesses are turning to building their business to last and make work exactly what it should be – more fun, more meaningful, more profitable, and a better value to the customers/clients.
As I conclude this passionate business bio, my conclusion is easy…all of our good work would have been impossible without the talented and smart people around me. Many of you know them…they are people who are not frightened by challenges or only want to work when it is easy. More than any business accomplishment, I am very proud of the people we have on board doing this great work. We begin and end every day with the spirit in which we founded this business. It truly is all about the people. You have to have a decent product and you have to have a good process, but in the end good, loyal, courageous, and thoughtful people will make it work. That equation has been around for thousands of years and I suspect will be around for thousands more.
Ralph Twombly (Founder)
