After listening to some of our Start the New You Now interviews this week, I decided to follow the advice of Dorothy the Organizer and go through a couple of my file folders. Since I fall into the category of what she calls a “Piler and Stacker,” I thought the New Me could use a little more order in my desk drawers. One of the folders I pulled out contained some brochures from our early events and I Can Do It! Conferences. As I looked at the dates, I realized that it’s been 25 years since we held our very first Hay House event. I was very new with the company at the time. I remember how Louise wanted to reach out to more people in the community and decided to do a live event. The world was hungry for messages about healing and feeling better about themselves and Louise wanted to help. “People are so hungry to learn how to take control of their lives. I’d like to see them discover what they can really do for themselves.” And so the first Hay House Live Event was born. It was held at the Santa Monica Auditorium in 1989, which was very close to our first office. This first conference featured such authors as Bernie Siegel (pictured here with me), Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, W. Brugh Joy, Jerry Jampolsky and of course, Louise. We usually showcased four or five popular authors along with Louise. We would invite some of the authors we already worked with or we’d contact others whose work Louise admired and felt had good information to share. That has always been Louise’s mission: “I like to find people who do good work and introduce them to the world.” The second year, we invited Wayne Dyer. With Louise just appearing on Donahue and Oprah, and Wayne having the biggest selling books in the last two decades, this event was huge. We were drawing thousands of people who wanted to learn more about healing their lives. The following year, we decided to take our show to other cities around the United States. This is when we started calling it, “Healing in the 90s” and later “Visions of the Future.” Hay House was the only company doing this type of event at the time—multi-speaker events of this caliber. That’s how we built our name. People read our books, but they didn’t really know Hay House until we started doing these events. Over the years at these events, Hay House provided a platform for several “unknown” authors who would later become known around the world. Two of these unknowns were Caroline Myss and Deepak Chopra! That’s how we met most of our earlier authors, many of whom we later published. We brought on Jerry Jampolsky to speak at one of our events and that’s how we received his book, Wake Up Calls. That was the very first hardcover book we published. Then we brought on Barbara De Angelis, and were able to publish her first Hay House book, Confidence. I wore a lot of hats in those days. I was Hay House’s event coordinator, greeter and bookstore clerk. I met every single author at the airport when they arrived at their gate. (In those days, you could walk right up to the gate.) Then I rented a car and brought each author to the hotel and checked them in. After that, I worked in the bookstore with our customer care manager Claire and volunteers who offered to help. No one really knew I ran the company, they thought I was just a clerk. (Wait till you hear the funny story about how I first met Wayne Dyer. I’ll save that for next time.) In 2003, we presented our first weekend conference in Atlanta—I Can Do It! (named after Louise’s popular affirmations calendar) with a roster of almost 20 authors. As our company opened offices in various countries, these conferences went global in the last decade (Brisbane, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Melbourne, Perth, Salzburg, Sydney, Toronto and Vancouver.). And we’re still expanding worldwide, adding our first I Can Do It! Conference in Hamburg last year and Amsterdam in 2014. You never know what memories you’ll uncover when you start getting organized. I want to thank you all for being a part of these memories. And by the way, you’ll still find me at the conferences working in the bookstore or maybe even taking one of our authors back to their hotel. Some habits are too much fun to break.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:13:35 +0000