Coachville.com is an online coach training organization. It was headed up by Thomas J. Leonard. After Thomas Leonard's death and after a period of time through the legal muck, Dave Buck inherited this organization. When Leonard was running it, I became an 'early adopter' of the School of Coaching / Graduate School of Coach program at a whopping $895 for a lifetime membership. Leonard gave folks who had this membership, licenses to sell the courses he wrote in many different forms. You could ebook is course, teach it live, etc. I had these course available on one of my sites as downloadable and was making meager revenue from it. I was also selling streaming audio I created myself. Bringing in $50 per month was the average between my products and the licensed ones.
Then in 2003 Leonard dies. Buck gets control of the company maybe a year later and I'm sent this rude, scathing email from the female general manager of coachville Terri Zelenak that I will be sued if I do not remove the licensed material on my site. Wow! What a slap in the face. No nice reminder or even a heads up as to what's going on. Thomas Leonard would never sink so low as to act like an intimidating mobster, but it looks like Terri Zelenak has a personality like a loan shark and has shown that to me in her emails.
Prior to getting this 'remove all material or be sued' email, I started up a competing site that offers advertising, very similar to a site coachville has. I am not naming names because now my site is an industry leader and better to let everyone know about Dave Buck and Terri Zelenak without revealing my identity.
So after the email I do some checking around and find that other coaches STILL HAVE their access to the same licenses that I now do not. Any fool could see Dave Buck is punishing me because a new site I opened up is his competition. So I go to log into coachville.com to see if I have access to that. I have no membership. There's a custom message saying it has been revoked. Now Dave Buck is playing dirty pool and using underhanded tacktics.
So just by starting up a competing site, I loose out on $895 I paid Thomas Leonard but since Buck is running the ship, there's no recourse. On a coachville.com call, Dave Buck was talking with Andrea Lee the former GM of coachville while Leonard was still alive. Buck was talking about how he and Lee had a falling out and now they're mending the past. Buck mentioned that he's a coach, modeling peacemakers.
So I get the wild idea that maybe he has changed. So I email him and say: Hey Dave, now that you're a coach modeling peacemakers, I guess I get my lifetime membership back? Buck replies in a very unfriendly way that no, I'm not ever going to get my membership back and also, that I should take down my fan website I have on Thomas Leonard. Buck states that he will 'talk to his lawyers about it' if I don't take it down.
I reply saying, here's my phone number. Have your lawyers call me since it will be the quickest way to get all this crap dealt with. I received a reply to that email from Buck but I filed it away not bothering to read it. I'm not bothering to read anything Dave Buck sends me due to the fact that he's the total antithesis of Thomas Leonard and is most likely bi-polar or Jeykle and Hyde in his behavior.
He shows the coaching world his trusting happy face and then behind everyone's back he's the worst person to ever have taken control of such a high visibility organization. He and his henchwoman general manager Terri Zelenak are both pulling the wool over everyone's eyes appearing to be upright honorable coaches when they threaten to sue fellow coaches who have just become their competition. Buck and Zelenak virtually stole $895 of my money. They are crooks. If you cross them and you're part of coachville, your membership will be terminated. That's what happened to me.
In this case, yes, I'm out $895. But my once tiny site is now an industry leader and Buck's smaller site is lame, behind the times and going downhill. The word on the coaching street is that coaches will never do business with his smaller site ever. But what do you expect Dave? You only take thier money and have nothing else to do with them. You take and take but do not give back.
No wonder the insider info about Buck and coachville is that he works with the greatest minds on projects and then pisses them off and burns bridges extensively. I expect his smaller site and coachville to be bankrupt 2010. The way Buck is running both sites into the ground, I'll be surprised if Buck can even pay any of the bills from site revenue by then. More than likely the rats will leave that sinking ship before it totally goes down like the Titanic did.
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