The Guru: Investors bankrolled Sally Anderson's life coaching businesses, but the money was all spent
Thursday, 26 April 2018
Self-improvement guru Sally Anderson says she wants to help people, but some believe she does more harm than good. In part one of a four-part series, Tony Wall and Steve Kilgallon trace from Anderson's shocking back-story to her life coaching empire.
Sally Anderson says she screamed so hard when she was being raped by gang members that she permanently damaged her vocal cords.
When she takes the stage to tell her story in keynote speeches, people are mesmerised by her deep voice — some mistake her for a transsexual, she says. Her platinum blond hair and chin tattoo only add to the mystique.
'She's really quite frenetic on stage and then — it's quite magnificent to watch — all of a sudden she stops,' says Dan Thurston, a former business partner. 'And the theatre of it … all of a sudden everything changes. She stops, drops her tone, and tells the rape story — there's not a dry eye in the house.'
Anderson says as a teenager in the early 1980s she was abducted from a Taumarunui bar and gang-raped over several hours by Mongrel Mob members, setting her on a self-destructive path of booze, drugs and sex addiction before she came out the other side as a life coach.
'When I do keynote speaking now, I say the Mongrel Mob are my spiritual initiators,' the 52-year-old once told 60 Minutes.
The power of Anderson's story and her charismatic personality have drawn many people into her orbit as they seek answers to problems in their own lives or help with professional development.
Her fans say she's inspirational, but our investigation has found some who think quite the opposite.
In almost two dozen interviews with her former business partners, staff and coaches, a picture formed of an all-controlling guru who doesn't tolerate dissent and has left some people traumatised and indebted.
Business partners have been left hundreds of thousands of dollars out of pocket as her various ventures hit the rocks amid profligate spending.
She is accused of a bullying coaching style — breaking people down in order to build them up — and some of her ideas are described as dangerous: she believes, for instance, that she can get people off depression medication.
She's also claimed that some rape victims 'don't own the part they play in what they've attracted.'
Anderson does one-on-one coaching and also runs three-day retreats costing $5000.
These are designed to convince people to take the leap to her longer 'immersion' course, where they pay up to $50,000 to become a coach themselves.
There are promises that graduates will make big money coaching corporate clients but several of her former coaches say that never eventuated.
Anderson's education is a blend of pop psychology, material borrowed from the likes of Landmark Forum and her own philosophy.
She claims to be the first in the world to specialise in 'sustainable transformation'.
'The work we do can be confronting,' she told us by email. 'We specialise in confrontation, resistance and uncomfortability – the three emotions that deny people the ability to experience the level of transformation they desire.'
Central to her education is something she calls the 'Default Disempowered Blueprint'.
The idea is that we all have incidents in our childhood and adolescence that negatively shape us — our 'defaults' — which continue to determine how we view ourselves and behave.
Anderson's disciples are taught to identify their motivations, so when they are 'triggered' by their defaults, they can recognise that and shift to a more empowered state.
It's simple stuff and for many, life changing.
'I truly believe in my heart this education is exceptionally powerful,' says Tauranga brand consultant Mike Dunn. 'It enables you to navigate life with a bit more grace and peace and love.'
However, he and many others we spoke to believe the problem is that Anderson doesn't follow her own teachings.
'I don't hold her responsible for her behaviour,' Dunn says. 'She's operating in default and fails to acknowledge that.'
Rotorua businesswoman Maree Tassell paid more than $40,000 for Anderson's training and says the organisation felt like a cult.
'There's this insidious pressure to behave in certain ways. I got kicked out because I wouldn't toe the line.'
Anderson wouldn't be interviewed, replying to questions by email.
She says our investigation is based on a small number of people making 'vague accusations', some of whom are rival coaches.
As a leader who is 'championing a vision', she accepts there will be criticism but says she lives true to her values and integrity.
How did she come to coaching?
Anderson told 60 Minutes she underwent two decades of self destruction after the gang rape — while building a career in hotel management and doing competitive body sculpting.
Her epiphany came when she did courses run by Landmark Forum — the worldwide self-improvement organisation described by some as life changing and others as a cult designed to part vulnerable people from their money.
'I'm alive because of Landmark Education,' Anderson says. 'But the missing pieces for me were the sustainability and spiritual elements, and this is why I developed my own education.'
By 2005, she was doing one-on-one coaching from a villa in Ponsonby, Auckland.
Her ambition was to teach group seminars so she could charge larger fees — and it was around this time she met a group of people, with backgrounds in sales, marketing and management, who saw potential in her.
Chris and Michele Destrieux, Grant Leighton and his partner Kim Dooris, and Neil Pyne decided to invest in Anderson's new company, Live Now.
Chris Destrieux, Dooris, and Pyne each invested $50,000 for a 10 per cent stake, hired two staff and eventually quit their jobs to work fulltime in the business.
Their first seminar series drew about 12 people, each paying $14,500, with the promise of becoming certified Live Now coaches.
A second group was enrolled, before the wheels starting falling off as Anderson's spending spun out of control.
Leighton says when they took the company bank card off her, she simply got another.
'She drew the cash out of the business until there was none left,' he says.
Destrieux says expensive coaching sessions in Australia and a book published by a US vanity press were among the excesses, and soon they couldn't afford to pay staff.
'She was incapable of adhering to agreed budgets. Lines between private and business spending were incessantly blurred.'
Leighton says about $250,000 came into the business from investors and course fees — but it was all spent.
The group agreed they had to get out before they went bankrupt.
In June, 2008 they wrote to trainee coaches saying they were leaving. 'We apologised for our part in taking $15,000 off each of them and giving them nothing in return,' Leighton says.
Live Now was removed from the Companies Register in 2009 and the investors never saw their money.
Destrieux puts his losses at 'north' of $200,000.
Leighton and Dooris think they lost about the same, and struggled to find jobs as good as the ones they quit to join Live Now.
Destrieux says he's staggered by how many people fall for Anderson's shtick. 'I'm quite frankly astounded at the gullibility involved, although I can hardly point the finger — we were taken in as well.'
Anderson disputes the amounts of money quoted and says the investors were just as accountable for the failure.
'They were actively involved in the venture and … part of all decision making authority on all monies spent.'
When they left, they abdicated all responsibility for their investments, she says.
'I took responsibility to repay creditors when they chose to depart.'
Was she financially reckless?
'There is always learning in any business evolution. Could things have been done differently? Yes. That being said, all parties need to take equal responsibility for what transpired.'
In 2010, Anderson's life took a new turn when she married former construction worker Roger Te Tai, who later got a full facial moko.
(Anderson, who is pākehā, would later get her own moko kauae, or chin tattoo.)
'People think I've married a Mongrel Mob member,' she told 60 Minutes. 'The irony is he's just a teddy bear.'
Te Tai told the programme Anderson 'basically saved me' and without her he'd be dead or doing time.
Her new husband would take a role in her coaching business and the pair became something of a double act. Several people we spoke to say they found Te Tai intimidating.
'I'm a strong personality and very intimidating to a lot of people,' Anderson told 60 Minutes. 'The combination of the two of us together is pretty outrageous.'
The failure of Live Now was just a speed bump for Anderson — she was about to launch the next iteration of her education, and find a new group of investors.