REFERENCE LETTERS

GIRL SCOUTS, STAFF TRAINING

February 15, 2001

Girl Scouts – Lone Start Council

7537 Cameron Road, P.O. Box 15385

Austin, TX 78761

Dear Sharon:

On behalf of Girl Scouts –Lone Star Council, I would like to thank you for your impressive presentation to our staff on February 14, 2001. There is an air of excitement about the packet you organized for us and we have begun to talk about how the staff can further use the information you taught us.

The Austin community is so lucky to have you here at our fingertips. I know your information is inclusive of all the leading professionals whoa re teaching about building community, and the most up-to-date. We appreciate so much the hands-on suggestion you offered to us for dealing with communication in the office. Today our Diversity task Force is meeting to discuss ways to implement your suggestion into our teams at the Girl Scouts.

I look forward to a time when we can have you back to follow up on some of your strategies we are using. As a team leader, I am holding a workshop with my staff utilizing the skills you brought to our attention yesterday. So much of what you said is dire to a smooth-running sand strong team. I cannot thank you enough for your advice and words of encouragement.

I wish the best for you and your business and look forward to working with you again in the future. If there is every anything we can do for you, please do not hesitate to call.

Respectfully,

Julia Cuba

Collaborative Program Executive

December 12, 1999

DIANA VANDEL’S LETTER ABOUT HELPING A PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATION

Regarding: Sharon Sarles Seminars

Dear Sharon,

You were an absolute savior to the ISPI Austin Chapter Board. Your expertise was instrumental in the chapter arriving at a widely agreed upon settlement. Even though the board was made up of very competent, highly educated, skilled PhDs, facilitators, and consultants, we had no idea how to utilize Robert’s Rules of Order as a tool for resolution to the extremely unfortunate and bizarre situation that arose. The board members were well versed in the corporate approach to problem solving, and lacked your experts and experience in membership organization where boards, Roberts’ Rules and personal politics rule. Your consultation and collaboration with the majority of the board in planning a strategy and helping implement it was excellent. The focus you provided help us steady to determine the appropriate interventions, so that later on others could pick up and go forward into a promising futures. Thank you for recommending we get a mediator and use a modified Roberts’ Rules. This settlement saved the reputation and very likely the existence of this chapter, saved the dignity of everyone involved, and helped put the organization back on the track to health.

Work with you was easy and flexible. You were very responsive to our needs and time lines. You provide a calm foundation in the midst of an emotional storm.

Warmest Regards,

Diana Vandel

Winning Solutions: High Performance Organizational Strategies and Training

BUBBA AND TOM’S LETTER/ M. E. ‘GENE’ JOHNSON GARAGE – DO THE MATH!

November 30, 1999

To who it may concern:

We hired Sharon to help us after we had an unfortunate experience with our source our bookkeeping. The first thing we asked of her, besides writing payroll, was to restore order to our Accounts Receivables. Sharon quickly re-organized accounts receivable. First she reconstituted the system as it had once been done on paper. Then she put it on a new software system that coordinated with our CPA’s needs. The result was that our customers were better able to understand what they owed us, paid us more frequently, and called us less frequently. We improve out AR situation by $82,00.00 in the first three months of Sharon’s tenure. Furthermore, our overall AR position continues to improve as old debts are cleared up and large accounts are staying more current. Our debtors call us about their account mush les soften and send check more often and much sooner than they did before.

Then Sharon shopped for health insurance. She had been support for employees and handling the entire interface with our existing insurer. The interface had always been difficult, but high premiums were our first concern. She found a company, which was more financially stable, had an excellent claims paying history, offered similar but slightly better benefits – at about half the rate we were prying. The cost of basic health insurance for an average mechanic was $263.00 and is now $122.08 a month. This is a substantial savings to our company. Today we insure twice as many people (as our employees are now insuring more dependents – for less than the total cost of our previous covers.) Overall, then, to all fold here at M.E. “Gene” Johnson Garage, Sharon has saved us about $36,000/00 annually on health insurance alone.

Then she discovered that our cafeteria plan administrator was not really doing the job for us. She replaced that service with a better one. She helped us understand supplementary insurance products offered to us. She also strengthened our relationship with our existing supplemental company and now we are able to officer disability and other coverages that we did not previously offer.

Incidentally, let me tall you about the things we did with Sharon to insure that we retain more produce, typically older, mechanics. Finding and keeping excellent mechanics is a key business objective in our business and especially so now since labor is in short supply in Austin now. Sharon pointed out when we made the decision about which insurance to buy that some policies favored the older mechanics and some did not. Finding good benefits, which do not cost the company too must, is important in attempting to retain these older employees.

Another key tasks that Sharon helped us with was setting up a pension for our employees. We shopped carefully through the various plans, brokers, fund house, and fund, -- and considered clerical interface for our bookkeeper. We now have a working pension system. We feel good that not only are our personal futures insured, but also the business is strengthened by this benefit to our employees. It was Sharon who enable us to do this, as she had enough prior knowledge, waded through a great deal of material and gave us executive summaries, and was able to keenly separate our who and what might be helpful to us.

Not only did Sharon choose and implement new accounting software, but also we set her the tasks of shopping for our new shop management software. We thought her experience with the accounting software and with purchasing made her a valuable asset. However she discovered important shortcomings and assets in the various programs and installation and training services that made her help indispensable. She gave us a short list of recommendation as we are in the process of negotiation for her top recommendation.

We have also been stunned at the new ability we now have for financial analysis. Sharon’s work on our new software package has meant that we have tremendously better access to the information that every business needs like Profit and Loss statements and analysis of accounts. We are use to waiting on our CPA for this, but to discover that Sharon (and the bookkeeper she will train for us) can generate this so quickly for us is beyond our wildest dreams

Never before has pulling old records been so easy. Here, when a customer comes in with a warranty complaint or our credit card company sends us a charge back complaint, while it is a distraction to our primary mission of helping current customer, often the situation itself is critical and time sensitive. Find old records used to be a big headache. Now we usually have them in our hands in a matter of minutes.

Sharon has been a star in helping us comply with the many and complicated Human Resource Laws. She got the got the posters and posted them without cost or time from us. She advised us on the HR compliance needs after having picked out the best, most value-packed HR legal seminar. In short, Sharon has taken care of much of the management and advisory detail in order that we could continue to do what this company is famous for”: taking care of our customers and their vehicles.

Sharon wrote a training manual and can train a new bookkeeper so that we can continue to have this same kind of dependable backup. She even trained one of our older, most loyal employees to use the computer, even though we said it couldn’t be done. This will prove to be valuable as we now have placed him as manager over a division of the company and wish to computerize the records over there.

We could tell you have she learned several software program in a flash, we could tell you has she modified QuickBooks to work even in situations it is not supposed to work because that is what we needed in our transition situation, and we could tell you how she quietly took care of other difficulties – even given us marketing and management idea. Overall, we wanted to be freed up to do what we do best and Sharon allwo3ed us to do that by being a master of many trades, quietly solved many problems.

Most of all, however, we would like to emphasize how much Sharon fit into our existing organization, even though certainly she did not have an automotive background. When she re-organized the office and bookkeeping system, she used the logic that was used around her for a long time. Her strategies fit into our existing systems seamlessly. Our men quickly gained a respect for her because they know not only that their paychecks and insurance was taken care of better, but that Sharon as looking our for them and always ready to hear their concerns and work with them on whatever needed to be done. Besides her problem solving ability, she brought the ability to listen and understand others. All this change might have made for a rough road, but Sharon made it smooth.

We are satisfied that we improve our bookkeeping by letting go our pervious vendor and hiring Sharon to help us with bookkeeping, but we got such organization and purchasing talent, and such management support that no bookkeeping in the world could have provided to us. Consequently, far beyond our fondest hopes, we found that adding Sharon to our business team strengthened it. We have always had a solid, well-known business. (We know Sharon will tell you, for she often does brag on us, letter our customer know that she too was a customer for many years before she joined our team.) We just had an office disaster. Now we have back an office that will continue to function a strong addition to our great automotive team. Sharon was a new miraculous addition to that team. We might not have suspected, so we wanted to tell you.

Sincerely,

Thomas Hebson & Michael Williams

MICHAEL MORGAN – PROGRESSIVE IDEAS IMPLEMENTED

August 1996

Dear Colleagues,

Let me recommend to you, Sharon Sarles, my solution genie. I have twice brought in nationally known consultants but I was displeased with their services. I almost literally threw that last salesman out of my office! I have also used a variety of training strategies, but Sharon stands out as really different. She really listened to our needs, both mine and my employees, and designed strategies that were tailored to how we don things here at Morgan Printing.

I knew she could speak, but she has an uncanny ability to understand the people dimension of a company, and the even rarer ability to actually move things along in the right direction. In the seminar, she made things fun, but she also got right to the point, so the employees were very pleased. I feel immensely heartened about reaching my business goals; I didn’t let Sharon leave until I singed a contract to have her back.

Sharon’s serves as a consultant and trainer are a bargain at any price, but at her current rates, I cannot imagine any business owner or principal not rushing out to bring Sharon in immediately. She makes a real difference.

Sincerely,

Michael Morgan