We speak to our old friend and Leah family member Julian Wain about his experiences with WISE (World Institute of Scientology Enterprises) companies and how they implement high pressure sales techniques into dental and chiropractic offices, and are recruitment agencies for scientology.
I did an earlier post about these WISE Guys
This is the entry on WISE in Wikipedia
Here is the definition of “Hard Sell” contained in the official scientology dictionary — this is the sanitized version. The meaning in scientology fundraising circles is “do whatever necessary to get the money”:
Great article in Tampa Bay Times about scientology Hard Sell techniques, featuring former Flag reg Hy Levy:
This is the Wikipedia entry on Sterling Management Systems
Sterling was founded by dentist Greg Hughes (he subsequently lost his license). Greg and his wife Debbie were recruited for the Sea Org and he eventually became WDC WISE in CMO International. Like everyone else in CMO Int, he and Debbie ended up in The Hole. Their daughter helped extricate them from the Sea Org because Debbie’s diabetic condition was deteriorating drastically due to lack of sleep and nutrition in The Hole. I wrote briefly about them here: The Ex-SO Hall of Shame
The Time Magazine cover story: Scientology The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power
This Wiki entry on this article which gives more information about circumstances surrounding it and the fallout from it.
The organizational structure of scientology — taken from the official scientology “Command Channels Booklet”:
From the same booklet, the various “sectors” overseen by the Watchdog Committee (WDC) in CMO International, which includes WISE:
Please visit http://www.scientologyblog.org for more information on scientology and how they are not welcome to all.
Please visit: http://www.scientologyblog.org its my new blog on my own account of the Church of Scientology. I am working on developing it more.
Please visit: http://www.scientologyblog.org
Leah is amazing:
“…..[WISE consultants]….they are like religious pimps….”
LOL, Religious pimps!
PS: Imagine if the non Scientologists not wanting anything to do with Scientology, they know it’s a cult scam, but imagine if they knew Xenu’s dumping “body-thetans” onto earth which the upper OT 8 role model Scientologists in their business they are at, have bought into the OT 3, 4, 5 6 and 7 snipe hunting for Xenu’s “body-thetans” exorcism!
Holy religious pimps for Xenu’s “body-thetans” snipe hunting exorcism, the “serious” scam the non Scientologists might someday rise to become.
Join TeamXenu and exorcise some snipes with OT 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 like the dupe bosses of these Scientology WISE companies.
I wrote a long comment about Sterling but it isn’t on here. I’ll just say that the decline happened in 1991 when the Times article came out, and on to 2015 as the Wikipedia article says. That is about 25 years of spiraling down stats for Sterling. Why didn’t they use the WISE tech to get the stats up? Why did they allow it to shrink from 300 employees to 25 or less? And why let this Wilson person blame it on the declining economy? That is not what the WISE courses and LRH say. They say the cause is you and not some outside thing. If the business tech worked, Sterling should have been able to turn around these stats and thrive again. What happened, hmmm?
Cindy. As we know the admin “tech” was written for the orgs as scn progressed over the years. Secularizing it with the idea that the world would adapt to “tech”, rather than the other way around, was very pretentious.
But the fundamental point remains that wise’s purpose was to make money and business for scn, an end in itself.
So any concept of professional ethics went to fry making everyone become an unscrupulous reg, like in the orgs – a swarm of always hungry locusts.
It is obvious that by dint of turning a vicious circle it would have bitten its tail.
Losing My Religion, Yes, you’re right. SMS was just a front group to get doctors into Scn and then once in to reg them for their money, ALL of it. Your term of “always hungry locusts” describes it well.
When it comes to scientology technology one HAS to have blinders on for it to “work.”
Mary Kahn, Yes! So true!
The way I call myself, publicly, when I shorthand my career job of OEC/FEBC Course Sup, and on and on, is:
cult bureaucrat training department
Scientology’s “tech” is quackery.
Thus, in truth, the cult bureaucracy administration “techniques” or “tech” for running the successful Scientology quackery scam.
So, that cuts it all down to size, quickly, in sync with the Hubbard “spiritual tech” which is Scientology core quackery practices of past lives trauma pseudo-therapy, and the upper levels secret exorcism of the hundreds of thousands of bodiless souls (Xenu’s “Body-Thetans” which Xenu implanted and let loose to infest and orbit around all humans today, causing humanity all our turmoil spiritually and mentally).
Quackery cult administration, that’s Scientology’s admin “tech”.
Chuck Beatty
xTeamXenu75to03
And Xenu kind of holds it all in place.
Xenu, and cult, that’s about all you have to give someone new to Scientology to grab onto intellectually, and tie everything into Xenu and cult, and people have about all they need to know.
Team Xenu, hip hip hooray.
I worked for a dentist in a poor area of Nashville in 2004 who used Wise and Sterling ideas. He tried to get me to go to Clearwater and I refused. I only lasted about 5 months when I finally quit. The dentist tried to fire me but I quit first because I didn’t like all the statistics and forced appts. The final straw for me was when he told me to make the patient (who was obviously poor) to put a 2nd mortgage on their home to pay for dental work. I refused to ask the patient to do so. Just was all so slimy. I found out later so many others had quit because he swore it wasn’t Scientology but kept forcing all the mngmt tech. It was traumatic experience it has made me fear Scientology even more.
Trish, who was this dentist? I was on staff at CCNashville from 2009 to 2011 and might know him.
Dr Tim Blair was in Madison, TN
Dentists, chiros, and don’t forget veterinarians. I’ve dealt with more than my fair share of them.
I wonder how common my personal experience was, as an Org Staff being hired by a company run by an OT (VII?) and a member of WISE. They went offlines quite a while back, the company allegedly is no longer WISE or with any connection to Scn, but somehow more than a decade later they’re trying to spin renamed Scn / WISE tech as what was learned in college doing business courses. They just cannot let go completely. (Rushes off for muster … er, staff meeting with an agenda that any Org staff would be immensely familiar with.)
I am not surprised that Sterling has basically collapsed, from 300 to 25 employees (a 90% implosion) over 1994-2015, as quoted in the Wikipedia article. That period tracks closely with the rise of the Internet, which made critical information about Scientology available to everyone.
In the past, people who saw something on a WISE brochure about how it uses management techniques of L. Ron Hubbard might have thought that’s a little odd, but maybe there was something there. Scientology didn’t have the toxic brand name that it does today. Now, somebody doing a simple Google search on Sterling Management, or any other WISE consultant, will see the Scientology connection instantly (thanks to the tireless work of all the critics out there) and will be even less interested in doing business with WISE than they would in ordering a box full of Ebola-coated kiddie porn. Dentists and chiropractors are now networked nationally or globally, instead of just participating in local medical associations, and gossip about how predatory WISE consultants are will spread much faster throughout the pool of prospective customers than ever before.
The other thing spelling doom for WISE is the increasing ability of people to resist or avoid high-pressure sales tactics. People are wise to this sort of thing (no pun intended) and will just walk away. Younger generations are much more likely to just hang up instead of hearing someone out so that they don’t come across as rude. Anyone can screen calls and send e-mail to spam faster than ever before. So once you’ve come across as a high-pressure salesperson, you’re dead to the prospect. Unfortunately, since all of Scientology’s sales tactics are rooted in 1960s high-pressure methods, they’ll be increasingly divergent from what works today. Scientology “crush regging” becomes less effective outside the church itself than ever before.
Exactly right, John P. I have seen it up close and personal as I worked for Sterling for about a year. The Wikipedia article had one detail wrong.
The implosion of Sterling started in 1991instead of 1994, and continued to the 2015 date that Wilson is quoted as saying. Note he is probably the son of Kevin and Barbara Wilson. In 1991 the Behar Times article came out called “Scientology, the Cult of Greed and Power.” This decked Sterling as they were named in the article as a feeder line getting doctors into Scn and hard sales tactics to take their money. In the Wikipedia article, the dates it uses are 21 years of implosion and the person quoted (Wilson) says it was just due to the economy downturn. HA! Where is your LRH quote that you told every doctor you consulted, that stats should always be going up and if they are not, don’t blame it on the economy or anything. It is you and you alone who caused the down stats.
So if Sterling is a Wise company, which they are, why do they do the opposite and blame it on a “downturn in the economy” for for 25 years????? The economy has not been “down” for 25 years. Maybe Sterling was down for 25 years, going from 300 staff to 25 or less staff because their WISE technology didn’t work and doctors don’t want to be marks to have their money taken from them to join a cult. It is so ironic that they would blame it on the economy when they teach that the why is never outside forces, but is always within the company themselves by not applying LRH tech at all or correctly or by having SP’s on staff to sabotage it. The truth came out in Behar’s article and Sterling crashed as a result.
As a post note: I knew Sterling staff who second mortgaged their homes to be able to live for the many months Sterling stopped paying staff yet expected them to keep working for Sterling to pull them out of the hole. I saw staff declare bankruptcy after going several months without pay. I saw marriages dissolve in divorce after going many months without pay while they worked to turn it around. Know what I never saw? I never saw Kevin Wilson and Barb second mortgage their nice La Canada home. Never saw him give up his expensive sports car, never saw him stop wearing the $1,000 suits. They gave up nothing but expected their staff to lose their homes if necessary.
One of the remote registrars (the ones that go on circuit touring the US giving seminars and signing doctors up for the Sterling program, told me that when the Times article came out, Sterling was giving more money out in refunds than they were pulling in in sales. Doctors left in droves.
J.P., I think it’s also just dated like the rest of the “tech.” People now look for things like TQM (Total Quality Management) and ISO certification, which grew out of the failures of the old industrial style management by statistics that Hubbard ‘s “work” is wedded to, typified by the Detroit auto companies and their near demise in the latter part of the last century.
WISE is a great recruiting tool for Scientology… my parents got into Scientology after a few seminars, and subsequently dedicated their life (and me) to Scn…
Here’s a funny fact a friend told me.
He was in direct telex comm with Ron throughout the formation and registration of WISE. Hubbard sent him all the documents he wanted to be used in the process of registering WISE in the District of Columbia. The registration office required the corporate name include “INC” but Ron wouldn’t accept that. My friend finally did include it in the formal recording and thankfully Hubbard never found out. He also told me he considered using ASS (for association) instead of INC but knew he’d be RPFed if so. He is such a wiseass. 😉
Dang, now I wonder if I didn’t sit in on a “sales pitch” that is patterned after the hard sales when I looked at a time share condo once. Once and only once. I didn’t need to sit through another one because I figured out that they were all the same. The old carrot and stick thing. dangle a prize in front of a potential buyer and tell them they had to sit through the entire sales pitch to gain the prize. my wife and I sat through two people telling us how great this deal was with us both knowing after the first person that it was a scam that would cost a whole lot of money with us not getting much at all in return. About half way through the second guy, who was said to be some type of manager, I told him we were leaving. He said we couldn’t leave until he finished. I simply told him to watch us, we were walking out. Now I wonder if they were using this business structure. Hmmmm. Either way, that type of sales tactic does not work with me.
If Hubbard’s management technology actually worked it would be copied.
The sad thing is there are still people who believe it’s does work.
It is also still operating in some form in Australia. My concern is some individuals may be hustling others including Scientologist into so called “businesses” where they are promised prosperity but the only winner is CoS and a few individuals. The other poor individuals have been conned and locked into legal contracts they believe cannot be nulled or challenged. It’s a very interesting circle of deceit and ASIC documentation paints a very clear trail where you can connect the dots. Would love to be able to reveal more but one must be careful.
One thing common amongst Cult is the mafia style control and abuses.
So , what it has do with technology dude 🤔
Watch all 3 parts of Godfather , it contain too much crime technique.
Maybe it’s the method employed for coercion and undue influence rebranded as technology.