Right now I’m thinking about how I can expand the About page. Because one central question, of course, is: what exactly is the purpose, what exactly is the goal of UNO.TEAM? There has to be a justification, a reason for this project and this website to exist. And in that context it has become clearer and clearer to me that I’ve been trying for quite a long time – probably mostly in my subconscious – to create something that is larger than me and that can one day exist without me and keep on growing. And to that end I’ve launched various projects, some more successful than others. One of them was English-Team, and then, a bit later, of course, English-Test.net.
And now it has all come back to me: all the experiences, the positive ones, that I had from the summer of 1999 onwards through meeting Steven Pelcman. And now, after so many years, it suddenly dawns on me that Steven Pelcman is one of the very few people who strongly shaped my goal and my wish, my drive, to create something larger than myself. And when I analyse it now, I see that Steven has already achieved what I’m still setting out to do. Steven Pelcman is, I think, about 22 years older than me. That means he’s already in a phase of life where a person really does prepare intensively for death, too. And when we met, as I remember, Steven had just turned 50. We got to know each other in Halle an der Saale, and many of the things he said, many of his sentences, have stuck in my memory to this day.
One of these Steven Pelcman quotes: when we were talking about the differences between his hometown, New York, and Halle an der Saale, he nailed it by saying: “Halle is a hard city.” But he meant it a bit ironically, of course – and rather positively, too. He definitely also saw the positive side of how Halle was developing as a city.
And over the last few hours, quietly, at night, I’ve been thinking about the encounters and experiences I actually had with Steven Pelcman, and I realised that I took away an incredible number of useful, positive things. And I have this idea that it would be great if I could just plug a cable into my head and then download all these memories and this information and these experiences – or rather move them to the cloud. And I’m back with Yuval Harari again, who says it’s by no means settled that we can only think if we also have the language for it. Because I’ve now remembered lots of details from my interactions with Steven Pelcman – but now that I want to transfer all these details, put them down in writing, I notice it doesn’t just work like that, because then I have to concentrate harder and find the words. So obviously there are also thoughts that aren’t fully put into words and still somehow make sense to us when we think.
That means: over the next few days, together with my supporters – Claude Terminal and maybe Antigravity too – I’m going to try to extract as many details as possible and then piece them back together, so I can share them with people who can benefit and grow from them.
I got to know Steven in 1999, because back then I’d started teaching English as a freelance lecturer – as it was called at the time – to adults in so-called training programmes, training schemes, whatever you want to call them, organised by the Arbeitsagentur, the employment agency, and later by the Jobcenter. Although I’d like to point out here that I like neither the term “lecturer” nor “teaching”, because for me there’s no such thing as teaching – but that’s just by the way.
Steven Pelcman, for his part, is an intellectual, an academic from New York, who back in the ’90s met his future wife, Sabine Pröschel, in New York, and the two of them then decided to move to Germany and found a company in Halle an der Saale that still exists today as a GmbH: ELT – English Language Trainers. And back then the two of them placed an ad, looking for people. I applied, they invited me to an interview – in English, of course – and my English at the time left something to be desired. And they let me know that, too, but in a very positive way: they acknowledged that I’d taken on the challenge even though the ad said they were looking for native speakers. And they gave me the chance – that was decisive. And they didn’t make me feel that I wasn’t actually up to the job; instead they told me: “Hey, you’ve got the potential, we’ll give you a chance. We can see that you obviously haven’t had that many opportunities to learn English yet. You’ve never been to an English-speaking country, and given those circumstances, under those conditions, you’ve already reached a good level.” That was how it started. That was the beginning of a productive, friendly, positive business relationship.
What struck me right from the start was that the two of them – despite what was, by the standards of the time, quite a big age gap – got on really well, that they met as equals, and that it was definitely not a sugar-daddy relationship, which some Germans around them may have wanted to insinuate. I didn’t see it that way at all. I experienced them as showing each other a lot of appreciation, and I think from the very beginning – at least that was my impression – they were very much in sync when it came to building their company. Which was incredibly hard, because they funded everything out of their own pockets and didn’t have big sums to invest – and yet, as outsiders in Halle, they still managed to establish a new company in English language training. And that even though the big players were already there, like Berlitz or Inlingua – or rather, other big education providers, other big language schools were already established. And with a new concept they managed to find their market. Of course that was above all thanks to Steven’s experience – but at the same time it also took Sabine Pröschel’s female leadership.
So what I really liked from the start was that they had an international team that was 99 percent native speakers. They had Donnell, an Irishman, who was the trainer’s trainer and gave us very efficient methods for working with the groups. And what also impressed me a lot was that Steven taught himself. He went into the groups himself, and these groups weren’t easy: they were unemployed East Germans, mostly men, who rejected Steven for all kinds of reasons. One of them was that the US administration was making very bad decisions back then, and Steven always had to explain himself and apologise for his government’s policies, even though he didn’t agree with them at all. The next line of attack against him was that in Halle in the ’90s – no matter where a person came from – people demanded that you speak German, and of course that was hard for Steven, since he hadn’t learned German. So naturally he mostly spoke English.
And I remember: we taught several groups together, always as a tandem, always taking turns. And then we were at the farewell of one of the groups, and each of us was supposed to say a few words. And the education provider more or less demanded that we speak German. And Steven, of course, said: “Okay, I’m going to speak English – surprise, surprise!” After all, the whole point is to learn English, and it mattered that we had access to native speakers, so we could take in their culture, their mentality, their ideas, their values. So I found it a real shame that the education provider in particular was rather negative towards Steven – but he didn’t let it show at all. He handled it very professionally and with great composure, and that really impressed me. And the way he put his thoughts into words: I could feel that he had the ability to express himself very elegantly, efficiently and pleasantly – in writing too, of course – and to pass that knowledge on. And he spent a lot of time with me, saw me as his mentee, and I learned an awful lot from him.
Yes, and then I got my first assignments from the two of them pretty quickly, and it was always a positive collaboration. Most groups rated me positively – except once, I remember: there was a group in Merseburg, I think, IT people of some kind, mostly men. And that was an exception, because there Steven and Sabine had put in two Germans: another German colleague, who was a bit younger than me, I think – I was in my late twenties and he was maybe in his mid-twenties – and me. And at the end the group got to rate us, and Steven said: “Okay Torsten, they rated the other trainer a bit higher than you, but that’s fine.” But even so, it was still very positive. Steven even offered me the chance to take on assignments at companies like Dow Chemical or Siemens – as his sub, so to speak. But back then the companies’ policy really was that you had to be a native speaker to be allowed to work there. And I accept that, I understand it. Back then I myself only wanted to deal with native speakers and learn from them, not from German teachers – so I fully accepted it and was fine with it. Yes, and I also remember a Christmas party in Halle, organised and paid for by ELT Language Trainers – very positive. The mood was great, we went to a Greek restaurant – that was in December 1999! Ages ago, and I still love thinking back to it.
Steven also talked, for example, about how you organise a business, and there was one thing that has stuck in my memory very vividly. He said: “Hey Torsten, do you think you can make a burger the same quality as McDonald’s?” I said: “If I have all the ingredients, I probably can.” And he said: “Yes – but can you replicate the system?” What he was getting at was that there’s a difference between being able to reproduce a product as such and reproducing an entire system. And that’s what he always paid attention to: he always thought systemically, always developed methods, structures and processes too – and that, of course, put him ahead of all these education providers.
And he also pulled it off with the Köhlis – that was, I think, his way in back then: Professor Köhli and Karin Köhli, the married couple who built themselves an empire in and around Halle and across Saxony-Anhalt with an education provider called BBI (Bildungs- und Beratungsinstitut, an institute for education and consulting). I think they’ve since sold the company. And he agreed with Köhli that Köhli would allow Steven and Sabine to hire subcontractors – meaning us. Because back then that wasn’t really established; this model wasn’t actually foreseen. But it worked really well, because the two of them didn’t just offer some kind of lecturer placement service – because those existed: there was BDM (Bildung und Dienstleistungen Mischke, Monika Mischke), which basically just passed the contacts on and signed us up to gagging contracts that didn’t allow us to enter into direct contracts with the education providers. Sabine and Steven established a different concept: they brought in a system in which the trainers were developed further too, could find each other as a team, share knowledge, experience, ideas and materials, and so could keep developing and growing. So there was a real bond among us ELT trainers, and what Sabine and Steven passed on to us in fees was fair, too: we trainers got the biggest share of the fee, on top of all the in-house coaching. So all in all, the two of them created a win-win situation – and the company still exists today, with Sabine Pröschel as managing partner.
And I remember one episode: back then I’d also already started building my own team in Leipzig – English-Team, very slowly – and had contacts with native speakers there, including Doug. And I explained my philosophy, my English-Team approach, to Doug, and he was like: “Hey Torsten, I’m not interested in this team bullshit, I just want the job. I know what I can do, people will be happy with me.” And then I passed Doug on to Steven as well, gave him the contact, and the two of them met. And afterwards Steven said: “Thanks for sharing the contact for Doug with me. We are the English Language Trainers company – we’re not looking for cowboys! Doug is a cowboy.”
Who would you like to talk to about this thought?
Thank you. Every answer fits – take it with you into your day. Would you like to share something yourself?
