Speaking up: Executive Expression promotes classes in smoothing out accents.

IN Hollywood, if a budding actor from a foreign country wants to break into the mainstream American movie market, he makes a trip to a speech coach to ditch his accent.

But if an immigrant executive wants to mainstream his accent to get ahead in corporate America, he hasn't had too many options.

Enter Sherman Oaks-based Executive Expression, the brain-child of speech pathologist Denise Middleton. The goal of this five-year-old company is to help immigrant corporate executives, salespeople and customer service reps to communicate more effectively in English. If they are more easily understood, the reasoning goes, they can more easily close that deal or seal that promotion.

"You take a recent immigrant executive who has to make an important presentation to his board of directors or negotiate a deal. That presentation isn't going to go well if the other people in the room have to strain to comprehend what he is saying," Middleton said.

But while the L.A. region's diversity would seem fertile ground for such a venture, it's been a tough haul for Middleton, her business manager husband Rik, and their staff of eight full-time speech pathologists. To date, they've only trained a couple of dozen executives, sales and customer service professionals, most of those as the company ramped up operations over the past two years.

Last year, they posted billings of $1.2 million, down slightly from $1.3 million in 2004, much of which was from the more traditional social service provider parent company, Miller & Standel Speech Pathology Services.

The biggest obstacle? Corporate executives and supervisors are simply unaware that accents can be reduced through intense training. They have learned to muddle through on their own.

"Most people don't even realize that a program like this is even possible," said Gave Kruger-Ribble, president of the Women's Council of the Building Industry of Southern California. Kruger-Ribble said she is aware of Executive Expression, but hasn't used their services.

Indeed, Middleton herself never set out to reduce foreign accents in corporate America. She simply wanted to help children and the developmentally disabled speak better.

For more than 15 years, she pursued the more traditional route by rising through the ranks of Miller & Standel, which contracts with public schools and other public agencies to improve the speech skills of developmentally disabled children and adults. After serving as chief executive for four years, Middleton bought out the owners in 1995.

Middleton enjoyed the social service aspect of the work--"it's where my heart is," she said. But she soon found that the business itself was heavily dependent on annual budget allocations from schools and other governmental agencies, especially state government. Each year, it was a constant battle to keep the contracts from being cut off as these public sector agencies sought to balance their budgets.

Meanwhile, as she dealt with various local hospitals, Middleton saw another opportunity to use her communication expertise. Faced with a shortage of nurses trained in the U.S., several hospitals were importing Filipino nurses. While these nurses could speak English and had a good grasp of English vocabulary, their accents were sometimes difficult for doctors and patients to understand.

"Elderly patients, especially those with some heating or cognitive problems, have a particularly hard time understanding foreign accents," Middleton said. "They have been used to hearing American accents and intonation their whole lives."

Middleton began working with the Filipino nurses to reduce their accents. In so doing, she glimpsed a relatively untapped market in accent reduction for immigrants in corporate America.

For decades, speech coaches have worked one-on-one with clients to improve their English pronunciation and intonation, mostly so that they could speak clearer on stage or screen.

But, Middleton said, only a couple of companies had ever sprang up to work on accent reduction in corporate settings, and those companies were on the East Coast.

So in 2000, Middleton set up the Executive Expression division. She teamed up with an Orange County company called LDS Associates that had developed some training materials for accent reduction and together they assembled an intense multi-week accent reduction course for Miller & Standel speech pathologists to administer, complete with frequent communication skills testing.

Middleton had two target markets for this new venture: English speaking immigrants who wanted to perfect their communication skills to move up the corporate ladder and corporate supervisors who wanted their sales or customer service staffs to hone their speaking tech niques to better interact with customers.

The training does not come cheap. A typical battery of 20-plus hours of training costs about $1,500. When employers send their employees through the program, the cost is usually split between them.

Besides the general lack of awareness about the method and the program's high cost, Middleton soon encountered another problem. The business of reducing accented English to get along better in the corporate world is a very sensitive area. Immigrant executives don't want their bosses to find out they are taking a course to remedy any communications difficulties they may be having.

"Nobody wants to show any fault or weakness--and going to a program like this is an admission that you have a weakness," said Brian Barry, senior executive with Philadelphia-based Drake Beam Morin Inc., or DBM, a human capital management services firm.

While it may not be as stigmatizing as an alcohol treatment program, it's embarrassing enough to prevent many people from going through the program. Indeed, the program is so sensitive that Executive Expression could not find a client willing to talk about the training for this article.

However, one corporate executive was willing to talk about his decision to offer the Executive Expression training to one of his employees.

Kevin Parikh, who leads the outsourcing transactions practice of Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. at the firm's Los Angeles office, said he realized that some employees wanted to improve their intonation.

"Our associates speak exceptional English, but some desire to soften their accents in order to facilitate communications during negotiations with U.S.-based clients," Parikh said. With better speech, he said, the associates can communicate more effectively and "help the parties get down to business more quickly."

Parikh found Executive Expression through a Google search and offered to sponsor one employee on his team as a test case. That employee accepted the offer and begins his training this month.

So far, Parikh said he has been impressed with the level of testing at Executive Expression, but he was reserving judgment on the program's overall effectiveness.

"This is an investigation on our part; if it works with one employee, we may consider offering employees access to the program," he said.

Executive Expression

Year Founded: 2000

Core Business: Reducing the accents of immigrant executives, sales and customer service representatives to enable them to progress in the corporate world

Revenues in 2004: $1.3 million

Revenues in 2005: $1.2 million

Employees in 2004: 5

Employees in 2005: 8

Goal: To transition completely out of traditional speech pathology and concentrate the entire business in accent reduction for the corporate world

Driving Force: Need for executives and sales/ customer service professionals to communicate better in meetings, sales presentations and with customers

HOWARD FINE Staff Reporter