When Opportunity Knocks

Jan Fox couldn’t tear her eyes from the screen. At six years old, she was watching her first Miss America pageant at her Aunt Lottie’s house, finding herself completely lost in awe over the elegance and grace she saw in the women. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but my mother was chronically depressed and didn’t know how to raise kids,” she explains. “Our house was always filthy and disorganized, and while watching that pageant, I really noticed for the first time how matted my hair was and how ratty my clothes were compared to theirs. I went home, wrapped my old bed sheet around me like a gown, and looked at my reflection in the mirror. I distinctly remember thinking to myself, ‘I’m out of here.’ I knew I was capable of more than this filth and neglect. I wanted whatever that Miss America pageant had represented for me.”

Decades later, Jan Fox is not a Miss America, but a four-time Emmy Award winner. She’s now five years into her newest adventure, Fox Talks, a consulting business focused on delivering speaking and leadership coaching to individuals from all walks of life. “My goal as a speaking coach is to help you SPEAK! For FULL-BLOWN IMPACT!” she says with enthusiasm. “I strongly believe in the power of tweaks. I can teach you to speak better in order to sell more, or help you gain media attention, and it’s all done through exercises and tiny adjustments.” She’s also a sought-after speaker.

Jan started the business shortly after retiring from D.C.’s Channel 9 News, her final assignment as a reporter for a total of nearly 30 years in the field.  Clients began asking for coaching, but she wasn’t quite sure how to charge them. She decided her best option was to go to a brander, where she was able to corral her stories. She wanted to know what would have the most impact on those who sought her services. “Looking back on my journey toward Fox Talks, I realized my pattern was just jumping in and doing it,” she says. “If I saw something out there I was interested in, I would follow the path and ask questions. When a little crack in the door appeared, I would stick my toe in and see what happened. My dad always said, ’Opportunity knocks; in walks Janet Fox,’ and I guess he was right.”

Jan and her younger brother grew up in Shelbyville, Indiana, not far from most of her 32 cousins. Her father was a watchmaker for the early years of her childhood, running a little town shop and hunting raccoons on the weekend. His deepest love was serving as a lay preacher for his storefront church. Because Jan’s mother had been divorced long before marrying her father, his denomination forbade him from holding the position of Reverend, but he constantly volunteered to help the church. “He was asked to speak everywhere: nursing homes, jails, even substituting for preachers at other churches,” she recalls. “When he died, more than 350 people crammed into the funeral home. He really touched people’s lives. He had a fierce commitment to his family and his work. It gave deep meaning to his life and ours.”

At the onset of the Cold War, her father was summoned to work in the naval ordinance at Fort Benjamin Harrison, using his fine instrument techniques to aid in the construction of bombs. The job came with a pay raise, but the family seemed to always struggle for money, most likely due to her mother’s inability to manage a household. As Jan would find out in her adulthood, her mother battled depression and anxiety. She was physically and verbally abuse to Jan and her brother. “Dad would belt us sometimes, but at least we knew what we’d done and how many licks we were getting,” she recalls. “Mom was outrageous. It was horrible. I often wondered why he never protected us from her, and my only guess is that he believed in ‘honoring thy father and mother.’ She was our mother, so we had to do as she said.”

Despite her troubles at home, Jan managed to stay a positive, upbeat child, frequently playing baseball at the field by the factory across the street and working in the town dime store or Broadway Café. She served as Secretary/Treasurer of her class, and would sneak off to twirl batons when her father preferred she play the saxophone in the band. She earned good grades and aspired to become a teacher, after lots of playing teacher as a kid. She once taught a boy with special needs to write his name.

“I was always on the fringes of the cool group since I was from the other side of town,” she recalls. “I wore my friends’ hand-me-down clothes. Even though I sang in the Singing Stars group in high school, I couldn’t help but feel less than, so on the inside, I was always pushing for something bigger and better. I could see it and feel it, so I went to work to find whatever it might be.”

When she graduated from high school, Jan’s father borrowed $500 from the bank to send her to a small church college where she could study to become a teacher. “My mother was against it, but I was determined,” she says. “I worked every job I could find to pay my way. Growing up the way I did, working came easily.”

In college, she became a cheerleader and finally made it to the in-crowd, making countless friends and falling in love during her freshman year. “He was the smartest guy in the college, and I was very attracted to his linear thinking,” she recalls. “He told me he liked that I was a bubbly cheerleader, and that when he took me home, I would do all the small talking with his family so he wouldn’t have to interact with anyone.” In the middle of her sophomore year, he proposed and they married during her winter break, despite her parents’ dismay. “I was only 19, so my mother was livid,” Jan recalls. “My father was only okay with it because he came from a good family and had plans to join the Peace Corps after graduating.” Her husband’s Peace Corps dreams were interrupted, however, when he enlisted in the military to avoid the draft that came with Vietnam.  He was assigned to Germany, and Jan finished college a semester early to join him and teach at the Army base nursery school in Munich.  Kristin, her daughter, was born there.

After a couple of years back in the states, they divorced. Never one to be down for long, Jan enrolled at Lesley University and earned her Masters degree in education. She went on to teach kindergarten through second grade, and eventually ran workshops for the Greater Boston Regional Education Center. She also worked as a consultant for the Follow-Through Project, a program dedicated to continuing the Head Start Program in grades 1 through 4.  She then returned to Lesley to teach graduate education courses and direct the outreach program.

During these years, she frequently traveled for her various positions and worked closely with parents, teachers, and community members. A therapist and instructor from her Master’s program was invited to be a guest on a talk show in Boston, and he needed two people to argue as husband and wife, so Jan agreed and spent four Sundays appearing on the show. Eventually, the host position opened, and a photographer encouraged her to apply. She did, but she did not get the job.

A year later, she met a show producer at a little church in Harvard Square who asked to see a sample tape of her TV work.  With nothing to lose, Jan hired a cameraman to film her reporting on fake stories to show that she could do the work, if it were offered. A few days later, the producer called, asking her to fill in for a talk show host who had called in sick. “They wanted me to interview the new choreographer of the Boston Ballet, and I said sure,” she remembers. “I had no idea what I was doing, and it was on live TV! Somehow I did it, and they continued to call me to report for the show. After a few months, the host left. They offered me a thirteen-week contract that ended up turning into a permanent position.”

Jan stayed with the program for several years until the TV station was sold to another network, which cut all local programming and left Jan without a job. With a daughter in high school and no leads, she heard about an opening for a reporter in Portland, Maine, so she flew up for the interview. The meeting went so well that the News Director asked her to sit on set with the anchorman and read the anchorwoman’s part. Jan had no experience as an anchor, but she made it through the scripts and landed the job. “It was a huge honor, but also terrifying,” she confesses. “It was a big job, and a lot of the responsibility for the ratings would ride, in part, on my performance. I decided to go to every parade, every festival, kiss every baby, and make every appearance possible so that, even if I flunked myself out of the job, I would be embedded in the community.”

Jan stayed with Channel 6 for four years, and during that time, she met her current husband, Michael O’Sullivan.  After several years of dating, he was offered a job in D.C. that would allow him to put his three sons through college, so Jan began looking for jobs in the area. With the help of her Portland news director, she was invited to meet with Channel 9. “After my interview, they asked me to join them in the conference room so I could meet the rest of the team,” she says. “I met one gentleman who was excited to talk with me about Portland and his love of Maine Lobsters. Another gentleman asked me if I would crave the anchor position, since I had been an anchor. I told him that I was at an age where being an anchor wasn’t as important as longevity in the business.“ By the end of the meeting, the general manager told her they were very interested, and that they would be in touch.

Their phone call never came. Jan waited weeks for Channel 9 to follow up, and even despite her calls to the secretary and hand written notes, she waited in vain. She was about to give up hope, when one day, walking down the streets of Portland, she saw an advertisement that read, ‘We ship lobsters anywhere in 24 hours.’ She went into the store, bought two lobsters, and shipped them to Channel 9 in D.C. with a note that said, ‘It would be hard to leave these bad boys behind, but for you, I would.’ Sure enough, the station called her soon after to formally offer her the position of General Assignment Reporter.

Jan served many roles while at Channel 9, filling in for the weekend anchors when Glenn Brenner was rushed to the hospital after running in the Marine Corps Marathon.  She covered heart-wrenching stories of murders and fallen soldiers, fires and bad car accidents, snowstorms and floods. Eventually, her boss asked her to serve as the consumer reporter on 9 Wants to Know. “I’m very grateful for every day of that job,” she reminisces. “The producer and I worked together with the Fairfax County Police and the Safe Kids’ Coalition to start car seat checks, and it made a real difference in people’s lives.”

After five or six years as the consumer reporter, a new news director disbanded the unit, and several people over the age of 50 were relieved of their duties. Jan was spared, but was later transferred to the Morning Show, which she saw as the metaphorical end of her career. “I wasn’t happy about it, but I took the job, went to the ladies room to cry for a minute, and then put my smile back on and went on with it,” she says. “The hours were terrible—I should have gone to bed at 7 pm every night, but I wanted to have a life with my hubby. Eventually I realized I was living my life in a stupor from lack of sleep.”

After five years of maintaining an unfathomable schedule, Jan finally felt she had had enough. “My husband had just brought home an HD TV, and when I saw myself on the screen, I thought, ‘Oh no, I look just like my great aunt Marian!’” she laughs. She decided that, at 62, she was ready to approach the news director and declare her retirement. “I’d interviewed presidents and many celebrities, gotten people their money back, sent thieves to jail, and made a business pay a million dollars in fines to the State of Maryland,” she recounts. “I had the opportunity to do some amazing things, but even at my age, I knew there were lots of other things out there that I could get passionate about, and I wanted to do something else. I asked for a severance package for my years of being a loyal and faithful servant, a farewell cake from a nice bakery, and most importantly, a chance to say goodbye on my shows, because so often people just disappear with no explanation. I was very grateful to be given that opportunity.”

After Jan retired from Channel 9, she worked for Billy Casper Golf. “I hoped taking that job would mean I was playing more golf but I ended up talking about playing golf and working a lot on excel spreadsheets, which really was way too hard for me,” she laughs. “After a couple years, the management realized I could help them work on their speaking and presenting skills. I also produced videos for the annual meeting. I kept getting asked to speak and coach on the outside, so I realized I could actually build a business around it. I see the gaps in my clients’ communication and have the ability to make those gaps seem smaller. Over time, I learned the art of taking a few steps backward, changing their point of view, helping them through their fear, and helping them move forward.”

Although Jan had never held a professional position of authority, she now frequently coaches leadership skills by drawing on her experience at Channel 9. During her fourteen years with the station, she saw at least, nineteen different News Directors and General Managers come and go, creating a culture that was always ready for change. “Because I was able to see such a fast turnover of leaders, I feel I have the authority to speak on what leadership feels like from the inside out,” she says. “When I work with CEOs, I tell them that they are the lions and lionesses of the jungle, while I have spent my career as lion food. Because I have fourteen years of experience from the lion food point of view, I can see how the way you speak and present affects those you lead. It’s a rare person who can lead fairly, honestly, and from the heart, but I believe the way you speak about yourself and your business determines whether or not people will follow you. Leadership is all in your mouth. It better be driven by heart.”

When Jan is not busy with Fox Talks, she devotes her time to her blended family of kids and grandkids, and her husband, Michael, to whom she has been married for ten years. After several years together, Michael showed up on the morning show and proposed. “I can honestly say I love him more today than I ever did before, and I’m so grateful because we are modeling a good marriage for our kids,” Jan affirms. “He and my daughter have a wonderful relationship. She was 16 when they met, so he often says she embedded his buttons rather than pushed them.” Michael has always been incredibly supportive of Jan’s career, so much so that he even came up with her business’s name. “I was struggling so much over the branding decisions, and no names were sounding right to me,” she recalls. “My husband eventually just said, ‘Why don’t you call it Fox Talks, because you certainly do!’”

Since starting the business, Jan has written Get Yourself on TV and a Minibuk of her speaking practice plans to hand out to clients like brochures, which have been extremely successful. Additionally, she continues to speak all over the country. Her clients are so varied that it’s hard to describe her niche. She’s spoken at events as vast and varied as International Car Week in New Orleans, a Fantastic 50 IT company in Chantilly, Virginia, and a number of women’s conferences. She’s spoken at CEO coaching groups like Vistage International, at the D.C. Bar, and at meetings of the International Association of Pet Cemetery and Crematory Owners. “And I only have gold fish!” Jan laughs.

“I have no plans of slowing down any time soon,” she affirms. “My husband always says that if I hear a ‘no,’ I will try a hundred ways to get a ‘yes.’ It can drive him nuts, but I know that’s how I operate, and it’s how I succeed. I also do believe somebody bigger than I am laid the path for me and I just walked it. I didn’t have What Color is Your Parachute back then. That path, coupled with plain, old-fashioned work, helped me go from such meager upbringings to the accomplishments I’ve experienced over my life, and I wouldn’t change a thing. When opportunity knocks, I know what to do.”

‍