Interview and Article MICHELLE R PRICE
If you love a good story, then sit down and strap in because the following is a pretty fantastic yarn. Business owner, Lee Harold, has a tale to tell and he shared it with us from his new office space on the Sunshine Coast.
Lee has an infectious personality and perhaps that is one of the things that has helped him take each of his business pursuits to the next level. But his early years were anything but usual. Lee was raised within a religious sect and describes his childhood as being ‘sheltered’. He admits none of the members were able to mingle with outsiders.
He went on to learn five different languages and also studied surveying. During his time at university he met a woman who invited him to go to a nightclub with her. Lee had never danced before, largely due to his strict upbringing, but he watched the other dancers and copied their moves. Lee quit his degree and went on to dance professionally and even won the title of World Dance Champion two years later. The story gets even more intriguing.
At the age of 27, Lee died. In the lead-up he had just completed his training as a Gestalt therapist, a form of psychotherapy that is focused on the individual’s present life and challenges. He had also completed his studies in Neuro Linguistic Programming and then he died for six hours. He didn’t go into details about what caused his death but did say that he had, “No belief systems in place and I’d never heard of yoga, I’d never heard of meditation, I had no context for a new state of being and a new birth.” Lee admits it was difficult to talk to anyone about his unique experience without them thinking he had lost his mind. So, he did what anyone else in his position would do and became a monk, living at monasteries in Tibet and Thailand… eventually finding himself at a monastery in Perth, Western Australia. A while later he met up with the woman who encouraged him to start dancing and married her. After marrying he set up a site, www.yoga.com.au, which went on to become the biggest yoga school in Australia with a total of 5500 students.
Life was going swimmingly when his dad phoned to say he had prostate cancer. Lee spent a lot of time and money researching potential cures. He thought Magnesium might help his father, but his medical team wouldn’t allow it and his dad eventually lost his fight for life. After that, Lee embarked on a wilderness trek in the desert in WA as a way of processing his grief. I should mention at this point that Lee had been suffering from back pain he believes was due to his dancing career. He recalls stumbling across a lake in the desert around 200km north of Kalgoorlie. It was a hot day, so he paddled for around 30 minutes before wading back to shore. Once out, he realised he didn’t have his back pain anymore, saying, “My pain is gone, that’s weird… it was really hurting when I got to the lake. So, I went back and I emptied all my water bottles and I filled them up with this water.”
After returning to civilisation, Lee discovered that lake was around 7 million years old and was once an inland sea. “Over hundreds of thousands of years, being in the desert, all the H20 evaporated… until it became a super saturated solution,” largely made up of Magnesium. Lee was able to get access to around 20 litres of that solution and he poured that into small bottles which he handed to his yoga students to trial. “The response was more than I could have imagined… people were saying, ‘my headaches are gone’, ‘I can sleep at night’, ‘I don’t hurt after yoga’, ‘my arthritis doesn’t hurt’, ‘I’m not getting PMT’.” Lee admits he didn’t believe all of the feedback himself, but it did occur to him that, “This could be big!”
Later, Lee took some of his Magnesium spray to the Markets in Eumundi on the Sunshine Coast. He admits he hates being sold to, so he would just ask people who walked over to his stand where they had pain and he would spray a little on their skin and wait. When people realised he wasn’t actually selling it, but rather was conducting a trial, they grew angry and that’s when he realised this would be his new business. Lee managed to fill 400 bottles and printed off labels from his home printer and returned to the markets. He sold them all and Amazing Oils was born.
Lee’s daughter Grace mentioned at that point that her friend’s dad owned the largest distributorship on the Sunshine Coast. While holidaying in Phuket, Thailand, Lee set up a Skype chat with the friend’s dad who said he was only interested in distributing a range, not a single product. That was until Lee introduced him to the men he was having breakfast with. He panned the camera around to show he was with singer Robbie Williams and music guru Mollie Meldrum and that is how Lee managed to get his products into grocery stores across Australia. Based on his training in NLP he was aware that people didn’t want to be ‘sold to’ so he recorded candid testimonial videos and posted those on social media for others to see.
He explains that Magnesium helps relax the muscles and tendons of the human body, while Calcification causes tension and tightening. Magnesium also facilitates cognitive function, bringing the mind to a state of calm. Amazing Oils is a family business made up of Lee’s wife and children. The products are TGA approved and are available in 6000 chemists Australia-wide.
