They initially studied three successful therapists, Fritz Perls (the founder of Gestalt therapy), Virginia Satir (the founder of Family Therapy) and Milton Erickson (the leading exponent of Modern Hypnotherapy) and using an effective way of asking precise questions found out from them how they were able to get such consistently good results. Whilst initially modelling these people, over the course of the next few years they modelled many different people from sportsmen and women to marksmen and businessmen, and as such started to coin the phrase that NLP was being able to model the structure of excellence.