Coaching for success: SBDC helps entrepreneur set PR

PUYALLUP, Wash.—Ruth Perkins, an elite runner who competed in two Olympic Trials, knows the value of a good coach. Sometimes hard work is just hard work and the goal remains elusive, but a good coach can change everything.

And that’s what happened in 2023, when Perkins, owner of Perkins Coaching, attended a Thriving Together Resource Event in the City of Lakewood and met Washington SBDC advisor Liz Jamieson. Jamieson, who presented a workshop on branding and marketing, talked with Perkins after the presentation and mentioned that the SBDC also offers no-cost, one-on-one, confidential advising.

Perkins remembers laughing and saying, “Where have you been all my life?”

The Washington SBDC, which stands for Small Business Development Center, is part of the nation’s oldest and largest publicly supported technical assistance program for small business. The SBDC in Washington State was created in 1980 and has grown to become a network of more than 40 small business advisors working in communities across the state to help entrepreneurs and small business owners start, grow or buy/sell a business. SBDC advisors can assist business owners in just about any industry and at any stage of the business cycle.

SBDC services are funded through a cooperative agreement between Washington State University, the statewide host of the SBDC, and the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA). About half of the SBDC budget comes from the SBA, and the rest is from state and local funding partners.

Perkins, who ran middle distances in high school and college, became a personal trainer in 2005, typically subcontracting with gyms and fitness centers.

While Perkins enjoyed helping clients improve their fitness, too often, she said, her clients saw exercise as a means to lose weight, rather than truly building health and wellness.

After successfully dealing with an eating disorder of her own that emerged once she got back into competitive running in 2010, Perkins said she realized she needed to rebrand her services, from personal training to coaching.

“Personal training is usually about aesthetics, but coaching is about performance,” she said. When her clients, especially women, would talk about wanting to lose weight, she would say, “I won’t work with you on body size, but I will work with you on performance.”

She began her coaching business in 2014 and over the next six years she continued to grow her client list, but then COVID hit.

In 2023, when she discovered the Washington SBDC, she was still building back from losses she suffered during the pandemic. The problem, she said, is that while people kept running, most races, including the big ones, were canceled in 2020 and 2021. Without a goal to work toward—qualifying for the Boston Marathon, for example—runners were less motivated to pay for coaching.

When Perkins first sat down with Jamieson to discuss how to build her business, developing a marketing plan was high on the to-do list. But Jamieson, a marketing expert, also wanted to discuss pricing. She encouraged Perkins to do more research into what other running coaches were charging, and what was included in their services.

It was an eye-opening experience. Perkins learned that she was charging about half what other coaches were charging, or even less, and was including more services. That’s not sustainable, Jamieson told her, which confirmed what Perkins had already been feeling: she couldn’t keep working that hard for so little return.

Then Jamieson asked, how much do you want to make next year? At the time, Perkins said, it was a terrifying question. A number popped into her head, but it seemed so absurd that it took her 20 minutes to get the courage to say it out loud.

In retelling the story now, Perkins laughs, “I ended up making that much last year, and it wasn’t even the goal we had set.”

Not that it was easy. When Jamieson first broached the subject of increasing her prices, Perkins balked. “I was just so very afraid of upsetting my athletes,” Perkins said. But, she said, Jamieson worked with her to help her understand her value.

“When you price yourself properly, your value goes up,” Perkins said. “When I was charging too little, what I was saying is that what I had to offer wasn’t valuable.”

Perkins said she lost about a third of her clients, which was hard, she said, but she also had clients who congratulated her and said, basically, it was about time.

“Liz reminded me that even if I did lose athletes, I would keep the ones that were right for me, and I would gain other athletes that were right for me,” she said.

“It was a very scary several months, but I kept going back and I kept trusting her,” Perkins said. “I know I would have never had the courage to make such a shift without her.”

While online coaching has really grown over the past decade or more, Perkins wanted to build a client list of runners who valued in-person coaching. “I can help them way more with pacing when I’m running the track with them,” she said. “I can also help them push through a mental block or reframe a really frustrating workout into a cause for celebration.”

Instead of offering runners an a la carte menu of different services to choose from, she created a limited number of packages that include services tailored to specific needs and her clients pay in advance each month.

Appropriately pricing her services has resulted in clients showing up differently, and Perkins upping her game as well. With Jamieson’s input, Perkins has updated her website and also increased her social media presence.

Perkins said she has always enjoyed coaching, but for a long time she was running her business as a hobby. If not for her husband’s employment, she could not have affording to keep doing it. Now, with Jamieson’s assistance, she is getting results that she could barely imagine three years ago.

In some ways it’s a full circle moment for Perkins, who definitely understands the value of a good coach. “It’s been really cool to watch people accomplish things they didn’t think they could accomplish,” she said.

For more about Perkins Coaching, go to https://www.perkinscoaching.net/.

For more about the Washington SBDC, go to https://wsbdc.org.