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The pitch

Lisa Reichmann, co-founder, Run Farther & Faster

“Our focus has always been on coaching the whole runner – not just giving someone a running schedule, but really creating a comprehensive program. We not only coach running, we also address strength, injury prevention and nutrition. We take a lot of pride in forming personal relationships with our runners and getting to know them to support them. We recognize that our clients are balancing so many things in their lives besides their running schedule, so we make a concerted effort to make running fit into their lives and serve as a stress reliever.

“We offer group programs and private virtual coaching. We typically hold two major group programs per year, that meet in-person about once per week. We bring in experts to talk about other supplemental topics of interest to runners. Groups now range in size from 40 to 80 people. We also offer some group programs for specific organizations. For example, we have coached Montgomery College’s faculty and staff for a health-and-wellness program and twice a year we do a virtual program for Montgomery County Public Schools employees.

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“We offer the private virtual coaching over the phone and through email. Participants may be runners in the region who don’t want to join a group program or have different goals, or those located outside the region. Those clients pay on a monthly basis for our guidance and ongoing communication about their running goals.”

Julie Sapper, co-founder

“We’d like to grow our business, but we are also trying to streamline our business. We are both really hard workers and respond very quickly to our clients. Right now, we don’t use a software platform for our virtual coaching and prefer to do most of our communication through personal emails. Even though it might not be as functionally efficient as some of the available platforms, we think it gives us a better rapport with our clients and that’s really what defines our business. The upside is people feel they are getting the service they deserve — personalized attention — but the downside is we are probably doing more work than other coaches. How can we become more efficient without losing our personal-touch edge?

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Reichmann

“We’ve talked about expanding our programs and hiring additional coaches to scale the business, but then that takes us out of the equation. We do use some volunteer assistant coaches with our group programs and they have been great. It’s hard to give up our personal involvement in the day-to-day operations. We have bonded with our clients over the years through the individualized attention and our clients seem to really respond well to us as individuals. If we were to add scale to this part of the business, we would need to spend considerable time training other coaches to ensure consistency of service. And, we would not want that time to be taken away from our current clientele. .

How do we grow our business with these limitations? “

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The advice

Elana Fine, executive director, the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business

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“You need to make a decision about what you mean by ‘growing’ your business. You can grow the business by charging more per person to increase your revenues while keeping your coaching a very high-touch service business. Currently, you are not at a price-point that requires the kind of personal attention that you are giving and you could charge more for your time.

“The more scalable way to grow is to use a technology platform to manage the business and your client interactions so you can add more clients. This technology could be a standard customer relationship management or CRM platform or something more specific for coaches – there are lots of off-the-shelf options. If you go this route, you can easily expand outside of this immediate region and easily do things like conduct webinars, send group emails and daily inspirations, etc.

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“Most entrepreneurs feel like they need to maintain all the control of the business and in your case. But once they give up a little bit of control of the things that aren’t in their core competencies, they often enjoy the business more and find more success. Figure out what you as co-founders each specifically bring to the business. Is it the content of your training programs? Your ability to bring on new clients? Physically leading the runs? Where do you have to be and where will the business fall apart without you, and what are the things you could bring other people on to do?

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“I see you both as the charismatic leaders of a community of runners who can create the content for your program, but you could likely hire like-minded people to handle some of the communication, community maintenance or training development.”

The reaction

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Sapper

“We agree that we need to critically examine our business and determine our definition of growth to better assess our short-term and long-term goals. We also think that there is significant value in carefully assessing various technology platforms, along with elements we can outsource, while balancing the hallmark of our business—the personal connections we have with our clients. Thanks for helping us improve how we ‘run’ our business!”