Executive Coaching grad helps small businesses thrive

Learn more about the Master of Arts in Executive and Organizational Coaching.

There is a startling trait small business in Canada share: more than 20 per cent of them fail in their first year and just half make it to five years. 

That’s where Beverlee Rasmussen comes in. In the crowded coaching market, she has many qualifications for helping business owners thrive:  

• Started a business? Check — a travel agency in Langley, B.C., in 1993, when she was the single mother of a young boy.
• Built a successful business? Check — that business topped $3 million in annual sales after just two years.
• Sold the business? Check — after seven years, she moved on from the successful agency to begin a new career helping other business owners.

Despite all that experience, something was missing when, as a consultant, she would attempt to share her knowledge to help business owners improve, and sometimes save, their enterprises — and make their lives better.

“I realized I needed different skills and I realized I needed to learn how to coach. I needed to learn how to speak to these individuals differently,” says Rasmussen.

To make that happen, she pursued graduate certificates in Executive Coaching and in Organization Design and Development at Royal Roads University in 2011 and 2017 respectively, then earned a Master of Arts in Executive and Organizational Coaching in 2023.

Embracing that education allowed her to learn what worked and what didn’t — “I learned that human beings do not like to be told what to do… You need to ask and not tell.” — and then, “All the pieces started to make sense. So, I started taking a coaching approach in my consulting practice, which now became a coaching practice, and I was on fire.”

Just as she started Somerville Travel Inc. to build a career based on her years of experience as a travel agent, she started Systems Business Coach to make the most of everything she’d learned in small businesses and Royal Roads classes. Her company offers courses such as Business Resiliency Boot Camp and Systematize Your Business, and Rasmussen’s books, including Small Business, Big Opportunity, share her insights with business owners.

Rasmussen’s company offers Business Coach Certification and now has 40 coaches in nine countries using the methodologies she developed through her time at RRU. Their efforts go beyond building profitable businesses. In Lithuania, for instance, her coaches are working with 12 emerging NGOs while, in London, one coach is helping immigrant women micro-business owners from Bangladesh create sustainable enterprises.

At the core of all her company’s offerings is the knowledge that every business owner starts from a different place but most “are too busy just doing it, doing it, doing it every day” to be able to step back and assess the changes and systems approach their business needs, she says.

“We have this invisible chaos that no one's really talking about,” Rasmussen says. “But because I had done all those interviews [with business owners], I knew this was going on. I had felt the pain of lawyers, mortgage brokers, soap makers, manufacturers — it didn't matter who and what industry. They have a 50-50 chance of surviving.”

Rasmussen’s goal in sharing her wisdom is to improve those odds.

Learn more about the Master of Arts in Executive and Organizational Coaching.