From a Cubicle to a Franchise: The SoccerGemz Story
Meet Jerome Smalls
"Carmin Wharton has helped me improve my business with her coaching techniques. She's provided me with a lot of marketing tips. She coached me on operations techniques. Carmin is a very good instructor and mentor."
Years ago, before B.E.G.I.N. had a name, a young man used to find his way to my cubicle almost every single day.
We worked together as academic advisors at the time. He wasn't officially my client — he was my coworker. But he had a dream he couldn't put down: a soccer program for toddlers, something joyful and simple that didn't exist yet in the way he imagined it. So he'd pull up a chair, run his latest idea by me, and ask the question that would eventually shape how I coach every client I have today: "What shall I do next, and then what?"
I remember one exchange clearly. I told him he needed two things before he could call this a real business: a business license with the City of Tampa, and a second one with Hillsborough County. Most people sit on advice like that for weeks. He didn't. He used his lunch hour the very next day to secure the first license. The day after, he went back and secured the second. Then he was back at my cubicle asking the same question all over again — what's next?
That question is the heartbeat of my B.E.G.I.N. Business System. Not "someday." Not "when I feel ready." Just the next right action — and then the one after that.
Today, that toddler soccer dream is SoccerGemz — a thriving youth soccer program serving the Tampa Bay area, with a full team of coaches, a curriculum built for kids as young as 18 months, and a franchise model now giving other entrepreneurs the chance to bring the same program to their own communities. What started in a cubicle on a lunch break is now a business other people are lining up to own a piece of.
Read that last sentence again.