YOUR BUSINESS AUTHORITY
Springfield, MO
YOUR BUSINESS AUTHORITY
Springfield, MO
Local women share their journey to the top of their professions and the challenges and triumphs they faced along the way. They’re rewriting the script on success and there’s no ceiling.
My guest this week is Sherry Coker. She’s the owner of Coker Consulting LLC, assisting businesses with education and training solutions. She spent 17 years in workforce development at Ozarks Technical Community College, leaving in 2023 to pursue a long-held dream to run her own business. The path to finding the courage to bet on herself was long and bumpy. Sherry says she’s struggled with an eating disorder and self-worth. But she’s learned to turn down the track inside her head that says she isn’t good enough, and that’s led to new opportunities and ways to impact others. In this conversation, Sherry talks about her new consulting venture, as well as the death of her first husband and finding love again.
Below is an excerpt from the start of our conversation.
—Christine Temple, Executive Editor
Christine Temple: I want to start with a big change that you made, which was leaving your job at OTC where you worked for many years to go out on your own and start your own business.
Sherry Coker: It was exciting. The timing was just right for that. I had learned and had accomplished everything that I really wanted to accomplish at OTC. I was doing the thing that I loved to do, and I just had this, I can’t even explain it to you really, but it was important for me to make a decision at the time to just do my own thing.
Temple: Tell me about this dream of owning your own business.
Coker: I’m always amazed at the women that had choices to accomplish things earlier in life than what I’ve had. They’ve had the opportunity to go out on their own. For me, the timing was not ever correct. My first husband passed away when my kids were little. I was working a little bit on my own at that time, but after he passed away, I knew it was time, that I needed to do something that provided the stability and the consistency that my children needed until they got to be older. I don’t regret that at all. Now that they are in college and doing things for themselves, I get to follow up on this dream. And I have a very supportive husband now, too.
Temple: What kind of services are you providing, and how have you developed your skill set?
Coker: I joke about it – it’s like you do this thing for 17 years and then you leave and then you’re in between jobs, so, I’ll just become a consultant, right? It was a tough job to go: How do I take what I do and what I did so well at the college and turn that into a proposition that clients would find value in and pay money for? It took truly about two months for me to visit with colleagues and friends and other consultants in the business. I drank more coffee in the first two months after me leaving OTC, just listening, throwing pitches, practicing pitches, screwing them up so badly but yet having those kind, wonderful friends to say, “It’s OK, Sherry, you’re getting there.” It wasn’t being afraid to just throw things on paper, scratch them out, start all over again. What I decided to do was, ultimately, education and training. What I want to do is alert clients and small-business owners, medium-size business owners, pretty much anyone who will listen to me, talk to them about the value of employee retention – of the value of attracting not just skilled individuals but individuals who have that desire to learn on the job and take that and work with them to develop training plans, strategies for that attraction and retention. This is a work in progress.
A safe room and classroom addition at Willard Central Elementary School will be used by the music, arts and athletic programs for a district that had 4,536 students last year, according to Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education figures, but school officials say enrollment is projected to grow.