Maurice Pennington and Alisha Pennington are the masterminds behind multiple businesses. In 2012, Alisha started ATvantage Athletic Training with the support of her then-boyfriend Maurice. Alisha leveraged her two sports medicine degrees to build ATvantage into the premier staffing agency for athletic trainers, growing it into a million-dollar business in under four years. Determined to help those around them understand the value of providing services under a business, Alisha started The Business ATvantage podcast (produced by Maurice), where she focused on the often overlooked intersection of business and athletic training. By 2019, Alisha Pennington became a published author of Best Practices by the National Athletic Training Association. The title acknowledged Alisha as an expert on how to conduct oneself as a self-employed athletic trainer, reinforcing her impact in the field. But, Alisha Pennington never wanted to limit herself to one industry. After tens of thousands of podcast streams and hundreds of answered questions, Alisha and Maurice began consulting other aspiring and existing entrepreneurs. It was clear their work was having an impact, but it was equally evident that business was having an equal impact on their own lives.
With the goal of helping others understand the benefits of business and take action towards starting and scaling their own, the couple formally began providing business coaching and consulting services together under Pennington Perspective in 2020. The Start-Up Incubator, Pennington Perspective’s first self-paced course, launched in May later that year. Essentially a startup school, its purpose was to provide a playbook of steps to start a business upon a solid foundation that is built to last. It focuses on the extremely important, but often overlooked “unsexy” tasks like entity types, legal, business bank accounts, accounting, and taxes. As a result of feedback, they created a mini-course called Business Viability Benchmark. It allows anyone to test their unique business idea and identify whether it can become a viable business. In 2021, Pennington Perspective launched Self-Made Accelerator, targeting entrepreneurs who wanted to learn how to grow and scale their business, which took them around the country delivering it in a 1:1 capacity and also having business owners fly them from all over to learn in a workshop setting.
As founders of Pennington Perspective with a decade of experience starting and scaling businesses, there is one aspect that Maurice and Alisha drive home on an ongoing basis – Financial Freedom. As people who have seen the fruit of business benefit their lives in ways they never could have imagined, they will explain to anyone who’ll listen to the incredible financial perks that come with starting a business. In an exclusive interview, Maurice and Alisha Pennington shared with LA Confidential five financial perks that come with becoming your own boss.
- It is bigger than us
Alisha Pennington shares that her first business was started out of necessity. She was a college graduate when the effects of the 2008 recession lingered. “There wasn’t work available,” she shares, “so I had to start a business. It was started selfishly”. However, today, with multiple companies up and running, Alisha is proud to recognize that her efforts are much bigger than her. “It serves more people. My family, employees, contractors,” and, of course, other business owners. Maurice continues,” when we remain focused on serving and recognize we are in service to others, the mission and opportunity take us to heights we never thought possible.”
2. Limit Our Tax Liability
Alisha shares that in the United States, the tax code is designed to incentivize and thus benefit businesses. “We’ve learned to leverage that,” says Alisha when referring to the tax regulations and opportunities available to business owners, “and we’ve used it to benefit our lives,” she adds. Maurice adds, “at first it felt like we were doing something wrong,” but they then realized that the IRS benefits are in place to support and recognize people who start businesses because it spurs the economy, provides jobs, and often is an investment back in the local community. As we all know, none of this is taught in school, but in the 10 years they’ve been in business, they have amassed a good number of tips that they now share freely.
3. Deepen Our Financial Literacy
While explaining that businesses can challenge owners to grow, learn and evolve along with their work, Alisha describes the journey that one takes with financial literacy. Our businesses have “challenged us to go even deeper into managing money and communicating with others,” she says. She continues, “when our entire livelihood depended on this, it was imperative that we understood this on as many levels as possible.” Maurice added, “she has always hoarded money,” so their knowledge about investment opportunities was perhaps beyond what most are, but “reaching new levels of finance” and “understanding the tax code” caused them to deepen their understanding beyond what most books or common tips cover. Owning a business can open one’s eyes to a whole new way of seeing assets and capital.
4. No Limit to Our Earning Potential
“Every business must make money,” states Alisha, but she never imagined the heights that they would reach. The multi-million dollar business owners assured us that there is no limit to how much one can achieve, because if they can do it, so can anyone else. “We never imagined we’d make the Inc 5,000, let alone generate multi-7 figures of revenue,” she adds. They share, “coming from single mother households, we were both given strong work ethics, but never realized ALL that was possible through business ownership.” This is probably one of the greatest opportunities in being your own boss “the ability to continually scale up and up and up,” states Maurice. We’re all so accustomed to intermittent raises with a total cap put on our earning potential, that it “truly is something we had to get used to,” he says.
5. Financial Freedom Bought Us Time Freedom
Finally, there is the one sole reason most would risk it all to become successful business owners – time freedom. “While we still maintain a work schedule,” explains Alisha, “the ability to travel when needed, be home with our daughter or show up for friends and family has been the ultimate gift.” They had a daughter in 2020 amidst the pandemic, and to have the solace of knowing their businesses were safe financially allowed them to be fully present in those precious few first months. “Financial freedom buys time freedom,” says Maurice, with Alisha adding, “and truly, what I was after was the time freedom.” For a certain amount of time at the beginning of their entrepreneurial journey, Maurice maintained a corporate job, but within a few years, they opted to have him leave because, as Alisha says, “it wasn’t worth having full flexibility for myself if I couldn’t have my partner alongside me.”
