The twenty-six-plus miles that form the modern marathon originate from the Greek legend of a messenger who was sent that distance from the city of Marathon to Athens and subsequently died of exhaustion. As legend would dictate, the race is supposed to be tough.
Shawna Rasmussen, an eleven-time marathoner who runs fifty miles weekly, enjoys a completed race much in the same way she relishes helping clients achieve peek performance in business.
“I love it when someone says, ‘You can’t do that; you can’t run Boston; you can’t be it all or have it all,’” says Rasmussen, who turned forty and qualified for and ran the prestigious Boston Marathon this year.
“You learn a lot of things about life by marathoning,” she says. “All it takes is hard work. It’s baby step, baby step. First you go three miles, and then you go four, then five. You just slowly achieve those goals. I think that applies to a lot of things in life.”
The persistence with which Rasmussen approaches athletics has been an asset in her business. She started on her own in 1994, consulting her only client, a surgeon, with tax prep and working one day a week. She had just given birth to the oldest of her three daughters and quit her full-time job as a city accountant. During the next few years, she slowly added clients and work days; now she has to turn people away every month.
But Rasmussen is not using her accounting degree from the Marriott School and her MBA from the University of Utah to simply prepare taxes. She works with every client all year long, looking at tax strategy as a function of business organization and planning, not after-the-fact paperwork.
“It’s looking at how to structure everything so that it maximizes tax benefits rather than ‘Here’s my mess—do the best that you can,’” she says. It’s a service many small companies need, but few get. Her unique approach has put her expertise in high demand, allowing her to be extra selective with her clientele, whom she refers to as “the cream” and calls them her best friends.
Ever since her first accounting class at BYU, she has loved the field. “I would have rather gone to that class than go to the movies,” she says. But without a business background and everything so new, she had to work harder than most of her peers. Of course, she probably wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“You get so much back from working hard,” she says. “When you work hard for a client, you get so much back from them and the satisfaction you did your best and provided a good service.”
