Interview with Jason Elkin, Jason Elkin’s perspective: owning a small business, Hist 150 Spring 2025, Conducted by Maddie Elkin, March 5, 2025

Overview to Social Change Interview

Jason Elkin talks about how his background in exercise science and health education led him to launch a strength and conditioning company in 2009. He describes the challenges and triumphs of being an entrepreneur, particularly in a turbulent economy and in the face of crises like COVID-19 and a significant facility flood, inspired by his early coaching experiences. He emphasizes how his company has survived thanks to strong personal motivation, family support, and virtues like tenacity and mentoring.

Elkin also highlights the substantial influence Elkin Sports Performance has on the community, especially through training adolescents and high school athletes in the area and through programs like the Championship Fitness Program, which is currently offered by the Police Athletic League in 28 cities across the US. There are recurring themes of work-life balance and character development through athletics.

The economic importance of small businesses in America, their high risk of failure, and the support of government institutions in fostering their success are all highlighted in reference works. Jason Elkin’s 15 years of success contrast with the 50% of small businesses in the country that fail within five years, indicating his business acumen and social roots.

Brief biography

I will be interviewing my dad, Jason Elkin. He grew up in Richmond, VA. I will be interviewing him about his business, Elkin Sports Performance that he founded in 2009. Jason attended Virginia Commonwealth University May of 1996 with a degree in health education and then went on to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville for a masters in exercise science in 1999. While he was doing his masters at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, he was working with numerous sports teams including the football team as part of their strength and conditioning staff.

Pre Interview

I reached out via text message to Jason on Tuesday, February 18 around 2:30pm asking if he would be willing to be interviewed for this project and he immediately responded saying that he would do it. I asked if he was alright with it being on a public site and if he was okay with his name being up and he said that he was okay with it. I have yet to tell him that what he says in the interview does not have an effect on my grade. The themes that I will be focusing on are the education required to start a strength and conditioning business and community building. We do not have a specific date lined up for the interview yet but I am thinking that it is going to either be Sunday, March 2nd or sometime this week. I haven’t yet confirmed with Jason about the transcript. Jason has confirmed that he is okay with follow up questions if there is a need.

 

Maddie Elkin 0:02

Hi, so I’m Maddie Elkin, and I’m doing my interview for my social change project for history 150 and I’m here with my father, Jason Elkin, who is the founder and CEO of Elkin Sports Performance located in Richmond, Virginia. So my first question is, what inspired you to start your business?

 

Mr. Elkin 0:22

When I was going through Virginia Commonwealth University, I was a high school wrestling coach. I loved training the high school athlete and seeing how they could progress. When during that time as I completed my graduation from VCU, I did an internship at University of Richmond, where I was a strength conditioning coach on their staff, and absolutely fell in love with training athletes. I went down to University of Tennessee to do my Masters, and then worked at a private boys school, then worked with another company. That was the first time I got into the private side. Once I saw to do that, and I that’s why I really liked being able to train all kinds of people from all different walks of life. And my wife and I had a chance to move back to Richmond, where we were from, and start our own business. And I just jumped at the opportunity, and back in 2009 January, 2009 to open up my own spot, to have my own vision of everything that I’ve learned in the past, from the business side of it to the training side of it, and see how it could incorporate everything, and to try to train as many people as possible during that time, and and so it’s been almost 15 years now that we’ve had the business, and it’s been great ever since.

 

Maddie Elkin 1:50

Perfect. Okay. And then the second question. Can you describe what it is like to own your own business and an economy that’s constantly changing?

 

Mr. Elkin 1:59

Owning my own business is the happiest, most rewarding, exciting, humbling, laugh myself to sleep, cry to myself to sleep experience I’ve ever had. There are some days that it is absolutely amazing. There’s some days I looked at other things to do, but everything is about pushing forward and perseverance. And things I try to instill with our athletes each and every day, is adapt, overcome, have determination, have the drive to when something gets tough, to keep pushing forward. I feel that owning your own business is very much like that. There’s going to be good days and bad days. Probably the scariest time was when we had had to go through the COVID experience, and when the business got shut down. As a very trying time for me personally, as well as a father and as well as a business owner and all that. And then a year later, unfortunately, there was a flood in our building, which shut down our building for another couple times. So it’s been some exciting times. There’s also been some tough times and But the exciting times when you have athletes that come in and they have hired you to do a service, and they work really hard, and they reach their goals, then it is the most exciting thing to be able to see these athletes reach their goals and to see their hard work pay off. So that’s really what I love about owning my own company.

 

Maddie Elkin 3:29

Yeah. Okay. What kind of impact did starting your own business have on your personal life?

 

Mr. Elkin 3:37

Um, that’s a great question. Um, it very, very fortunately, I have a wife of 27 year, almost 27 years, that has been incredibly supportive. I have two amazing kids that have seen what I hope, has been hard work and integrity. It’s been, there been some days it’s been very trying on my personal life. There’s some days it’s been really exciting, because it’s led me, is what I do, I may some of the clients I’m able to see. It’s led to really cool things that we’ve been able to do outside of here[Elkin Sports Performance], from who I train from, on the athletic side, and to see how, how the business side incorporates the personal side. It is tough. It is tough. Some days are great, because it is. But there’s a lot of time away from the family that other friends don’t have to do because they are, they have a nine to five, so to speak. And my job is not that. There’s some days it’s really, really long and some days it’s way shorter. So it just depends. But it’s, it’s a, a balancing act between the two of them.

 

Maddie Elkin 4:56

Perfect, and what impact has your business had on the community?

 

Mr. Elkin 5:01

I like that question. I hope it’s been a very good part for the community.Very Fortunately, we have a lot of kids who have come through our program, and many of them have started and in early on in their elementary or middle school age, and they’ve gone on to compete at the highest level in professional sports. We have other kids and other teams that have trained with us, that have gone on to win state championships. We have other people that have never been able to make a varsity team, and they’ve come through, and they’ve worked really hard, and now they’ve reached their goal and make of making a varsity team. I feel like the community impact is such that we work with a lot of individual high schools and different teams and leagues around here[Richmond, VA], so our reach has been far more reaching than I thought it was going to be. And that part of it’s been very, very exciting for me personally. We started a business that affects a lot of folks. Where I was actually talking to another coach today, and I feel like he asked, How many people do I think we have trained in the last 15 years since we’ve been open, and it’s kind of crazy to think that it, when I say 1000s, that it’s been 1000s of kids that have come through, or adults or teens and everything that have come through the program over the years, and to see that, so I think that it’s had a very nice impact on the community, at least, that’s My hope.

 

Maddie Elkin 6:40

Alright. And I know you’ve been working on something with the Police Athletic League. Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve been doing with that?

 

Mr. Elkin 6:50

Yes, so we started a program called the championship fitness program, and what that does is this, whether it’s a Police Athletic League with an after school program that’s very similar to the Boys and Girls Club or Big Brothers Big Sisters, a place for many times, for inner city youth to go to and have a safe environment to be at after school while mom or dad or guardian is working. When they go through, and they go to this place, they have different activities that they can do each day where each one of these chapters across the country have a curriculum for them to follow. I put together a program called called The Championship Fitness Program that incorporates nutrition, incorporates workouts and incorporates more, most importantly, mentorship. Different words are the week words that that kids can go by; character, respect, discipline, determination, intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. Words, I think, that really help guide individuals to find their own personal success and where they can have stepping stones to reach their full potential. And so that program, fortunately got picked up by the Police Athletic League, and as of now, it’s in 28 cities across the country, and is helping 1000s of kids each and every day reach their goals through the mentorship and also through obesity prevention.

 

Maddie Elkin 8:20

Perfect. And how do you differentiate your business from your competitors?

 

Mr. Elkin 8:28

You know that is a question that I go back and forth with all the time. I think that a lot of people in our industry do stuff that’s similar, but I think that what we differ in is one, personal touch, and also that our focus onespecially the younger athlete, to help them have the proper foundation for their future successes, and to make sure that when they go through that side of it. So what I feel is that we do a lot of off site training as well as on site training and the off site training means that we’ll go out to a school, we’ll go out to a field, to a league, where we train a lot of kids at one time, where a lot of our competitors will do the single kid that comes in. We also do that. But I really like just being a strength coach at heart that It fulfills me personally, to go out to train an entire team at one time. I like for the adage of I like for my hair to be on fire, and I like to be fired up and yell and scream and get kids excited and move them through drills and so they can learn how to run properly, cut properly, and have proper conditioning to succeed in their sport.

 

Maddie Elkin 10:05

Okay, um. How do you balance the demands of running your own business with the other aspects of your life?

 

Mr. Elkin 10:15

I don’t know if I’ve ever found that balance. I work really hard at it. There are certain things that I absolutely gave up in my children’s lives. As I opened my own business, what I tried to make sure that I didn’t miss out on was their competitions. I knew I wasn’t going to be the dad that got to every practice. When it was my turn to pick my kids up from practices. I wanted to make sure that I could do that because I thoroughly enjoyed our ride homes. That was very, very big for me personally, whether it was atotal non conversation night, or it was a night that there was conversation. There’s an issue that I was asked to help with. That was a really big, big deal for me. One of the things I really enjoyed when your brother[Nate Elkin] was going through lacrosse stuff, was to be in the car, not necessarily the game. The game was bonus for me. It was being in the car going to the competitions. I had no problem hiring somebody to cover groups here, and I would every day pay extra. I’d do it a million times over because I didn’t want to be the one that missed the competitions. If I missed something, there’s a very definitive reason, and the only reason I missed something was because I was at the other one’s event. There’s very few times I can ever remember dismissing because of work. I did not want work to come in front of their competitions.

 

Maddie Elkin 11:59

Yeah, and I can vouch for that. You were at every single competition. Okay, um, what personal qualities helped you in starting your business?

 

Mr. Elkin 12:11

I think that my determination and my will to work and my focus when it came to what I wanted to do and just a unwavering desire not to fail, not necessarily, I guess, growing up as a wrestler, I hated losing more than I enjoyed winning. And I did not want to fail. And I don’t want to fail. And I want to continue to push forward. And I think that that unwavering desire and unwavering focus on “I have to be the best I can be on this,” and some days are better than others, but I want to make sure that as I push forward with it, that what I learned in wrestling of just grit and determination and being tough, mentally and physically, that would help push my business forward. And that I wasn’t really worried about what the opponent was doing, going back to the question about what my competitors do, I wasn’t really worried about what they’re doing. I just knew that what I was doing had to be the best I could be.

 

Maddie Elkin 13:24

What is the most rewarding part of owning your business?

 

Mr. Elkin 13:31

Setting my own time was and has been hard, but I again going back to being able to see my kids competitions. Knowing something that has my name on the building. Knowing that something that I’ve built from the ground up. Knowing that you can take a kid that starts with you, and if you can put your strong character traits, and help push those to another individual, another human and see and have them work through everything. And to work at their best of their ability, and then get on the field to play or the court or the mat or whatever sport that they’re doing, and be able to reach their highest level. And it’s not necessarily the kid that goes on to be a pro athlete. I find just as much satisfaction and joy on the kid that has never made a varsity team and makes their varsity team. The kid that’s never been all district and becomes all district. The kid that’s on varsity but now becomes a starter. That’s just as important and rewarding to me as the kid that has done everything, but now they’re a pro athlete, they just have different genetics than than the kid that just makes the high school team. That there’s anything wrong with that, by any means, that’s a massive part of what I think is so important is to have that high school experience and to be the best they can be, and just hopefully that some of those lessons that they learn of “outwork them all” as our slogan, and for those kids to understand what that means and to be able to comprehend it and execute it are a really big thing that I want to push on to our athletes.

 

Maddie Elkin 15:19

Alright. And how do you stay motivated to continue when things get hard or when your business is slow?

 

Mr. Elkin 15:26

College tuition bills. No I just everyday life, and just like you said, just having the perseverance and just knowing that, knowing that their failure is not an option. Eminem has that song of success. “Success is my only option. Failure is not.” I know it’s a song but that one, that one verse, I hear it in my head all the time, when things get rough, that failure is not an option. It’s just not. It can’t be. I cannot relent. And that comes in many different forms and many different phases in life. And it just, when things get tough, you just, just keep on pushing. When I was growing up, the saying was, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” is what it was and so I think it still holds true today that there’s going to be tough times in life. And I think that when you learn and you’ve come up and you’ve experienced tough or hard, then when something gets harder for you in everyday life, you know how to handle that a little bit better, and you can go back to what you learned. I have friends that are in big, big corporate industry who I wrestled with, and we talk about all the time that they’re able to go back and rely on the lessons that they learned as wrestlers. When it gets tough in an everyday corporate world, they’re like, “man that’s not tougher than this.” And so that’s why, when we go out and we train athletes that we don’t want it to be soft. We want it to be tough. One to be hard. Because, fortunately, a lot of these young men and young women, it’s not as hard as when their parents grew up. Because their parents and guardians worked that much harder for them not to have the same tough lifestyle. So sometimes the competition and the practices you put in have to be tougher than what that was. So they can experience that they understand what it means to fight.

 

Maddie Elkin 17:48

Right. And sort of piggybacking off of that. Are there any lessons that you have learned from starting your business?

 

Mr. Elkin 17:56

That it’s tough, there’s not a money tree you get to go shake in the back when it’s tough, that you’re kind of Hunter, you kind of eat what you kill, and you keep on pushing forward, when life gets tough or something gets hard, there’s no one coming in to save you. You gotta go through and you gotta figure it out, and you gotta push through. Um, stuff I’ve learned in business. I would have never thought. I would have learned on my own doing something different. But there it is. The biggest lesson is, when it’s tough, you just keep on fighting. Just keep on fighting through. Just don’t give up. Just don’t give up. There’s other things, other people that are dependent on you, on many different forms that you can’t allow a little bit of struggle to get in the way of your success.

 

Maddie Elkin 18:46

Okay. And we’re on the last question. Where do you see your business in the next five years?

 

Mr. Elkin 18:55

Hopefully continues to grow. Um. I would like for the Championship Fitness Program to reach 50 cities. This is my ultimate goal. With that, I think that our business, I want to continue to see that grow in the basketball and baseball world, in the lacrosse world. And just try to continue to train as many athletes as possible. And to find different ways and different paths that I might not have looked at prior to see how that could be developed and to see how the business can grow.

 

Maddie Elkin 19:31

Okay. And that is it. Thank you so much.

 

Mr. Elkin 19:35

Absolutely. Miss Elkin. It was wonderful. I appreciate you having me on to to be interviewed today.

 

Maddie Elkin 19:41

Of Course. Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Research

I picked this website because it has statistics from the Bureau of Labour Statistics like how 18% of small businesses fail within the first year, 50% fail within 5 years and 65% fail by the tenth year. Of the 32.5 million small businesses owned in the United States, 70% of them are individually owned. There are many ways that a small business can fail. Some of them are poor management, not enough financing and poor marketing.

Chamber of Commerce Team. “Small Business Statistics | Chamber of Commerce.” Chamberofcommerce.org, 2022, www.chamberofcommerce.org/small-business-statistics/.

Small Businesses and Entrepreneurship is a strategy used to develop the economy. For small businesses and entrepreneurs to thrive and succeed, the support from public officials and local organizations to help guide and lead these businesses to understand the characteristics that are important to our economy. With all this, small businesses have had such a rise on our economy that the U.S. The Small Business Administration has made a list of most asked questions to be answered for these entrepreneurs to succeed in today’s world.

“Facts about Small Businesses in the U.S.” Unc.edu, 2025, www.sog.unc.edu/blogs/community-and-economic-development-ced/facts-about-small-businesses-us. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.

According to this article, a Small Business is a company in which has fewer than 500 employees, According to Sean Greene a Yale graduate and the founder and CEO of away.com in which he then sold to Orbitz. When asked about the most important role in this economy for a small business he said It’s very easy but the economy adds jobs through small businesses. Not every small business is alike. Something he said was “Of the six million small businesses that employ others, I divide them into three buckets. One is the mom and pop small business they dry cleaner or restaurant. Those are inherently local businesses. Mom and pops employ a lot of people, but they’re not the next new job creators.” He then uses facebook as another example because even though they get the world’s attention they don’t necessarily employ that many people either. Lastly the real drivers of net new jobs which is a group that isn’t talked about as much but these companies have high growth ambitions and potential and they aren’t overnight successes, they are mostly family owned businesses with a $50 million revenue with about 100 employees. They are known for creating new jobs for sectors like manufacturing, business services, retail, consumer goods. Even with all this there are multiple other different things that are considered small businesses that play a huge role for success

Greene, Sean . “What Do Small Businesses Need?” Yale Insights, 17 Jan. 2017, insights.som.yale.edu/insights/what-do-small-businesses-need.