Berry Fowler’s ability to grow businesses over the last four decades contrasts sharply with his early academic years.

Fowler founded the Sylvan Learning Centers in the late 1970s. Born out of his own academic challenges, he created an educational tutoring system that was designed to help struggling students—particularly in reading and math—improve in less than a week’s time.

He started the business in Portland in 1979, but has now been a Spokane resident for 21 years.

For years, he says, his critics—primarily teachers and administrators in public schools—scoffed at his ideas and approaches. And in the meantime, Sylvan went on to grow, he claims, to more than 800 locations around the globe, helping more than 4 million students.

Fowler sold Sylvan Learning Centers more than 20 years ago. Sylvan now has two locations in the Spokane area, one in North Spokane and the other in Spokane Valley. Today, the Sylvan Learning Centers website says it has locations in 48 of 50 states, Guam, and Puerto Rico. There are also centers in eight Canadian provinces, as well as Bahrain, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, the website says.

 “A lot of people tried to talk me out of creating Sylvan; and I didn’t listen,” he says. “There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Sylvan would work. I was naïve and had a dream.”

Now, the 68-year-old South Hill resident says he is continuing—through a more recent business venture—to try to help others realize their full potential. He is operating a home-based business here named the Fowler International Academy of Professional Coaching, a program he founded in 2008 that’s designed to train certified life coaches in as little as two days. The cost of the 20-hour course is $795.

The coursework and enrollment is primarily online. Close to 6,000 certifications have been issued since 2008, says Fowler.

Also, with assistance from Linda Morrison Combs, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, Fowler has also created an Executive Leadership Certification course.

Fowler says he is happiest when he is working to help others.  “For me, teaching and helping people are among the most honorable professions a person can have,” Fowler says.

Like the teachers and administrators who derided his methods, he contends, today’s professional life coaches are doing the same, saying that it takes years of training—and “many more thousands of dollars”—to train and coach effectively. Fowler believes the process of education and coaching is much simpler than educators and coaches want it to be.

“Coaching was an integral part of the tutoring,” he says of what made Sylvan successful. “It made perfect sense to train life coaches. If you want to help other people, you can be a life coach.”

Before moving to Spokane at the beginning of 1994, he spent his childhood going back and forth between Dallas and Tulsa, Okla., when his family moved. He attended college in California, and that is when the realization of his academic deficiencies hit home. 

“I was a kid that needed Sylvan’s help,” Fowler says. He says he largely “breezed” his way through the K-12 years. He was personable and charismatic, popular among teachers and classmates. Though he was “able to get by,” he was painfully insecure when it came to his academic deficiencies. And those shortcomings finally caught up to him.

“I couldn’t fool my way through college,” Fowler says.

He struggled to read, and between ages 18 and 23, wound up enrolling and dropping out of college nearly a half a dozen times. He tried to sell life insurance for six months before he re-enrolled. At that point, he had two years of college credits and a grade point average of below a C. He says he signed up for a noncredit speed-reading class, filled primarily with 18-year-old freshmen students.

At 24, he was the same age as the instructor, and the two connected. After two weeks, the instructor recognized that Fowler lacked many education fundamentals. She gave him an assessment test, and from there could specifically identify his shortcomings. He would never drop out again. He earned a bachelor’s degree in education from Chapman University in Orange, Calif.

“She motivated me, kept me focused, excited, and happy,” Fowler says. When his view of himself changed—and what he was capable of accomplishing—he became a straight-A student from that point forward.

He graduated in 1974 and went into teaching. He became a public school teacher shortly thereafter, and quickly saw that there was no shortage of students like himself. And as time went on, he saw their challenges mount.

One student in particular still stands out in his mind. She was vibrant, energetic, gifted, but frequently absent. Finally, after four months, Fowler said he asked her why she skipped school so often.

“She told me: ‘Mr. Fowler, I’ve got four younger brothers. If I don’t take care of them, no one else will.’ It was just heartbreaking,” he says.

Fowler eventually moved to Portland, wanting to experience another part of the country. That’s when he took his $14,000 life savings at the time and started Sylvan.

His opponents challenged him feverishly, he says, as his learning centers quickly began to spread.

“They didn’t think there was any way possible for me to make the guarantees we did at Sylvan,” he asserts. “They would say: “We spend a year with our students, and they don’t progress at that rate.”

Fowler says what made his approach successful was testing struggling students for learning deficiencies. “Did they miss out on comprehension concepts? Like my instructor, we explored their educational history to find where the gaps were.”

Fowler claims he was also ridiculed for rewarding students. Those who improved were given tokens, and they could use their coins to purchase items from gift shops set up in the Sylvan centers. “They said, ‘You’re paying students to read. That’s not right.’ My response was, “It’s kind of like the real world, what a neat concept.”

Sylvan was taking off. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel H. Bell was so impressed with the Sylvan model that for a time he served as chairman of Sylvan’s board of directors. Newsweek magazine affectionately dubbed him “the Colonel Sanders of education,” comparing the speed of the Sylvan Learning Center’s expansion to Kentucky Fried Chicken’s early growth.

Fowler made an appearance on the Today Show in 1985, but unknown to him, a friend of his in Boston contacted the owners of KinderCare and told them to watch the program and learn what he had done with the Sylvan centers. KinderCare approached Fowler, and shortly thereafter bought the company from him.

The $5.3 million sale of Sylvan allowed Fowler and his wife to take an early retirement he thought would last the rest of their lives. 

But after five years, much of it spent living in Hawaii, Fowler says boredom began to set in, and he could feel his mind begin to atrophy.

Fowler started the new business ventures not because he financially had to, but to preserve his health. “I’m mentally healthier when I use my mind, I have to keep doing things.”

In 1996 he wrote a book titled, “Return from Krypton: Rational Steps to Entrepreneurial Success.”

“I had a great time writing a book that today I believe still has the worst title in the world,” he says, laughing.

As a result of Sylvan’s growth, he says, business owners continued to approach him to do consulting work as they sought advice and insights on how to help them succeed in the same way he had.

“I would go in, meet with them for a few months, examine their business and then come up with a list of recommendations,” Fowler says.

Upon following up with those businesses, however, he says he often discovered that relatively few of his recommendations were implemented. 

Gradually he began transitioning from consulting to coaching because he believes coaching is more effective than consulting.

“The key to coaching is asking the question, ‘What do you want?’ ’’ he says. “At that point, the business, or an individual, more effectively develops a well-articulated plan. They now have ownership in their plan compared to having a consultant telling them what to do.”