Alumni Profile: Sharema Harvell

After losing her uncle during a medical emergency, Blueprint alum Shimeka Jones-Ricks turned grief into a mission to equip New Yorkers with lifesaving skills.

For Sharema Harvell, ideas have never been the hard part. Turning them into action is where she has built her career.

Harvell, who holds a Master of Public Administration and is the founder and CEO of Harvell Consulting LLC, has spent years helping organizations, leaders and communities transform ambitious ideas into programs, strategies and measurable outcomes. Publicly known as Coach Rema, “The Execution Coach,” she has built a professional reputation around a simple but often difficult question: What does it actually take to get the work done?

Her background spans community engagement, workforce development, strategic planning, facilitation, leadership training, entrepreneurship and program development. Across those roles, Harvell repeatedly found herself becoming the person colleagues and organizations turned to when they had an initiative they wanted to launch but needed help figuring out how to move it forward.

Eventually, she realized that ability was more than a professional strength. It was a business.

Today, Harvell Consulting helps organizations close the often-overlooked gap between strategy and execution. The firm works with community-based organizations, associations, leadership teams, institutions and other organizational clients that may already have strong ideas, capable people and clearly articulated goals but need additional support putting those resources into motion.

Its services include organizational training and facilitation, implementation strategy, program and curriculum development, community engagement, workforce development, capacity building and customized learning experiences.

At the center of the company is a philosophy Harvell summarizes in five words: “Stop Playing. Execute What You Know.”

For Harvell, that message reflects what she has observed throughout her career. Organizations do not always need another meeting, another brainstorming session or even another training. Sometimes, they need a practical process that helps people take what they already know and turn it into consistent action.

That focus has become increasingly clear as Harvell Consulting enters its growth and scaling stage.

When Harvell participated in Blueprint Activate, she already had years of professional experience, relationships, ideas and the ability to deliver high-quality services. What she was still developing was the business infrastructure surrounding those skills.

The program helped her begin looking at the company through a different lens.

Rather than simply asking what services she could offer, Harvell started asking more fundamental questions: Who is the customer? What problem is the company solving? What should the offer cost? What systems are required to deliver it effectively? And what would it take to create sustainable revenue?

That shift also helped Harvell establish a clearer distinction between her personal brand and her consulting firm. Coach Rema primarily serves individuals, while Harvell Consulting is positioned to work with organizations.

The distinction has allowed her to think beyond creating income from her personal expertise and toward building a company capable of producing measurable impact, generating sustainable revenue and eventually operating beyond its founder.

Harvell’s entrepreneurial journey grew from recognizing a pattern in her own career. She could take an idea and turn it into a program. She could turn a conversation into a strategy, a community need into an initiative or a training topic into a curriculum.

For years, she viewed those capabilities simply as part of her skill set.

Over time, she realized they represented solutions to real organizational problems — problems organizations were willing to pay to solve.

Her motivation is also rooted in the communities she has worked with and served. Harvell has seen talented leaders, entrepreneurs, parents, young people and organizations struggle not because they lacked ideas or potential, but because they lacked infrastructure, access, strategy or implementation support.

“Potential is not always the problem,” she explained. “Sometimes the real challenge is execution.”

That understanding has shaped not only Harvell Consulting's mission, but also the advice Harvell offers to emerging entrepreneurs.

Her first lesson is to pay close attention to what people already ask for help with. Entrepreneurs often assume they need to invent something entirely new, she said, when a viable business may already exist inside the problems people consistently trust them to solve.

For Harvell, years of professional experience had already produced intellectual property, processes, relationships and expertise that could eventually be transformed into business offerings.

Her second lesson is that talent and entrepreneurship are not the same thing.

A person can be highly skilled, experienced and even have paying clients without having built a sustainable business. Developing a company requires intentional decisions about pricing, customers, sales, marketing, follow