Shama Kabani is your typical overachiever. She covered her entire tuition at the University of Texas through applying for scholarships far and wide. She went on to earn her master’s degree and started her own business straight out of graduate school. Yet this final step was not always in the plan. Ms. Kabani had hoped to take her social media savy – her own blog and a master’s thesis on Twitter – into a corporate position. However, she found that big firms like McKinsey and Bain were not interested in social media at the time.

At this point Kabani decided it was time to take matters into her own hands and enlighten the world to what she knew was a profitable way to conduct marketing. She started a blog to give small business tips about using social media. She soon found that her site was booming and her knowledge was legitimately in demand. So she did something incredibly difficult yet simply logical – she wrote a definitive book on the prudence of social media marketing called The Zen of Social Media Marketing. 

Now it was time to get down to business – literally. With a bestseller on what she could offer to businesses Kabani started the Marketing Zen Group which consults businesses in ways to increase leads, get offers out to clients, and generally use social media to their advantage in growing their business. With a team of over 40 spread throughout the globe, this decentralized service team is booming, estimated to bring in over $2 million in revenue this year. The employees are free to work on their own in their location and simply connect and help clients. Clients have seen dramatic increases in revenue and particularly leads, with one client stating an increase in that number by over ten-fold.

All the while Kabani has never taken money from eager investors, doing this all by herself. All growth has been organic and she intends to keep it that way while the influence and scope of the company grows. For now, Ms. Kabani is content to “focus on bottom-line numbers” and let her book and work take care of the rest.