Meet Marcela Shine
Marcela Shine is a startup executive turned founder with over two decades of experience leading marketing and growth operations across venture-backed and high-growth companies.
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She knows what it's like to pitch, launch, and build with limited resources, and she brings that real-world experience into every system, tool, and workshop she creates.​
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Founder, advisor, speaker.
Proud mama.
Marcela Shine founded Ready, Plan, Grow! to help entrepreneurs feel confident about how they run and grow their business. Her goal is to make executive-level expertise accessible to those who want to invest in themselves.
AI helps her share proven systems at scale while keeping the community and connection founders need.
She's passionate about helping women learn to tell their story with numbers so they can gain more access to funding and grants.
Marcela spent the past five years with mission-driven companies helping entrepreneurs launch, fund, and scale their businesses.
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At ZenBusiness, she served as Senior Director of Marketing, leading organic growth strategy, community engagement, and educational programs that reached thousands of entrepreneurs. She also helped shape the business coaching program adopted by the Dallas Mavericks’ Business Assist program, which gives founders hands-on training and pitch support.
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At Ureeka (later acquired by ZenBusiness), Marcela built national programs connecting underrepresented founders with mentorship and funding, including pitch initiatives featuring Kevin O’Leary. During one of these events, O’Leary called the presentations she helped prepare “a nine out of ten, as good as anything I’ve seen on Shark Tank.”
These experiences remain among her proudest achievements, knowing she helped founders tell their stories with confidence and credibility.
Impact Work
Operator and Founder
Marcela has served as both CEO and COO of venture-backed startups, where she built the systems, teams, and go-to-market frameworks that helped early-stage companies scale. Her leadership is defined by operational clarity and an ability to connect marketing, product, and execution.
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As a two-time founder, Marcela brings first-hand experience of what it takes to move from concept to company. She has raised capital, led investor communications, and guided teams through product launches, pivots, and growth stages. Her work combines analytical rigor with creative storytelling, helping founders turn ideas into scalable businesses with measurable results.
Marcela spent more than a decade in product leadership in financial services, managing global business lines through periods of rapid growth and post-acquisition integration.
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At Thomson Reuters (later acquired by Refinitiv), she led go-to-market strategy, customer growth, and product positioning for global data platforms serving institutional clients.
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A fun fact from that era: Marcela helped bring mutual fund data online in the early days of the internet, when financial data was first becoming accessible to individual investors. It marked the beginning of her lifelong focus on digital transformation and customer-centered innovation.
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This foundation in large-scale financial technology operations strengthened her ability to balance creativity with structure and to translate complex strategies into clear, measurable outcomes. It remains the through line in Marcela’s work, from scaling early-stage startups to guiding founders toward sustainable growth.
Enterprise Roots in Fintech
and Global Marketing
Caption: Marcela Shine with Isabel Guzman, former SBA Administrator for the Biden Administration.
Speaking Engagements
Bring Marcela to your stage to share what every founder should know about growth, marketing, and the mindset behind sustainable success.
Education & Workshops
Does your organization support entrepreneurs or small-business owners? Marcela brings proven frameworks and hands-on guidance that help founders strengthen their business strategy, marketing, and investor readiness.