Co-Founder, Ready, Plan, Grow! | Operations Expert | Advisor | Angel Investor

Marcela Shine has spent over 30 years doing what most consultants only talk about: actually building the operational systems that keep businesses running and growing. She co-founded Ready, Plan, Grow! to give small business owners something the corporate world never offered them. Real implementation, not just advice.

At Ready, Plan, Grow!, Marcela leads operations, client delivery, and content strategy. Her work is grounded in a simple but powerful belief: AI is only as useful as the knowledge system behind it. She helps small business owners stop collecting prompts and start building the centralized business backpack that makes AI genuinely strategic. That philosophy, the Knowledge-System-First approach, is the foundation of everything Ready, Plan, Grow! teaches.

Before founding Ready, Plan, Grow!, Marcela built her career at the intersection of product, operations, and strategy. She started in fintech, leading global product teams that delivered financial data to organizations like The Wall Street Journal, Fidelity, and Merrill Lynch. At Thomson Reuters, she ran pre-acquisition due diligence and post-acquisition integrations. The kind of high-stakes operational work that sharpens your instincts fast.

That experience led her to the startup world, where she spent years working with venture-backed martech companies and building and investing in SaaS platforms across affiliate marketing, audience development, and image-recognition technologies.

Marcela immigrated from Colombia and remains deeply connected to her roots. She founded the Promising Growth project to support childhood education in rural schools near her hometown of Medellin. Since 2013, she has served as a board member for The Tutu Project, focused on community and partner development strategy.