Hiba Rosace walked Sam through a year that would have broken most business owners. Her boutique marketing firm had been pulling in six figures a month when a string of client buy-sells cut her revenue in half almost overnight. What she talks about on this episode is not the playbook she ran to recover it. It's the mental work underneath. How a pastor's daughter who grew up on mission trips learned to treat her business like a calling, set boundaries with male-dominated rooms, and pace herself through burnout without walking away.
What You'll Hear
- Why Hiba says marketing should not be another hat a business owner has to wear
- How a childhood of mission trips through Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Romania, Jordan, and Mexico shaped her view of clients
- The Peru trip at 19 that shook her faith and eventually deepened it
- Losing roughly half of her monthly revenue after a run of client buy-sells, and what pulled her out
- The convention moment when a stranger asked if her dad gave her the director of marketing job
- How she recognizes burnout early now by watching whether she is still taking care of her own appearance
- The mentor line that reframed her focus: just because you can does not mean you should
- Practical red flags she coaches women to watch for when a workplace stops being safe
A boutique marketing firm built on the why
Hiba runs Rosace Enterprises as a boutique marketing and consulting firm that works with clients nationally and a handful internationally. Her starting move with any new client is not a campaign brief. It is a conversation about the mission statement, the why behind the business, and the specific problem the owner is trying to solve in the market.
She describes her role as bringing business back to the basics. Owners already wear too many hats, and marketing should not be one of them, especially when they do not have the background for it. A steady outside perspective can see the pieces the founder is too close to see. That is the service she is actually selling.
She is direct about what she is not. She is not a social media shop doing cute posts. She wants to light up the channels that turn a profit, and she tailors her approach to the channels that fit a given client's go-to-market strategy. The posture is warm and the work is laser focused on revenue.
From pre-law to nursing to marketing
Hiba grew up in a family where her mom wanted a doctor, a lawyer, or an accountant in the house. She picked law. She studied pre-law and international relations with a minor in Arabic, planning to become a malpractice attorney. Money for law school was her problem to solve, and Youngstown was pushing people into healthcare, so she pivoted into nursing as a bridge.
She quickly realized sick people were not the people she was built to help day in and day out. What she had was a creative instinct and a natural ability to sell. Marketing as a formal career path was not really on the menu when she was making these decisions, so she had to carve her own way toward it.
That winding path is now a feature, not a bug. The healthcare background, the humanities orientation, the pre-law discipline, and the sales instinct all feed into how she consults. She reads client conversations the way a good clinician reads a patient, and she argues her recommendations with data so the room has to respond to the work, not to the fact that she is a woman making the pitch.
Mission trips, Peru, and the making of her faith
Hiba was born in Michigan, her sister in Pennsylvania, and the family eventually landed in Ohio when her father, a pastor, took a teaching position in the Youngstown area. By the time she was ten she had been to Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Romania, Jordan, Mexico, Canada, and Germany on mission trips. That early global citizenship changed how she moved through her hometown.
The trip that reset her faith was Peru at nineteen. She stayed in Miraflores, just outside Lima, and helped in a hospital where girls between eleven and seventeen were having babies. The scale of the hurt rattled her. She questioned God directly. The closure did not arrive in a single epiphany. It came through a series of moments, including two miscarriages after her oldest, followed by twins within about ten months.
She now describes her work as an expression of that faith rather than a departure from it. Her mission statement for Rosace is execute with excellence. She gives pro bono hours, matches employee giving on Giving Tuesday, and points to community work she ran with a prior long-standing client and to support for the Cleveland Food Bank. The ministry did not stop when she stopped traveling. It moved into how she runs the company.
Losing half her revenue and deciding to fight
When Sam met her, Hiba was in the hardest stretch of her career. Rosace had been running at roughly ninety to one hundred twenty thousand dollars a month in revenue. A string of client buy-sells, where companies she served were bought and sold, plus other client-side issues, took more than half of that income off the table.
Her framing of what happened is worth paying attention to. She talks about two options when your back is against a wall, freeze or fight, and says she has never been wired to freeze. She is not the primary breadwinner right now, but she is responsible for a team, and she refused to let the business contract around the pain. She injected more capital, got more fiscally disciplined, and looked hard at which hats she could take off so she could be unshakable in the seat that actually mattered.
She also named the monster in the room instead of pretending it was not there. She got honest about being mentally, physically, and financially in debt to her own business for a season, called it healthy debt while she rebuilt, and leaned on a core group of loyal clients plus a few mentors who kept telling her she had not come this far to only come this far.
Male-dominated rooms, burnout, and staying in your lane
The other weight on Hiba's career has been showing up as a woman in rooms that do not expect her. At a convention she paid her own way to, while serving as director of marketing for a larger company, a man asked if her dad had gotten her the job. At another event a stranger walked up behind her and physically squished her mid-conversation. She has learned to respond with grace, clear boundaries, and data that is hard to argue with.
Her advice for women reading a workplace is simple. Watch whether your values are being compromised. Watch for unwanted touch or repeated boundary crossings. Speak up once, clearly, and if it continues, leave or change the environment. Complacency is what kills careers and, in her words, kills people.
Burnout is the other edge of the same knife. She has recovered from it more than once. Her early warning sign now is when she stops taking care of her own appearance, because for her that means the bucket is empty and she is giving without refilling. The line that keeps her centered came from a mentor: just because you can does not mean you should. She calls it staying in your lane, not as a dismissal but as protection, a way to hone in on the work that aligns with her purpose and let the rest go. When she sets expectations she tells her team and her clients she is visible but limiting her accessibility, so that the moments she is in, she is actually in.
About Hiba Rosace
At the time of recording, Hiba was the founder of Rosace Enterprises, a boutique marketing and consulting firm serving clients across the United States with a handful of international accounts. Her background includes pre-law and international relations studies, a stint in nursing, and leadership roles in sales-driven organizations including a previous post as director of marketing. She leads a small team and is a mother of three. Rosace Enterprises