The Mindset of Building a Brand Everyone Loves
Samara Beth has moved 31 times. She has buried a child, survived a miscarriage mid-speech in front of hundreds of people, closed a 12-year business during a pandemic, and watched her marriage of 22 years end. She has also raised a son with autism, launched a bestselling book the week her mother died, and built a thriving branding and marketing company from the ground up.
And she does it all at five feet tall, with what she calls “New York fast” energy and the best bear hugs you will ever receive.
Her story is not one of overnight success. It is one of relentless, unglamorous, get-back-up-again reinvention. And if you are an entrepreneur, a parent, or a human being who has ever felt like life keeps testing you before it rewards you, her words might be exactly what you need to hear.
Little Bamboo to Badass Bamboo
Samara Beth grew up watching her mother plan events and conferences for the International Association of Near Death Studies. Organization was in her blood from the start. She color coded everything, arranged her socks by type, and thrived in structured chaos. By the time she reached the University of Maryland, she was majoring in public relations through the college of journalism, serving as president of PRSSA, chairing philanthropy events across campus, and learning HTML and web design before most of her peers even owned a personal computer.
Before graduation, she landed a job at Empire Force Events, one of the longest-running corporate event planning companies in New York City. Her friends backpacked through Europe. She moved to Jersey City, started at $28,000 a year, and never looked back.
That mentality, fast, efficient, relentlessly forward, would carry her through everything that came next.
Thirteen States, Thirty-One Homes, One Very Resilient Business Owner
When Samara married a nuclear submarine officer from the Naval Academy, she signed up for a life she could never fully predict. Over the years, she lived in Florida, Hawaii, Georgia, South Carolina, Houston, Vancouver, British Columbia, Scottsdale, and more. Each move meant starting over. New community. New culture. New language, sometimes literally. She taught herself basic Mandarin in Vancouver so she could arrange a playdate for her daughter with a neighbor whose family spoke no English.
Rather than resist the constant upheaval, Samara became what she calls a chameleon. She ran a Pampered Chef business that made her one of the top recruiters in the world. She planned pharmaceutical meetings. She took on freelance corporate events. She kept building, even when the ground beneath her kept shifting.
“I can hang out in a trailer park drinking cheap beer just as easily as wearing couture in a ballroom dancing with billionaires,” she says. “And I’ve done everything in between.”
That range is not accidental. It is the product of decades spent learning to see people for who they are, wherever they are.
The Week She Miscarried on Stage
In Chicago, at a national Pampered Chef convention with tens of thousands of attendees, Samara began to miscarry.
She did not stop speaking.
She pushed through breakfast, through the museum dinner, through photos with the CEO and executive team, through hours of cramping and pain she could not explain. Her family was nearby enjoying Navy Pier and baseball games, unaware. She kept going, the way she always kept going, and flew home to see her doctor.
It was a molar pregnancy. A DNC surgery followed. Then a second one, a month later, after complications surfaced during a trip to Hawaii. The recovery was brutal and quiet and happened largely away from any spotlight.
When she finally got pregnant again, the joy was short-lived. At eight weeks, doctors discovered that her son Cameron had a condition so rare, her OB had only ever seen one other case in a textbook. His liver, intestines, and stomach were in a membrane outside his body. He had a hole in his heart and ten percent lung capacity. The hospital told Samara and her husband to sell a car, file for divorce, and go on welfare if they wanted to afford his care.
Cameron was born weighing one pound. He did not survive. He is buried in Houston.
“You just get through it,” Samara says. Not as a platitude. As a lived truth.
Ava, Gavin, and What Comes After Grief
Shortly after losing Cameron, Samara became pregnant with her daughter Ava. The pregnancy was anything but calm. One morning, her son Gavin, who had been diagnosed with autism at 13 months old, discovered a pool of blood. Samara was rushed to the hospital. Her OB was at a conference in Florida. A stranger delivered Ava, a preemie who arrived earlier than anyone expected and made it clear from the very first moment that she intended to do things on her own terms.
Ava is now 16, interning at a hospital, scooping gelato on weekends, taking all honors classes, and planning to become a cardiologist.
Gavin is a senior in college, studying astronomy, and on track to become an astrophysicist. He has had a girlfriend for three years.
Their birthdays fall within the same week in February, a few days apart, with Valentine’s Day nestled in the middle.
“God always works crazy,” Samara says. “He gives you not-so-good things to test your patience, and then you come out even better on the other side.”
When the Pandemic Took Everything and She Built Something New
Samara ran her events company, Celebrations by Samara, for twelve years. It survived 9/11, which she watched unfold in New York City while her then-husband was at the Pentagon. It survived Hurricane Ike. It survived the 2008 financial crisis, which forced her to launch the business in the first place after she was let go from her corporate director role.
The pandemic, however, closed it for good.
At the same time, her father passed away. Her marriage of 22 years ended in divorce. And yet, within that grief and upheaval, she found what would become Samara Beth and Company, a full-service branding, marketing, public relations, and social media firm built on thirty years of event industry expertise and a deeply personal understanding of what it takes to start over.
“The silver lining from the pandemic is we are so global now,” she says. “It opened the world to us.”
Her team is now global. Her clients are global. And she positions herself as a fractional CMO for entrepreneurs and small businesses who need a one-stop shop for visibility, credibility, and authority across every platform including the ones they have not thought about yet, like Pinterest.
The Book That Became a Bestseller While Her Mother Was Dying
Samara’s book, which chronicles her journey from Little Bamboo to what she calls Badass Bamboo, launched while she was sleeping in a chair next to her mother’s hospital bed.
Her mother had been admitted for a surgery that required removal of her entire large intestine. Doctors were optimistic. She was about to be discharged. Then all her organs failed. She was moved back to the ICU overnight, and she died.
Samara barely wanted the book to launch. Her team did it anyway.
It became a bestseller in nine categories. It won the Four Seasons Book Award for Best Business Book. Most recently, it received the Heart of Humanity Award from a top talent agency in Hollywood.
“I want teenagers to understand it,” Samara says of the book. “I want people to grow from it. I speak at a level anyone and everyone can understand.”
She also writes at that level because she has a learning disability, one she has never hidden, that shapes how she communicates and why she has always cared about reaching people who might otherwise feel like the room was not built for them.
What She Wants You to Know If You Are Starting Over
Samara does not romanticize reinvention. She knows how hard it is. She has lived it more than thirty times in different zip codes, different industries, different versions of herself.
But she does have a framework, one she calls the Badass Bonus, which lives in the back of her book and outlines what she has learned from coaches, mentors, and her own hard years.
The core of it is simpler than any framework suggests.
Mix the crowd. Give without expecting. Do not be the smartest person in the room on purpose. Show up for your industry organizations, your community events, your neighbor who does not speak your language. Volunteer. Build two brands, a personal one and a business one, because your legacy should outlast any company you can grow and exit.
And when life tests you, which it will, keep going. Not because it is easy. Because that is what bamboo does. It bends. It does not break. And eventually, it grows taller than anything around it.
About me:
I am currently a Master Facilitator for The Elliott Group in addition to being on the board of advisors for our Cultural Transformation Department in ELLIOTT ARMY.
With over 14 years of client service experience, I have held substantial leadership roles in the automotive industry. I’m also an accredited coach, a writer, a speaker, and a triathlon finisher. To contact me for engagements, you can reach me at [email protected].
