Beth Carls

From busts in the plumbing lines to facilitating board meetings, Beth does it all with finesse while serving as a rock solid source of inspiration for the team.  She has a keen mind for turning corporate strategy into profit. Her commitment is not only to OneSeventeen Media’s success, but more importantly, as a dedicated social venture entrepreneur, to building our company with a greater purpose and including higher standards of accountability, transparency and performance. In short, she is helping create OneSeventeen Media into a powerful social media company known for its commitment to a triple bottom line.

As the recognized “quiet-thinker” of the three co-founders, Beth has already created, cultivated and expanded OneSeventeen Media into Houston’s first company to be recognized with the prestigious B Corporation Certification.

She began her career as a health-care marketer, and in 1990 she decided to take her first entrepreneurial plunge by co-founding a marketing design firm company, 7 Seventeen Group, with business partner Amy Looper. For the next eight years Beth was Chief of Operations (no health care pun intended!). When the World Wide Web (remember that one?) became available on the Internet, her life took a great and unexpected turn setting the future foundation for OneSeventeen Media’s birth.

In 1996, having leveraged 7 Seventeen Group’s assets, Beth became an equity partner and co-founder in Align Solutions, the first fully integrated Internet consulting firm in the country. In 1999, through her collaboration as one of ten co-founders and the National Marketing Director, Align Solutions was named the Fastest Growing Privately Held Company in Houston, growing a record-setting 8,164% in three short years. During those three years, Beth and her co-partners positioned Align as the largest of eight companies to roll up as Luminant Worldwide, the largest, mid-cap IPO in the tech sector (September 1999) with a $158 million valuation. Beth then took a much-deserved Hawaiian vacation before jumping in again.

Beth wanted to do something as a social venture entrepreneur, so she and Amy Looper teamed up once again and in 2000, Beth took the helm and served as CEO, Chairman of the Board and Co-Founder of MindOH! – the character-education company that produced evidence-based, online interactive tools to help almost 500 schools and over 400,000 kids stay in school and develop their character skills.  Now, after successfully serving some of our nation’s most challenged, at-risk school systems, the time is right to bring her talent into a new market segment. OneSeventeen Media, with its next generation social community, PlumbBrain, is poised to reach millions of kids inside their technology-based comfort zone with positive, engaging, life changing content.

One of Beth’s most rewarding experiences was the co-authoring of a book compiled from the essay submissions of 95 teen authors sharing their experiences and advice on bullying. In spite of Hurricane Rita pounding her Houston home in 2005, I Wish I Knew What To Do To Get Bullies To Leave Me Alone, made it to the bookstores in 2005 as a wonderful resource to help kids deal with the bullying epidemic.

Throughout her working career, Beth has always valued volunteering her time to non-profit organizations like The March of Dimes, FotoFest, The Women’s Home, Human Rights Campaign, The United Way, The MindOH! Foundation, Inspired Legacies and The Women’s Foundation of California. Beth also enjoys mentoring young people. With the little spare time she has, she teaches online marketing and public relations for the University of Phoenix. She’s the proud mom of two awesome sons who graduated from the University of Texas (turning her into an avid Longhorn fan), and while they are out of the nest and off the family payroll, they still live close by in Austin, Texas.

About Beth...

Favorite links:

apophenia

texas football

HOw to change the world

B Corporation

philanthropy 2173