After 18 years in television across more than 22 countries, the founder of 11 MEDIA is teaching women entrepreneurs to build authority first and sell without selling.
Ask a coach, a consultant or a clinic owner about her work and she will talk for an hour. Ask about her sales process and the conversation often goes quiet. For many women in business, selling feels like a job for someone else: someone louder, someone pushier, someone with a sales department behind them.
Arus Amarian thinks that silence costs women more than almost anything else, and she has built her career around ending it.
Amarian is the founder of 11 MEDIA, a California-based reputation management and personal branding agency, and the creator of the Relationship Revenue System, a method for growing revenue through relationships rather than pressure. Her clients range from solo coaches to industrial companies. One was a furniture manufacturer that needed more sales. Another was a marine port that needed its reputation restored. The industries have little in common, but in her view the problem was the same each time: the market did not yet see the business the way its owners knew it deserved to be seen.
“For a very long time, we have thought of sales as something aggressive, something you push on people, something almost unethical,” she says. “I believe that in the 21st century, when a single product can literally change a person’s life, we are long overdue to rethink how we see selling.”
The Gap
The numbers behind her work are hard to ignore. Women own 15.7 million businesses in the United States, or 40.6% of all American companies, according to the 2026 Impact of Women-Owned Businesses report commissioned by Wells Fargo. Those businesses generate $2.8 trillion a year. Yet that is only 4.6% of total U.S. business revenue. Women own two in five companies and bring in less than one in twenty dollars.
Growth past the early stage is where the gap widens. Research by the JPMorgan Chase Institute found that among small firms starting with $100,000 to $249,999 in annual revenue, only 2.8% of women-owned firms went on to reach $1 million, compared with 4.4% of firms owned by men.
Researchers point to many causes, from unequal access to capital to the double load many women carry at work and at home. Amarian focuses on two that an owner can change herself: how visible and trusted she is in her market, and how comfortable she is asking for the sale.
The culture makes the second one harder. In Gallup’s honesty and ethics survey conducted in December 2025, only 7% of Americans rated car salespeople as having high or very high ethical standards. If that is the public image of a salesperson, it is no surprise that a doctor or a lawyer does not want to become one.
Amarian’s answer is that they never have to.
From The Studio To The Balance Sheet
She came to sales through media, not through a sales department. Amarian earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in television and radio journalism, then spent 18 years in television and media production on projects in more than 22 countries, working across Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States. Along the way she built businesses of her own, which she says grew from zero to millions in revenue.
Television, she argues, is one of the harshest schools for understanding trust. A viewer decides in seconds whether to believe the person on screen and rarely gives a second chance. A potential client reading a press mention or scrolling past an expert’s profile makes the same judgment.
“Because of my background in media, I look at a business as a structure,” she says. “And that structure should sell without selling.”
Her interest in how people decide eventually took her back to school. She earned a second master’s degree, in analytical psychology, positive psychology and coaching, and is now completing a third, in business psychology. She has also completed specialized business courses at Stanford and UCLA, and lectured at universities in Europe. “Teaching at university left a very deep mark on me,” she says. “I truly love to teach.”
Authority First
At 11 MEDIA, the work follows a strict order: authority, then sales. Try to sell before the market trusts you, Amarian says, and every conversation becomes uphill.
That matters most in service businesses, where a client cannot test the product before paying for it. Someone choosing a coach, a financial adviser or a clinic is really buying confidence in the person. “First, we help people build the right kind of authority, the kind that speaks for itself,” she says. “Only then do we teach them to sell.”
The agency’s year-long partnerships combine media placements, positioning, content, speaking opportunities and a full sales module. It was also early to AI avatar content for experts who cannot be on camera every day. According to the agency, those projects now reach around two million viewers a month. For Amarian, the technology changes the speed of building trust, not the rules. An avatar can multiply an expert’s reach, but the expertise behind it still has to be real.
Selling Without Selling
The principles behind the Relationship Revenue System are set out in her book, How to Sell Without Selling: 11 Principles to Build Trust, Create Value, and Grow Your Business. Several of them read like corrections to the traditional sales playbook. Price is a boundary, not an argument. Until they feel safe, there is no yes. Pressure always comes back, because a client pushed into a purchase returns as a refund request or a bad review.
The most distinctive part of her method is how she reads buyers. Amarian teaches a profiling framework adapted from behavioral techniques originally developed for law enforcement, where reading a person quickly and accurately can matter enormously. It describes eight psychological types, each with its own way of deciding, its own idea of safety and its own predictable objections.
She often compares two of them. One buyer wants to be noticed and responds to emotion and a sense of occasion. Hand her a spreadsheet and she loses interest. The other wants order and control, asks for timelines and guarantees, and reads enthusiasm as a warning sign. The pitch that wins the first will lose the second.
Objections, in this view, are information. Three buyers can all say “I need to think about it” and mean three different things. “The clients they lost may never have been rejecting the product,” Amarian says. “They may simply have been spoken to in the wrong language.”
Underneath it all is a phrase she repeats often: selling is serving. She does not claim to have invented it, but she makes the case plainly. “Say you buy a laptop. It helps you with your work, with your studies, with booking your holidays. Somebody sold it to you. That person is not a fraud. That person solved your problem.” The principle holds only for products made ethically, she adds, and it includes telling a client honestly when an offer is not right for them.
A Room Full Of Founders
Amarian’s focus on relationships extends to the community she has built. EmpowerHer Event, the forum for women in business that she founded and hosts, grew out of Life Balance, a course she launched in February 2022. The November 2024 forum at the Woman’s Club of Hollywood in Los Angeles brought together more than 150 women, with speakers including Lavinia Errico, co-founder of Equinox Fitness, and Fox 11 anchor Marla Tellez.
The 2026 edition is explicitly about business. Sessions cover sales, financial planning, pitching investors, AI agents and acquiring an established business from a retiring owner. Speakers include Shirit Oren, a revenue strategist and former vice president at Uber Freight. Each forum is capped at around 150 seats so that conversations in the room can turn into real relationships.
Her newest initiative brings the two halves of her work together: a three-month international program she describes as a mini-MBA for women business owners, which she teaches personally. Half of it covers sales and the eight buyer types. The other half covers authority, including how to pitch the media directly without hiring an agency. Alongside the agency’s premium partnerships, it reflects a choice to keep her knowledge accessible to owners who cannot yet hand a team twelve months of work.
Amarian does not pretend a sales method can close the revenue gap on its own. Capital, policy and caregiving all play their part. But she believes reluctance to sell is one barrier women can remove themselves, and that removing it changes what every other advantage is worth.
“The next generation of women-led businesses,” she says, “will not grow by selling harder. They will grow by being trusted sooner.”
Executive Editor at Forbes Georgia.
