The HER in HERO Scholarship

The HER in HERO Scholarship: Official Rules

The short version, in plain English. Entry is free and no purchase is ever necessary. Buying something never helps anyone win and nobody can buy their way onto the list. We do sell our own programs, and if you would rather start today than wait to be nominated there is a link for that on our site; it changes nothing about the judging, and we would rather say so here than let you find it and wonder. A panel of real people scores every nomination against the criteria below. The winner gets a free semester of our program. The one thing we ask of a winner is that she lets us tell her story honestly, and she signs that in writing before anything is announced.

1. Who can be nominated

Any woman who owns or operates a home service business in the United States or Canada, aged eighteen or older: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, landscaping, cleaning, and the trades beside them. Nominate a peer, an employee's boss, a spouse, a customer's favorite, or yourself. Self-nomination is allowed and treated exactly like any other nomination.

The award goes to the person who owns or runs the business. If you are training, apprenticing, or working toward your own shop, you are welcome to nominate someone, and we hope you come back and win this the year the trucks are yours.

Employees and immediate family of Shark Life Media INC. are not eligible to win.

2. The awards

This scholarship honors women who own or run home service and trade businesses. Nominations come from everywhere: partner organizations in the women-in-trades world, their members, and the open public. Additional seats may be awarded beyond the first, and there is no fixed cap on how many. To be clear about how that works, because it would otherwise look like a way around the panel: our founder decides HOW MANY seats a drive awards, and the panel's scores decide WHO gets them, always in score order from the same judged pool. Nobody is ever added outside the scoring.

The general pool. A nomination that arrives outside an open window, or that does not win the drive it was entered in, stays in the pool and is considered for future drives. A nomination is live for twelve months from the day it is submitted.

3. The prize

One semester, defined as sixteen weeks, of full access to the On-Demand Revenue Engine and a seat in The Engine Room group coaching room. Here is every piece of it.

On the course side, the On-Demand Revenue Engine, $349 a month at our public rate:

  • The Revenue Leak Diagnostic. She puts in her own job values and call numbers and sees, with the math visible on screen, exactly where her money is leaking every month. She walks out of her first session holding her single biggest hole.
  • The Financial Freedom Formula, inside it. From three numbers she already has, it turns the leak around and shows her the year she could be having, and the gap between that and the year she is having. Then she watches the gap close on her own screen.
  • Her Revenue Game Plan. The plan that comes out of that first session, hers to keep and work.
  • The course itself, all of it. The full playbook across the three engines, Foundation, Acquisition and Retention. Every module as it ships during her semester, including any that launch while she is inside, at no extra cost to her. This is where the whole system she is being handed actually lives, inside GrowthHub.
  • The Autopilots, the done-for-you builds. The Missed-Call Autopilot, the Review Autopilot, the Booking Autopilot, and more loaded in over time. She imports them into her own account in an afternoon instead of wiring tools together for weeks, turns them on, and they keep working while she is under a truck. Up to $500 of build work she would otherwise pay someone to do.
  • The Hero Rate. The true hourly number her shop actually needs to charge, built so it can never bless an underpriced truck. It ships into Module 03 and it is hers the moment it lands.
  • Mia AI. Her marketing assistant, awake at 11pm when she finally sits down to this, talking her trade instead of marketing jargon. Customer copy, a calm reply to a one-star review, texts that sound like a tradesperson, her retention sequences in one pass. $99 a month standalone. Hers for the semester.
  • The Revenue Engine Community. The private room behind her login, where she hits a wall at the kitchen table, asks, and Heroes a few steps ahead answer.
  • The Coffee and Cocktail Hours. A live room twice every week, one morning and one evening so she can always catch one, where she can bring a question about her own shop.
  • Her Blueprint Call. Thirty minutes, one to one, with a real trades guy three generations deep, on the phone with her actual numbers, mapping her exact next move. Not a bot and not a form.

On the coaching side, The Engine Room group coaching room, $999 a month at our public rate:

  • The group coaching room itself. Done with her, never done for her. The room where the speed bumps get cleared: she brings the thing that is actually stuck in her business and works it out with Mia and a room of owners doing the same build.
  • Implementation support. Help getting the thing actually turned on in her own shop, not just explained to her.

Together that is about $5,400 of program at public rates, and the winner pays none of it.

What the prize does not include, said plainly. The private one-to-one coaching sessions that sit inside the paid coaching tiers are not part of the scholarship, per Mia's ruling of 2026-08-12. The prize is the group room. Nothing in any copy anywhere implies private coaching.

Winners also receive the HER in HERO badge, a press release offered to their local news outlets, and their story told with their permission.

At the end of the semester, access simply ends unless the winner chooses to continue at the then-current regular rate. No card is required to accept the prize, nothing renews automatically, and there is no obligation to continue.

Runners-up. Nominees who do not win receive a Finalist Award: their first month free on top of whatever seat rate is open when they join, claimable within fourteen days of the winner announcement. This is a real award with a real expiry, not a discount code. The regular rate, and the date it starts, are disclosed plainly before any card is entered.

Nominators. Everyone who nominates receives a free copy of Just Make The Phone Ring as a thank-you for their time.

4. How judging works (the panel, and the published criteria)

Every nomination is scored one to five on four criteria, equally weighted, for a maximum of twenty:

  1. The building. Is she genuinely building something: a shop, a crew, a standard, a name people trust?
  2. The care. Did she take care of her people, her customers, or her town in a way that stands out?
  3. The grit. What has she pushed through to keep the trucks rolling?
  4. The lift. Would this semester meaningfully change her next twelve months?

Who judges. A panel scores the nominations. The panel includes our founder, Mia Shark, and invited judges from the women-in-trades world, including partner organizations who hold a panel seat. No single judge and no single organization picks the winner, including for its own members: the panel's combined scores decide, and Mia Shark holds the final call and the tie-break on criterion four, the lift.

How judges handle their own nominees. A judge who nominated someone does not score her. That judge's score on that nominee is set aside and does not count.

What judges see. Judges read the nomination text only. They do not receive anyone's contact details, and what they read stays with the panel.

The check before any announcement. Every prospective winner passes a short verification: a real business, a real story, and no conflict that would embarrass the winner or the program. A nomination that does not pass is set aside quietly and the next highest score is considered. The nominee is treated with every courtesy either way.

Judges' decisions are final.

5. The one condition of winning, and the honesty rules

Winning carries one condition, and we say it plainly rather than burying it: the winner agrees, in writing, to let us tell her story. That means a short interview, brief check-ins during the semester, and permission to use her name, her business name and her town.

What that never means: she is never scripted, she can decline any specific question, and she can tell us at any time to stop using her story, which we will honor for everything we publish after that request.

Anywhere we share a winner's story in our marketing, we state plainly that she received her seat free through this scholarship. If a winner's results are ever quoted, they are her real results, given by her, and never presented as typical.

If a winner would rather not share her story at all, that is a completely honorable no. The prize requires the agreement, so the seat passes to the next highest score, and nothing about her decision is ever announced or held against her.

6. Timing, and this round's dates

Nominations are accepted year-round on this page. Each drive runs in an announced window with a published reveal date.

This round of The HER in HERO Scholarship. These dates can shift, and here is the only reason they will: if a partner organization needs longer to get this in front of its members, we would rather move the window than let a good nomination miss it. Any change is posted on this page with the date it was made, and nobody who has already nominated loses anything.

  • Nominations open Wednesday, August 19, 2026.
  • Nominations close Monday, August 31, 2026, at 11:59pm Pacific time.
  • Judging runs September 1 and 2, 2026.
  • Winners are announced Thursday, September 3, 2026, after the winner has accepted and the check in section 4 has cleared.
  • Finalist Awards are claimable through Thursday, September 17, 2026.

If we cannot reach a winner. We contact winners by email at the address given in the nomination. A winner has five business days from our first email to respond and accept. If she does not, the seat passes to the next highest score, and she keeps every courtesy and the Finalist Award.

7. Taxes, the boring part

Prizes may be taxable income. Before a winner accepts, we tell her in writing exactly what value we will report, and we collect the tax form we are required to collect before the seat is granted. Winners should talk to their own tax professional about what it means for them. We will never pretend to be one.

8. Your information, and what we do with it

A nomination gives us two people's details: the nominee's and the nominator's. Here is exactly what happens to them.

We email the nominee to tell her she was nominated, and we share what was written about her. We do not tell her who nominated her; that stays private unless the person who nominated her tells her themselves. We email the nominator to confirm it and send the free book. We use these details to run the award and to tell you about our own programs. We do not sell your details to anyone.

Every email we send carries a one-click unsubscribe. If a nominee asks to be removed, we honor it the same day: she comes out of every email list and her nomination is withdrawn from judging. A no is a no, and it takes one line to say.

9. The plain-dealing clause

No purchase is necessary to nominate or to win, and no purchase changes anyone's odds. This program is void where prohibited by law. We may correct, pause, or amend these rules to keep the program fair and lawful, and any change is posted on this page with the date it was made.

These rules are governed by the laws of the State of Florida. If a dispute ever arises that we cannot sort out between us directly, and we will always try that first, it is resolved in the state or federal courts sitting in Broward County, Florida.

10. Who runs this

The HER in HERO Scholarship is run by Shark Life Media INC., 7901 4th Street North, Suite 300, St. Petersburg, FL 33702. Questions about anything on this page: [email protected].

Rules version 2.0, posted August 13, 2026.