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Women In Power—How Sharon Naim Built Her Empire

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October 24, 2018

Sharon Naim sits behind her white lacquer desk embossed with crocodile skin in her office on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. As she overlooks the Hollywood sign, she seems completely unbothered by the fact that her telephone won’t stop ringing, and neither will her Skype notifications. Today she’s reviewing one of many offers for a Merger & Acquisition of her company, which resides in a highly competitive field: online education. And in a few hours, she will be picking up her three young kids from school.

Naim does everything society tells women they cannot do. She is a mother, a wife, an attorney, and an entrepreneur—simultaneously. After graduating from UCLA’s School of Law, she founded the first online traffic school in California, and then went on to launch the first online driver education course for pre-licensed teens.

“My passion was education and business from the start,” she says. In fact, while she was in law school, she worked for TestMasters, one of the nation’s largest test preparation companies specializing in the LSAT, GMAT, GRE and SAT. Naim was integral in spearheading the expansion of the company, making its California-based classes available in all states, several countries and online. It was during her time at TestMasters that she founded her company. Today, CyberActive’s classes are offered in over 25 states.

“The CEO of TestMasters, Robin Singh believed in me,” Naim says. After collaborating on many projects together, Singh gave Naim a small room akin to a storage space with a desk, phone line and computer and let her use all of his office resources and employees to get her own company started. “His mentorship and support was invaluable, as a business partner, and my success is a reflection of his amazing spirit, generosity and support.”

When Naim first started working on her own venture, traffic school and driver education were not yet sanctioned online, so she worked directly with lawmakers and judges in over 20 states to make both traffic school driver education more accessible. Today, CyberActive offers courses online and via apps, directly to consumers and through contracts, it maintains with school districts, states, municipalities, counties, courts, and private business affiliates.

CyberActive stands out because they are constantly working to keep the courses interactive, adaptive, and in alignment with the preferences of individual users.

“When we started, our courses catered to Generation X by utilizing the latest in gamification techniques and leveraging live simulation scenarios in an adaptive learning environment,” Naim says. “Our interactive experiences had to be intuitive, engaging, and straightforward. Our customers demanded it.”

But their most recent initiative targets a different generation, and offers a series of interactive focus groups with Generation-Z audiences across the country. “We’re developing new online teaching approaches that utilize the language, expectations, and needs of the new digital generation,” she says. “This means creating mobile apps and tailoring our program for increasingly smaller devices and catering to those on-the-go.”

Naim’s success seems unprecedented. But of course, like any other person who has earned this level of success, she experienced challenges along the way.

“I wish someone had told me to bring in equity partners early to grow the company faster,” she says. “I was always so busy growing the company organically that many of the roles fell on me and a few of our top employees. In retrospect, I should have kept my focus on my expertise and passion: creating excellent courses and getting them approved rather than on areas such as handling human resources.”

Surrounding yourself with smart and talented people makes it easier to find and keep other smart and talented people, Naim says. “It’s quite challenging to build a smart team. To that end, I wish someone told me early on to structure my growing business around talented people I can depend upon, and not try to shoulder so much of the burden alone with a few top employees.”

She says this would have made growing the company a lot easier, but that in retrospect, it taught her many valuable lessons about business ownership. “I know how to wear every hat at my company,” Naim says.

Like other tech entrepreneurs, Naim is meticulous when it comes to hiring great employees and software developers as technology rapidly evolves. “Finding and keeping the best engineers is a challenge, as those types of employees are in high demand. The best people are incredibly hard to come by, and recognizing that talent is a frequent challenge for any business owner,” she says.

Another challenge she faces is making sure their company stays ahead of the curve. “Pioneering the concept of online traffic school and driver education industry means you have to solve every problem with careful analysis and attention to detail,” she says. “In fact, my company has solved such problems for states that chose my company exclusively to offer to their constituents traffic school”

“There was no model to compare my company against. We took the first steps in every new development and we had to think of everything such as how to stop people from advancing to quickly, deter cheating and ensuring they were reading the material.”

Today, 7 million customers later, CyberActive has one of the most comprehensive software platforms because they seamlessly utilize their platform to create other online certification courses.

Perhaps that’s why Naim’s company won government bids over other much larger and well-funded companies. “We win these bids because of the quality of our product and the competence of our executive team,” Naim says. “We were also chosen by independent school districts who offer our driver education courses to their students as part of their curriculum.”

Among several triumphs, CyberActive was chosen by the United States Army to provide online courses to their military personnel. They also work with the Educare Foundation to make education accessible to all students, and empower them to reach their highest potential.

The popularity of CyberActive’s course content is a direct result of a number of factors. The courses are engaging, the material is delivered in a fun way, and their interactive courses are adaptive to the learning capabilities and speed of each individual. “We know that the users of our product come from all walks of life, and we are responsive to the needs of our students.”

In fact, CyberActive gives free courses to students from underprivileged backgrounds that do not have equal access to education. Naim—who lost her mother to cancer—frequently donates to the UCLA cancer research fund, and, participates in local D.A.R.E. initiatives for teenagers.

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