Caren - Case Study #2

How the Inner MBA Helped Caren Prentice Grow Hamsa Meditation Center Without Leaving Its Values Behind

Caren Prentice had already built something meaningful before she joined the Inner MBA.

As the founder of Hamsa Meditation Center, she had created a community where children, teenagers, mothers, and adults came to learn meditation. She taught classes, led workshops and retreats, and had begun training future meditation teachers because she could already see that the work was becoming bigger than one person could carry alone.

Caren Prentice had already built something meaningful before she joined the Inner MBA.

Every week, the center was serving approximately 60 students. From the outside, it looked like a beautiful success. But almost everything still depended on Caren.

She was teaching nearly every class, leading the retreats, and running the organization. One woman helped with bookkeeping and registrations, and another mother from the community helped keep things moving.

The mission was working.

The model wasn’t.

What Caren wanted was not simply a way to grow the center. She wanted to know whether the principles at the heart of her meditation practice could actually become the principles at the heart of the business.

As she put it:

“If those teachings couldn’t be applied in a business setting… I wasn’t interested.”

That was part of what drew her to the Inner MBA.

Then the Physical Center Had to Close

Not long after Caren began the program, the pandemic forced her to close the physical meditation center she had spent years building. Suddenly, the question of how Hamsa would grow became much more immediate.

One teaching from the Inner MBA landed especially hard.

“You have one foot on the gas because you want to grow. But somewhere beneath the surface, your other foot is still pressing the brake.”

Caren’s reaction was immediate:

“How did you know?”

She had the vision. She believed deeply in the work. She wanted the center to reach more people. But she was also beginning to see some of the internal patterns that were making it difficult for the organization to grow beyond her.

Over the following months, she began applying what she was learning not only to herself, but to the way the meditation center operated. And the organization began to change.

From 60 Students a Week to 120

Hamsa moved completely online.

Before the Inner MBA, the center had been serving approximately 60 students each week. After the move online, that number grew to approximately 120 students a week, allowing Hamsa to reach people beyond its local community.

But the growth wasn’t simply about serving more students. The organization also became less dependent on Caren herself. Before, Caren had essentially been the center’s only teacher. Afterward, five additional meditation teachers she had trained were leading classes alongside her.

The team expanded as well. Where Caren had previously been writing a paycheck to one person, she was now paying five team members who were helping carry the organization forward.

Her monthly revenue tripled, but what mattered most to Caren was what happened to the culture.

“A Backbone of Compassion”

At some point during the transformation, members of Caren’s team gave her a phrase for what Hamsa had become. They described the organization as having: “A backbone of compassion.”

For Caren, those words captured something much bigger than a business result. She had wanted to discover whether the wisdom people practiced in meditation could live beyond the meditation cushion. Could it influence the way an organization grew? Could it shape the way people were led, communicated with, hired, supported, and treated?

The culture developing at Hamsa suggested that it could.

The center was growing, more teachers were carrying the work, more people were being served, and the business itself was becoming stronger.

But the growth didn’t require Caren to abandon the values that had made her want to build Hamsa in the first place. Those values became part of how the organization worked.

Growth Without Separating Business From Practice

That may be the most compelling part of Caren’s story. She did not enter the Inner MBA wanting to become a different kind of person from the meditation teacher she already was.

She wanted to know whether the awareness, compassion, and presence she had spent years cultivating could help her become a better organizational leader. The growth of Hamsa gave her an opportunity to test that in real time.

Instead of keeping “business” on one side of her life and meditation on the other, she began bringing the two together. The result was an organization that could serve more people without requiring Caren to personally carry every part of the mission.

And halfway through the Inner MBA, she was already overwhelmed by how much had changed.

“This has exceeded every expectation of what I thought I was going to gain from the program.”

Then she added:

“And we’re only halfway through.”

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