Meet Aya Kikimova (MBA, ’11), Zicklin Alum Living Her Entrepreneurial Dream

Aya Kikimova (MBA, ’11) was always an entrepreneur at heart.  

Growing up in Kazakhstan, she was surrounded by family members who ran small businesses. “My grandma had a deli shop, and my mom worked in real estate and was also an importer of flour and sugar for bakeries,” Aya says. “I always wanted to try my hand at entrepreneurship.”  

When she was 16, Aya moved to the United States as an international high school student. She stayed on to earn a bachelor’s degree in economics and computer science, then came to New York to work in finance at an insurance company. This was in 2008, during the Great Recession, and jobs were hard to come by. After working for a year, she decided to go for her MBA, “to see if I wanted to continue in finance.”  

Aya applied to the Zicklin School for its reputation, high ranking, and affordability, and is “very grateful” she did. “Zicklin was very generous in qualifying me for fellowships,” Aya says. “I got one for marketing and one for entrepreneurship, and they paid for two semesters at a time when I was really struggling to pay my bills.”  

Majoring in finance and marketing, Aya fell in love with marketing, but she liked almost all her classes: “My statistics class taught me precision. My finance class taught me to think outside the box, and my entrepreneurship class gave me a critical perspective, which is essential in the real world.” She also enjoyed an environmental marketing class and credits the Graduate Career Management Center with helping her land internships that eventually led to a full-time opportunity.  

Eventually, Aya got hired in digital media ad sales at Microsoft, where her clients included Macy’s, Estee Lauder, AT&T, Sanofi, Nestle, and other well-known companies. She spent more than six years there and by the end was overseeing $50 million in ad spend per year, earning entry into the company’s Platinum Club, designated for the top 1 percent of performers.  

But she wanted more “meaning and impact” in her career, she says.   

There was another key factor: After 15 years in the U.S., she’d finally earned her “green card,” or permanent residency, which gave her the right to work for any company. Previously she’d been employed on company-sponsored work visas, but at Microsoft, sponsorship for permanent residency was routine for long-term employees in good standing.  

No longer chained to a specific employer, Aya was finally free of the “golden visa handcuffs,” as she calls them. Throughout her career, she’d always found it unfair that only large companies could afford top-of-the-line digital marketing services. She left her six-figure job because she wanted “to help business owners, not just corporations.”  

Now, her handpicked team of 14 at LeapEngine boasts former executives from Google, IBM, and the like—the kind of corporate background that’s usually accessible only to multibillion-dollar companies: “We have high-quality services and a high-quality strategic approach, at rates that are forty to fifty percent below market.” 

With LeapEngine, Aya is helping entrepreneurs not unlike her mother and grandmother turbo-charge their sales. Her clients are “small mom and pop shops”—restaurants, candy stores, construction companies, cleaning businesses, and other local enterprises as well as online startups, and they’re already reaping the benefits. “One of my clients was a new beauty spa struggling to increase its clientele,” she notes. Just six months after hiring LeapEngine, the spa’s revenue has doubled; it is now expected to earn $2 million for 2024. Another client, a local dental office, saw such tremendous return on investment after just three months of spending $1,000 a month that it has now increased its spending to $10,000 a month.  

“Zicklin gave me my foundational springboard,” Aya concludes. “Why choose Zicklin? I’d sum it up by saying, ‘No BS.’ The education I got was very practical, without any fluff. It gave me exactly what I needed for my career.”  

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