Episodes

A student's zip code should not decide their future. Penelope Barton built a school in 70 countries to prove it. Penelope is the CEO of Crimson Global Academy and co-founder of Crimson Academies, a group of five schools serving students from age five through eighteen, online and in person. Last year her team ran 144,000 classes. Some of her students learn from boats, connected by satellite internet. She grew up in rural New Zealand before the internet, where one teacher covered English, math, ...

You are great at what you do. Your clients love you. And almost nobody knows you exist. That gap between your skill and your visibility is where revenue disappears. Diane Strand of JDS Productions, has spent 23 years building businesses in one of the most competitive industries in the world: entertainment production. She has worked on sets for General Hospital, Friends, and Walt Disney. She built JDS Productions into a seven-figure media company, launched over 100 actors and producers through he...

You want to build the business. You also cannot afford to quit your job. For most women, that tension kills the idea before it starts. Toni Toomey refused to let it. She is a second-time founder who sold her first company in her twenties, a full-time AI professional, the primary breadwinner in her family, and the CEO of Hone - a premium postpartum apparel brand made from hormone-safe natural fibers. She bootstrapped her startup without a single dollar of venture capital because, as she puts it, ...

Leah Lykins thinks college isn't the only path to a good career, and she's built worker-first tools that prove it. Leah is the co-founder of Where We Go, a public benefit corporation connecting people who are ready to work with the programs ready to train them, and the co-founder of Camp Chateau, an adult women's sleepaway camp in a French château. In this episode, Leah explains why the infrastructure that keeps a country running, from clean energy to advanced manufacturing to the electrical gr...

Most women founders never sell the business they built. Alisha Pennington wants to change that, and she says the block is not financial literacy. It is identity. In this episode, I sit down with Alisha Pennington, founder of Exette and a consultant who scaled and sold her own multi-seven-figure staffing agency. Only about 1% of female founders ever exit, and Alisha breaks down why: a lack of women we can point to who have done it, and the emotional attachment that keeps us holding on long after...

Most real estate agents know nothing about the homes they sell. Jennifer DeVito built a woman-owned construction and real estate company to fix exactly that. In this episode, I sit down with Jennifer DeVito, founder of Evolution, a design-build general contracting and real estate company on Long Island. Jennifer grew up running equipment on her parents' excavation sites, became the only woman managing 400 home builds for a national developer, and turned that into a business that combines buying...

Most business frameworks women are taught were designed for someone else. The playbook says pattern your company after proven models of success, but those models were built for a different kind of founder operating inside a different kind of system. Melissa McCann Tilton, President and Chief Revenue Officer at Criteria, has spent two decades scaling companies from $20M to $100M+ across automotive, logistics, and HR tech. She makes a case that stops you cold: AI does not create efficiency. AI cre...

Meghann Butcher built RepSpark, a B2B wholesale e-commerce platform now moving over a billion dollars a year, without a single line of tech on her resume. She grew up in her dad's apparel and footwear business, hanging around the warehouse at five years old. At 27, when her father's order-entry tool started catching on with independent sales reps, he asked if she wanted to run with it. She said yes, and bootstrapped it from there. In this conversation, Meghann and I get into how a psychology a...

Most networking advice was built for men and tested on men. It tells you to work the room, collect contacts, and follow up fast. But research across four continents and fifteen years of longitudinal studies shows that women who network like men consistently underperform the women who don't. Networking strategist and two-time author J. Kelly Hoey shares the goods from the landmark study that launched her latest book, The Social Billionaire. Women who reach the top don't just stay plugged into inf...

The hardest shift in business is learning to lead your team without doing their jobs for them. Christina Cassotis, CEO of the Allegheny County Airport Authority, runs a 6,000-person, 24/7/365 operation where a communication breakdown is both costly and dangerous. She took a struggling, de-hubbed Pittsburgh International and turned it into one of the most celebrated airports in the world, and she did it by mastering how to communicate the WHY behind every decision. If you're a founder who has bui...

If your service business has hit a revenue ceiling, the problem probably isn't your offer, it's your pricing. In this episode, pricing strategist and author Linda Hunt introduces the concept of the "minimum aligned price," the pricing floor below which you're actually paying your clients to work for them. Linda covers the three points at which service businesses start to show weakness: the pricing conversation, scope creep inside the work, and a lack of repeatable processes. If you've been boots...

Women founders get 2.3% of VC funding. Not because they lack vision, grit, or ideas, but because the playbook they've been handed was built for men. In this episode, I sit down with Anna Mazarsky, founder of PinkX PowerCore, the first tactical platform built to close the funding gap from the inside out. Anna spent nearly two decades inside the fundraising world. When she pulled the data, she didn't find a confidence problem. She found a systems problem, a bias problem, and a pattern-matching problem no amount of mindset coaching was ever going to fix. So she stopped coaching and started building. We get into why female-led VC funds aren't moving the needle, why women consistently ask for less than they've earned the right to raise, and why 80% of something will always beat 100% of nothing. The system wasn't built for us. Anna is building the one that is.

Brain lady Julie Anderson spent thirty years studying how neuroscience shapes women's success, and what keeps them from the million dollar mark is not capability. It is mindset, and specifically what their brains have been trained to listen to. In this episode, Adrienne sits down with Julie Anderson, certified brain health professional and international speaker, to talk about the mindset and neuroscience behind how women build and scale. Julie breaks down why women take on too much, why the word...

Dr. Cindy Trice, veterinarian, cancer survivor, and co-founder of KickIt Recovery Wear, built a company from a problem the healthcare industry ignored: what patients actually wear while they heal. During chemo, a friend brought her a pair of cute pajamas. She put them on and everything changed. She walked laps around the nurses' station. She let visitors in. But the nurses could not work around them, and she realized the hospital gown exists for a reason. The question was: why has nobody made s...

Brands don't need more visibility, they need meaning. That's the thesis behind Ashley Orfus's work as founder of ALAB Group, where she helps innovative companies replace traditional PR tactics with performance-driven communication built on education, credibility, and community. In this episode, Ashley shares why platforms like Substack and Beehive are leveling the playing field for founders without big budgets, why handwritten notes and customer phone calls are now a competitive edge, and why wo...

Stop fixing women — fix the system. That's the message at the heart of Jodi Bondi Norgaard's work as an entrepreneur, author, and advocate. In this episode, Jodi shares how a frustrating trip to a toy store with her daughter sparked a mission to challenge the gender stereotypes marketed to girls — and ultimately led her to create the award-winning Go Go Sports Girls, write her book "More Than a Doll," and advise organizations from the White House Gender Policy Council to the Gena Davis Institute...

After 200 conversations with women entrepreneurs building toward $1 million and beyond, I'm recording live from Santiago, Chile, where I'm leading a global field experience for Rice University MBA students. One pattern has emerged that nobody in this space talks about enough: the journey for women entrepreneurs never ends. In this solo episode of the She Leads Podcast, I look back at what these conversations have taught me since I first launched the show as Sugarcoated. The women founders who cr...

IP attorney Laurie Selkowitz breaks down why women founders are chronically under-informed when it comes to trademarking and intellectual property - and the moves you need to make before it's too late to protect what you've built. As a partner at Greenberg Glusker, Laurie advises companies from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 enterprises on technology, privacy, and intellectual property. In this conversation, she explains why many women founders unintentionally miss critical opportunities to...

From glassblowing studios to AI boardrooms, Michelle Hamilton shares how she turned decades of commercial real estate experience into actionable AI strategies for businesses of all sizes. This episode explores how entrepreneurs can use AI in business as a personal assistant to improve productivity, protect intellectual property, and support business growth. Michelle, founder and CEO of Spark AI Strategy and AI Class Lab, dives into the intersection of art, creativity, and artificial intelligenc...

If you have ever walked into a doctor’s office with real perimenopause symptoms and been told you are too young, this conversation will feel validating. In this episode, Madge Rumman, co-founder of Blair Health, shares how women can access specialist-level menopause care without waiting months for referrals or feeling dismissed in primary care. We talk about why menopause is diagnosed based on symptoms rather than blood tests, what often gets missed in traditional healthcare, and how to trust w...

Solve a real buyer problem. Build enterprise value. Exit on your terms. In this episode of the She Leads Podcast, Kelly Parker shares how she built Send Ribbon, a bootstrapped corporate gifting company acquired by UrbanStems, by focusing on one overlooked opportunity: solving real pain points for real buyers. With just $5,000 and no outside funding, Kelly launched her business at 27 after years inside high growth companies like Indeed, WeWork, and DoorDash. Instead of chasing luxury products or...

What does it take to create a $100K consulting offer for corporate clients? Let's once and for all move on from trading time for dollars. In this episode, Jessica Fearnley and I talk about what it truly takes to structure a high-value $100K consulting offer for corporate clients, without overcomplicating your services or building a massive team or charging an hourly rate. But this conversation goes beyond pricing. We talk about what happens after you leave corporate, recover from burnout, and ...

From Washington, D.C. to the Brooklyn waterfront, Lindsay Greene shares how a career in finance evolved into a mission to transform industrial spaces into engines of opportunity for underserved communities. Lindsay Greene is the President and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where she leads one of New York City’s most ambitious models for inclusive economic development. With more than 550 businesses and 11,000 employees on site, the Navy Yard is not simply a real estate portfolio but a living eco...

I’m saying the quiet part out loud: if you don’t build your sales muscle, growth stalls - no matter how talented you are. In this episode, Julia Arpag, CEO and Founder of Aligned Recruitment, shares with me how she went from five weeks postpartum and laid off to building a seven-figure tech recruitment firm by treating selling as service, investing early in mentorship, and using LinkedIn + networking like a real funnel. Julia’s journey began in August 2023 when she was unexpectedly laid off whil...