She Built It® Podcast

A new hire shows you their best in the first month. Pamela Dicso, CEO of ZD Stucco Repair, waits until month three and looks at the work. She also explains how she earned a skeptical team's respect and how a simple onboarding standard keeps quality consistent. Key Takeaways: Judge a hire at month three, not month one.  Evaluate the work, especially in areas where you aren't the expert. ...

AI will give you an answer in seconds, and most of the time it will be an average one. Dr. Jessica Wu , a Beverly Hills dermatologist building a physician-delivered women's health practice, calls that C-plus work. Here is how she uses AI for speed and research, and what she keeps for herself. Key Takeaways: Treat AI output as a rough draft Give AI the full story before you ask for an answer U...

Most employers want to be good bosses, and most employees want to do good work. Most of them still walk into the next relationship carrying the last bad one. For Alex Tieu, CEO of JLG Lawyers, that gap is the part of business AI can't solve, and closing it is a leadership decision. Key Takeaways: Name the baggage you bring to every hire.  Alex calls it the ex-boyfriend effect: carrying the si...

Dr. Whitney Hovenic removes skin cancer for a living. She still didn't know what ROAS meant when she co-founded a sunscreen brand with Reno mayor Hillary Schieve. Two years in, she says she's basically earned an unofficial MBA the hard way. Key Takeaways: Know that expertise builds the product, not the customer base.  Budget for the real runway to cash positive.  Protect your brand voice...

Lauren Schulte Wang has had to fight every major ad platform, Meta, Instagram, YouTube, Google, Amazon, just to say the word "period" in an ad, while men's sexual health brands face no such resistance. She's built the #1 selling menstrual discs and cups anyway. Key Takeaways: Knowing the platforms won't give you clear rules. Lauren's team has repeatedly asked ad platf...

Business owners keep telling Melissa Broughton the same thing: they tried letting AI fully handle their bookkeeping, and a few months later they were back, books wrong, no one to call, and no idea why. Key Takeaways: Reconcile your books at least quarterly: automation causes real errors, duplicated or tripled income entries, and the only way to catch them is to actually check, not assume the softw...

Revenue climbs. So do the hours, the stress, and the number of decisions only you can make. Allison Maslan has built 10 companies and mentored over 150,000 founders, and she says the growth ceiling almost everyone hits isn't a revenue problem. It's them. Key Takeaways: Recognize the bottleneck pattern early. Founders keep trying to have their eyes on everything long after the business ha...

Lillian Rafson got caught up in the press, the awards, and the pressure of "what's next," and grew her team faster than her demand could support. When growth plateaued, she had to lay people off to save the company, and then had to learn the hardest lesson of her career: she is not her business. Key Takeaways: Watch for validation-driven growth: press coverage and awards for growing...

For seven years, Caroline D'Amore built Pizza Girl around one model: get it into supermarkets. Then a tragedy she never saw coming, the LA fires, handed her the business she'd actually been missing the whole time. Key Takeaways: Watch your crisis response for a business signal: Pizza Girl's turnkey B2B event program came directly out of the community pizza donations Caroline organiz...

Episode 300 feels like the right time to talk about something every CEO and business owner needs to be paying attention to right now. The way people find you is changing. Someone can open Claude, ChatGPT or another AI platform and ask who leads your industry, who they should hire, or what they need to know before making a decision. They get an answer in seconds. The question is, are you part of th...

On She Built It®, Rachel Lee Lozina, founder of Blue Water Spa, licensed esthetician with 23 years of experience, and owner of two locations in New York, shares the skincare truth that most people never hear: the facials that actually change your skin, the ingredients that are marketing ploys, and why slow and consistent beats aggressive and trendy every single time. This conversation goes well be...

On She Built It®, Christy Shannon, co-founder, CMO, and mother of four, opens with a stat that should stop every busy parent in their tracks: 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function. That’s not a personal failing; that’s a U.S. Surgeon General warning.  Christy asks a question that’s harder to answer than it sounds: if you use AI every day to make your work life...

On She Built It®, Lauren Makler, co-founder of Cofertility, shares how a rare disease diagnosis, three surgeries, and her sister’s act of extraordinary generosity led her to build something the fertility world desperately needed. Cofertility helps women freeze their eggs for free when they donate eggs to intended parents, making egg freezing more accessible and egg donation less transactional at t...

On She Built It®, Brynn MacLennan, product designer, mother of five, and co-founder of Slate, shares how co-managing a dental practice revealed something that couldn’t be unseen: even wealthy, educated patients weren’t flossing. Not because they didn’t care about their health, but because flossing was broken. Brynn shares how she turned that insight into a patented 3-in-1 electric flosser now sold...

On She Built It®, Lauren Dudley Stephens, co-founder and CEO of Dudley Stephens, shares the origin story behind one of the most beloved family-owned fashion brands in the lifestyle space. What started as her mother's frustration with finding stylish, washable fleece that could go from boat to dinner became a 10-year brand built entirely on family funding, community, and the belief that women...

On She Built It®, Lori Casselman, a 20-year healthcare executive turned founder, shares what it took to build June Health, Canada’s first virtual clinic providing complete care across every stage of women’s health. Lori talks about the opportunity she sees for AI to close the gender health equity gap, the leadership lessons that come with scaling a startup in healthcare, and the culture principles...

On She Built It®, Amy Briggs, a pediatric speech and language pathologist turned tech founder, shares how a clinical career spent supporting families revealed an invisible problem: the mental load of modern parenthood. That insight became Aviva, an AI-powered app that takes over family scheduling logistics so parents can put the phone down and actually be present. Amy walks through why she chose s...

On She Built It®, Dr. Angela Casey, double board-certified dermatologist, micrographic surgeon, residency program director, and founder of Bright Girl Skincare, shares why the patients she operates on every day inspired her to build a consumer brand for teens. After years of treating skin cancers that could have been prevented with early habits, Dr. Casey created Bright Girl: a clinically tested,...

Childcare is not a personal problem. It is an economic one, and the system built to support it is underfunded, understaffed, and breaking down. On She Built It®, Jennifer Cowan, CEO of Connections for Children, a $30 million nonprofit serving the West Side and South Bay of Los Angeles, shares what it actually takes to lead a mission-driven organization through a pandemic, wildfires, a headquarters...

When Dr. Maheen Mausoof Adamson’s father had a stroke that left him unable to speak, it took him fifteen minutes to ask for a glass of water. She had just finished her PhD in neuroscience. She understood the brain but still couldn’t help him. On She Built It®, Dr. Adamson shares how that experience eventually led her to found Soof Solutions, an FDA-cleared, AI-guided communication app that uses ey...

On She Built It®, Becky Fawcett, founder and CEO of Helpusadopt.org, shares the deeply personal and fiercely honest story behind building a national multi-million dollar adoption grant program from her New York City apartment. After three miscarriages and a failed IVF journey, Becky found her way to adoption, and then turned her experience into a mission that has helped over 1,100 families and dis...

On She Built It®, Andrea Faulkner Williams, co-founder and president of Tubby Todd Bath Co., shares what it really took to build a brand that drives 95% of growth in the baby lotion category on Amazon, without paid ads, without VC funding, and without celebrity investors. What started as a solution to her own son's eczema became a 12-year journey of community-first growth, profitable scaling,...

On She Built It®, Susanne Mitschke, co-founder and CEO of Citruslabs and Harvard-trained epidemiologist, pulls back the curtain on what's really happening in the wellness, beauty, and consumer health industries. From claims washing and heavy metals in protein powders to why transparency is now a growth strategy, Susanne explains what separates the brands consumers actually trust from the ones...

On She Built It®, Jessica Tellian, former medical professional, EFT tapping expert, and founder of The Tapping School, shares why the most successful women she works with often feel the most stuck. Not because they lack strategy or ambition, but because 95% of what drives their decisions, behaviors, and results is running from the subconscious mind, a part of the brain most high achievers never ad...

On She Built It®, Georgia Thomas, former corporate lawyer, co-founder of E!Studios, and CEO of the eight-figure Venture Haus Group, shares what it actually takes to build a business that runs without you. Not in theory, but in real life, as a founder, mother, and multi-business operator navigating maternity leave, AI disruption, and the constant pressure to grow. Georgia talks about why founders s...