The Entrepreneur's Blueprint

Karen Stubbs is the founder of Birds on a Wire, a ministry built to equip and encourage moms with practical, biblical wisdom. What started as a small group of seven moms in her basement has grown over 15 years into a worldwide ministry with a podcast, curriculum, books, and a conference. In this episode, Karen joins Courtney for a candid conversation about the real operational challenges of runnin...

Most productivity advice was written for people with too much free time. In this solo episode, Courtney cuts through the noise and shares seven of her most important productivity practices, the ones that have actually moved the needle for her as a founder and fractional COO working inside other founders' businesses.   Courtney breaks down not just what to do, but why your current approach is...

Jacob and Christin Willis are the founders of We Heart Nutrition, a research-backed supplement company on a mission to help people live energetic, joyful lives. They are also pro-life and proudly donate 10% of all sales to pregnancy care centers across the country.   Jacob is back for a second conversation, and a lot has changed. He and Courtney dig into the team and agency structure that is...

You closed the deal. You made the hire. Everyone's excited. And then the first two weeks happen and something feels off. Files are coming from three different places. The kickoff call agenda is being built in real time. Your new hire is spending their first three days tracking down login credentials that should have been ready before they walked in the door.   Most founders file this under "w...

Josh Menold is the CEO and owner of CHE Companies, an exterior construction platform serving the Carolinas and Virginia. Before CHE, he spent two decades in finance and operations leadership, including CFO roles at Bobbitt Design Build and Faulkner Hays. He's also the founder of ITABWODI LLC, a parent brand for several ventures rooted in a question his grandfather taught him on the farm: Is th...

You know exactly who it is. You have rewritten the conversation in your head a hundred times, and you still have not had it.   In this solo episode, Courtney breaks down why founders avoid hard conversations, what that avoidance is actually costing their teams, and two practical frameworks you can use right now, whether you need to correct someone or challenge them to step up. In this episode...

Scott Woods is back. If you caught his first appearance on the show, you already know the depth he brings. This time, we got into the operational and spiritual realities of running a values-driven consulting business for over a decade, including the stuff most business owners never talk about out loud.   Scott leads Advocatus Consulting and Silverback Ventures, where he helps companies unlock...

Episode 51 is a solo episode, and Courtney is bringing you into something she is right in the middle of with a real client. The client has a loyal customer base, products people love, and years of hard work behind her. From the outside, the business looks fine. On the inside, she is constantly reacting, second-guessing decisions she used to make with conviction, and opening her laptop every mornin...

Will and Courtney Kassner founded Crew + Co in 2015 out of a passion for faith-based products — custom leather Bibles and family devotionals sold online. Ten years later, they're running a nine-person operation in a small town just outside of Memphis, Tennessee, and their building now includes a coffee shop that has become something of a community anchor. They sat down with me to talk about...

Revenue is the loudest number in your business. It's on the Instagram graphic, it's what people ask about at conferences, and it feels like proof that what you're building is real. But it is one data point, and if it's the only one you're tracking with any emotional investment, you are missing most of the story.   In this solo episode, Courtney breaks down the four numbers that together actua...

This episode is dropping during SAAM, and it could not be more fitting. Jessi Bixler is the author of The Story We Share, a multi-perspective memoir about surviving sexual assault, and she also runs Bixler Consulting, an eight-year-old marketing and AI-driven sales agency she built without full-time employees. This conversation covers how she built both, what she had to stop doing to protect her f...

Most businesses think they know how their customers feel. They send a survey, watch the numbers come in, and call it good. Jessica Fraser built an entire business around the idea that that is not enough. Jessica is the founder and CEO of ElucidCX, a voice of customer consultancy that turns actual human conversations into a strategic roadmap for growth. She has worked across oil and gas, ministry,...

It's Friday. The thing you mentioned on Monday? Nobody touched it. Before you chalk it up to your team dropping the ball, Courtney Cook wants to challenge that assumption. In this episode, she breaks down why most execution gaps aren't a character flaw on your team's part. They're a process and clarity flaw on yours. Courtney walks through the four reasons tasks fall through the cracks, including...

What does it look like to run a product-based business where the mission is the filter for every decision? Amy Kavanaugh, COO of GoodKind, joins Courtney to talk about building a lean, seasonal, inventory-based business without losing the values that make it worth building in the first place. In this episode, you'll hear: How GoodKind accidentally launched with 500 Advent Blocks out of a churc...

Productivity, Control, and Learning to Surrender Some of us aren't just interested in productivity. We're wired for it. The problem is that the same drive that helps us build great systems can quietly become a need for control, and that's where things get complicated. In this episode, I'm getting honest about why I love having everything documented and accounted for, what that tension between cont...

On this episode of The Entrepreneur's Blueprint, I sit down with Garrett Perkins, Chief Revenue Officer at Givingtons, a company I've had the pleasure of working with for years. After starting with a vision to help nonprofits generate revenue through e-commerce, Garrett and his team quickly learned their initial problem wasn't the one that needed solving. What began as a pivot to fulfi...

After 15 years working with e-commerce brands, product-based businesses, and Christian authors, Courtney Cook knows that the most valuable conversations aren't about how someone built their empire five years ago. They're about what founders are wrestling with right now. In this trailer episode, Courtney introduces The Entrepreneurs Blueprint, a podcast designed for Christian business owners who ar...

In this solo episode, host Courtney Cook tackles a challenge most founders know all too well: feeling like they can’t take a real vacation. If the thought of being unreachable for even a day makes you panic, this episode is your wake-up call. With the holiday season approaching, Courtney walks through a practical framework to help you loosen your grip on daily operations and reclaim the freedom yo...

In this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Blueprint , Courtney sits down with Mandy Morris , LPC — a licensed therapist, executive psychology coach, and co-founder of SoFree , a neuroscience-based app designed to help users reset their nervous system in under two minutes. Mandy shares how her work as a trauma therapist led her into the executive space, helping high-achieving leaders uncover their blin...

In this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Blueprint , Courtney breaks down one of the most critical and often overlooked relationships in business: the connection between marketing and operations. While marketing drives demand and brings customers in the door, operations fulfills that demand and ensures promises are delivered. When these two functions operate in silos, businesses waste money, lose tru...

In this episode, I sit down with Sarah Wells—founder of Sarah Wells Bags, a mission-driven brand serving new and breastfeeding moms with beautifully designed, truly functional pump bags, cooler bags, wet/dry bags, and nursing/pumping bras. We talk about how a personal pain point became a product line, how to stay mission-anchored when business is hard, and why relationships (with customers, banks,...

 In this solo episode of The Entrepreneur’s Blueprint , Courtney Cook breaks down one of the simplest yet most transformative tools you can use to run your business with clarity: a scorecard. Without one, you’re making decisions based on gut feel, urgency, or emotion. With one, you have clear numbers guiding every step. Courtney explains what life looks like without a scorecard, what to measure fi...

On this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Blueprint , I sit down with Lisa Simone , founder of Pearl Spark Pages and creator of the Female Founders Journal . After 20 years in PR and marketing, Lisa felt the need for reinvention. What started as a moment of doubt on stage in front of 150 female founders became the spark for her newest venture: creating a luxury guided journal designed to help wo...

In this solo episode of The Entrepreneur’s Blueprint , I share the story of when I first realized that inventory isn’t just “stuff on shelves”—it’s cash flow. I talk about the lessons I learned early on in my career, from walking a warehouse floor when cash was tight to navigating the challenges of selling seasonal, year-dated product. You’ll hear why inventory can be both your biggest asset and y...

In this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Blueprint , I sit down with Tom Rauen, founder and CEO of 1-800-Tshirts , to talk about his journey from printing shirts in his parents’ basement to leading a 40-person company that’s been growing steadily for 20 years. Tom shares: How a college side hustle turned into a thriving business. The pivotal moment when he acquired the 1-800-Tshirts brand during the...