The She Leads® Podcast - Wealth Building & Business Growth

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...

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 fiber...

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 WhereWeGo , 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 infrastruct...

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...

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 mana...

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,...

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 ye...

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 launch...

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 d...

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...

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 did...

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 neuro...

Hospital gowns strip your dignity. That's what Dr. Cindy Trice learned firsthand during treatment for advanced cervical cancer. When a friend brought her a pair of pajamas, it changed everything: she felt like a person again, not just a patient. That moment became the origin story for Kickit Recovery Wear, a company designing stylish, functional post-surgery clothing and chemo-friendly apparel for...

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 withou...

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 Do...

After 200 conversations with women entrepreneurs building toward $1 million and beyond, Adrienne is recording live from Santiago, Chile, where she is 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...

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 th...

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 S...

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 sym...

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 in...

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 go...

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...

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 + network...

Paige Arnof-Fenn shares how to stop competing on price by sharpening brand positioning, owning a niche, and turning reputation + referrals into consistent demand. In this episode, Paige Arnof-Fenn shares her journey from investment banking to branding powerhouse and discovering her true calling in marketing, building a distributed firm long before remote work was mainstream, and detailing how to t...

From courtroom litigator to emotionally intelligent mediator, Katherine Eisold Miller shares how she is reshaping divorce into a process grounded in clarity, compassion, and agency for women navigating one of life’s hardest transitions. Today, I sit down with Katherine Miller, founder of the Miller Law Group and a New York-based divorce attorney, mediator, author, and podcast host who is changing...