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Badass Women in Business
Welcome to The Badass Women in Business Podcast, the definitive space for unfiltered, tactical insights into female entrepreneurship, enterprise scaling, and business monetization.
Hosted by seasoned business owners, growth partners, and exit strategists Cristy O’Connor and Aggie Chydzinski, this podcast moves past passive advisory to bring you directly inside the high-stakes execution of building and successfully exiting companies on your own terms.
As hands-on growth partners who actively engineer scale and value alongside founders, we deliberately strip away the superficiality of traditional corporate highlight reels. Instead, we dissect the raw, hard-earned operational strategies and profound psychological shifts required to unlock true enterprise value.
Each week, our conversations turn systemic business obstacles into high-velocity execution plans, offering sophisticated, real-world frameworks for ambitious women who are leading teams, optimizing cash flow, and engineering highly scalable, exit-ready companies.
Whether you are in the trenches of bootstrapping an innovative startup, navigating complex partnership dynamics, or designing the ultimate monetization strategy for your life's work, this podcast provides the active strategy needed to drive valuation and claim full autonomy over your future.
Subscribe now to join a premier movement of women rewriting the rules of modern commerce, one definitive story at a time. New episodes deliver partner-level value every Tuesday.
Episodes
167 episodes
Build a Business That Works Without You: Ashley Ortiz on Delegation, Systems and Ownership
SUMMARYThe hardest part of growing a business is often not finding more work, but building a company that no longer depends on you to make every decision. Ashley Ortiz shares how she and her husband grew Bella Vista Painting from nights ...
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Her First Project Was $53 Million. Then Came the Hard Part | Melissa Drew
SUMMARYMost founders spend their first years trying to land a major client. Melissa Drew had the opposite problem: InSite BUILD’s first project was worth $53 million, and once that extraordinary opportunity ended, she faced the harder qu...
The Revenue Trap: Why Growing Sales Can Shrink Your Profit | Natalia Zacharin
A bigger business is not automatically a better business. Natalia Zacharin explains how a company can grow from $1 million to $4 million in revenue and still become less profitable when pricing, hiring, cash flow, and expenses are not managed w...
Don’t Just Go for It: Mara Smith on Research, Credibility and Building in a New Industry
SUMMARYEntrepreneurship celebrates action, but Mara Smith makes a strong case for something less glamorous: do the work before you make the leap. After 16 years outside the traditional workforce, she entered the spirits industry with no ...
Women’s Hair Loss Was an Industry Blind Spot. Shab Caspara Built a New Category
Women struggling with thinning hair were spending money across salons, dermatologists, products, and treatments, yet no one owned the full customer journey. After seeing that gap from behind the chair, Shab Caspara left a highly paid luxury sal...
When Growth Breaks the Model: Deanna Woodroffe on Choosing Better Care Over More Patients
What happens when growing your business makes it harder to deliver the work you built the company to do? Deanna Woodroffe explains why Vibrant Health of Colorado moved from an insurance based practice serving roughly 7,000 patients to a direct ...
Charge From Day One: Clara Ma on Bootstrapping a Profitable Community Business
Many founders try to build a large audience before asking anyone to pay, but Clara Ma built Ask a Chief of Staff around the opposite premise: prove the value first and let committed customers shape what comes next. She explains how charging fro...
The Risk of Doing Nothing: Stephanie Georges on Midlife Reinvention for Women Over 50
The most dangerous career risk for many experienced women is not the leap, but staying in roles and systems that keep minimizing their power. Stephanie Georges brings four decades of Wall Street and C suite transformation experience to a sharpe...
Turning Fandom Into Revenue Without Losing the Brand with Veronica Hart
Growth in entertainment is no longer just about getting attention; it is about turning emotional connection into live experiences, licensing, merchandise, sports, and global partnerships without diluting what people loved in the first place. Ve...
AI Transformation Is a People Problem: Megan Malli
Megan Malli, CEO of AnswerLab, reframes transformation as a deeply human discipline, where AI, customer insight, and leadership all fail when they are layered onto broken workflows or disconnected cultures. In this conversation, she shows why c...
How to Modernize a Legacy Business Without Losing Its Core: Anne Huntington Sharma
Anne Huntington Sharma explains how leaders can honor a company’s history while still making the difficult decisions required for its next chapter. Drawing from her path from “center number 17” to President and CEO of Huntington Learning Center...
Reinvention Without Permission: Jane Bertch on Building La Cuisine Paris and Starting Again at Any Age
Jane Bertch left corporate banking, moved through London into Paris, and built La Cuisine Paris into the largest English language French cooking school in the city, despite having no culinary ...
Scaling a Purpose-Driven Coffee Brand from Garage Roasting to National Retail with Jillian Salinas
Jillian Salinas, founder of Beach City Coffee, joins Badass Women in Business to share how a backyard roasting hobby became a national retail brand rooted in community, sustainability, and res...
Building a Franchise Brand Around Care, Systems, and Self Belief with Nuttha Goutier
Nuttha Goutier built Sabai Thai Spa from less than $1,000, a clear vision, and a deep belief that wellness should feel like belonging, not a transaction. In this conversation, she shares how Thai hospitality, community care, disciplined systems...
Giving Patients Their Voice Back: Human-Centered AI with Dr. Maheen Adamson
When Dr. Maheen Musoof Adamson watched her father lose his ability to speak after a stroke, her life’s work became deeply personal. In this episode, she shares how that experience led her to build Soof Solutions, an AI-enabled communication pla...
Why Legal Strategy Is a Growth Strategy: Protecting Value Before It Costs You Millions with Hillary Hughes
Most entrepreneurs view legal support as something they need when problems arise, yet the most successful founders understand that legal strategy is one of the earliest and most important investments they can make in protecting enterprise value...
When Money Feels Unsafe: Tiffany Carter on Trauma, Sales, and Building Real Wealth
Tiffany Carter’s story challenges the polished mythology of entrepreneurship by exposing how trauma can quietly shape the way high achieving founders earn, sell, lead, and stay visible, even when they appear successful from the outside. In this...
The Retail Breakthrough That Almost Didn’t Happen with Shan and Erika of Shades By Shan
Shan and Erika built Shades By Shan from a San Francisco garage into a nationally distributed cosmetics brand carried in more than 600 JCPenney Beauty stores, but the real lesson is not simply how they scaled, it is how they protected their mis...
Building the Business of Caregiving with AI, Trust, and Tenacity with Nicole àBeckett
Caregiving is one of the most universal experiences in life, yet it remains one of the most overlooked problems in healthcare, technology, and the workplace. In this episode, Nicole àBeckett shares how her own experience caring for both parents...
From Financial Shame to Strategic Control with Nancy Benet
After divorce left Nancy Benet with four children, no income, five failed businesses, and more than $650,000 in debt, she had to rebuild not only her finances, but her confidence, judgment, and sense of personal agency. In this conversation, Na...
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How Scarlett Leung Built a Beverage Brand Into 2,000 Stores and Learned When to Walk Away
Scarlett Leung, co-founder of Pretty Tasty, joins us for an honest conversation about what it really takes to build a modern consumer brand. From turning around retail businesses and launching companies from scratch to rebuilding after founder ...
From Refugee to Founder: Soon Hagerty on Building Businesses That Give Back Without Burning Out
What if success is not about balance, but about building a life with purpose, curiosity, and impact? In this episode, Soon Hagerty shares how fleeing Vietnam as a child shaped her entrepreneurial mindset, why “business for good” has to be built...
Building What Tech Ignored: Rebecca Matchett on Connection, Neurodivergence, and the Business of Belonging
What happens when a seasoned entrepreneur steps away from building brands and decides to solve something far more human?In this episode, Rebecca Matchett shares her journey from launching fashion brands like alice + olivia to co-founding...
Deborah Farone on Why Business Development Is the Skill Women Can’t Ignore
There’s a point in your career where being good at your work stops being enough.You’re experienced. You deliver. You’re trusted. But growth slows, and the path to real influence or ownership becomes less clear.Deborah Farone has s...