Erika Ayers Badan: The Barstool Sports CEO Who Bet on Herself

Erika Ayers Badan is best known as the former CEO of Barstool Sports, but her story is about far more than one company or one massive exit.

In 2016, Erika stepped into a 12-person operation valued at roughly $15 million and became Barstool Sports’ first CEO. During her time there, the company grew into one of the most recognizable media brands in the country and was eventually acquired in a deal valued at approximately $550 million.

But this episode is not a step-by-step breakdown of how Barstool scaled.

It is the story of the woman who agreed to lead it.

In Season 1, Episode 5 of Fine, I’ll Do It, Faith and Jenn explore Erika Ayers Badan’s career, her leadership style, her experience as a working mother, the lessons from her book Nobody Cares About Your Career, and her next chapter at Food52.

We talk about:

• Why Erika accepted a job almost everyone warned her not to take
• What her years at Barstool Sports reveal about leadership, risk and resilience
• How she handled criticism, failure and working in a highly public role
• The career lessons behind Nobody Cares About Your Career
• How ambition and motherhood shaped her decisions
• Why leaving a successful chapter can be just as important as building one
• What we can learn from her move from Barstool Sports to Food52
• The takeaways mothers, founders and women in business can apply to their own careers

Erika’s story is a reminder that your career will rarely follow a clean, predictable path. Sometimes the biggest opportunities are the ones that make the least sense on paper.

This episode is about betting on yourself, doing the uncomfortable work, learning as you go and taking ownership of the career you want to build.

Fine, I’ll Do It studies the real stories of successful mothers in business—the risks, decisions, failures and lessons behind what they built.

Listen to Season 1, Episode 5 wherever you get your podcasts.Resources Mentioned in This Episode

Read Nobody Cares About Your Career by Erika Ayers Badan
Erika’s book is an honest, practical guide to navigating work, failure, difficult bosses, unexpected opportunities and the reality that no one will take greater ownership of your career than you.

https://www.erikaayersbadan.com/book

Subscribe to Erika’s Substack, Mule Media
Read Erika’s thoughts on work, leadership, motherhood, career changes and building a life that works for you.

https://erikaayersbadan.substack.com/

Join Work Like a Girl
Work Like a Girl is Erika’s community for professional women who want to connect, learn from one another and create value for each other at work.

https://www.worklikeagirl.com/

Support Fine, I’ll Do It

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Transcript

FAITH 0:00

Picture this a company running out of space. They're above a dental office. They're twelve people and they're worth fifteen million dollars. And eight years later, they were valued at five hundred and fifty million dollars.

JENN 0:12

That's a good glow-up. I like that. I love the glow up, bro.

FAITH 0:15

I'm Faith. And I'm Jen. And this is the Find I'll Do It podcast. A podcast where we talk about women in business who did it without an app, without a trust fund, and without a rich husband. With kids. With kids. Did I say moms? I said moms. Erica Ayres Badan. We'll talk about why I chose her and why I think what she has to share is important, even if she didn't take the route that we would have typically talked about. I feel like typically we talk about moms who built businesses from tea boxes in their office with their kids playing around. Well, Erica didn't technically build her own business from the start. She worked in corporate and she built her career over time and she had kids the whole time. Erica Badon was the first ever CEO of Barstool Sports. She worked there from 2016 to 2024.

JENN 1:08

Okay. I used to see a bunch of Barstool memes on the socials, but I never understood what the company was. What is what's the company?

FAITH 1:17

Barstool Sports started as a blog above a dentist's office with 12 people and just a blog. It was a sports blog. Their target audience was mostly men. And we'll get into why that is a little strange that they hired a woman. Then she was a CEO of Food 52 from 2024 to 2026. She's the author of Nobody Cares About Your Career. It's why Failure is Good, The Great Ones Play Hurt, and Other Hard Truths. I think if you can read this book and you have the time, it is a very good book. I enjoyed it a lot. And now she has um the work podcast and writes on Substack. So she's no longer a CEO at this time after leaving Food 52 in 2026. Barstool Sports is a very male-dominated sports media company, and they hired a woman to run it. A Dead Spin piece specifically called her a token CEO. The insinuation being she was only there to soften the brand's image, not because she was qualified. She named her own daily podcast token CEO and took that insult and turned it into her own brand. She pretty much was like, oh. Oh, that's what you think? Guess what? Next. Which I love about her. I think owning it is pretty cool. And I don't think that she was hired as a token CEO. She grew money from $15 million to $550 million in eight years. That's pretty crazy. And I think in three years they were worth like $440 million. So I think you could even shorten the time frame and say that in three years they were worth a lot of money. Interesting. She's a mom. She doesn't talk about her kids much publicly. It's worth noting that she doesn't share a lot. I think a lot of it has to do with the Barstool sports, it's pretty controversial. And it doesn't really fit Barstool's image. And I think that she is just more private about her family. She also went through some like not so great publicity about her most recent marriage. And I just think that she chooses to keep her family out of the spotlight. We won't have a lot of the details of how she did it with kids. I think we just know that as moms, parenting is hard and doing it while running a business or being in corporate America is doesn't make it any easier. If not, it makes it harder. And I think you can extrapolate from that that you just do it. And I think that's a lot of her what her book talks about. I know. I chose her because I like her style. I think she has a lot to say to moms that not a lot of people are saying out loud, and I think a lot of moms need to hear a lot of her advice. Her advice is practical, it's not motivational poster stuff. For most of her career, she was building other people's companies, but what she built at Barstool is wild. It took it from a garage-type 12-person operation to a $550 million empire. In 2023, Barstool sold to Penn Entertainment, a gambling and casino company for around $550 million. Later that same year, Penn sold it back to the founder Dave Portnoy for $1 reputation. So they kept denying Penn's licensing and it was causing a bunch of issues. Who's Penn? It's the company that bought Barstool Sports for $550 million. They originally had this plan that they were gonna like uh Barstool Sports was going to also dabble into some gambling, but it turns out that the gambling board did not like that and they're making it really difficult for them. So ultimately, Erica, Dave, and Penn decided to sell the company back to Barstool and Dave, making him a hundred percent owner for a dollar. That alone is crazy because not only did Barstool Sports make $550 million, they also got their company back for a dollar, are in complete control. And the deal is is if Dave ever sells the business, it they get 50% of the proceeds. But Dave says he'll he'll never sell. Okay. Like he's like, I gotta back up. Never sell.

JENN 4:51

Why would they sell for I don't understand why they'd sell for one dollar?

FAITH 4:54

Because they realized that the partnership wasn't a good partnership. Like ultimately, I know it's complicated. But that's what a kind of Erica's thing is a lot of it is like failures teach you a lot of things, but even though that this partnership was a failure, she still grew a business from 12 million to $550 million in eight years. That's crazy. By most accounts, the Penn Barstool marriage was considered a failure, mainly because Penn is a heavily regulated gambling company and Barstool's brash controversial content, and Portnoy's persona specifically kept causing problems with gambling regulators, including license denials and investigations in states like Massachusetts. Penn and Barstool were just never a match on the regulatory side. So even though the sale itself failed, it ended up positioning Portnoy to walk away owning 100% of his company for a dollar. And the same year he sold it for half a billion. Erica was the one actually working the deal on both ends. That's a hell of a story on its own before we even get to everything else that she's done. Let's get into a little bit of like her origin story and how she got to be the CEO of Barstool Sports. Her parents were teachers and artists. They weren't business people. They busted tables as kids. They instilled a lot of work ethic. Erica got a sociology degree and a philosophy degree from Colby College, and she had no real plan for graduating. She thought that she'd be a lawyer. Her first job was with Fidelity Investments Legal Department, and she hated it. So she moved to Fidelities Creative Department instead. She took a 70% pay cut down from $50,000 to $16,000 to work at something that she actually loved to do. She got laid off from that job and she described it as being devastating and it felt very personal. And that day that she got laid off, she took a job as a nanny. Just for income. And by her own account, she was very bad at it. And she didn't. Well, if she's a CEO, I'm thinking about who like her what her personality is. She's probably not like the super nurturing.

JENN 6:53

Right now, at the time she's young, she's just getting into corporate America. So she was really kind of felt defeated, I think. And she really didn't have a plan. Yeah. And her parents didn't really set a blueprint of how to be like a CEO, but to ultimately she did become one. So yeah. From there, she worked at ad agencies in Boston, Arnold Worldwide, Digital's LBI on accounts like Volkswagen, ESPN, American Express, Delta, and then Microsoft. She worked for Demand Media Backstage. She was the president in chief revenue officer for AOL. She was the chief marketing officer, and for Yahoo, she was the VP of branding. It was over a decade of climbing up the corporate ladder.

FAITH 7:31

Okay, so she's working in all these different places. Yeah. Yeah. She she climbed the corporate ladder essentially through all these huge big companies. In her own words, she was not the smartest person in the room, so she worked the hardest and stayed the most curious. In 2015, by a chance meeting, she met the Sharon group who who were the new investors for Barstool, right as they were looking for a CEO, and she called it a sil a sliver of a chance, and it worked. So she wanted, she really, really wanted to be the CEO of Barstool Sports once they once she found out they were looking for a CEO, because she recognized that they were ahead of the game in marketing, that they were doing something differently than everybody else, and she wanted to be a part of that. What made her a good fit was that she recognized Barstool already had real fans, a distinct voice and an audience moving at internet speed. So she recognized that they were they were ahead of the game and they were moving really quickly, and she wanted to be early in on that, and she thought it'd be a really great move for her career.

JENN 8:24

So what were they doing that was way ahead of the game? One of the first sports podcasts. They like they were early, early, early into the podcast game. They are just saying it how it is, and they're getting people's attention and they're creating a lot of loyalty. And I used to see it a lot, and I I remember thinking it was hilarious, but I I was like, I have no idea what this business actually does, except they have really funny memes.

FAITH 8:46

I think the only thing that Barstoel Sports was doing that would apply to us at that time would have been call her daddy. Yes, that sounds familiar.

JENN 8:54

Okay, okay.

FAITH 8:55

So they put they put Alex Cooper on the map. So they were doing things that I see weren't being asked. This is clicking now. Okay. I know. So she became Barstell Sports first ever CEO in 2016. So Barstoel Sports was a very male-dominated bro sports media culture. And in 2017, she tested job candidates by this is the part that we probably disagree with, and most people will disagree with. She would text candidates for jobs at 11 p.m. or on weekends, expecting fast replies to prove commitment. Um, and that drew a lot of real public backlash for encouraging burnout culture. So although I think that Erica is a really cool person, and I think she gives a lot of good practical advice that I think a lot of people need to hear. I don't I don't think we need to agree with everything. I don't think that you need to text your employees at 11 to prove that they are committed.

JENN 9:44

But it does kind of a savage way to we weed people out.

FAITH 9:47

It is savage, but I do think that there I think a lot of her outlook is that like this is hard work and it is difficult and you do need to be committed, and it is going to take a lot from you, and the sooner you realize that the better.

JENN 10:00

Yeah. So that tells me a little bit about what her life was as a working mom. She sounds like she was always on. She's very far on one spectrum of moms and business.

FAITH 10:11

She's like she has dialed it back a little bit. I do think that she's like, okay, like I probably was kind of extreme. I think she is very balanced. She in her book says, like, Barstel Sports and herself have done a lot of controversial things that she probably wouldn't do again, but she doesn't regret it and she's not gonna apologize for it. And I like that about her. We admire her work ethic. We don't think anyone needs to text an employee at 11 p.m. to prove commitment, but those are two different things. Despite all this, Barstool Sports grew into 300 plus employees, $550 million evaluation, $5 billion plus monthly video views, 225 million followers, the top 10 US podcast publisher, 35 plus brands launched, including Pac McVeigh, Call Our Daddy, and Buzzin' with the Boys. So Pen Entertainment buys Barstool for $550 million. She personally worked the deal on a compressed timeline, a lot of secrecy, late nights, negotiating between the investor and the company. And then later that same year, Dave Portnoy buys back Barstool for $1. She helped negotiate both sides, says it was more surreal, but much easier on the on the second sale. Selling it by getting it back to Dave was much easier than it was to sell to Penn. Um around the same time, her father is diagnosed with terminal cancer. He passes away in late March 2024, and she said she idolized him and was grateful she already she had stepped away from. So after this, she she left Barstool Sports and she moved to Food 52. Okay. Which is her next CEO gig. And Food 52, she was hired to kind of bring it back to save it. And so that inevitably ended up failing. It ended up not being able to be saved, and she ended up having to go through chapter 11 bankruptcy that company. Yeah. So around the time that her dad passes away and she goes to Africa to reset for the first time in years, she wasn't glued to her phone. And she was very, very like that. She was just like, wow. So she takes a year off. So but when she comes back in April 2024, she becomes the CEO of Food 52. It's a food and home media e-commerce, also known and it also owns Schoolhouse and Dansk. I don't ask me what those companies were. I didn't look too much into it.

JENN 12:27

Sounds familiar.

FAITH 12:28

It was essentially a turnaround job. Uh it was a company that was in trouble and needed help. So she makes she cuts $20 million plus cost over 19 months trying to get it to be profitable. She meets a bank called Avid Bank and it seems to be productive. Then December 15th, with zero warning, Avid sweeps all of Food 52's cash. So they had no cash flow to pay payroll, tax funds, everything. She called it an unheard of and unprecedented situation. So on December 17th, she lays off 60% of her staff. December 26th, she lays off another 20%. And this isn't in her book. This is just extra information that I'm sharing. She described it as a total closure. They knock out 80% of the business in like a week. On December 29th, 2025, they filed Chapter 11 in Delaware for with a $25 million plus dollars in debt. She spends the holiday break during this Chapter 11 bankruptcy at her parents' house in Vermont, working from a desk in her mom's home office right next to her 13-year-old daughter's pile of oversides, sweatshirt, stuffed animals, and press-on nails, she says plainly it was not a Zen holiday. She says quitting was the most tempting option on the table in that two weeks that she would have loved to quit, but she decided that quitting just wasn't who she was and that she was going to see it through. Because like being brought on as a CEO of a company to turn it around and then ultimately failing after being this amazing success story for Barstool Sports, like it's like the ups and the downs of being in business. Being in business, even if you're a business owner, if you're in corporate America, like it's inevitable. Like you're going to have successes and you're going to have failures. And I think that's what she talks about a lot is owning failure and taking it and not seeing it as a personal, like you're not a bad person, you're not a bad business. You're you're learning, and it doesn't matter where you are on the scale or how high up you are, you're going to fail. And the sooner that you own it publicly, the more admirable it is. Like I had a situation that I told you about at the village, my business this weekend, and somebody had a complaint, and I immediately owned it. And I I'd thank them for their advice and their critique, and I'm gonna own it and I'm gonna fix it. I feel like some people would choose to like be offended or hurt, and at the end of the day, what is it being offended or hurt do for you? Right. Right. It doesn't really do anything for you, and they probably are being very honest, and what they are saying probably is true, and you had a failure, and take it, do better.

JENN 15:00

Yeah, and that's kind of a whole thing. Constantly a learning experience and business. And also being the CEO, she obviously the responsibility does fall to the CEO, and you're leading the team, but it is also a team, like you're not doing all the work. So I I mean, I I know that you have to own it, like this is like your company, but also like she's coming in to save a company that was clearly not doing well. I feel like so you can't pull it off. I mean, is that really like a huge failure?

FAITH 15:33

Like, yeah, then that's what she's kind of saying. Like, she could easily a lot of people probably would take it personally, and you don't, but not you don't need to that yeah, she it is still a success. Like, she is still successful, she still did the job, and she she continued going through one of the hardest things that you can do as a business, which is file chapter 11 bankruptcy, especially when you're dealing with that type of money, the amount of accounting and like constant that was what she was saying. Is like you're you're doing the same cash flow counting every single day for like 30 days, like cash flow cuts, cash flow cuts, cash flow cuts, and it's very intense. And she says that she actually ends up really liking bankruptcy people. She says that they are very efficient, very uh you guys want to go into business, they're doing one of the hardest jobs there is to do in business, but they show up and they're like, Hey, how are you doing? Everything's gonna be all right, you know, like we're only losing $25 million, you know. Um, but and they're pretty cutthroat, but they they kept their head down and did the job. And she says that she really appreciates that. Um, she ranks this bankruptcy as the hardest thing she's done professionally, harder than an IPO three company sales or any asset deal. What she says she actually learned is that it came down to precision, not vision. The same grinding cash flow question over and over. She came to respect the lawyers, the bankers, doing the work, calling them good under pressure.

JENN 16:47

Dude, that would be very hard to separate, obviously, her from her past success and just thinking about anything that you're going through right now, it would be hard to have that, I guess, clarity that this isn't a failure. But she's like obviously took something away from it. She learned, and yeah, even though you do have to start over.

FAITH 17:04

Yeah.

JENN 17:05

Yeah, you're taking something with you.

FAITH 17:07

I see people I've seen and met so many people who have started businesses and failed and started over and succeeded and failed and then succeeded and failed. And at the end of the day, I think it's all a success. Yeah. Like there are so many people out there who don't do anything.

JENN 17:21

Yes, I was just gonna say that. I was like, you don't let the critics who are never doing anything bring you down, or like yeah, and the only way to learn by failing.

FAITH 17:32

Right. This is a whole episode is about failure, I'm so sorry. Happy Monday. So the Nobody Cares About Your Career. I'll give you a quick summary. Um, it's why failure is good, the great ones play hurt, and other hard truths. It's a part memoir, part career playbook written for her Barstool experience. The central premises is nobody is coming to manage your career for you, not a boss, not a mentor, not a company. So the sooner you take full ownership of it, the sooner you'll actually get somewhere. I think a lot of people I am guilty of this myself, is being a young person in any sort of business or any sort of leadership, I was very confused about my role. I didn't always have the best leaders, and I took a lot of things personally. But now that I look back, I wish I would have kind of been like I I am a people plazer, I would feel a lot of um guilt about somebody else's businesses failing and like things like that. And I think if I would have just owned my failures more in some of my career and just been like, yeah, I failed and this is what I've learned for it, and this is what I'm gonna do better. The people who I was working with probably would have admired that a lot more. And not that I didn't do that, because I did sometimes, but it took me a long time to learn that. Anyways, she reframes failure as tuition, not a verdict. She's reframing that a failure is not a judgment of your character or personality, it is the tuition that is college, that is the learning moment. Like there. I don't know anybody learning by succeeding all the time. Like you said, if you're successful all the time, what did you learn? No one's successful all the time. Like every success is great, but I think if you're successful all the time, you start to get a false sense of security. And if you know what I'm saying?

JENN 19:16

Yeah.

FAITH 19:17

Because inevitably something will fail and something will go wrong. And if you don't embrace the failures in business, then whenever you actually do hit a really big failure, it can be really detrimental because you don't know how to handle it.

JENN 19:28

You don't know how to go through problem solving.

FAITH 19:31

Right. Yeah, which every business has where you quit if you the second you fail. If you are yeah, I think Obama said it, he said don't take the criticism too seriously and don't take the the compliments too seriously. Just do and learn and be who you are and fail and because they don't know anything. Yeah.

JENN 19:49

You only need to about what you're doing. Nobody understands what you're going through more than you do.

FAITH 19:54

Embrace the suck. Hard, boring, unglamorous effort is most of the job. The people who make it aren't the ones who avoid the grind, they're the ones who do it anyway. Rare chances are worth taking, even if they are not the safe choice. She's written about people who turned down a shot at joining Barstool early on and regretted it for decades. Her point, you can rarely get genuinely rare opportunity back once it's gone, even if it looks risky on paper. So she's a big proprietor of taking risks, even if maybe it's maybe it's not the best idea, but inevitably you will learn from it.

JENN 20:25

You gotta try or you might miss your moment. Yeah, yeah.

FAITH 20:29

I feel like I definitely am one of those who did that.

JENN 20:31

You just jumped on it, right? Yep.

FAITH 20:33

Yeah. Well, I was like, that's too like that doesn't happen. That opportunity doesn't happen. We're gonna do it. And I think a lot of people disagreed with me. My husband, my mom, everybody I know was like, that sounds like not a good idea. But for what? For me to start the village. Yeah, well, they were scared because this is the Napa Valley. But they're like, how are you gonna start a business when the wine industry is in a total plummet? But somebody came to me and well, I went to them, but they said, Here's a tasting room, here's my wine to sell, you can make whatever you want. That does not happen. Mm-hmm. Everything was lining up.

JENN 21:04

You're you did your test.

FAITH 21:06

And I did my test.

JENN 21:08

Yeah, you did your testing before before fully launching. So you knew you had a you had a good idea. There's a concept for sure.

FAITH 21:16

Yeah. So some of my takeaways is if you're a mom with no plan and feel behind because of it, start anywhere. Her path was never linear. She just kept saying yes to the next thing. That's most of her career was just keep she just kept going. She openly admitted that she wasn't the smartest person in the room, but she showed up and she was curious. And I think that says a lot. I think a lot of people are scared to start because they don't know where to start. But I think again, as we've heard from all these moms that we've talked about, is that starting no matter what is the where to go.

JENN 21:48

Also, a lot of these moms that we've talked about have had a failed business. Yeah. Or s something didn't work out, like like you said, everybody has failure.

FAITH 21:56

It's yeah, and I think it's not the end all the time. Like being a Especially being a parent and starting a business and investing a lot of money. Um, to fail kind of makes you feel like, oh, like that could affect my my child's entire livelihood. But also I could go work somewhere and get a job and still get fired and still ruin my entire life as well.

JENN 22:14

So Or you could stay in healthcare and be miserable. Like a husband was like, Thank God when I finally stopped. Yeah. He was like, You you're like the worst version of yourself.

FAITH 22:24

You can be scared to start something, especially as a mom. It could feel like when you go start a business and you invest all this money and you know it's gonna take a lot of time away from your kids, it can be kind of difficult. I feel guilty about it all the time. I'm like, if my business fails, I just blew $79,000.

JENN 22:37

What would you have learned from it?

FAITH 22:39

Exactly. Nothing. I would have been working at another winery, being overworked, not spending that much time with my kids, or I could be a stay-at-home mom. That's not really my personality.

JENN 22:49

And you but you would have always wondered, what if I did that? I am I'm a huge advocate for you're thinking about it, you've got the idea. Try like I would always regret not trying something. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like that's worse than to fail, than to be like, what if I would have done that thing that somebody else now did that's now successful?

FAITH 23:11

Personally, I kind of enjoy failing. I'm like, yeah, we did it.

JENN 23:15

I mean, I'm a fanist. I don't love a failure. I'm just proud. Yeah. But we we gotta do it. That's that's the point.

FAITH 23:21

Yeah. If you're building a business and don't want to burn your team out, work as hard as you want for yourself, but don't confuse an 11 p.m. text reply with real commitment. How she was running things is not the way I would do it. Same. I would not do that. So don't get confused. Like work as hard as you possibly can and be there for your team. Yeah. So yeah, we don't agree with everything everybody does. And treat failure as tuition, not a verdict. And take the rare, scary opportunity instead of the safe one when it actually shows up. Yeah, and that's all I have on Erica Ayres Bardan.

JENN 23:54

I think she's a pretty badass lady. I want to check out Substack. I'm not very familiar with Substack yet. It's like the new blogging.

FAITH 24:03

Yeah.

JENN 24:04

Um, but I yeah, I would be down to follow her what she's doing there.

FAITH 24:08

A lot of great, great advice. I wonder if I have any of it highlighted. Vision sets apart the people who can get their heads out of their asses and see a world, a possibility, and an opportunity or a mission that is beyond where they stand and who they are today. Like I just like the way she talks. Okay. Many of you have a ridiculous expectations that someone will shepherd you through your professional journey, that you'll somehow be handed a golden ticket, or that you'll always be able to rely on helping hands or someone smarter to make your decisions for you. That's a fantasy. It's on you, and nobody else is there to oversee your success and prevent you from failure. Anyone who thinks otherwise is either delusional, entitled, or both. I think there is something to be said about that because I think we're going in a direction where everybody thinks that things are just going to be magic. Because that's what you're shown on the internet. I think that's why she hates it so much. Is you're kind of shown on the internet, like these people just magically succeeding. And I think we ball know that even like the Alex Earls and the Alex Coopers of the world, in the reality, they're working their butts off. Yeah. And like that's the thing with these mom preneurs and these like or these like mom and they're kind of showing you these easy, like, oh, it's so easy, like it's never hard. Like, here's my course.

JENN 25:17

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Like, there's there's a lot of people want to be comfortable for work, and if it's not comfortable, they don't work. Yeah. And I think she's calling that out pretty hard.

FAITH 25:29

Yeah. If you you're uncomfortable, that's fine, but you still have to do the job that you're paid to do.

JENN 25:34

And that's not how it sounds like her whole story is how to get to the top and how to make things happen. And that's never gonna work if you're soft, basically. She's like, you can't be soft.

FAITH 25:44

And like this says, even though I felt unqualified, had gaps, I needed I needed to speak to and had things I didn't know how to do yet. I made up for it with energy and enthusiasm, a point of view on the product and service, and a vision for what I could do to help. She says there was no meeting I wouldn't go to, no plane I wouldn't take, no place I wouldn't go. This was exhausting, but it was critical to delivering value and making an impact and being considered. I thought it taught me the value of mastering the small things even when I was overwhelmed by the big things. It also taught me the value of showing up and the importance and respect of making the effort to be in the room. And I think probably a lot of the stuff comes from her being a mom. You show up and you get the job done, like no matter what. Like that's something that you learned as a mom is that it's hard, it's never gonna get easier. I think we know that. There's no easy button for parenting. And I think once you realize that, you can adapt that over into anything you do. Mm-hmm. So yeah, that's Erica Ayers Badon, and I highly recommend her recommend her book. Nice.

JENN 26:46

Or add it to the book list.

FAITH 26:47

Yeah. We'll we'll link it. We'll put it in the in the blog.

JENN 26:52

Cool. Well done. I think