Badass Women in Business

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SUMMARY

Alyssa Mouton spent a decade as an analytical chemist, expecting to build her career in the oil and gas industry until retirement. Becoming a mother changed her priorities, leading her to explore business ownership, acquire a laundromat through an unconventional approach, and discover how federal government contracts could transform its revenue potential. Her story offers a practical look at transitioning from a corporate career into entrepreneurship, financing a business acquisition, and finding opportunities most aspiring business owners never consider.

SHOW NOTES

Strategic Focus

You don't need to invent a product or launch a startup to become a business owner. Alyssa's transition from scientist to entrepreneur demonstrates how acquiring an existing business can create a new career path, provided you understand the financial risks, operational demands, and opportunities for growth. Her experience also challenges the promise of passive income and reveals how an ordinary laundromat can become a platform for commercial services and government contracting.

Key Takeaways

• From scientist to entrepreneur. Discover why motherhood prompted Alyssa to reconsider her career and how she identified a business that could operate while she was still employed.
• The acquisition opportunity nobody advertised. Learn how sending letters to more than 20 laundromat owners led to an off-market purchase, seller financing, and a relationship with an experienced business mentor.
• One laundromat, multiple revenue streams. Explore how Alyssa expanded beyond self-service laundry into wash-and-fold, pickup and delivery, commercial services, and federal contracts without immediately acquiring another location.
• The federal government as a customer. Understand how SAM.gov, women-owned small business certification, procurement set-asides, and commercial past performance can help smaller companies compete for contracts, and why knowing your costs before bidding is essential.

GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT

Alyssa Mouton is a Louisiana-based entrepreneur, former analytical chemist, laundromat owner, federal government contractor, and business educator. Through Alyssa Mouton Brand, she helps entrepreneurs explore laundromat ownership and government contracting.

• Website: https://www.alyssamoutonbrand.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyssa-mouton-04b92328a/
• Instagram: @laundry_lyss_ - https://www.instagram.com/laundry_lyss_/
• TikTok: @laundry_lyss - https://www.tiktok.com/@laundry_lyss
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alyssa.mouton.7

Join the proveHER community to connect with women navigating business ownership, growth, and the decisions that shape their futures.

Read the companion Blogcast for more business insights and conversations:
https://badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com/bawblog

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SUMMARY

A company can be worth millions and still face a cash crisis in divorce. Jamie Paine, cofounder of Thrive Family Law, explains how a spouse buyout, weak legal agreements, and a business that depends entirely on its owner can put years of work at risk. Drawing on her own path from childhood instability to courtroom advocacy and entrepreneurship, she shares how women can protect their businesses without losing sight of themselves.

SHOW NOTES

Strategic Focus

Jamie's experience as a prosecutor, family law attorney, and founder gives her a distinct understanding of what happens when personal upheaval threatens financial stability. She explores the gap between business valuation and available cash, why divorce can disrupt daily operations, and how building Thrive Family Law after an unexpected career change challenged her beliefs about work, boundaries, and leadership.

Key Takeaways

• Why a valuable company can become a liquidity problem when divorce requires a spouse buyout.
• How prenups, postnups, financial records, and attorney drafted operating agreements can preserve choices.
• What Jamie learned from cases where divorce affected contracts, vendors, and founder dependent operations.
• Why building a law firm without a culture of burnout required Jamie to rethink her own boundaries.

GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT

Jamie B. Paine is cofounder and managing partner of Colorado based Thrive Family Law. A Campbell University School of Law graduate, she has handled over 200 trials and hearings and was named a 5280 Top Lawyer in Family Law in 2025 and 2026. Her community work includes pro bono assistance to human trafficking survivors and service with A Precious Child.

Website: https://www.thrivefamilylaw.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thrive-family-law-llc

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thrive_family_law_llc/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/Thrive-Family-Law-LLC-61569807563814/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thrive.family.law

Join proveHER: https://www.linkedin.com/company/proveher/

Read the Blogcast: https://badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com/bawblog

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SUMMARY

The traits women are taught to tone down may be the very traits that make a founder memorable, trusted, and difficult to replace. Kim Bode shares how ADHD, intensity, failure, personal betrayal, and the fight to save her company reshaped the way she thinks about personal branding, business ownership, and why women need to stop hiding behind their companies and start owning the value only they can bring.

SHOW NOTES

Strategic Focus

What happens when a founder stops trying to look polished and starts building visibility around what actually makes her distinct? Kim argues that people buy from people, not logos, and that a strong personal brand begins by rejecting rules that encourage women to stay quiet, separating less of the personal from the professional, and becoming clear about the experiences and qualities that make them worth remembering.

Key Takeaways

• Kim’s QUIRKS framework moves beyond conventional personal branding by asking women to question inherited rules, define where they are going, identify what makes them different, reframe their story, know their value, and show it.
• After discovering that her sister had embezzled roughly $265,000 from the company, Kim learned how dangerous unchecked trust can become and why business owners ultimately need to understand what is happening inside their own finances.
• Her business survived because clients, contractors, and peers stayed with her during crisis, reinforcing her belief that relationships built long before you need them can become one of a company’s strongest forms of protection.
• Kim challenges the assumption that growth should always look profitable from the outside. For second stage founders, growth can mean stepping back, rebuilding infrastructure, tolerating discomfort, and creating enough support to finally work on the business instead of being consumed by it.

GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT

Kim Bode is the founder and CEO of 8THIRTYFOUR, an integrated communications and learning company. She has more than 20 years of business ownership, and 8THIRTYFOUR has been recognized as a Forbes Top 200 PR Firm.

Website: www.8thirtyfour.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimbode/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bodespeaks/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bodespeaks

Join the proveHER community to continue the conversation with women building and leading businesses, and read the companion Blogcast for more from this episode.

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Stay badass. Stay bold. Build it your way.

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SUMMARY

The 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 spent painting $200 apartments with their kids in tow to a million dollar business, and why learning to hire, delegate, document and tolerate mistakes became essential to creating the freedom they actually wanted from ownership.

SHOW NOTES

Strategic Focus

A growing company can still be a demanding job if the owner remains the person everyone calls, every decision requires approval, and knowledge lives primarily in her head. Ashley’s story explores the transition from hardworking operator to business owner, including the uncomfortable reality that delegation requires accepting mistakes today in order to build independence tomorrow.

Key Takeaways

• Ashley kept her job while the company gained traction, but later realized staying too long also limited the time and attention she could invest in growth.
• Hiring was not simply about reducing workload. It became part of a long term strategy to create a company capable of operating while Ashley and her family eventually divide their time between the Pacific Northwest and Honduras.
• Delegation became real when Ashley allowed her operations manager to send smaller estimates without approval, accepting that occasional mistakes are part of developing independent decision makers.
• Relationships drove growth from the beginning, from mom owned business networks and real estate referrals to Ashley’s current effort to build the contractor relationships necessary to expand into commercial work.

GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT

Ashley Ortiz is the Founder and CEO of Bella Vista Painting & Drywall, a Native American entrepreneur and co-owner of the family run Pacific Northwest painting company she built with her husband.

Website: https://www.bellavistanw.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bellavistanw/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BellaVistaNW/

Join the proveHER community and continue the conversation with women building businesses on their own terms. Read the companion Blogcast for more ideas and lessons from the episode.

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Stay badass. Stay bold. Build it your way.

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SUMMARY

Most 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 question of how to turn one big win into a durable business. She shares how strategic partnerships, transparent communication, disciplined planning, and a different approach to leadership are helping her build the pipeline, systems, culture, and confidence required for the next stage of growth.

SHOW NOTES

Strategic Focus

A major opportunity can launch a company, but it cannot build the company for you. Melissa’s story explores what happens after the breakthrough: how a founder moves from executing one enormous project to creating repeatable growth, expanding without losing culture, and deciding which parts of the corporate playbook are worth keeping versus rebuilding.

Key Takeaways

• Melissa launched as a one person company and used a strategic partnership to take the lead on a $53 million project, showing how relationships can create capacity before a young company has built it internally.
• After three years focused on delivering that anchor project, she says year four feels more like a startup than year one because the challenge has shifted from execution to building backlog and repeatable growth.
• Empathy does not mean lowering standards. Melissa explains how understanding competing priorities, communicating expectations clearly, and knowing when to apply pressure can strengthen performance and relationships.
• Confidence was not something Melissa possessed before becoming an entrepreneur. It grew through action, experience, and finally seeing her judgment taken seriously.

GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT

Melissa Drew is the Founder and CEO of InSite BUILD, a Maryland based general contracting firm specializing in state government projects. She brings more than 20 years of construction experience and is building InSite BUILD around disciplined planning, collaboration, transparency, and long term relationships.

InSite BUILD: https://www.insite-build.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissadrew/

Join the proveHER community to continue the conversation with women building and leading businesses.

Read the companion Blogcast:
https://badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com/bawblog

---

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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 with financial discipline. This conversation shows founders how to use their numbers to catch problems earlier, price based on the work they actually deliver, and make growth decisions before the consequences hit cash.

SHOW NOTES

Strategic Focus
Growth can create the illusion of progress while quietly weakening the business underneath it. Natalia breaks down the financial decisions founders often delay, from raising prices and hiring the right people to recognizing when a loan is funding productive growth versus covering a deeper cash problem. She also explains the practical difference between a bookkeeper, controller, and fractional CFO, and why financials should help leaders see where the business is going, not simply document where it has been.

Key Takeaways

• Why revenue can rise while profitability falls when expenses grow faster than the business.
• How underpricing creates operational pain, and why Natalia learned to quote the right price and then stop talking.
• Why cash shortages can signal deeper problems with pricing, productivity, overspending, or inefficiency.
• How forecasting lets founders test hiring, investment, and growth decisions six to twelve months before cash becomes the problem.

GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT

Natalia Zacharin is the founder of Zacharin Consulting, an Inc. 5000 accounting and fractional CFO firm serving service businesses generating $1 million to $30 million in annual revenue. She grew the firm from a solo practice into a multimillion dollar business and now helps founders improve profitability, cash flow, forecasting, and financial decision making.

Website: www.zacharinconsulting.com
Listener resources: www.zacharinconsulting.com/BWB
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/growyourbottomline
Instagram: @growyourbottomline
Facebook: facebook.com/zacharinconsulting
TikTok: @zacharinconsulting
YouTube: youtube.com/@zacharinconsulting

Join the proveHER community and read the companion Blogcast to continue the conversation.

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SUMMARY

Entrepreneurship 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 tequila experience and built Inspiro Tequila through deep research, deliberate credibility building, disciplined growth, and an unwillingness to accept a product that was merely good enough.

SHOW NOTES

Strategic Focus

What does it take to enter an industry where you have no track record and convince customers, distributors, and insiders that you belong? Mara’s answer is not confidence alone. It is preparation, focus, disciplined execution, and earning credibility one decision at a time.

Key Takeaways

• Mara rejects the familiar “just go for it” advice. Before launching, she studied tequila production, regulations, competitors, distribution, and the customer the industry was overlooking.
• When Inspiro’s first production run failed to meet her standards, she scrapped it rather than blend it into something acceptable, choosing the long term brand over the sunk cost.
• Growth does not always mean adding more. Mara uses SKU discipline, focused markets, and carefully chosen retail accounts to protect resources and build demand.
• Reentering business after years away required more than rebuilding a résumé. Mara deliberately built a network of founders and peers and learned to make specific asks when seeking help.

GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT

Mara Smith is Founder and CEO of Inspiro Tequila, a premium additive free tequila brand with an all women leadership and production team. After careers in accounting, law, and corporate strategy, she spent 16 years outside the traditional workforce raising her family before entering the spirits industry.

Inspiro Tequila is woman owned and B Corp certified.

Website: https://inspirotequila.com/
Mara on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mara-smith-inspiro/
Inspiro on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/inspiro-tequila
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/inspirotequila/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inspirotequila/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@inspirotequila

Join the proveHER community:
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Read the companion Blogcast:
https://badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com/phblog

---

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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 salon career, became a board-certified trichologist, and created New York City’s first hair preservation studio. Her story shows how deep specialization becomes market authority, why customer trust can outperform advertising, and how to prove a category before scaling it.

SHOW NOTES

Strategic Focus

Shab did not begin with a category; she began with women whose hair loss was being disguised, dismissed, or treated in fragments. The deeper business question is how a practitioner recognizes an overlooked customer, builds authority before infrastructure, and trades the original launch plan for a leaner proof of concept without abandoning the larger vision.

Key Takeaways

•  Why women’s hair loss remains underserved even when customers can access leading salons, physicians, products, and treatments. 
•  How consultations and social media revealed what customers had tried, what they would realistically follow, and what the market was still missing. 
•  Why Shab replaced a $1.5 million flagship launch with a $250,000 friends-and-family round and a lean studio built through strategic partnerships. 
•  How deep specialization helped produce a 90 percent consultation-to-package conversion rate without paid marketing, and why authority must come before scale. 

GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT

Shab Caspara is a board-certified trichologist, hair growth expert, and founder of Caspara Hair Preservation Studio in New York City. She advises beauty and haircare brands and helps bridge clinical hair science with practical consumer education. 

Website: https://caspara.co
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shab-caspara-bb464210b/
Instagram and TikTok: @shabhairexpert
Studio Instagram: @casparastudio

Join the proveHER community: https://badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com/subscribe
Read the companion Blogcast: https://badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com/phblog

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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 primary care model capped at 1,000, and how that difficult decision changed patient care, provider burnout, and her relationship with the business itself.

SHOW NOTES

Growth is usually treated as evidence that a business is working, but Deanna's experience raises a harder question: what if the economics driving growth are quietly undermining quality, capacity, and the people delivering the service? Her transition away from insurance based care offers founders a useful case study in redesigning a business model when more customers, more employees, and more revenue no longer produce a better company.

Key Takeaways

• Insurance reimbursement created a growth treadmill: as expenses rose without corresponding increases in reimbursement, maintaining the practice meant adding providers and seeing more patients.
• Deanna chose to reduce the practice from approximately 7,000 patients to a planned cap of 1,000, trading volume for time, accessibility, deeper patient relationships, and greater clinical capacity.
• A business model change can be financially sound and still provoke criticism. Deanna discusses learning to make consequential decisions without allowing the desire to keep everyone happy to determine the future of the company.
• Healthcare taught her a lesson that applies far beyond medicine: caring deeply about the work does not remove the obligation to understand cash flow, overhead, staffing, pricing, and the economics required to keep delivering it.

GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT

Deanna Woodroffe is the owner of Vibrant Health of Colorado, a two location Colorado medical practice combining traditional, functional, and integrative care. A nurse practitioner with more than 20 years in women's health, she leads an all female nurse practitioner team serving patients in Denver and Eagle.

Website: Vibrant Health of Colorado

Facebook: Vibrant Health of Colorado

Instagram: @vibranthealthofcolorado

Join the proveHER community for continued conversations with women building and leading businesses, and read the companion Blogcast for key ideas from the episode.

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Stay badass. Stay bold. Build it your way.

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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 from day one, staying bootstrapped, hiring for leverage, and protecting her time helped her build a profitable 500+ member community while keeping the business in service of her life rather than the other way around. 

SHOW NOTES

Strategic Focus

At the center of this conversation is a question every founder eventually faces: are you building a business that depends on more of you, or one that creates enough value and leverage to grow beyond you? Clara’s experience shows how pricing, delegation, disciplined hiring, and a clear operating model can shape both profitability and founder freedom.

Key Takeaways

•  Why charging for a community from day one can strengthen perceived value, attract more committed members, and create a healthier participation culture. 
•  How Clara used recruiting revenue to validate demand, then expanded into a paid community rather than overbuilding the business before customers asked for more. 
•  Why hiring an executive assistant in month three created more strategic capacity, and how she now evaluates whether a problem needs automation, a contractor, or a long term team member. 
•  What a Chief of Staff actually does, how the role differs from a COO, and why the best hire is often the person who complements the leader rather than simply matches a title. 

GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT

Clara Ma is the founder and CEO of Ask a Chief of Staff, a bootstrapped community and recruiting platform serving Chiefs of Staff and the executives who hire them. She previously served as a Chief of Staff at Hugging Face during its Series A and was named to the Inc. Magazine 2026 Female Founders 500.

• Website: askachiefofstaff.com
•  LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/clarama/
•  Substack: askachiefofstaff.substack.com
•  YouTube: youtube.com/@askachiefofstaff

Join the proveHER community and read the companion Blogcast for more conversations and practical insights for women building and leading businesses.

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If you loved this episode, drop us a review, share it with a badass woman in your life, and subscribe to Badass Women in Business wherever you get your podcasts.

Stay badass. Stay bold. Build it your way.

Keep up with more content from Aggie and Cristy here:

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• Website: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com
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