Badass Women in Business

By Aggie & Cristy

Welcome to The Badass Women in Business Podcast, the definitive space for unfiltered, tactical insights into female entrepreneurship, enterprise scaling, and business monetization.

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FAQs about Badass Women in Business:

How many episodes does Badass Women in Business have?

The podcast currently has 164 episodes available.

Badass Women in Business episodes:

September 15, 2026Don’t Just Go for It: Mara Smith on Research, Credibility and Building in a New Industry
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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:
https://proveher.com/
Read the companion Blogcast:
https://badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com/phblog
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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:
Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders
Instagram: @badass_women_in_business
LinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in Business
Website: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com
Athena: athenaac.com
...more
54min
September 08, 2026Women’s Hair Loss Was an Industry Blind Spot. Shab Caspara Built a New Category
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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
---
Subscribe and Review
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:
Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders
Instagram: @badass_women_in_business
LinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in Business
Website: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com
Athena: athenaac.com
...more
44min
September 01, 2026When Growth Breaks the Model: Deanna Woodroffe on Choosing Better Care Over More Patients
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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.
---
Subscribe and Review
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:
Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders
Instagram: @badass_women_in_business
LinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in Business
Website: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com
Athena: athenaac.com
...more
52min
August 25, 2026Charge From Day One: Clara Ma on Bootstrapping a Profitable Community Business
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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.
---
Subscribe and Review
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:
Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders
Instagram: @badass_women_in_business
LinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in Business
Website: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com
Athena: athenaac.com
...more
52min
August 18, 2026The Risk of Doing Nothing: Stephanie Georges on Midlife Reinvention for Women Over 50
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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 sharper conversation about dignity, agency, AI, and why midlife can become a serious entrepreneurial advantage when women stop waiting for permission and start building the conditions for their next chapter.
SHOW NOTES
Strategic Focus
This conversation asks what happens when highly capable women reach the edge of reinvention and realize that competence alone will not protect their purpose, health, or power. For founders and executives, Stephanie’s lens is especially useful because she treats dignity not as a soft idea, but as a strategic operating principle for making decisions, designing better systems, and building platforms that serve women with more precision.
Key Takeaways
Why the real risk may be staying too long in a role, relationship, or system that quietly drains agency.
How dignity offers a broader, less zero sum frame than equity for changing the narrative around women’s power.
Why women over 50 carry underrecognized economic, professional, and lived experience that the business world has not fully learned how to value.
How AI can become more useful for women when it is trained around women’s language, research, health needs, and workplace realities rather than generic assumptions.
GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT
Stephanie Georges is a seasoned executive, strategist, Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Senior Fellow, and co creator of The Meraki Dignity Project, a women’s movement and AI enabled platform supporting women over 50 through major life transitions.
Website: https://www.merakidignity.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/merakidignity/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/merakidignity/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMerakiDignityProject
Substack: https://substack.com/@merakidignity
Join the proveHER community and read the companion Blogcast for more conversations and practical resources for women building, leading, and redefining what comes next.
---
Subscribe and Review
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:
Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders
Instagram: @badass_women_in_business
LinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in Business
Website: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com
Athena: athenaac.com
...more
54min
August 11, 2026Turning Fandom Into Revenue Without Losing the Brand with Veronica Hart
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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. Veronica Hart, Chief Growth Officer of RWS Global, unpacks how leaders can build new revenue streams, protect brand integrity, and create momentum in complex markets while making sure women are not waiting for permission to claim their seat at the table.
SHOW NOTES
Strategic Focus
This conversation explores the discipline behind modern brand growth: how companies decide when an idea has enough audience demand to expand, how leaders build alignment across creative and commercial teams, and why women’s perspectives are not a side conversation but a business requirement when companies are trying to reach the full market.
Key Takeaways
Brand expansion works when companies understand where fans are emotionally invested, then create products, experiences, and partnerships that feel like a natural extension rather than a cash grab.
Live experiences are becoming a serious growth channel because consumers need a compelling reason to leave the couch, show up in person, and participate in a story beyond the screen.
Women leaders bring a critical lens to growth strategy because companies often leave meaningful revenue untapped when they fail to account for women as consumers, decision makers, and cultural drivers.
Veronica’s career shows the power of taking an opportunity further than assigned, especially for women who have been conditioned to ask for permission when the better move is to take the work, run with it, and raise the standard.
GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT
Veronica Hart is the Chief Growth Officer of RWS Global, where she leads growth strategy across live entertainment, brand experiences, licensing, merchandise, and global partnerships. Her career includes executive leadership roles at Paramount, CBS Consumer Products, Sesame Workshop, The Jim Henson Company, and HIT Entertainment, as well as service as Chair of the Board for Licensing International.
Website: www.rwsglobal.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/rws-global/
Instagram: @rwsglobalofficial
Join the proveHER community and read the companion Blogcast for deeper takeaways from this conversation.
---
Subscribe and Review
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:
Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders
Instagram: @badass_women_in_business
LinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in Business
Website: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com
Athena: athenaac.com
...more
52min
August 04, 2026AI Transformation Is a People Problem: Megan Malli
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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 curiosity, trust, and human centered strategy are becoming the real executive advantage for companies that need to move faster without losing the people they depend on.
Show Notes
The Strategic Focus: This episode explores what it takes to lead through uncertainty when technology is accelerating, customer behavior is shifting, and traditional planning cycles no longer hold. Megan makes the case that the future belongs to leaders who can replace control with trust, turn research into business currency, and build organizations where better answers emerge from the right people being invited into the room.
Key Takeaways:
Why AI cannot rescue a weak workflow, and how leaders can redesign the work before adding new tools.
How human centered research helps companies move beyond what happened and understand what customers actually need next.
Why high achieving women often keep raising the bar without claiming the room, and how imposter syndrome can become a leadership signal rather than a limitation.
How trust, curiosity, and visibility inside teams create stronger decisions, better adoption, and more durable momentum during change.
Guest Contact & Connect
Megan Malli is the CEO of AnswerLab, a user experience research and strategy company helping major brands translate human insight into better business decisions.
Company: https://www.answerlab.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganamalli/
Join the proveHER community and read the companion blogcast for more founder led conversations on leadership, growth, and building businesses with greater courage and clarity.
---
Subscribe and Review
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:
Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders
Instagram: @badass_women_in_business
LinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in Business
Website: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com
Athena: athenaac.com
...more
53min
July 28, 2026How to Modernize a Legacy Business Without Losing Its Core: Anne Huntington Sharma
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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, she explores succession, franchise growth, digital transformation, and the discipline of evolving only when change creates measurable value.
Show Notes
The Strategic Focus
This conversation examines what it takes to lead a second generation company with credibility, patience, and strategic clarity, especially when the business must preserve a proven model while adapting to new technology, changing customer expectations, and a complex franchise network.
Key Takeaways
Legacy leadership requires more than inheritance; it demands outside experience, operational credibility, and the humility to build a team with deeper expertise than your own.
Successful transformation begins with a real market need, followed by careful testing, franchisee input, and consistent communication before broad implementation.
Succession is not a single event but a long process built on trust, role clarity, honest dialogue, and a shared understanding of what the business will need next.
Franchising can create scalable impact and recurring revenue, but only when the model is repeatable, the founder can relinquish control, and franchisees have meaningful forums for feedback.
Guest Contact & Connect
Anne Huntington Sharma is President, CEO, and Board Member of Huntington Learning Center, where she leads strategy, partnerships, innovation, and the continued evolution of a nearly 50 year education brand.
Website: https://huntingtonhelps.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anne-huntington-sharma/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/huntingtonhelps/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HuntingtonHelps
Join the proveHER community and explore the companion blogcast for deeper insights, practical tools, and continued conversations with women building influential, enduring businesses.
---
Subscribe and Review
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:
Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders
Instagram: @badass_women_in_business
LinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in Business
Website: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com
Athena: athenaac.com
...more
54min
July 21, 2026Reinvention Without Permission: Jane Bertch on Building La Cuisine Paris and Starting Again at Any Age
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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 background and no perfect plan. In this conversation, she shares why clarity comes through action, how community turns an experience based business into something durable, and why women should stop waiting for permission to begin again.
Show Notes
Jane’s story is a masterclass in founder reinvention, not as a polished leap from certainty to success, but as a lived process of testing, adapting, listening to clients, and building community around an idea that once felt wildly impractical.
Clarity comes through action: Jane makes a powerful case for practicing in public, reminding women that waiting for complete readiness often delays the very learning that creates confidence.
A lasting business is built through responsiveness: La Cuisine Paris grew through relationships, word of mouth, client trust, and constant adaptation, proving that beautiful ideas only survive when they meet real market desire.
Community is not a soft asset: From her cooking school to her retreats and future work with women entrepreneurs, Jane shows how the right people, in the right environment, can help women see and step into a larger version of themselves.
Reinvention belongs at every age: At 50, Jane is expanding beyond La Cuisine Paris into women’s development, retreats, writing, and entrepreneurial support, carrying the message that it is never too late to plant the tree.
Guest Contact & Connect
Jane Bertch is the founder of La Cuisine Paris, author of The French Ingredient, and creator of women centered experiences through JCMB Consulting, including retreats, entrepreneurial programs, and her Substack, Prompts from Paris.
Website: La Cuisine Paris
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 00 33 6 25 58 80 83
LinkedIn: Jane Bertch on LinkedIn
Instagram: @janebertch
Substack: Prompts from Paris
Join the proveHER community and access the companion blogcast for deeper insights from this episode.
---
Subscribe and Review
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:
Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders
Instagram: @badass_women_in_business
LinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in Business
Website: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com
Athena: athenaac.com
...more
49min
July 14, 2026Scaling a Purpose-Driven Coffee Brand from Garage Roasting to National Retail with Jillian Salinas
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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 resilience. Her story offers a grounded look at what it takes to rebuild after disruption, enter major retail without a clear roadmap, and grow without abandoning the values that made people care in the first place.
Show Notes
The Strategic Focus:
This conversation explores the long game of building a values-led consumer brand, where staying power comes not from chasing every opportunity, but from staying deeply connected to community, moving quickly when the market shifts, and making operational choices that reflect the company’s original purpose.
Key Takeaways:
Community can become a strategic advantage. Jillian’s growth was not built only on product quality, but on relationships, trust, and a brand story people could believe in.
Resilience often means rebuilding before you feel ready. When Beach City Coffee’s original revenue stream disappeared during the pandemic, Jillian had to pivot quickly and pursue retail growth without a perfect roadmap.
Sustainability has to survive scale. Beach City Coffee’s compostable, PFAS-free packaging reflects Jillian’s belief that environmental responsibility should be built into the business model, not added later as a marketing layer.
Purpose-driven growth requires discipline. As the brand expanded into major retailers, including Whole Foods, Walmart, Kroger, Ralphs, Frys, and King Soopers, Jillian stayed focused on protecting the principles that shaped the company from the beginning.
Guest Contact & Connect
Jillian Salinas is the founder of Beach City Coffee, a Redondo Beach-based coffee brand that grew from small-batch roasting into a national retail presence while championing compostable packaging, community, and ocean-conscious business practices.
Connect with Beach City Coffee:
Website
Instagram
LinkedIn
Facebook
TikTok
To connect with more women building bold, values-led businesses, join the proveHER community and read the companion blogcast.
---
Subscribe and Review
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:
Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders
Instagram: @badass_women_in_business
LinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in Business
Website: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com
Athena: athenaac.com
...more
49min

FAQs about Badass Women in Business:

How many episodes does Badass Women in Business have?

The podcast currently has 164 episodes available.