On May 10, 2020 (Mother's Day), Amber Lee's heart stopped while she was driving with her husband and daughter in the car. No pulse. Her car went across four lanes of traffic and into a brick home. When she woke up in the hospital with every rib broken, she didn't ask for time to heal. She asked for her computer.

Three weeks later, she and her longtime colleague Sandra Myers launched Select Date Society, a luxury matchmaking firm for high-net-worth clients. She had spent 20+ years making millions for someone else. Now it's her firm, with fees that start at $150,000 and a $1 million Founders' Club that takes one client at a time.

On this episode of Girl, Why Not You? with Jennie Blackwood, we get into what's really keeping you on the shelf. It isn't timing. It's permission, and nobody is coming to give it to you.

In this episode:

• Why "the biggest killer of entrepreneurship is a healthy paycheck"
• The hospital-bed phone call that finally made the business real
• Launching with broken ribs, pain meds and one shared Google Doc checklist
• How she went from charging $10K to a $150K minimum by proving results first
• Inside the $1 million Founders' Club, and why most of her clients are high-achieving women
• Why boardroom skills backfire in your love life
• Why she caps the firm at 30 clients on purpose
• Her message to the woman who's 40 or 50 and still "has time"

If this one moves you, send it to the woman in your life who's been sitting on her dream. Maybe it's you. Girl, why not you?

Connect with Amber Lee and Select Date Society:
selectdatesociety.com (use the inquiry page if you'd like to be considered as a client or a match)

Connect with Jennie Blackwood: Instagram @girlwhynotyou_ 

Disclaimer: Guest experiences and results are their own and aren't typical or guaranteed. This episode shares a personal health story and isn't medical advice.

Perfectionism isn't high standards. It's fear wearing a better outfit — and it's costing you money.

Kelli France went from food stamps to seven figures on social media, built a team of 25,000 people, and then watched the income disappear almost overnight when the company changed its comp plan. In this episode she tells Jennie what she learned on the way up, what she learned on the way down, and why the women who win aren't the confident ones — they're the ones who move before they feel ready.

In this conversation:

• Why perfectionism is fear, not high standards — and how to spot it in yourself
• The $16 checkout that started everything
• Going all in, and building a 25,000-person team
• Losing her income stream overnight — and what she did next
• Fight, flight, freeze, fawn: how your body hijacks your business decisions
• The four perfectionist archetypes — which one is running you
• How to date discomfort instead of avoiding it
• The client who got on TikTok Live terrified — and what happened
• Inside Kelli's Breaking Up With Perfect program and her POWER habits framework
• Why confidence comes after the action, never before

If you've been waiting to feel ready — to launch the thing, post the video, raise your prices — this is the episode that gets you moving.

Connect with Kelli France:
Instagram: @kellifrance
Website + links: http://www.kellifrance.com/linktree Podcast: Finally Fearless
Program: Breaking Up With Perfect
Book: One Goal for 100 Days

Girl, Why Not You? is hosted by Jennie Blackwood.

Starting over at 50, career change, clean beauty, and building a business through cancer treatment — Girl, Why Not You? host Jennie Blackwood talks with Lynn Power, founder of clean haircare brand MASAMI and the last CEO of J. Walter Thompson New York.

Lynn started as a receptionist in 1989 because she could type. She worked her way up through Ogilvy, BBDO and Grey to run the flagship office of the oldest advertising agency in the world, on brands like Listerine, American Express, Clinique, Hershey’s, L’Oreal and Rolex. In 2018 she left all of it. She launched MASAMI — premium clean haircare built around mekabu, a Japanese ocean botanical — at New York Fashion Week in February 2020, one month before the world shut down. A year later she was diagnosed with aggressive stage 3 breast cancer. In the middle of six-hour chemo sessions she started something new: the Power Beauty Collab, now a collective of 65+ indie clean beauty brands.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• Why “if you don’t like change, do not become an entrepreneur” is the most honest business advice you’ll hear this year
• How to make a career change in your 40s or 50s without starting from zero — your experience is the asset
• How collaboration beat a marketing budget: giveaways, gift exchanges, live streams and pop-ups that cost almost nothing
• The conversations to have BEFORE you go into business with a partner — roles, accountability, and who does what
• What “clean beauty” actually means, and why clean products can outperform the drugstore version
• How to build when the timing is objectively terrible

CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open
02:59 Meet Lynn Power — receptionist to CEO of J. Walter Thompson NY
06:23 1989, a typing class, and the job she got on the spot
10:28 “If you don’t like change, do not become an entrepreneur”
14:25 Why she walked away from the top job
18:04 A stage 3 diagnosis, chemo, and buying the apartment in Italy anyway
23:48 Starting the Power Beauty Collab from a hospital chair
25:51 The power of community when you’re building alone
31:22 Business partnerships: define the roles early
35:21 Clean beauty is not a marketing gimmick
40:36 Where to find Lynn
41:51 Girl, why not you?

CONNECT WITH LYNN
MASAMI: lovemasami.com — @lovemasamihair on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and TikTok
Power Beauty Collab: powerbeautycollab.com
Lynn on LinkedIn (she answers her DMs there)

CONNECT WITH JENNIE
Instagram: @girlwhynotyou_
Girl, Why Not You? — new episodes weekly. Follow the show and leave a review, it’s genuinely how other women find us.

How to start a spray tan business with no loan, no investor, and a full-time job — Stacy Fike built Glow Girl Spray Tanning Boutique in Houston on a $500 start while teaching sixth grade as a single mom. One year after opening her first storefront, a client asked her to do the math, and she found she'd earned eight times what her teaching salary had paid her.

On this episode of Girl, Why Not You? with Jennie Blackwood, Stacy walks through every stage: Spa Nordstrom, mobile, a converted room in her own house, a rented closet inside someone else's salon, and finally her own storefront with a team — more than 60,000 spray tans and 400-plus five-star reviews later. It's a masterclass in turning a beauty side hustle into a systemized business you own instead of one that owns you, and in the mindset shift from technician to CEO.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• How to start a spray tanning business on a small budget and calculate your break-even before you spend a dollar
• How to build a side hustle around a full-time job, a mortgage, and a kid's schedule
• When to quit the day job — what Stacy had in place before she left teaching
• The moment a service turns into a brand, and the client question that triggered it
• The 15-minute service system that changed how she manages capacity and income
• Hiring and delegating when you're type A and convinced nobody can do it like you can
• Choosing salon and spa software that handles booking, marketing, payments, and analytics
• Why spray tanning is an unregulated industry, and the sanitation, safety, and compliance standards that actually matter
• Inside GlowPro, her spray tan certification and business development program

CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold open
0:31 Welcome — the two women this episode is for
1:41 Booked is not free: busy is not a business model
2:37 Meet Stacy Fike — $500, a mortgage, and a sixth-grade classroom
5:11 The woman in the classroom, and the tanning supply catalog she ordered as a kid
7:52 Convincing Nordstrom to let her try spray tanning in the early 2000s
9:04 Why mobile didn't work — and converting a room in her own home
11:22 700 women through her house, then renting a closet in a hair salon
12:57 The scary leap: quitting teaching and opening a storefront
15:28 "I'm not building a spray tan business, I'm building a brand"
16:28 "Have you done the math?" — the client question that changed everything
18:58 Who was in her corner, and why customer feedback built the business
21:20 Systems: the 15-minute spray tan and what it does to your capacity
23:58 Hiring the right people and getting okay with asking for help
25:09 Invest in the software — booking, payments, marketing, analytics
26:55 GlowPro: bringing spray tan education into cosmetology programs
27:37 The unregulated side of the sunless industry, and why standards matter
32:46 Where to find Stacy and how to work with her
33:51 Jennie's close: stop being the girl doing the work

CONNECT WITH STACEY FIKE
Website: glogirltanning.com
GloPro spray tan certification + business training: glopro.glogirltanning.com
Instagram — boutique: @glogirlspraytan
Instagram — training program: @glopro2024
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stacey-fike
Facebook: facebook.com/glogirlspraytan
GloGirl Spray Tanning Boutique — Houston, TX

CONNECT WITH JENNIE
Website: jennieblackwood.com
Instagram: @socialgraze.charcuterie
Podcast: Girl, Why Not You? — new episodes weekly

Sometimes life hands you something unfair, there's no lesson in it, and no amount of positive thinking makes it make sense. In this solo episode of Girl, Why Not You?, Jennie Blackwood talks about how to stop overthinking something you can't control — and the 5 things that are actually yours.

If you're a woman in the middle of something hard — lying awake at 2am replaying it, having full conversations in the shower with someone who isn't there — this one is for you. Jennie shares the mindset shift that let her stop arm wrestling the weather, plus the one sentence that changed her life: let it be theirs, and let it be mine.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
- Why being a fixer turns on you the moment you hit something you can't fix
- The hard truth nobody puts on a graphic: trying hard does not entitle you to an outcome
- How to stop caring what people think about you (and why you get input, not a vote)
- The 24-hour rule for never sending an angry text, email, or DM again
- The 5 things you actually control: your response, your hands, your circle, your presence, your character
- How to stay present with your family while you're going through something hard
- The one sentence to say out loud when something isn't yours to carry

CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
00:30 Why I sat on this episode for weeks
00:59 Sometimes it's just bullshit — and there's no lesson in it
01:38 It's what you do in the days after
02:33 The fixer problem: when you hit something you can't fix
03:16 2am replays and shower arguments
03:50 Trying hard does not entitle you to an outcome
04:38 The fast list of what you don't control
05:54 The sentence that changed my life: let it be theirs
07:28 #1 Your response - nothing goes out warm (the 24-hour rule)
08:45 #2 Your hands - why making something breaks the loop
09:50 #3 Your circle - tell two people, not fourteen
10:30 #4 Your presence - those dinners don't come back
11:36 #5 Your character - "I stayed me"
13:16 It's a practice, not a one-time decision
13:34 Say it out loud: "That is not mine to carry"
14:28 You can be in the middle of something hard and still be building
15:20 Most things don't resolve - they get smaller as your life gets bigger
16:24 You've got this, girl

Send this to the woman in your life who's white-knuckling something right now. She won't tell you she needs it. Send it anyway.

Girl, why not you?

Hosted by Jennie Blackwood - mom of four, founder of Social Graze, and creator of Cart to Cashflow.
Instagram: @socialgraze.charcuterie
Website: jennieblackwood.com

What do you do when someone tells you you're behind?

Nesha Pai walked into her annual performance review at a Charlotte CPA firm ready to ask for a raise — and her boss told her she was "nowhere near her peers" because she'd taken time off to raise her son. She quit on the spot, with no plan and no backup income, at 40, as a single mom. One client followed her. Fifteen years later, Pai CPA is the first fully remote accounting firm in North Carolina, serving 80+ clients with a team of stay-at-home moms.

In this episode, Jennie and Nesha talk about the "mom gap" and why the time you spent raising your kids is not a hole in your resume, how to advocate for yourself in a room full of men, the biggest money mistakes women business owners make, why she fired her largest client to protect her core values, what to do this week if you're scared to open your books, her book Overcoming Ordinary Obstacles, and what it looks like to reinvent yourself again at 55.

In this episode:
- The performance review that changed everything
- "Little Nesha stood up and said I quit"
- Starting a firm at the kitchen table with one client
- Building the first fully remote CPA firm in North Carolina
- The hustle: every networking event in her city for six months
- Perfectionism vs. actually investing in yourself
- Firing her biggest client over her core values
- How to stop being afraid of your own numbers
- Writing a book to heal, and the reader she never expected
- Keynote speaking and the "Don't Settle" speech
- Why there is no age limit on reinvention

Connect with Nesha Pai:
Instagram: @neshapai
Website: neshapai.com
LinkedIn: Nesha Pai
Book: Overcoming Ordinary Obstacles

If this episode hit you, share it with the woman you were thinking about the whole time you listened, and leave a review — it's how these stories find the women who need them most.

Girl, why not you?

I took my three-and-a-half-year-old to see Moana expecting popcorn, candy, and a cute little mom-son afternoon. Instead I sat in a dark theater and ugly-cried through about 70% of it. Apparently, I was not ok... Ha!

Because what I saw on that screen wasn't an island adventure. It was the entire journey of being a female entrepreneur, laid out scene by scene — and nobody warned me it was coming.

In this episode I break down why Moana is secretly the most entrepreneurial movie Disney has ever made:

• The ocean calling her — that whisper you hear folding laundry at 2am that says there's more. Mine showed up while I was standing in my kitchen, eight months pregnant, after the rug got pulled out from under my family.
• "No one goes beyond the reef" — why the people who love you most will hand you their fear disguised as protection, and why their reef is not your boundary.
• Grandma Tala — every woman building something needs one person dancing on the shoreline saying go. If you don't have one, I'll be her.
• The storms and the crashes — my first year was me getting rocked by every wave. Wrong pricing. Flopped marketing. Events that went sideways. She stays on the boat. That's the whole game.
• "Just choose someone else" — the scene that broke me, because I've sat on my couch and said those exact words.
• "Do you know who you are?" — the single question that separates the women who build empires from the women who almost did.
• Walking toward the fire — how many of us have turned our pain into walls and become our own version of Te Kā.

I started with a toddler at home, a baby on the way, and served my first event three days before giving birth. It was messy. It was scared. It happened anyway.

So here's your Moana challenge: listen to the whisper. Sail past the reef. Stay on the boat. Pick the heart back up. Walk toward the fire — because the most beautiful version of your life is on the other side of it.

Girl, why not you?

WEBSITE: www.girlwhynotyou.com

What do you do when your child is diagnosed with a condition so rare that only nine other kids in the world have it — and there's no playbook?

Today's guest, Kasey Walsh, lived that reality. After her daughter Robbie was diagnosed with a rare form of hereditary spastic paraplegia at just two years old, Kasey refused to sit on the sidelines. She bought Neuroscience for Dummies, taught herself genetics, co-founded a nonprofit, and connected with researchers at Boston Children's Hospital — all while raising two kids.

Now she's the Founder & CEO of Winsights, a groundbreaking patient-powered platform using AI to turn real family experiences into research-grade evidence for rare disease communities.

In this episode, we talk about:

-The moment that took her breath away — and how she found the strength to keep going
-Why families often have to connect the dots that the medical system misses
-How she found her voice in rooms full of experts
-What she's building with Winsights and why it matters for every rare disease family
-Her advice for anyone facing something unexpected: don't say "why me" — say "plot twist"

Timestamps:
00:00 — Intro
00:30 — Meet Kasey Walsh
02:16 — The diagnosis that changed everything
04:43 — Navigating the early days as a special needs mom
05:32 — Starting a nonprofit & finding other families
09:16 — Buying Neuroscience for Dummies — the moment she took control
12:16 — What is Winsights? Turning anecdotes into evidence
14:59 — Finding her voice in rooms full of experts
16:28 — Advice for anyone afraid to advocate for themselves
19:36 — "Don't say why me — say plot twist"
20:09 — Where to connect with Kasey & learn about Winsights

Connect with Kasey:
Winsights: https://winsights.life Website: https://kaseywalsh.com

Connect with Jennie:
Podcast IG: @girlwhynotyou_
Website: https://girlwhynotyou.com Email: mailto:[email protected]

#raredisease #patientadvocacy #momentrepreneur #healthtech #winsights #kaseywalsh #hereditaryspasticparaplegia #caregiver #AIinhealthcare #rarediseaseresearch #womeninbusiness #girlwhynotyou #jennieblackwood #podcast #femalefounder

You're posting. You're showing up. You're doing all the "right" things — so why does it still feel like you're running in place?

Here's the truth nobody wants to hear: the thing holding you back probably isn't your strategy. It's you.

In this episode, I sit down with Leanna de Bellevue — a single mom who was making $80/hour doing massage, got told her job was disappearing overnight, and said "OK, I'll figure it out." She taught herself marketing from a Google search, built a six-figure agency from scratch with zero budget, scaled it across 17 countries for 15 years, and then sold it for over asking in 10 days flat.

Now she helps entrepreneurs uncover the blind spots they can't see on their own — and 85-90% of the time, the real problem isn't systems or marketing. It's mindset.

We're talking about:

 The "Whisper Theory" — why ignoring your gut always costs you more later
 Why imposter syndrome gets LOUDER at every new level (yes, even after you "make it")
 The one free thing you can do today to find your biggest blind spot
 Why the promises you keep breaking are always the ones you make to yourself
 How accountability — real, uncomfortable accountability — changes everything

If you're stuck and you've tried everything, this one's going to hit different.

Connect with Leanna: @debellevueconsulting | debellevueconsulting.com

What happens when you stop waiting for someone else and just go? In this episode, Jennie Blackwood sits down with Charlotte Lilly, founder of The Retreat Co, who turned a spontaneous solo yoga retreat in Cuba into a thriving business creating transformative travel experiences for women. Charlotte shares how that one trip gave her a confidence she didn't know she needed, why the scariest part is always saying yes, and what she sees happen when women finally stop waiting to feel ready. Whether you're dreaming about starting a business, booking a solo adventure, or just taking that first scary step — this episode is your sign. Just go.

Guest: Charlotte Lily, Founder of The Retreat Co 

Website: theretreat.company 

Instagram: @_theretreatcompany