Heather Saffer won Food Network's Cupcake Wars in 2012, used the prize money to write The Dollop Book of Frosting, and turned a Rochester cupcake shop into Dollop Gourmet, a low-sugar, vegan frosting brand that landed a deal with Barbara Corcoran on Shark Tank and put her products in Whole Foods and on QVC. She has a psychology degree from SUNY Brockport, two published cookbooks, and the kind of resume most entrepreneurs in this city would trade for. Today she advises startups from Canandaigua and lives with her dog Donald. In January her husband died, and she started posting unfiltered videos about grief to an audience that had only ever known her for frosting.

In this episode she gets into the toxic positivity she has been fielding ever since, the decade of therapy that stopped working, why every group therapy session leaves her feeling worse, and the theory about new souls and old souls that almost nobody but her husband knew. She talks about bailing on a cruise a week before it sailed, booking a one-way ticket to Portugal to find out if she could move there, and disliking nearly every place she landed. She and Fitz also get into her husband's death by suicide, why she thinks people are so afraid of negativity, and what a person does with themselves after admitting they have no professional ambitions left. She is not selling anything, which is exactly why the conversation goes where it goes.

CONNECT 
Heather Saffer on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/realheathersaffer Heather Saffer on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathersaffer
ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com

New episodes every Tuesday.
Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY.
Learn more at https://rocvox.com

Amy Hawley built Kinz because the part of her story she most needed to keep was the part she had no interest in performing for anyone. Everyone already has the birthday photos and the promotion announcements. Kinz is a private platform for the in between, the reflections and the pieces of a story that never make it to a feed.

In this episode she joins Fitz at ROC Vox and gets into the comparison trap, why progress is almost impossible to see while you are inside it, and how she replaced research and outside opinions with alignment as her decision filter. She also talks about making choices as the person who already has the outcome, the trademark detour she now laughs about, why the idea was never the asset, running founder and stepmom and senior manager on one operating system, and why forcing action when your body is asking for rest costs more than it produces. 

CONNECT
Kinz → https://www.bekinz.com
ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com
Salvatore's → https://www.salvatores.com

New episodes every Tuesday.

Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY.

Learn more at https://rocvox.com

Dean Lucas lost his son Lee to a heroin overdose on December 23, 2016. Ten years later, the motorcycle ride he built in Lee's name has raised close to half a million dollars and a wing of a Rochester advocacy center carries his son's name. This August is the last one.

In this episode Dean joins Fitz at ROC Vox to walk through all of it. What the Wayne County Sheriff told him days after Lee died about bags deliberately made strong enough to kill. Why he puts his arm around the people selling the drug that took his son. What a decade of turning grief into a fundraiser actually costs, including the crash that comes every year the week after the ride. He also lays out exactly what happens on ride day, where every dollar goes now, and what the line on the back of this year's shirt means. 
CONNECT

Lee Lucas Memorial Poker Run → https://leelucasride.com/
Father Tracy Advocacy Center → https://www.fathertracycenter.org 
ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com

New episodes every Tuesday.

Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY.
Learn more at https://rocvox.com

R. Greg Adams built a career out of turning niche ideas into national brands, self-publishing Firehouse Cooking three decades ago and landing on Good Morning America, QVC, and Random House along the way. Now he's turning his pen toward something far more personal: a memoir about surviving a 2015 sexual assault by his own doctor, and the years he spent watching police, a district attorney, and a hospital system look away.

In this episode he walks through what happened, why the Brighton Police Department, Rochester Police Department, and Monroe County's then-district attorney declined to act, and how a recorded admission from Dr. Gareth Warren eventually helped him win in court and expose that his doctor was never actually board certified. He also talks candidly about the data on male sexual assault survivors, and why he sees survival as a lifelong process rather than a finish line.

CONNECT 
Strong Survivor (preorder) → https://thestrongsurvivor.com
Salvatore's Pizza → https://salvatores.com
ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com

New episodes every Tuesday.

Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY.

Learn more at https://rocvox.com

What if the person with no superpowers, in a world where everyone else has one, turns out to be the most important character in the room? Michael Solis joins Fitz at ROC Vox to talk about Deficient, his YA sci-fi novel set in a near future where super-powered people are the majority and one 15-year-old boy is the last kind of outcast anyone saw coming. The conversation moves well beyond the book: Michael's coming out story, Fitz's experience raising a trans son, what it takes to get your book rights back and build your own press from scratch, and what 20 years responding to Ebola outbreaks and floods in West Africa has to do with writing fiction.

In this episode, Michael walks through the ability hierarchy he built for the novel and why he made it as brutal as he did, the personal experiences woven into the characters without ever appearing by name in the text, what happens when the only person who responded right to a coming out said just three words, and why he walked away from humanitarian work and moved to Rochester to run Writers and Books and release his books on his own terms. 

CONNECT

Michael Solis: https://michaelsolisauthor.com
Writers and Books: https://wab.org
ROC Vox: https://rocvox.com
Salvatore's: https://salvatores.com
New episodes every Tuesday.

Recorded at ROC Vox in Bushnell's Basin, NY.

Dave Mammano ran Next Step Magazine for 21 years — a print publication for high school students that grew to 17 editions and $5 million in revenue. When print died, he sold it, rebuilt from scratch, survived COVID wiping out his events business, and somehow ended up back on stage doing stand-up comedy. He now travels the country as a keynote speaker teaching businesses how to use humor and levity to grow leadership, culture, and retention. He's also entrepreneur-in-residence at the Golisano Institute and the U of R Simon School's Ain Center for Entrepreneurship.

In this episode he gets into selling Next Step after 21 years and what it really feels like to let go of something you built, how he launched the Avanti Entrepreneur Network from nothing, why COVID knocked him down twice, how reviving his stand-up comedy roots turned into a full-time speaking career, what he sees in today's young entrepreneurs that gives him real hope, the value of truly disconnecting (lessons from three weeks in Sicily with no Wi-Fi), and his next big idea, a road trip TV show called The Good Business Tour.

CONNECT 
The David Mammano Show → https://davidmammano.com
ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com

New episodes of Positive Blatherings drop every Tuesday. 

Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, 
NY.

Learn more at https://rocvox.com

Marketing insurance agents nationwide sounds like a contradiction, but Uptown Marketing founder Martina Barley built a thirteen person, all female agency doing exactly that. Martina joins Fitz at ROC Vox to talk about her path from an unlicensed State Farm sales assistant to the self described "Michael Jordan of sales," and why the confidence that built her business almost got in the way of leading her team.

In this episode, you'll learn how Martina grew Uptown Marketing from three founders to thirteen employees, why she believes sales and leadership are two completely different skill sets, how she convinces insurance agents to actually invest in their online presence, and what she tells clients about AI replacing, or not replacing, their jobs. CHAPTERS

CONNECT
Uptown Marketing → https://uptownmarketing.com
The Marketing Girl (book) → https://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Girl-Trusting-Intuition-Confidence/dp/1956464484
ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com
Salvatore's → https://salvatores.com
New episodes of Positive Blatherings drop every Tuesday.
Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY.
Learn more at https://rocvox.com

Jon Goehring spent years behind the mic at Rochester radio stations before leaving it to build StoryTrust Media, a podcast production company built on one idea: your stories build trust with your audience whether you mean them to or not. He joins Fitz at ROC Vox to talk about what radio actually prepares you for, why collaboration beat competition in his business, and how two people running similar races figured out they weren't really competing at all.

In this episode, Jon explains why he tells his Brockport students not to marry radio, the moment he stopped auditioning for everything and started referring work to other talent, how faith shapes the way he runs StoryTrust, and what he'd tell his 15-year-old self about ignoring everyone else's formula for success. 

CONNECT 
StoryTrust Media (Jon Goehring) → https://storytrust.media Limitless
Leadership Lounge → https://limitlessleadershippodcast.com
ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com

New episodes every Tuesday.

Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY.

Learn more at https://rocvox.com

Sarina Morales spent years as an ESPN anchor and Los Angeles Rams sideline reporter before Bally Sports went bankrupt, she became a single mother, and everything she had built changed at once. She surveyed what came next, found WeTheHobby, and landed in the one place where every thread of her career finally connected.

In this episode she gets into the psychological techniques she developed for drawing out reluctant NFL players, the framework she built for grieving without getting stuck, why she argued at Newhouse in 2004 that content belongs on YouTube and Facebook before either platform supported video, the near-death experiences that explain why she still has what she calls zest for life, and the Bronx baseball story she used to get into Syracuse, where a 15-year-old girl showed up to practice on Monday after an entire opposing team sat down on the field to protest her.

CONNECT
Sarina Morales on Instagram → @moralesmorales
WeTheHobby → https://wethehobby.com
ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com

Maria Pascucci-Maciejewski spent over 20 years helping others manage perfectionism and anxiety. She launched a national speaking business at 27, wrote a book, delivered a TEDx talk, and coached hundreds of students through the hidden costs of needing to be perfect. In the summer of 2024, it all caught up with her.

In this episode she gets into the childhood bullying that became perfectionism, the 3.92 GPA that came with panic attacks in college bathrooms, and why none of it was enough to stop a complete nervous system breakdown, a suicide attempt, and 34 days in a psychiatric hospital over the holidays. She also talks about what actually pulled her back, why nutrition belongs in every mental health conversation, and what she is building now.

CONNECT
You Can Bounce Back → https://youcanbounceback.com
Campus Calm → https://campuscalm.com
ROC Vox → https://rocvox.com

New episodes every Tuesday.

Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Pittsford, NY. Learn more at https://rocvox.com