The Female CEO™ Podcast

Stephanie Ness spent her childhood evenings in her dad’s workshop, watching him work the lathe and planning to take over the family building business. He had other ideas. She tried law, then trained as a nurse while holding down three other jobs.

Eighteen years in the NHS later, she’s an aesthetic nurse prescriber, the founder of Ness Skin Medical and our October magazine cover star. She tells Mark Sephton about the treatment in her twenties that set her on a mission, the day she walked in as a client and left with a job, and the first time someone put a needle in her hand.

She also explains why her clinic’s best results were being undone at home, and what a small, focused skincare range has to do with it.

“Whatever negative there is in life, there is always a positive that you can pull from it.”

🎙️ A new episode of The Female CEO podcast: female founder interviews and women founder resilience, every week.

Mary Love was halfway through her studies when everything changed. She moved to Tennessee, stepped in for her father, the legendary Bobby Hebb, and found herself standing at his star on the Nashville Walk of Fame without him there.

Today she’s the CEO overseeing his music catalogue, an executive producer, an author, a singer and a podcaster. She tells Mark Sephton about the hardest chapter of her life and the stories that pulled her through it, the business wall she hit when she was shut out of the conversation about her father’s music, and why she’ll take expertise over charm every time.

(She also explains why her definition of success has nothing to do with high heels and a corner office.)

“Success is when you do something that makes you happy and other people like it too.”

🎙️ A new episode of The Female CEO podcast: female CEO stories and women founder resilience, every week.

Anne Wilkinson came out of corporate leadership with brilliant people skills and no idea what VAT, a route to market or a target audience was. She learned the business side the hard way. Two years into coaching, she was running four businesses.

Now she's the founder of Sprint Central and the author of the Independent Practice Longevity Report, and she talks to Mark Sephton about why so many gifted coaches and therapists struggle to make it commercially past year two.

She covers why a coach's work is as much identity as profession (which is exactly what makes change so hard), the one thing she won't let AI do for her, and why she's stepping back from one-to-one work after 25 years.

"The biggest jail that we can find ourselves in is the one that we put in ourselves."

🎙️ A new episode of The Female CEO podcast: female founder interviews and female CEO insights, every week.

Leslie Leifer runs marketing and product development for Prudent Publishing and The Gallery Collection. She has worked in IT, in marketing, in project management — a career she spent years assuming was evidence that she had no idea what she wanted.

Then somebody asked her what her career goal was, told her there were only two answers available, and changed how she reads her own history.

This conversation with host Mark Sephton covers the practical end of leading a brand: what real loyalty is made of and why "blind loyalty" is a different thing entirely, why she will not let her team ship a product that everyone else already sells, and the question she puts in front of every shiny new tool and AI idea before anyone is allowed to chase it.

There is also the part of her leadership that came from the managers she never wants to resemble — including the promotion she was handed alongside a list of her faults.

"It's about a team and a leader's a member of that team."

🎙️ A new episode of The Female CEO podcast — female CEO insights and female founder interviews, every week.

Victoria Costa Paz is the co-founder and CEO of Eywa, producing clinical-grade psilocybin through biosynthesis so that it can go where mushrooms cannot: into clinical trials, in front of regulators, and eventually onto a prescription pad.

Her route there ran through Coca-Cola, a bank, and a startup in Mexico — each move made on the same question. What do I want to learn in order to become a better leader, and a better person?

In this conversation with Mark Sephton she talks about what actually moves an investor at the early stages (it is not the technology), why she treats a fund's no as information rather than a judgement, and the discipline she credits above everything else: three goals, and keeping her word whether anyone is watching or not.

There is also the matter of what happens when you make the people around you shine. One phone call, one flight, twenty new conversations for somebody else, and Victoria's argument for why that is not generosity so much as strategy.

"They are not investing in your industry, they're not investing in your product, they are investing in you as a founder."

🎙️ A new episode of The Female CEO podcast — female CEO insights and female founder interviews, every week.

Lisa Dunn and Lori Sherrington are the co-founders of Inner Vision Healing & Wellness in Port Perry, Ontario; a centre built around the Harmonic Egg, a sound and light therapy chamber, and around remote energy healing that reaches clients wherever they happen to be sitting.

They met in a meditation group. Lisa had twenty-five years managing multidisciplinary healthcare clinics behind her; Lori had years in education with special needs children. Going into COVID, watching both sectors shake, they took what they call the biggest leap and opened the centre anyway — then worked full time for four more years while they grew it.

In this conversation with Mark Sephton they explain how remote Reiki and biofield tuning work at a distance, what happens to a body inside the egg, and why the first thing they say to a sceptic is the worst that's going to happen is you feel relaxed.

There is also the matter of the two eggs. A female one called Bella Pearl, a male one called Hector, and a method of clearing them that involves photographing each and putting it inside the other.

"You get what you need, not what you want."

The first episode of this podcast with two guests in the room — which, as they point out, is only fitting.

🎙️ A new episode of The Female CEO podcast — female CEO insights and female founder interviews every week.

Viji Richard is the founder of NeoFelis Labs — an enterprise intelligence company building AI and process solutions with ethics and governance at the core. Twenty years in corporate management, strategy and commercials. A master's in engineering, published research, and a leadership team made up of the friends she has had since she was a child.

She and those friends built their first product at sixteen, over a summer holiday they were meant to spend eating mangoes at their grandmothers' farms.

In this conversation with Mark Sephton, she talks about what it takes to build a company designed to still be standing when the hype cycle has moved on. Ethics and governance in the foundations, not the brochure. A revenue model that funds the products, so the funding round never has to. And a very deliberate no to the venture capitalists who now want a seat.

There is also the matter of the name. NeoFelis is a cat — and the reason why goes back to the tea estates she grew up around, the leopards that came down into them, and a decision she and her friends made about what to do with a wild thing rather than to it.

You can't train a cat. You have to work with the cat.

It turns out to be a governance philosophy.

🎙️ A new episode of The Female CEO podcast — female CEO insights and female founder interviews, every week.

Kate Hobbs is the founder of Insight with Kate — an intuitive empath, energy healer and consultant who helps people and businesses find the thing that is holding them back. Most of the women who come to her have already done the hard part. They have the business, the title, the relationship. What they have lost, somewhere between the beginning and here, is themselves.

In this conversation, she makes an argument that runs against everything the manifesting industry sells: the no matters more than the yes.

Every no you say is a funnel. It shows the universe what you will not take, and it narrows the field to what is actually yours; even when your own mind cannot picture what that is yet.

She talks about the non-negotiables she writes down before anything else. About the relationship she stayed in so long that her own energy turned against her. About the truth person you need beside you when your head has decided your intuition must be broken. And about the two lines she says at night, so the day does not travel into her dreams with her.

🎙️ A new episode of The Female CEO podcast — female CEO insights and female founder interviews, twice a week.

Viki Vallance Clark is the founder of the Ditch Booze for Good Movement and the creator of the Over-the-Influence System - a programme built on one central insight: problem drinking is a symptom, not a cause. The root is almost always something older and something unprocessed. Address the surface and the surface keeps returning. Address the source, and the symptom dissolves.

In this conversation with Mark Sephton, she traces what actually drives alcohol dependency in high-achieving women, why willpower is a conscious-mind tool applied to a subconscious-level pattern, and what it looks like to rewire the brain rather than manage the craving.

She talks about the childhood experiences that fuelled her own drinking for decades, the moment eleven years ago that forced a reckoning, and the NLP and hypnotherapy approach that finally did what a whole year of willpower could not.

🎙️ A special episode of The Female CEO podcast.

Simer Dhillon is the founder of Sharp Mind, Sharp Style and the creator of the SHARP framework — a five-pillar leadership system designed to make integrity, trust, and accountability visible, measurable, and actionable in any organisation. She works with founders, executives, and directors who are ready to stop treating governance as a compliance exercise and start building it as a strategic asset.

In this conversation with Mark Sephton, she lays out the central idea of everything she does: major corporate crises do not begin with a crisis. They begin with small integrity gaps — small disconnects between what an organisation says and what it actually does — that compound over months or years before they become public. And by the time they do, the conditions have been in place for a very long time.

She talks about what those early signals look like. About the five pillars of the SHARP framework and the one she believes is most consistently overlooked. About the most revealing benchmark of organisational health she has ever found — and why it has nothing to do with how quickly good news travels. About the audit question she would put to every founder in the room. About ego as the most common driver of trust-destroying decisions. And about grace and grit: the combination she believes female leaders need most, and why neither empathy nor authority has to be sacrificed to lead with both.

She closes with one line. "Success opens doors. Integrity keeps them open."