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."

Dr Melanie Lee is a clinical psychologist who has spent a decade running Trust Psychology in the northeast of England. She has trained in Internal Family Systems, somatic therapy, and mind-body work. She received her own ADHD diagnosis mid-career. She is now building Freeing Female Founders - a psychological practice for women in business, sitting between therapy and coaching, built on the belief that a truly integrated self makes everything easier.

In this conversation with Mark Sephton, she talks about the model at the centre of her work: Internal Family Systems. Its central claim is one that, once heard, is hard to put back down. There are no bad parts. Every inner critic, every perfectionist, every part that overthinks the pitch or goes completely silent in the wrong room - each one is protecting something. When you understand what, everything shifts.

She also talks about shame and where it lives in the body. About the C's of self-leadership that tell you from the inside whether you are operating from self or from a part with an agenda. About what the Pixar film Inside Out got right about human psychology. About the moment her own ADHD diagnosis made her whole career make sense. About what joy actually feels like when integration happens, not as a theory, but as a physical experience.

She closes with one line. Eight words. We promise you will still be carrying it long after the episode ends.

🎙️ A special episode of The Female CEO podcast.

April Jones did not plan to found a law firm. She planned to survive.

Three kids under four. A legal career she was not willing to abandon. A partnership environment that was not going to make space for both. So she walked out, started her own firm, and spent the next 18 years learning to be an exceptional attorney — then spent the years after that learning to run the whole thing like a business. Today, The Jones Law Firm is Colorado's premier family law practice, and April counts the children of her clients among her clients.

In this conversation with Mark Sephton, she talks about the pivot that changed everything, the coaching that delivered exponential growth, and the one insight she keeps returning to: the goal you had at the start should not be the goal you carry forever. You need goals that grow with you.

She also talks about what she watched growing up - women who owned their space, directed the room, delivered the service, and got rewarded for it. Her early employers. Her aunts. She didn't know she was being taught. Until it was everything.

👉🏼 New episodes of The Female CEO podcast drop every week. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

LeNae Goolsby is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, award-winning podcast host, and COO of Infinite Health Integrative Medicine Center - an integrative and regenerative medicine practice she has shaped from the inside out for over two decades. She's also a law school graduate, a recent convert to country songwriting, and someone with a very clear sense of who she is and what she's building.

In this warm, candid conversation with Mark Sephton, LeNae talks about falling into healthcare leadership by accident, why so many private practice owners get burned by the very people they hire to help, and the lesson she keeps returning to: that real growth begins when you stop looking outside yourself for the answer.

Listen for: the wedding-day handoff that started it all. The AI receptionist that didn't survive its first week. The secret to working with your spouse . And the one thing she'd tell every female CEO ready to step into her next level.

Ally Boyes-Varley grew up dyslexic and ADHD in a school system that gave her every academic intervention going — and none of the emotional regulation underneath. She is the founder of Roots & Wings Tutoring and the creator of the Connect-Ed Method, which centres one principle above all others: connection before correction.

In this conversation with Mark Sephton, she talks about what the three-part brain tells us about why academic support alone can never be enough, why behaviour is always communication, and what it actually sounds like to lead with a child's "fast brain" rather than their gaps. She also talks about 18 months in the deep countryside applying her own methodology to herself, the coach question that cracked everything open, and why playing small had been, for a long time, the safest thing she knew how to do.

In this episode, Mark Sephton sits down with Desiree Wingo - co-founder of Awaken IV and personal transformation advocate, for a conversation about what it really means to stop letting the past write the future. 

Desiree shares the tools she actually uses: the "ultimate truth" filter, the "could it be possible" practice, and the philosophy of leaning in to resistance rather than away from it. She also unpacks the invisible tax women pay when they refuse to own their identity, the power of speaking to your inner child, and what the connection between physical restoration and emotional capacity looks like from the inside.

Warm, honest, and fired up in places — this one is best heard on your own.

Rebecca Henwood spent eighteen years as a single mum running her household like a military operation: career, children, structure, forward motion. When her youngest followed her son to the UK for university and the corporate role fell away, the identity she'd built around all of it went with them. She packed up her Sydney life, drove north to Byron Bay, and started asking what had been underneath the doing all along.

In this conversation with Mark Sephton, Rebecca talks about the slow shift from masculine to feminine energy, the breathwork classroom where she discovered grief she hadn't known her body was storing, and the moment she understood that safety isn't something to find in another person or another role — it's something to build within yourself. She's now doing exactly that work with clients through Breathe with Beck, and she's also just launched the podcast Angels on the Airwaves.

Stay for the David Attenborough bit. You'll never watch a nature documentary the same way again.