The Sallie Ogden Show

In this episode, I sit down with Leslie Fram, Senior Vice President of Music Strategy for CMT, and one of the most consequential voices working in country music today. Leslie has spent her career questioning the assumptions everyone else in the industry treated as just the way things are — and the changes she's helped drive at CMT have shifted what's possible for an entire generation of female artists.

The story she tells is, on its surface, about radio play and music industry economics. But the lessons go far beyond music. Leslie kept hearing the same justifications for why women weren't getting played: people don't want to hear female artists, female artists can't sell out shows, the audience prefers male voices. These weren't research findings. They were stories the industry told itself to justify the status quo. So Leslie did what most people don't: she went looking for the actual data. And the data didn't support the stories.

What CMT has done since is genuinely remarkable. The network now plays male and female artists 50/50, prioritizes equal pay for its talent, and actively works to support new and emerging artists from traditionally underrepresented communities. None of that happened by accident. It happened because someone refused to accept the inherited narratives and was willing to do the work of actually checking them.

We talk about how to recognize the assumptions you're operating under without realizing it, what it actually takes to be the person who questions them out loud, and how the same pattern Leslie used in music applies in any industry where the way things have always been done is quietly limiting what's possible. If you've ever sensed that something in your industry, your company, or your own field is built on stories that aren't actually true, this conversation will help you see them more clearly — and give you a model for what to do about it.

This episode originally aired on Hitting Rock Middle, the show that has since evolved into The Sallie Ogden Show.

Connect with Leslie:CMT website: https://www.cmt.com

About the show:

The Sallie Ogden Show is for the woman who's already built something — and is stuck at the plateau where the old playbook stops working. Tactical when you need a number. Honest when you need a mirror. Hosted by former lawyer turned consultant Sallie Ogden.

Stay connected:Newsletter (Further): https://www.growwiththebrimm.com/furthernewsletterFree business assessment — The BRIMM Business Scan: https://thebrimm.typeform.com/to/fuYmBbJIWebsite: growwiththebrimm.comInstagram: @the_brimm

In this episode, I sit down with Emily Giffin — author of multiple #1 New York Times bestsellers, and one of the most successful contemporary novelists working today. You probably know Emily from her books. What you may not know is how openly she talks about the role of luck in her career, and how thoughtfully she distinguishes between the kind of luck that's outside your control and the kind you can actually prepare yourself to receive.

Emily's first novel got picked up at a particular moment, by a particular editor, in circumstances that included real elements of timing and happenstance. She doesn't pretend otherwise. But she also doesn't let the role of luck become an excuse for anyone hoping for the same kind of break. Her case is more nuanced and more useful: luck and hard work aren't opposites. They work together. The opportunities that look like luck from the outside almost always require years of unglamorous preparation to be ready to seize when they finally arrive.

We talk about what that preparation actually looked like for Emily — the years of writing without any guarantee of publication, the discipline of treating the work seriously even when no one was paying attention, and the specific moves that had her positioned to say yes when the right opportunity finally appeared. We also get into a deeper question most ambitious women secretly ask themselves: how much of success is genuine merit, how much is timing, and what does it actually mean to do good work in the meantime?

If you've been quietly waiting for your version of a lucky break — and quietly suspecting that you should be doing more in the meantime to be ready for it — this conversation will give you a much clearer picture of what being ready actually looks like.

This episode originally aired on Hitting Rock Middle, the show that has since evolved into The Sallie Ogden Show.

Connect with Emily:https://www.emilygiffin.com/all-titles

About the show:

The Sallie Ogden Show is for the woman who's already built something — and is stuck at the plateau where the old playbook stops working. Tactical when you need a number. Honest when you need a mirror. Hosted by former lawyer turned consultant Sallie Ogden.

Stay connected:Newsletter (Further): https://www.growwiththebrimm.com/furthernewsletterFree business assessment — The BRIMM Business Scan: https://thebrimm.typeform.com/to/fuYmBbJIWebsite: growwiththebrimm.comInstagram: @the_brimm

In this episode, I sit down with Krysti Henderson of The Chocolate Heaven Company — a baker who started making cakes for family and friends on the side while working full-time in hospitality, and who has since grown that side project into a seven-figure business with more than a hundred wholesale accounts.

That sentence sounds like a fairytale. It isn't. And the most useful part of this conversation is Krysti's willingness to talk honestly about the version of the story that doesn't make it into the highlight reel. The fits and starts. The decisions that didn't work. The moments she questioned whether the business was actually viable. The slow, uneven trajectory from one or two accounts to five to seven to over a hundred — which, when you're inside it, doesn't feel like steady growth at all.

We talk about something almost no founder-interview episode addresses honestly: the actual role of failure in building a business. Not failure as a motivational concept (failure is just feedback!), but failure as a real, uncomfortable, sometimes-existentially-scary part of the work. Krysti has had her share, and she's clear-eyed about how essential they were to where she is now. Without them, she wouldn't have learned the things that turned The Chocolate Heaven Company into what it is today.

If you've been quietly hard on yourself about the things that haven't worked in your business — the launches that fell flat, the offers that didn't sell, the directions you took that turned out to be wrong — this conversation will give you a much more honest framework for understanding what those moments actually were. Not signs you're failing. Steps in the only path that ever leads somewhere real.

This episode originally aired on Hitting Rock Middle, the show that has since evolved into The Sallie Ogden Show.

Connect with Krysti and The Chocolate Heaven Company:https://www.lovechocolateheaven.com/

About the show:

The Sallie Ogden Show is for the woman who's already built something — and is stuck at the plateau where the old playbook stops working. Tactical when you need a number. Honest when you need a mirror. Hosted by former lawyer turned consultant Sallie Ogden.

Stay connected:Newsletter (Further): https://www.growwiththebrimm.com/furthernewsletterFree business assessment — The BRIMM Business Scan: https://thebrimm.typeform.com/to/fuYmBbJIWebsite: growwiththebrimm.comInstagram: @the_brimm

In this episode, I sit down with Stacy Borocz, the founder of etúHome — a brand built on a foundation of nearly two decades in the wholesale business bringing European designs to the U.S. market. After all those years on the wholesale side, Stacy made the move into direct-to-consumer with etúHome, and the shift required her to think differently about almost every part of how she ran her business.

What I find most useful about Stacy's perspective is that she's lived both modes. She knows what it takes to do the work yourself — she's not afraid to roll up her sleeves and build something from scratch — but she's also figured out the harder discipline most ambitious founders skip past: trusting other people to execute on a vision you used to hold entirely on your own.

Most of us know intellectually that we should delegate, hire, and step back. The actual practice of doing it — of allowing someone else to do something you used to do, in a way you might not do it yourself — is much harder. It requires you to redefine what your role actually is, and to accept that your highest-value contribution is no longer the work itself but the clarity of the vision that other people are building toward. We talk about how Stacy made that shift, what she's learned about scaling without losing the original point of view, and how to recognize when you've become the bottleneck in your own company.

If you've been running a growing business and quietly suspecting that you've outgrown the do everything yourself phase but haven't fully figured out what comes next, this conversation will give you both the framework and the permission to evolve into the leader your business now needs.

This episode originally aired on Hitting Rock Middle, the show that has since evolved into The Sallie Ogden Show.

Connect with Stacy and etúHome:www.etuhome.com

About the show:

The Sallie Ogden Show is for the woman who's already built something — and is stuck at the plateau where the old playbook stops working. Tactical when you need a number. Honest when you need a mirror. Hosted by former lawyer turned consultant Sallie Ogden.

Stay connected:Newsletter (Further): https://www.growwiththebrimm.com/furthernewsletterFree business assessment — The BRIMM Business Scan: https://thebrimm.typeform.com/to/fuYmBbJIWebsite: growwiththebrimm.comInstagram: @the_brimm

In this episode, I sit down with Lindsey Boyd — best known as the co-founder of The Laundress, the cult laundry-care brand she helped build into one of the most recognizable names in the home-goods space. Today, Lindsey is in a different chapter, working on a brand new venture: Rondel Jewelry. And the conversation we have is less about The Laundress as a success story and more about what she's carrying with her into the next thing.

The single biggest lesson Lindsey takes from her career so far is one most founders skip past: clarity. Specifically, the discipline of writing your ideas down, understanding what you're actually passionate about, and refusing to let either get blurry as your business grows. That sounds simple — almost too simple — until you realize how rarely founders actually do it. Most of us drift into pricing decisions, branding decisions, hiring decisions without a clear, unshakable vision underneath. And the cost of that drift shows up everywhere: in the margins, in the marketing, in the parts of the business that quietly stop reflecting what you actually meant to build.

We talk about how Lindsey developed that clarity over the course of building The Laundress, what she's applying differently the second time around with Rondel, and the surprising places where a clear vision earns its keep — including in the operational decisions you'd think were purely tactical. Pricing. Margins. Product line decisions. The choices that look like spreadsheets but are actually anchored in something deeper.

If you've been making business decisions and quietly suspecting that you're drifting — that the what of your business is no longer fully connected to the why — this conversation will help you find your way back.

This episode originally aired on Hitting Rock Middle, the show that has since evolved into The Sallie Ogden Show.

Connect with Lindsey:www.rondeljewelry.com

About the show:

The Sallie Ogden Show is for the woman who's already built something — and is stuck at the plateau where the old playbook stops working. Tactical when you need a number. Honest when you need a mirror. Hosted by former lawyer turned consultant Sallie Ogden.

Stay connected:Newsletter (Further): https://www.growwiththebrimm.com/furthernewsletterFree business assessment — The BRIMM Business Scan: https://thebrimm.typeform.com/to/fuYmBbJIWebsite: growwiththebrimm.comInstagram: @the_brimm

In this episode, I sit down with Lindsay Pinchuk — an award-winning entrepreneur, consultant, community builder, and one of the most generous voices I've encountered on the subject of building real audiences for your business.

Lindsay's story is the kind every founder should hear at least once. She grew up in suburban Detroit, graduated from the University of Michigan, moved to Chicago, and found herself pregnant in a new city without the support or community she needed. So she did what most people don't think to do: she built it. What started as small events for expectant parents grew into Bump Club and Beyond — a seven-figure brand with international reach and partnerships with companies like Target, Huggies, and The Honest Company. After selling and exiting the business, Lindsay turned her hard-won expertise into a consulting practice helping other brands do what she did: build genuine community around their work.

We get tactical. How to get sponsors for your brand. How to monetize a community without making it feel transactional. Which social media platforms are actually worth your effort and which ones are quietly draining it. And the deeper insight underneath all of it — that community isn't something you broadcast at people. It's something you build with them, and the brands that figure out the difference are the ones that scale into something durable.

If you've been trying to grow your audience and quietly suspecting that the post more, post often advice you've been following isn't working, this conversation will give you a meaningfully different way to think about it.

This episode originally aired on Hitting Rock Middle, the show that has since evolved into The Sallie Ogden Show.

Connect with Lindsay:Website: https://www.lindsaypinchuk.com[Lindsay's Instagram and LinkedIn — see note below]

Resource mentioned in this episode:Lindsay's 7-Day Social Media Challenge: https://www.lindsaypinchuk.com

About the show:

The Sallie Ogden Show is for the woman who's already built something — and is stuck at the plateau where the old playbook stops working. Tactical when you need a number. Honest when you need a mirror. Hosted by former lawyer turned consultant Sallie Ogden.

Stay connected:Newsletter (Further): https://www.growwiththebrimm.com/furthernewsletterFree business assessment — The BRIMM Business Scan: https://thebrimm.typeform.com/to/fuYmBbJIWebsite: growwiththebrimm.comInstagram: @the_brimm

In this episode, I sit down with Marguerite Adzick, the founder of Addison Bay — the athleisure brand she started at six months pregnant while still working at a major fashion company. Marguerite saw a real gap in the market, and instead of waiting for the right time to act on it, she did what most ambitious women keep telling themselves they'll do later: she went.

That decision is the heart of this conversation. Marguerite is the kind of founder who proves a particular pattern — that the women who actually build distinctive brands aren't the ones who waited for permission, perfect timing, or full certainty. They're the ones who saw something, decided to go, and found the right people to go with them. Gritty, passionate people willing to build something new alongside someone who didn't yet know exactly how it would unfold.

We talk about the highs and the lows of being a solo founder, what it actually looks like to grow a brand quickly without losing your point of view, and how Marguerite thinks about differentiation in a fashion category that's increasingly crowded. We also get into something I find moving: the way she thinks about Addison Bay as a long-term project — something she's building not just for herself, but as a legacy for her daughter, who she hopes might run it one day.

If you've been sitting on an idea, waiting for the version of you who feels ready to show up and start, this conversation will make a strong case that the version you're waiting for isn't coming. The version who starts is the one you become by starting.

This episode originally aired on Hitting Rock Middle, the show that has since evolved into The Sallie Ogden Show.

Connect with Marguerite and Addison Bay:www.addisonbay.com

About the show:

The Sallie Ogden Show is for the woman who's already built something — and is stuck at the plateau where the old playbook stops working. Tactical when you need a number. Honest when you need a mirror. Hosted by former lawyer turned consultant Sallie Ogden.

Stay connected:Newsletter (Further): https://www.growwiththebrimm.com/furthernewsletterFree business assessment — The BRIMM Business Scan: https://thebrimm.typeform.com/to/fuYmBbJIWebsite: growwiththebrimm.comInstagram: @the_brimm

In this episode, I sit down with Courtney Folk, the CEO of Renewal Logistics — a company she has built with her husband over nearly two decades and that, in her own words, she still treats like a startup in many ways. That framing is unusual coming from a leader of an established business, and it's exactly what makes the conversation so worth having.

Most companies that have been around for twenty years operate from a place of established routine. Courtney operates from the opposite stance. She actively looks for new verticals and growth opportunities her existing equipment, team, and infrastructure could be redirected toward. She thinks about the parts of Renewal Logistics that are running smoothly as the foundation that frees her up to pursue the parts that are still being built. And she's expanded the company into multiple new business categories using exactly that approach.

We talk about how she structures the operating side of the business — what she's automated, what she's delegated, what she's chosen to keep close — so that she can step into startup mode for new ventures without the existing operations falling apart. She also gets into the mental shift required to keep treating a mature business like a young one, and why most founders lose that ability as their company grows.

If you've been running an established business and quietly missing the energy of the early days — or wondering whether there's a way to build new things without rebuilding from scratch — this conversation will give you a working model.

This episode originally aired on Hitting Rock Middle, the show that has since evolved into The Sallie Ogden Show.

Connect with Courtney and Renewal Logistics:www.renewallogistics.com

About the show:

The Sallie Ogden Show is for the woman who's already built something — and is stuck at the plateau where the old playbook stops working. Tactical when you need a number. Honest when you need a mirror. Hosted by former lawyer turned consultant Sallie Ogden.

Stay connected:Newsletter (Further): https://www.growwiththebrimm.com/furthernewsletterFree business assessment — The BRIMM Business Scan: https://thebrimm.typeform.com/to/fuYmBbJIWebsite: growwiththebrimm.comInstagram: @the_brimm

In this episode, I sit down with Christy Laurence, the founder and CEO of Plann — a marketing and productivity platform you may know primarily as an Instagram scheduler. As Christy explains, that's only the surface of what Plann actually does, and the problem she set out to solve is meaningfully deeper than helping people post on time.

Christy started Plann after spotting a real gap in how creators and small businesses were approaching social media. She'd developed a visual, organized approach that worked for her own work, and she realized the existing tools were nowhere near sophisticated enough to support what creators actually needed. Plann grew out of that frustration — and her central operating principle, which I find myself returning to in my own consulting work, is one most founders skip past: stay obsessively close to the actual problems your customers are facing, and let the solutions emerge from that closeness rather than from your own assumptions about what they need.

We talk about how Christy built Plann from a personal frustration into a leading productivity platform, what it looks like to scale a software business while keeping the customer's experience central, and the practical disciplines that have kept her from drifting away from the actual problem the company was built to solve. She's the kind of founder who proves that long-term success in a crowded software market comes not from outspending competitors, but from out-listening them.

If you've been building a product or service and quietly suspecting that your assumptions about what your customers need might be slightly off, this conversation will help you reset.

This episode originally aired on Hitting Rock Middle, the show that has since evolved into The Sallie Ogden Show.

Connect with Christy and Plann:www.plannthat.com@plannthat

About the show:

The Sallie Ogden Show is for the woman who's already built something — and is stuck at the plateau where the old playbook stops working. Tactical when you need a number. Honest when you need a mirror. Hosted by former lawyer turned consultant Sallie Ogden.

Stay connected:Newsletter (Further): https://www.growwiththebrimm.com/furthernewsletterFree business assessment — The BRIMM Business Scan: https://thebrimm.typeform.com/to/fuYmBbJIWebsite: growwiththebrimm.comInstagram: @the_brimm

In this episode, I sit down with Yarelys Tifa, founder of Cash Is Queen — a company built around a truth most ambitious women learn the hard way: real freedom in your business and your life starts with an honest look at your money.

Yarelys's own story is the short version of the conversation. She found her freedom by sitting down with her cash flow, looking at it without flinching, and understanding for the first time where her money was actually going and what she actually needed. That single act — refusing to look away from her own numbers — became the foundation for everything that followed.

Most of us have been quietly avoiding this work. We don't check the balances. We don't reconcile the spending. We don't run the math on what we'd actually need to feel secure. We let the numbers stay vague because looking at them feels worse than not looking, and we tell ourselves we'll get to it when things are calmer or when we have more time. We talk about why that avoidance is so common, what it actually costs us, and the practical, unflinching shift that happens once you finally look.

If money has felt like a topic that's always slightly over your head — or one you keep meaning to get a handle on but somehow never quite do — this conversation will give you both the framework and the courage to start.

This episode originally aired on Hitting Rock Middle, the show that has since evolved into The Sallie Ogden Show.

Connect with Yarelys:Cash Is Queen: https://cashisqueenllc.com[Yarelys's Instagram — see note below]

Resources mentioned in this episode:Personal Capital: https://personalcapital.com

About the show:

The Sallie Ogden Show is for the woman who's already built something — and is stuck at the plateau where the old playbook stops working. Tactical when you need a number. Honest when you need a mirror. Hosted by former lawyer turned consultant Sallie Ogden.

Stay connected:Newsletter (Further): https://www.growwiththebrimm.com/furthernewsletterFree business assessment — The BRIMM Business Scan: https://thebrimm.typeform.com/to/fuYmBbJIWebsite: growwiththebrimm.comInstagram: @the_brimm