Lindsay Guzowski is the CEO and founder of The Crucible, a company transforming how private equity and venture firms assess and develop leadership at their portfolio companies using scientifically validated, bias-tested tools. A visionary entrepreneur, she co-founded a plumbing company that grew from a $40,000 investment into a multi-million-dollar enterprise acquired for over $20 million. With degrees from Dartmouth College, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, Lindsay blends expertise in sociology, finance, and management. Since founding The Crucible in 2020, she has earned multiple industry awards, all while being a devoted mother to her competitive go-kart-racing son.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

🔍 👩‍🔬 Eliminating Bias in Executive Evaluations: Learn the innovative approach that removes bias from investors and others assessing founders and executive teams so venture firms no longer overlook diverse and qualified talent based on outdated stereotypes or unconscious bias.

🧩 👥 Strategic Team Building: How to assess cognitive abilities, resilience, pattern recognition, innovative thinking and emotional leverage, so your business can identify gaps and strategically build balanced teams, enhance collaboration and reduce turnover.

📈 🚀Data-Driven Decision Making: How The Crucible uses tailored algorithms and innovative assessments to provide actionable insights, allowing investors to make informed decisions and better match team dynamics with company objectives.

💼🔥The Five Success Factors: Learn what predicts the success of an entrepreneurial or executive leader, from “disdain for losing” to numbers fluency, storytelling, empathy, and ability to process information quickly with accuracy.

💡 🛠️ Systems Vs. Linear Thinkers: The creative power of ‘matrix thinking’ and why women with children are inherently better at “connecting the dots”, collaborating and enabling cross-disciplinary innovation.

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings923

More about Lindsay, plus a 20% discount on Crucible 

Short Link:  https://bit.ly/Wings923

Link: https://melindawittstock.com/wingspodcast/lindsay-guzowski

Julie Castro Abrams is a venture capitalist and gender and racial justice activist who has spent the majority of her career working to build great women-owned companies and economic access for women. She is the founder and CEO of How Women Lead, a network of 14,000-plus top executive women who come together to learn, break barriers to success, and make an impact. Using her extensive background, Julie helps top executive women harness and activate their power across all aspects of their careers and lives. She also leads the sister organization, How Women Invest, an early-stage venture capital firm seeking to realize untapped economic potential by focusing on the intersection of female founders and female investors, particularly those of color.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

🚀 📈 Potential vs Previous Results: Why women founders are evaluated by venture investors with a higher and different level of scrutiny than men, and how to overcome investor bias—whether conscious or unconscious.

👩‍🔬 🤟 Breaking Barriers: What it takes to launch a successful female-led venture capital firm, and how Julie succeeded by building on an already established community to get her first $10 million from 221 female investors.

🤝 🌱 Empowering Female Investors: Why women should diversify their investment portfolios into venture capital firms supporting women entrepreneurs—not only for a potential 10X return, but also because most female founders create mission-driven companies that have a social impact.

✨ 🌈 Invest in Values: How to make venture investments with companies and funds that align with your values for social impact and purpose.

💰💵 Expanding Women's Wealth: Learn how Julie’s New Table Campaign is encouraging women to unite their financial power to achieve a profound impact, with a target to channel $1 billion into women-run venture capital firms.

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings922

More about Julie at How Women Lead

https://www.howwomenlead.com/ and How Women Invest

 https://www.howwomeninvest.com/

Nina Sossamon-Pogue is a sought-after speaker, two-time bestselling author, and entrepreneur whose journey through elite gymnastics, TV anchoring, and Corporate America from startup to IPO defies the ordinary. An Olympic hopeful on the USA Gymnastics team with Mary Lou Retton, an injury crushed her dreams before becoming a catalyst for a 20-year career as an Emmy Award winning journalist and anchor. Another transformative challenge led her to technology and a journey navigating startup growth to a highly successful IPO. Drawing on her expertise across communications, corporate leadership and resilience research, she now helps others conquer life’s obstacles to reach new levels of success. Author of This Is Not the End: Strategies to Get You Through the Worst Chapters of Your Life and But I Want Both: A Working Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life She Loves, Nina also founded the innovative online coaching company Now What Workshop.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

🏆 🏋️‍♀️ What Athletes Teach Entrepreneurs about Resilience: Athletes bring essential skills to business: persistence, discipline, coachability, and the ability to get up after a fall. These skills are game changers in entrepreneurship, where failure is part of the journey. 

🌟✊Past the Pain There’s Gain: From life-changing injury to horrific public tragedy, learn how radical changes in circumstance brought about by unexpected events or challenges can help us all emerge stronger, revitalized and thriving in life’s new chapters.

💼 🚀 Adapting in Business: Sometimes external happenings like tariffs, recessions and pandemics force a change in business strategy and operations. Nina shares how her newly launched public speaking career got sidelined when Covid struck, and how she found the resilience to pivot quickly to grow an even bigger business. 

🌱🔍 The Now What Workshop: If you're in a "now what" moment, learn how Nina’s online coaching provides actionable strategies to help you navigate through crises and find paths forward, no matter the situation, so you do better than “bounce back” by growing stronger and more capable with each new hurdle. 

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings921

More about Nina at Nina Sossamon-Pogue

https://www.ninasossamonpogue.com/ and Now What Workshop https://nowwhatworkshop.com

Donna Letier is the CEO and founder of Gardenuity, a fast-growing company merging gardening with the wellness sector through personalized container gardens and AI-powered gardening experiences. Donna has raised $8 million for her company so far, innovating Gardenuity Match, which uses AI and weather tech to custom-craft gardens around lifestyles, climate and environment. With over 20 years of retail experience, spanning public and private companies, Donna has worked in the areas of operations, brand marketing, and product development, and takes a data-driven approach with a consumer point of view. Previously, she was CMO for a home furnishings brand with over $500M in annual revenue. She has also been part of the marketing team at Neiman Marcus, MGM, Barneys New York, and United Artists. Donna has been featured in Story of a Brand, Cheddar News, Forbes, Tech FW, WFAA #UpWithHer, Growing Spaces, and The Grow Network.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

🌿🌐 Gardening for All: Learn how gardening is being democratizing so that anyone can experience its nutritional and mental health benefits—whether you're in a high-rise, have a backyard, or live in an urban apartment.

🌍🤖 Grounding in a Digital World: Discover how gardening can improve your mental health by grounding you in the present, away from the hustle and bustle of technology and constant connectivity. Learn the holistic wellness benefits that come with getting your hands in the soil.

🌱💡 AI and Gardening: How AI is being used to personalize gardening experiences, from weather tech and predictive alerts to understanding what plants most align to climate, lifestyle and circumstance—to ensure your success, no matter where you live.

🔥🛠️Entrepreneurial Insights: What gardening can teach us about the entrepreneurial process – resilience, innovation and adaptability – from sprouting to pruning and seasons of growth.

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings920

More about Donna at Gardenuity

Melissa Broughton is a tax and accounting specialist and the founder of Busy Bee Advisors, helping business owners and entrepreneurs get savvy about complex, even frustrating, tax and bookkeeping situations. Her background in corporate accounting and auditing complements her desire to serve as a financial translator, of sorts, to sole proprietors and small business owners so that they feel confident in their financial decisions. With her husband Eric, a tax professional, Melissa co-hosts a popular podcast, The Real Buzz: Taking the Sting Out of Taxes. She is a member of Business Network International, Rotary, FU Nights, Women in Consulting, and previously served as finance chair on the Sacramento Children's Receiving Home Board of Directors.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

🚀 🌱Why Tax Time Is An Opportunity: Learn to be proactive about your taxes and get early advice from tax professionals.

🤔💭Understanding Uncertainty: With the shifting political landscape, tsunami of Presidential executive orders, and DOGE cuts, make sure you verify facts before making any business decisions based on news or social media.

📈 💡Proactivity over Reactivity: Understanding potential deductions and credits, like R&D tax credits or ADA compliance credits, can result in significant tax savings.

💼🔥Choosing the Right Business Structure: Whether it’s a sole proprietorship, LLC, S Corp, or C Corp, each business entity has different tax implications, and these can change depending on the state.

🛠️✨Tools in Your Arsenal: Why it’s vital to develop a robust toolkit of trusted advisors – including a tax professional, a business attorney, and a financial advisor.

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings919

Get a complimentary copy of Melissa's new book, The 4-Hour Bookkeeper

Listen to Melissa’s podcast The Real Buzz: Taking the Sting Out of Taxes

Rebecca Fitzsimmons is the founder of Tactical Harmony, an online business dedicated to mentoring ambitious professionals and businesses on holistic leadership and mindset strategies. She is also the host of the Tactical Harmony podcast, in which she shares game-changing tactics supporting her community to gracefully navigate their career and homelife, while enjoying freedom, abundance and bliss. Over the last two decades, Rebecca served as an NCIS Special Agent and as a senior leader at a technology company. Throughout her global experience living and working around the world, Rebecca saw first-hand why holistic leadership answers every challenge. Rebecca is also author of the new book, Unleashed: Holistic Leadership Insights from Our Canine Companions.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

✨ 🌱 Holistic Leadership: Discover the core pillars of Tactical Harmony—planning, alignment, execution, and receiving—designed to balance professional and personal life so you can achieve wholeness, peace, and freedom, aiming for genuine fulfillment.

🐾 🦋What Dogs Can Teach Us: How our furry friends can teach us mindfulness, gratitude, discipline, love, and resilience.

🌟💡Tactical Harmony's Dual Approach: Learn the two-track approach for mastering mindset to overcome limiting beliefs, enhance leadership skills master conflict resolution.

🧘‍♀️🔄 Mastering Self-Leadership: Why it’s vital to envision success to achieve it, plus the secrets of mental preparation, and following your intuition no matter how illogical it may seem to others.

🚀 💪Entrepreneurial Challenges: How to transition from the hands-on “doing it all” start-up founder roles to building and aligning a team for growth, and why strategic focus always beats multitasking.

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes here: https://bit.ly/wings918

More about Rebecca at Tactical Harmony

Get 50% off Tactical Harmony’s Essential Guide For Busy Pro's: How to Lower Stress, Boost Productivity and Operate At Peak Performance. Use code WINGS50

Subscribe to Rebecca’s podcast Tactical Harmony

Lauren Bayne is a personal brand creative director, advising entrepreneurs and executive leaders in building personal brands filled with personality and creating intellectual property that makes her clients money. Coming from the advertising industry, Lauren brings creative expression and pizazz to personal branding that gives her clients confidence to stand out from the crowd with bold and entertaining presence. She specializes in helping entrepreneurs, speakers, coaches, authors, consultants, and professionals express their unique personal brands through distinctive, brag-worthy marketing assets.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

🌍🌙Power of Polarization: Not everyone is going to love your brand, and that's okay. Learn why repelling as well as attracting can be an asset in attracting your ideal audience and customers. Hint: Embrace self-love and stop caring about being liked.

🌐🔄Conformity is Your Enemy: Authenticity is the key to branding success in a world where trust is at a premium, and if you try to conform to something you’re not, you’ll never succeed at building a trusted brand.

👩‍🔬 🤟 Start With Your Who (Not Why or What): Learn why self-knowledge is vital to building a successful brand. When you know yourself and your values, you’re more likely to attract customers who resonate with you and developing offerings and messaging that attracts your ideal buyers.

🚀 🎙️ Aligning Visual with Voice: Make sure your visual identity rhymes with your brand voice so you can stand out in the noisy “attention economy”.

🔥 💼 Balancing Personal and Business Branding: For those concerned about tying their brand too closely to their personal identity, learn how to create a legacy that can live on even if you step away.

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/wings917

More about Lauren at Lauren Bayne where you can get a free 30-minute Dreamcatcher Call

Kari Poppleton is the CEO and founder of Kari Poppleton Consulting, specializing in digital marketing metrics, data, and custom interactive dashboards. A Certified Director of Operations and Certified Dashboard Designer, Kari helps online entrepreneurs, course creators, coaches, and anyone with memberships and subscriptions, leverage actionable data analytics to make informed real time and strategic decisions.  Kari also founded the handmade kids accessory e-commerce business, Snugglywunkins.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

📈 🚀 Know Your Numbers: How your data tells the story of your business, and why it’s vital to have systems in place that monitor your KPIs in real time to help you make the right decisions to grow your company.

🖥️ 💰Dashboards to Dollars: Learn how Kari’s custom dashboards provide easy-to-understand visualization for accessible and integrated analytics that consolidate information from multiple platforms so you can optimize marketing and sales.

🧠✨Overcome Data Overwhelm: Start small, with specific questions, and track the impact with foundational tools like Google Analytics and UTM parameters so you can get comfortable tracking your numbers as you test, measure and learn what works best for your business.

🤖 💡 AI in Data Visualization: AI hasn't revolutionized data visualization just yet, learn some practical AI uses for writing complex formulas and analyzing data to identify growth opportunities. 

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings916

More about Kari at Kari Poppleton

Get Kari’s free guide "5 Questions Your Data Can Answer for You"

Somia Sadiq is an award-winning entrepreneur and peacebuilder who has developed a pioneering practice in impact assessment and conflict transformation rooted in storytelling. Somia is the founder and CEO of Narratives, a planning firm that emphasizes human-centric, trauma-informed dialogue, lived experience, and celebrating ancestral identity. She’s also the founder of Kahanee, a non-profit organization that works nationally and internationally interweaving stories to support peacebuilding efforts. Somia is a published author and a keynote speaker, offering insights on trauma-informed leadership, and fostering resilience in a rapidly changing environment. Recognized for her contributions to the Planning practice in Canada and globally, Somia was recently inducted into the Canadian Institute of Planners' esteemed College of Fellows, the highest honor for a planner in Canada. Her new book Garajah will be published in August 2025.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

🛑 💪Failure is Not a Taboo: Learn why failing is a vital prerequisite for success as an entrepreneur. (Hint: If you’re not failing you’re not taking enough risks and playing too small a game).

🚀 💡Overcoming Risk Adversity: Playing it safe often kills entrepreneurial dreams, so learn how to effectively balance risk and reward and operate from a spirit of abundance rather than scarcity.

👩‍🔬 🤟Own Your Journey:  No one can walk your path for you, you have to do it. If you want something, dream it, chase it, ask for feedback, ask to be on that exciting project, show that you are keen, make it happen. If you fail, figure out why, reconfigure and keep wading. Expecting the world to do it for you won't work.

🤝 🤎Fostering Dialogue and Inclusivity: With inspiration from Rumi and an emphasis on positive storytelling, Somia shares how her company, Narratives, and her nonprofit, Kahani empower people through Indigenous stories, community planning, and peace-building efforts.

🌍❤️ Building Communities: Learn how to create effective allies who inspire, challenge and teach you, plus how to apply Somia's experience uniting diaspora communities in Canada through storytelling events that address conflicts, racism, and a sense of belonging. Learn how to create effective allies who inspire, challenge and teach you

📚 Somia’s Upcoming Novel: Dive into the themes explored in Somia’s forthcoming novel, "Gujarat," a journey through justice, forgiveness, and trauma narrated by a young girl and interwoven with poetry and prose.

and spiritual growth.

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings915

More about Somia at Narratives Inc

www.narrativesinc.com and Somia Sadiq 

Get 20% off for a virtual or in-person Trauma Informed Practices workshop. Email [email protected] and provide the reference code *WINGS20*

Susan Sly is an award-winning AI entrepreneur, author, keynote speaker, and the Founder and CEO of thePause.ai, an AI-driven platform revolutionizing menopause management with personalized, gamified solutions. In November, thePause.ai won first place in the HITLAB x Versalie™ Innovation Challenge. Susan also co-founded RadiusAI, a visual intelligence company specializing in the retail and healthcare sectors. RadiusAI earned the prestigious AI Innovator at The Edge award from VentureBeat in 2022 for its cutting-edge computer vision technology. Susan also hosts two podcasts, Raw and Real Entrepreneurship and The Menopause Health Podcast.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

🔥 🤖 Transformative Power of Agentic AI: How autonomous “AI agents” are revolutionizing business operations and decision-making processes, enabling smaller teams to achieve more by process immense volumes of data and interact with each other to assist humans in decision-making, and what it means for the future of work.

🏥 🌱 AI in Health and Wellness: How thePause.ai is personalizing solutions for menopause management, from tracking symptoms to offering lifestyle recommendations.

💡 🌈 AI Ethics and Transparency: Who trains the AI? What biases lurk in the data? Why transparent, unbiased, inclusive and validated data is vital for the responsible deployment of AI solutions, so AI models are fair, equitable, and representative of the diverse populations they serve. 

💡 🧑‍💻 Company Policies: It’s time to move beyond just the Company Employee Handbook. Learn why all companies need clear AI Mission Statements to align their AI initiatives with ethical standards, the advantages of having an AI steering committee comprising diverse perspectives.

👩‍🔬 💪Empowering Women in AI: Why women’s leadership in AI is vital, both in the architecture of the underlying data models and their application.

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings914

More about Susan at ThePause.ai