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Women own 40.6% of U.S. businesses and generate 4.6% of the revenue. A lot of that gap comes down to who gets let into the room, whether that's capital, networks or a mentor who has actually done it. And an entire industry has figured out how to charge us for it. There's the $20,000 retreat at a luxury hotel, the $1,000 "intimate" dinner marketed to thousands of people, and the $130,000 mastermind. Look closely and what they're charging for is access we were denied, sisterhood with a price tag, and promises nobody can keep, usually sold to the founders who can least afford to guess wrong. This week, I sit down with Lindsay Pinchuk, who built Bump Club into a seven-figure business, sold it, and now runs Dear FoundHer, a podcast with more than 300 episodes and a community for women business owners over 40. After a woman stopped her at the gym to ask about her nieces' $20,000 retreat, Lindsay went public with what she's been seeing. Together we get into what the women founder industry is really charging us for, and why I hold GSD to the same test. What We Break Down: "I don't need to buy sisterhood": Why Lindsay turned down two $800 to $1,000 dinners sold as a table of amazing women, and how she has built her own tables since 2010.The $20,000 retreat question: What Lindsay found when she looked into a retreat sold to women who were just getting started.Why the pitch works on us: How revenue screenshots hide the cost behind them, including a coach Lindsay estimates spends $200,000 a month on ads.The tests that cut through it: The tangible-takeaways question, checking a seller's track record outside her referrals, and watching whether she ever platforms her clients.What actually paid her back: A podcast class, three virtual assistants, and a $3,000-a-month ads manager who returned more than four times the investment, hired only in year five.Holding ourselves accountable: Why I won't guarantee results at GSD, and why I tell people up front who we're not for. Continue with this week's free Growth Playbook: We take the story one step further by exploring what the women founder industry is really charging us for and how to stop paying for access you can build yourself, then give you one concrete move to make in your own business this week. You'll also get a look at what's happening inside the GSD community, including the progress we're celebrating and the ways founders are collaborating to help one another move. Want support putting it into action? Paid GSD members get the accountability, connections and support to keep moving. That includes a monthly Community Traction Lab to work through real business challenges together, a quarterly Growth Planning Party to review progress and plan what's next, feedback and introductions from other founders, and our full library of classes, templates and Playbooks. Read the free Growth Playbook on Substack 👉 http://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

Before a lot of women founders take an investor meeting, we text each other one question: "Have you ever met with him?" That text exists because the institutions around us don't protect us. When the person you'd have to report is the person deciding whether your company gets funded, staying quiet stops being a choice and becomes survival, for you and for everyone who depends on your business. This month, a lawsuit at Cornell alleges that seven fraternity members drugged and gang raped a student and invited the rest of the house to join through a group chat. It raised the same question for anyone building inside an elite institution: who does the system actually protect? So we're re-releasing our conversation on sexual harassment while fundraising. Alex Batdorf, a three-time founder with one exit, sits down with Helena Fogarty and Megan French Dunbar, to share their own accounts of what happened to them while they were raising money for their companies. What We Break Down: The Whisper Network as Due Diligence: Why women founders vet investors through private group chats, and what it costs us to do the institution's job for free.The Math Behind Staying Quiet: Startups founded entirely by women get about 1% of venture dollars. When capital is that scarce, reporting the person who controls it can cost you the company.Who Gets Treated as the Risk: Research puts false reports between 2% and 10%, yet according to RAINN, 975 of every 1,000 perpetrators walk free. Women are still the ones treated as liars.What Happens in Public Tells You About Private: Alex shares how the man who assaulted her did it in front of a group of people, and what that kind of boldness says about the culture that allowed it.Why This Isn't Men vs. Women: Someone in that fraternity captured the Snapchat, and that screenshot is now at the center of the case. Changing this culture takes more people willing to break the silence, and institutions that make it safe to do so. This episode is for you if you've ever weighed whether to take a meeting with an investor you'd heard things about, if you've stayed quiet about something because the person responsible had a say in your funding, or if you lead an accelerator, fund or university and want to understand what your founders may not be telling you. Read the full piece, free on Substack, on how institutions protect predators and what it will take to build a culture of consent instead. If this episode brings anything up for you, RAINN's National Sexual Assault Hotline is 800-656-HOPE. Learn More + Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

Your business still runs through you, and you're starting to feel it. The instincts that got you off the ground, like control, urgency and owning every detail, are the same ones that can quietly cap how far your business grows. The startup world keeps rewarding those instincts anyway. Investors still picture a certain kind of founder, and some of the most celebrated founders of the last decade, from Theranos to FTX, played that role right up until it all came apart. Susanna Kislenko has spent her career studying why. She founded the Founder Leadership Research Lab at Kellogg College, University of Oxford, and has interviewed founders in more than 30 countries. In this episode, Alex and Susanna dig into founder syndrome: what it is, why it happens, and how to catch it before your business can't grow without you. What We Break Down: The Question That Reveals Founder Syndrome: Susanna asks every founder whether they see themselves more as a founder or a leader, and who their hero is. The answers tell her more than most founders realize.When Startup Strengths Become Growth Limits: How the control you needed early turns into a bottleneck later, even at companies with thousands of employees where nobody can move without the founder's approval.What Happens to the People Inside: Susanna's research on star hires who get recruited hard, then diminished once they arrive.How Elizabeth Holmes Became Steve Jobs: Why Holmes pitched Boston first, what happened when the experts said no, and what she changed about herself to get funded in Palo Alto.The Founder Pedestal: How loyal executives, boards, funders and lists like Forbes 30 Under 30 protect founders until they get caught, and why Alex calls that list the next America's Most Wanted.Leading Without the Pedestal: What leader-first founders do differently, including reviews where the team evaluates the founder too. Continue with this week's free Growth Playbook: We take the story one step further by exploring how founder syndrome starts, why the ecosystem keeps rewarding it, and what it costs a business that can't grow past its founder, then give you one concrete move to make in your own business this week. Read the free Growth Playbook on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/ Want support putting it into action? Paid GSD members get the accountability, connections and support to keep moving. That includes a monthly Community Traction Lab to work through real business challenges together, a quarterly Growth Planning Party to review progress and plan what's next, feedback and introductions from other founders, and our full library of classes, templates and Playbooks.

Alex Schinasi built Hulken into an eight-figure business with two employees, and she didn't spend a dollar on ads for the first two years. She grew it niche by niche: one DM from a thrifter turned into a partnership offer from Poshmark. She did the same thing with makeup artists, then professional organizers. This momentum later turned into major brand deals with brands like Supreme. In this episode, Alex walks through how that thrifter DM turned into Poshmark reaching out to her, why she waited until Hulken was mid eight figures to spend a dollar on branding, the exact return she required before she'd let a channel that was already converting organically become a paid one, and how shes's scalin to $100M with > 10 employees. What We Break Down: The Niche Before The Budget: why Alex built her acquisition engine on niches small enough to win one person at a time, not audiences big enough to need an ad budget.The Free Ask That Wasn't a Favor: what she offered thrifters and makeup artists, and why it solved a real problem instead of asking for content in return.The 5-to-1 Rule: the exact return she required before turning on paid ads for a channel already converting for free.Profit First, Every Time: why she never raised outside funding for Hulken, and what her family's manufacturing relationship made possible instead.Eight Figures, Eight People: how she's staying intentionally small, using agencies instead of headcount, and why she thinks she can hit nine figures under ten employees. Paid Subscribers Get Access To: this week's Growth Playbook, where Alex's story becomes a repeatable system for finding the customer group already pulling your product forward, before you spend a dollar promoting it. Paid subscribers also get The Collective, our private founder community, where you can bring your niche list and get real feedback before you make the ask. Learn More + Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

Burnt out, overwhelmed, optimistic but feeling meeehhh? That's what founders in the Get Sh!t Done community have been telling Alex the last few weeks. Deals may be taking longer to close right now, no matter your stage, no matter how long you've been doing this. And the instinct when things get harder is to grip tighter and try to do more of it alone. Alex's answer is the opposite: stop trying to do this by yourself, and start building channel partners, the strategic partnerships where you're usually not even exchanging money, just access. In this episode, Alex walks through her full 7-step Channel Partner Framework, goal, offer, who, partner types, short list, ask, and activation, and tells the real stories behind how she's developed channel partnerships and how brands you know of have. What We Break Down: The Goal Before the Ask: why the founders who actually land partners get quantified before they ever reach out, not after.The Offer That Isn't Tit for Tat: how to build something a partner says yes to that isn't a mirror trade.The Who and the Seven Partner Types: the categories of channel partners most founders never think to pitch, including two that are probably already inside your target company right now.The Ask, In Alex's Actual Words: the exact phrasing she uses to open a partnership conversation.The Follow-Up Gap: the one habit almost every founder skips, and the number that proves it.SipFit x Google: how one free office fitting through a single contact became a nationwide channel, then a client relationship. Paid Subscribers Get Access To: this week's Growth Playbook, where Alex breaks down all 7 steps of the Get Sh!t Done Channel Partner Framework with a real action for each one, plus copy-and-send outreach templates so you can build your own partner list this week. Paid subscribers also get The Collective, our private founder community, where three members are already building their own partner lists together after this week's coaching call. Learn More + Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

Dolly Parton passed away on August 25th. By the time she did, this woman who started out as the fourth of twelve kids in rural Tennessee had built an estimated net worth of $450 million. So how did she get there? Beyond having an incredible, game-changing career, she stopped trying to do everything herself, and she built the capacity to prosper, and to circulate that prosperity back out to the people around her. This week, Alex walks through Dolly Parton's entire business journey using the Get Sh!t Done Prosperity Ecosystem, the five-pillar framework this whole show is built on: vision, oxygen, capacity, prosperity, and stewardship. From the radio show her Uncle Bill got her onto at 10 years old, to the song credited to him instead of her because she was too young to sign her own publishing contract, to the night she said no to Elvis Presley's team and reportedly cried through it, to an estimated $165 million theme park stake she never had to run herself. What We Break Down: The ownership lesson she learned at 13: Why "Puppy Love," the first song Dolly ever wrote, was legally credited to her Uncle Bill instead of her, and why that shaped how she handled every deal after it.The night she said no to Elvis: The real story behind refusing to hand over half the publishing rights to "I Will Always Love You," and the $3 million lawsuit from Porter Wagoner that came before it.How she built capacity beyond herself: Sandollar Productions, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Dollywood partnership with the Herschend family that turned into an estimated $165 million stake she never had to run day to day.What $450 million actually bought her: How a $120 million song catalog and a theme park she didn't personally operate turned into freedom, not just money.What she did with all of it: The Buddy Program, the Imagination Library, and why Dolly's giving looked structurally different from most celebrity philanthropy. Paid Subscribers Get Access To: this week's Growth Playbook, where we break down How to Build Capacity by Developing the Right Partnerships, a specific way to identify the one asset only you bring and find the right partner to build the rest with you, plus access to The Collective to workshop your own capacity gap with other founders doing the same work. Learn More + Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

You are trying to build something in an industry where the market keeps rewarding the cheapest option. You have run the math. You cannot match the price. And every time you try to compete anyway, you end up either losing the margin you need or losing the contract. Most founders in this position keep trying to close the price gap. Kathy Cheng went the other direction entirely. Kathy is the founder of Redwood Classics Apparel and president of WS and Co., a family-owned Canadian garment manufacturer that has been operating for nearly 40 years. In 2008, after the offshore wave shrunk her family's factory from nearly 500 employees to around 100, she and her father made the decision to restructure to 40 people and go all-in on made-in-Canada. She built a Tier 2 supplier model inside the $28 billion branded merchandise industry, a four-part value proposition that removes price from the conversation entirely, and an internal supplier diversity policy where over half of factory spend goes to women-owned and minority-owned businesses. What We Break Down: The constraint-based positioning decision: How Kathy identified what domestic production made structurally possible that offshore could not replicate, and built her entire value proposition around those four things instead of price.The Tier 2 distribution play: Why she sold through branded merchandise distributors rather than direct to corporations, and how that decision got her into a $28 billion industry without building a sales team from scratch.How Redwood Classics was actually born: A customer tracked down the factory through a CA number on a label to find a sweatshirt they had washed a million times and could not find anywhere else. What that call told Kathy about who was actually buying and why.Certification as a capacity tool: Why she pursued CAMSC certification not primarily for business leads but for executive education at Tuck Business School at Dartmouth, fully funded by GM, and what that reframe means for founders eligible for certification right now.The factory floor moment: What she felt standing among her makers when the word got out the factory might close, and why that emotion became the entire strategic foundation of what she built next.The internal diversity spend commitment: How Kathy operationalized a policy where over half of her factory's spend goes to women-owned and minority-owned businesses, and why she believes the ultimate goal is a world where programs like this are no longer necessary. This episode is for you if you are running a product or service business where price pressure never lets up, if you have been wondering whether supplier diversity certification is worth pursuing, or if you are trying to find a distribution strategy that does not require you to build a full sales infrastructure from scratch. Paid Subscribers Get Access To: The Price-Proof Value Proposition Framework, a named, structured, step-by-step system for identifying your operational constraints and rebuilding your positioning around them so price stops being the deciding factor in your sales conversations. Plus access to The Collective, a community of founders and ecosystem builders working through the exact same questions, together. Learn More + Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

You hit the number. The revenue milestone, the press hit, the round you'd been chasing for years. And you felt nothing. Or worse, you felt like it wasn't even real. That's not a personal failing. It's what happens when you build a business around what success is supposed to look like instead of how you actually want to feel. This week, I sit down with Claire Wasserman, founder of Ladies Get Paid, who built her business the way most of us are taught to, brand deals, national press, a book deal, over a million dollars in revenue, and still ended up on food stamps in that same five year stretch. What We Break Down The whiplash: How Claire went from seven figures to food stamps in the same five years, and what actually caused it.The reframe that changed everything: Why Claire stopped asking what success looks like and started asking what it feels like.The body keeps score: The herniated disc, the doctor's question, and what it costs to never process a crisis.Rebuilding on purpose: How Claire went from one revenue stream to three, and why premium pricing over volume finally gave her peace. This episode is for you if you've ever hit a goal and felt strangely empty, if your business has ever depended on one client, one platform, or one budget line that could disappear overnight, or if you've been pushing through stress and calling it resilience. Paid Subscribers Get Access To: this week's Growth Playbook, The Feeling-First Revenue Model, the exact framework for building your revenue decisions around how you actually want to feel instead of what success is supposed to look like from the outside. Plus direct access to our Group Chat, where founders trade real feedback on the stuff they can't post publicly yet. Become a paid subscriber and get this week's playbook here: https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

You built a business people actually need a human for. Then you started treating every part of it like a problem to automate, or you got so scared of losing the human touch that you wouldn't touch technology at all. Neither one is a strategy. There's a more precise way to decide what stays human in your business, and almost nobody teaches it. This week Alex talks with Nicole Wood, cofounder of Ama La Vida, about exactly that. Plus why she thinks the word "coach" has become almost a punchline, and what an entire industry got wrong by scaling for scale's sake. What We Break Down: Why coaching got predatory: Why Nicole watched an industry flood with people promising outcomes they had no business promising, and why she built the opposite kind of company on purpose.Tech-enabled, not tech-first: Why she built Ama La Vida around protecting the coach-client relationship instead of the platform, and what that protected as the company scaled past 35 coaches.The hybrid model that actually worked: How e-coaching software handles the surface-level reflection between sessions so coaches can go straight to the human challenge.Bootstrapped to multi-millions: How $8,000 each and no funding round became a business that's doubled revenue year over year.Why the relationship doesn't end at the first goal: The internal rule, "always be bettering," that turns one-time clients into years of revenue.Rejecting the headline path on purpose: Why Nicole had 10 conversations with founders who took the VC route before deciding Ama La Vida wouldn't. The episode gives you Nicole's story. The playbook gives you something to actually build with. Paid Subscribers Get Access To: the Multi-Million Dollar Service Model, the exact way to decide which part of your business gets to stay human and which part is free to scale, so you can grow without losing the thing people are actually paying you for + access to a community of other badass founders getting it done together Learn More  + Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

You may be one of the smartest people in the room. You work harder than anyone else, you have done everything right, and yet it still feels like it is not translating. The deals are not closing the way they should. And then you start coming down on your price before anyone even asks, out of fear you asked for too much. Yes. The system was not built for you to win and it has done a number on how we see ourselves and what we believe we are allowed to ask for. But sometimes we are also the barrier. We are the ones folding before anyone called our bluff. My guest today has spent 20 years at the intersection of both truths. Ellen Leikind spent 15 years at Pfizer and L'Oréal launching over a billion dollars in products before she founded PokerDivas in 2005. She is the creator of the BOLD Negotiation System, the author of PokerWoman: How to Win at Love, Life and Business Using the Principles of Poker, and one of the most practical voices on negotiation, access, and strategic confidence working today. She has worked with Fortune 500 companies, spoken at Chief, and spent two decades teaching women the rules of a game nobody wrote down for us. What We Break Down: Playing to win vs. playing not to lose: What fear-based play actually looks like in a negotiation, a pitch, or a room where you are the only woman and how to catch yourself doing it.The BOLD System: Ellen's four-part negotiation framework built specifically for the moment the ask is for you, not for your client or your company.Reading the room: How to walk into any high-stakes environment and understand who holds power before you say a word.The rooms we were never in: Why poker became the new golf and what it has cost women that we were not at either table.When folding is the move: How to know the difference between playing it wrong and just getting unlucky and why that question changes everything. How to Get Sh!t Done Become a paid subscriber and get this week's playbook HERE on Substack.Check out How We Support Entrepreneurs HERE Check out How We Partner HERE

Shawna Ruff was five days into writing government grants without sleeping when she ended up on her couch at 3am, crying into a bowl of cereal. She made it to her whiteboard instead. By morning she had the first version of what became Rayla AI. That's the version of this story nobody tells you when they say "go get equity-free government funding." The money is real, especially from SBIR, NSF, the America Seed Fund. This is non-dilutive capital available right now when most VC doors are closed. But there are 900+ trigger words that auto-reject proposals before a human ever reads them. There are portal registrations that take weeks to process. There are AI screeners flagging LLM-generated applications. And I know personally that you can do everything right and still have the entire round shut down when the political landscape shifts. This week Shawna breaks down the whole system on how to validate eligibility before you write, what the compliance layer actually requires, and how to build from Phase 1 all the way to $30M in Phase 3 commercialization. What we break down: The 900+ trigger words: Words and phrases that auto-reject your proposal before anyone reads it — and the language that wins instead.What "dual use" actually means: Who qualifies, who doesn't, and why your SaaS product probably isn't it.Your bio sketch is carrying more weight than you think: At early phases the government is funding a team. Most founders write this last.Phase 1 to Phase 3: From $275K to $30M and what they need to see at every stage.This episode is for you if you've been curious about government funding. This week's Growth Playbook goes deep on everything we covered. Paid subscribers have it in their inbox now. Become a paid subscriber and get this week's playbook here: https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

You've pitched fifteen investors. You've heard "come back when you have more traction" a hundred-eleven times. And you're starting to wonder if the problem is you, your deck, your story, your timing. It's not. The problem is the capital stack you've been told to pursue is structurally misaligned with the stage you're actually in. There is a $5 billion-a-year government program that has been funding pre-revenue, pre-MVP technology startups since 1982. It takes zero equity. You keep your IP. The government doesn't want a board seat or day-to-day control. They fund you, you solve the problem, and they get the indirect return of jobs, innovation, and tax revenue down the line. It's called SBIR and most founders have never seriously looked at it. This week I'm talking to Jerry Hollister, who spent nearly a decade helping a company pull in $50M in government funding to develop cancer treatment technology when every VC and angel said no. That same company now has a $120M supply agreement with Novartis — the largest radiopharmaceutical company in the world — plus deals with AstraZeneca and Bayer. Jerry has since helped technology companies across 30 states navigate the same path. He also serves as a reviewer for four of the eleven SBIR agencies, so he knows what's on the scoring sheet from both sides. What we break down: The three scoring criteria every SBIR application is graded on: Science, team, and commercial pathway — and why most technical founders fail on criteria two and threeWhat "traction" looks like before you have revenue: Pilots, letters of support, contingent purchase orders — and why customer discovery that causes you to pivot is actually proof of readinessThe free government resource most founders have never heard of: The FAST Program, which funds professional SBIR consulting in every state at little to no cost to foundersWhy this is a both/and capital strategy: How to think about SBIR alongside private capital — and the story of the $30M Novartis equity deal they turned downThe SBIR reauthorization drama and what it means now: The program expired, sat dormant through a government shutdown and months of political chaos, and was finally signed for six more years in AprilThis episode is for you if you're building a technology-based company, you're pre-revenue or pre-MVP, and you've been told by private investors you're too early or you've been raising for a while and need to understand every legitimate capital option on the table. Ready to go deeper? This week's Growth Playbook breaks down how to evaluate whether your company qualifies, what reviewers are actually scoring, how to build the team composition that wins, and how to find free consulting support in every state. Subscribe on Substack and you get the full playbook plus access to The Collective — our private founder community where you can bring your specific questions and keep building alongside people doing the same work. Become a paid subscriber and get this week's playbook HERE:https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

You worked for years to get a buyer to say yes, and when they finally did, you celebrated. Then the invoices started arriving. Slotting fees, spoilage allowances, distributor margins, demo days, and the math started not adding up. The retailer is making money. The distributor is making money. The freight carrier is making money. You are covering the gap with revenue from another part of the business and telling yourself this is what growth looks like. This is the CPG margin trap. And it's not a mistake you made. It's how the system is built. Teresa Ging has been running Sugar Bliss for 19 years — bootstrapped, 100% owner, zero outside investors. She's in the Chicago Bears, McCormick Place, Mariano's, and airport locations. She also spent two years inside conventional retail and is now exiting it strategically. Not because she failed. Because she ran the numbers and made a decision. What we break down: The real CPG cost stack: Co-manufacturer, distributor, freight, retailer margin, slotting fees, spoilage allowances — Teresa walks through every layer that takes money before it ever reaches the founder.The margin floor you need before you sign anything: Teresa's rule is 40 to 50% starting margin. By the time the channel takes its cut, that number will be much smaller. If you start lower, you are already behind.How to use shelf presence as a marketing play: Teresa's $115 shipper display in 35 Mariano's locations was never a profit center. It was a marketing buy. Knowing the difference changes every channel decision you make.The relationship pipeline that actually lands enterprise accounts: One conference. One scholarship application. One yes to a random water tasting. Those are the moves that got Sugar Bliss into the Chicago Bears and McCormick Place — not a broker.How to set a channel exit benchmark: Teresa gave her broker a hard target: 300+ stores by end of 2025. If it didn't hit, she was out. That kind of pre-commitment is how you make a clean decision without ego getting in the way.When to walk away from a retailer on principle: Teresa declined a major retailer that publicly pulled back on diverse supplier spending. She explains why, and what she observed happen to their sales as a result.This week's Growth Playbook breaks down the full CPG cost stack, Teresa's pricing framework, how to evaluate any channel before you enter it, and the relationship-building practice that has driven Sugar Bliss's biggest accounts. Paid subscribers also get the Run This Play steps and the post-event follow-up template ready to send. The Collective is where we talk through the channel decisions you're sitting on right now — bring yours. Become a paid subscriber and get this week's playbook here: https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

You built the company. You are the company. And that can feel like a strength until something goes wrong and you realize you have nowhere to stand that wasn't inside that one entity you'd poured everything into. That's the trap most founders don't see until they're already in it. This week, Lisa Bragg joins us. She's a former broadcast journalist, founder of Media Face, and author of Bragging Rights. She built a multi-million dollar content company in Canada through government contracts and journalistic credibility and then hit a legal situation that made her want to walk away. She couldn't. Not because the situation required her to stay, but because she'd never built herself as a portable asset. That crisis became the clarity that changed everything. What we break down: The RFP unlock: How Lisa turned a failed government bid into a feedback loop — and why the debrief she requested was worth more than the contract she didn't getThe identity trap: What happens when your company's reputation and your personal credibility are the same thing, and one of them hits a wallMarketing to your future self: The specific framing shift Lisa made to stop leading with where she'd been and start signaling where she was goingThe gazelle decision: How Lisa scaled back from 12 to 20 employees, made more money, and slept better — and why she calls that successBragging as service: The reframe that makes self-promotion feel less like ego and more like clarity for the people you're meant to helpThis episode is for you if you've ever realized your business is growing but you personally feel stuck, if you're doing great work and nobody outside your immediate network knows it, or if you've thought about a second revenue stream but can't figure out where you'd even begin. The paid playbook this week goes deep on all three plays: building portable credibility outside your company, using government RFPs as a scalable revenue channel, and signaling your future positioning before you have the receipts to prove it. Become a paid subscriber and get this week's playbook HERE

The Supreme Court just gutted the Voting Rights Act. A law people marched for, bled for, died for. And if you're paying attention, it's hard not to feel like the ground is shifting under everything you've built. Rights that took decades to embed into law are being rolled back in real time. And the question underneath all of it is the same one founders have always had to answer: how do you build something durable inside a system that was never designed for you to win? Here's what history keeps showing me. This is not new. This is the same playbook that gets run every time Black people, women, and communities that were never supposed to have power start accumulating too much of it. The mechanism doesn't change. Only the legal instrument does. Mary Ellen Pleasant figured this out in 1852. She arrived in San Francisco as a Black woman with no legal right to testify in court if someone robbed her, built what would today be worth nearly $864 million, secretly funded John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry, and won a civil rights case against streetcar segregation nearly a century before it became a national conversation. And then the courts found a way to take almost all of it back. Not because she wasn't brilliant. Because her assets were in someone else's name. In this episode, we break down: The access play she ran in 1852 that most founders are still sleeping on: She arrived with $50,000 in gold and took a cook's job. Not because she had to. Because it got her into rooms where the most powerful men in California talked freely about deals that hadn't been announced yet. She was taking notes.How she stacked a near half-billion dollar portfolio in three layers: Service businesses funded access. Access generated intelligence. Intelligence funded investments that compounded without her showing up every day.What actually brought it all down: When her partner Thomas Bell died, his widow went to court and claimed everything. Pleasant had built it all and could not legally prove it was hers. Teresa Bell didn't need to be malicious to win. She just needed paper that Pleasant didn't have.The four things founders can do differently today: From ownership documentation to building equity that doesn't depend on anyone's goodwill to survive.What she chose to put on her tombstone: Not "millionaire." Not "entrepreneur." Four words that tell you exactly what she understood capital to be for.This episode is for you if you're in a partnership that runs more on trust than documentation, if you're building a service business and haven't started converting that income into compounding assets yet, or if you've been watching what's happening politically and wondering what it actually means for what you're building. 🔥 Want to go deeper? This week's paid Growth Playbook breaks down the three-layer wealth structure Pleasant used and how to map it to your business, a step-by-step ownership audit you can run this week, and low-cost legal resources for founders who need to close documentation gaps without a big attorney budget. Paid subscribers also get access to The Collective, our private WhatsApp community where founders are digging into this week's topic together right now. 👉 Become a paid subscriber and get this week's playbook here: https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/subscribe