Get Sh!t Done

Get Sh!t Done
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Business as usual is b******t. The Get Sh!t Done Podcast is real talk for entrepreneurs tired of hustling harder inside systems never designed for them to win. Hosted by Alex Batdorf — 3x founder, 1 exit, scaled despite the system. Our guests are women who’ve scaled 7-9 figure businesses and leaders who understand business systems founders navigate every day who walk you through what worked, what didn’t, and what they wish they’d known on the way to scaling. We’re here to help you grow today while uncovering what needs to change so the next generation doesn’t have to fight this hard to win.

  1. 6d ago

    158: How to Stop Competing on Price and Build a Supplier Position Inside a $28 Billion Industry (Kathy Cheng, Redwood Classics Apparel)

    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/

  2. Jul 15

    #157:How She Went From a Million Dollar Business to Food Stamps, Then Rebuilt: The Feeling-First Revenue Model (Claire Wasserman, Ladies Get Paid)

    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/

  3. Jul 8

    #156: The Multi-Million Dollar Service Model: How to Scale a High-Touch Business (Nicole Wood, Ama La Vida) 202

    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/

  4. Jun 24

    #155: Play to Win: How Women Entrepreneurs Can Stop Leaving Money on the Table (Ellen Leikind, PokerDivas)

    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

  5. Jun 10

    #154: How to Write a Winning Grant Proposal to Access $5B in Equity-Free Funding (Shawna Ruff, Inten

    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/

  6. Jun 3

    #153: The $5 Billion Equity-Free Funding You May Be Sleeping On (Jerry Hollister, BBC Entrepreneurial Training & Consulting)

    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/

  7. May 27

    #152: The CPG Margin Trap: How Retail Channels Can Bleed Your Business Dry and How to Protect Yourself (Teresa Ging, Sugarbliss)

    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/

  8. May 13

    #151: She Built a $1M+ Company But Owned Nothing: How to Build a Personal Brand That Survives Your Business (Lisa Bragg, MediaFace) 2023

    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

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Business as usual is b******t. The Get Sh!t Done Podcast is real talk for entrepreneurs tired of hustling harder inside systems never designed for them to win. Hosted by Alex Batdorf — 3x founder, 1 exit, scaled despite the system. Our guests are women who’ve scaled 7-9 figure businesses and leaders who understand business systems founders navigate every day who walk you through what worked, what didn’t, and what they wish they’d known on the way to scaling. We’re here to help you grow today while uncovering what needs to change so the next generation doesn’t have to fight this hard to win.

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  • Creator
    Get Sh!t Done
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    176
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Get Sh!t Done
  • Show Website
    Get Sh!t Done

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