Get Sh!t Done

Get Sh!t Done
  • 5.0 (63)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Weekly

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. Oct 28

    165: How the Salem Witch Trials Were About Ownership and What Founders Still Sign Away

    You can negotiate a great rate and still sign away your business, because the terms that decide who keeps it are rarely the ones we fight over. In 1692, when the sheriff came to arrest a wealthy Salem woman named Mary English for witchcraft, she told him to come back in the morning, and he did. A year later she came home to find her house, warehouses, wharf and shop emptied, even though she was never convicted of anything. Her money bought her time, but it never bought her a say in when her property could be taken. That is the first unwritten rule we're kicking off this new series with. Women's ownership has always come with conditions attached, and today those conditions live in the contracts founders sign: personal guarantees, cash advances with confessions of judgment, and flat-fee deals that hand someone else the upside. What We Break Down The woman history wrote out: Tituba, an enslaved Indian woman, was the first person accused in Salem, beaten until she confessed and then sold for seven pounds. Her story shows where the ownership ladder starts, and why who you are still shapes the terms you're offered.Seized before a verdict, then and now: The sheriff emptied Mary English's property before any trial, and today a confession of judgment lets a lender freeze a founder's bank account before she's ever heard. New York's 2025 Yellowstone settlement canceled more than $534 million owed by over 18,000 small businesses.Same credit, different terms: Women's credit scores match men's, yet in bank mystery-shopper tests women, especially Black women, got a tougher reception, which pushes many of us toward the fast money where those clauses live.The $500 patent: Lizzie Magie invented the game that became Monopoly and sold her patent for $500 with no royalties, while the man who sold his version became a millionaire. Founders make the same trade every time a flat fee replaces a share of what they built.The woman who started Salem's witch economy: Laurie Cabot opened one of Salem's first witch shops in a town that wanted her gone, and now more than a million people visit every October. She closed her first storefront in 2012, which raises the question every category builder has to answer before she signs. Continue with this week's free Growth Playbook: We take the story one step further by exploring what the witch trials reveal about ownership today, including the 3 contract terms founders still sign away, then give you one concrete move to make in your own business this week. Read the free Growth Playbook on Substack 👉 http://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/ Want support putting it into action? Paid subscribers 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. Get Started on Substack 👉 http://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

  2. Oct 21

    #164: Buying Sisterhood: What the Women Founder Industry Is Really Charging Us For (Lindsay Pinchuk, FounderHer)

    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/

  3. Oct 1

    #163: Entrepreneurship has a Cornell Problem

    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/

  4. Sep 23

    #162: Theranos, FTX and a $175 Million Fraud Share One Founder Pattern. Here's How to Catch It in Your Business (Susanna Kislenko , Founder Leadership Research Lab)

    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.

  5. Sep 16

    #161: How She’s Scaling to $100M with > 10 Employees (Alex Schinasi , Hulken)

    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/

  6. Sep 9

    #160: 7 Steps to Creating Channel Partnerships That Get You In Front of Your Ideal Customer for Free

    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/

  7. Sep 2

    159: The $450 Million Business of Dolly Parton

    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/

  8. Jul 22

    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/

See All (183)

Trailers

5
out of 5
63 Ratings

About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Get Sh!t Done
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    183
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Get Sh!t Done
  • Show Website
    Get Sh!t Done

You Might Also Like