Badass Women in Business

Aggie & Cristy
  • 5.0 (18)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Bimonthly

Welcome to The Badass Women in Business Podcast, the definitive space for unfiltered, tactical insights into female entrepreneurship, enterprise scaling, and business monetization.  Hosted by seasoned business owners, growth partners, and exit strategists Cristy O’Connor and Aggie Chydzinski, this podcast moves past passive advisory to bring you directly inside the high-stakes execution of building and successfully exiting companies on your own terms. As hands-on growth partners who actively engineer scale and value alongside founders, we deliberately strip away the superficiality of traditional corporate highlight reels. Instead, we dissect the raw, hard-earned operational strategies and profound psychological shifts required to unlock true enterprise value.  Each week, our conversations turn systemic business obstacles into high-velocity execution plans, offering sophisticated, real-world frameworks for ambitious women who are leading teams, optimizing cash flow, and engineering highly scalable, exit-ready companies. Whether you are in the trenches of bootstrapping an innovative startup, navigating complex partnership dynamics, or designing the ultimate monetization strategy for your life's work, this podcast provides the active strategy needed to drive valuation and claim full autonomy over your future. Subscribe now to join a premier movement of women rewriting the rules of modern commerce, one definitive story at a time. New episodes deliver partner-level value every Tuesday.

  1. 6d ago

    Her First Project Was $53 Million. Then Came the Hard Part | Melissa Drew

    Send us Fan Mail SUMMARY Most founders spend their first years trying to land a major client. Melissa Drew had the opposite problem: InSite BUILD’s first project was worth $53 million, and once that extraordinary opportunity ended, she faced the harder question of how to turn one big win into a durable business. She shares how strategic partnerships, transparent communication, disciplined planning, and a different approach to leadership are helping her build the pipeline, systems, culture, and confidence required for the next stage of growth. SHOW NOTES Strategic Focus A major opportunity can launch a company, but it cannot build the company for you. Melissa’s story explores what happens after the breakthrough: how a founder moves from executing one enormous project to creating repeatable growth, expanding without losing culture, and deciding which parts of the corporate playbook are worth keeping versus rebuilding. Key Takeaways Melissa launched as a one person company and used a strategic partnership to take the lead on a $53 million project, showing how relationships can create capacity before a young company has built it internally.After three years focused on delivering that anchor project, she says year four feels more like a startup than year one because the challenge has shifted from execution to building backlog and repeatable growth.Empathy does not mean lowering standards. Melissa explains how understanding competing priorities, communicating expectations clearly, and knowing when to apply pressure can strengthen performance and relationships.Confidence was not something Melissa possessed before becoming an entrepreneur. It grew through action, experience, and finally seeing her judgment taken seriously.GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT Melissa Drew is the Founder and CEO of InSite BUILD, a Maryland based general contracting firm specializing in state government projects. She brings more than 20 years of construction experience and is building InSite BUILD around disciplined planning, collaboration, transparency, and long term relationships. InSite BUILD: https://www.insite-build.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissadrew/ Join the proveHER community to continue the conversation with women building and leading businesses. Read the companion Blogcast: https://badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com/bawblog --- Subscribe and Review If you loved this episode, drop us a review, share it with a badass woman in your life, and subscribe to Badass Women in Business wherever you get your podcasts. Stay badass. Stay bold. Build it your way. Keep up with more content from Aggie and Cristy here: Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders  Instagram: @badass_women_in_businessLinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in BusinessWebsite: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.comAthena: athenaac.com

  2. Sep 22

    The Revenue Trap: Why Growing Sales Can Shrink Your Profit | Natalia Zacharin

    Send us Fan Mail A bigger business is not automatically a better business. Natalia Zacharin explains how a company can grow from $1 million to $4 million in revenue and still become less profitable when pricing, hiring, cash flow, and expenses are not managed with financial discipline. This conversation shows founders how to use their numbers to catch problems earlier, price based on the work they actually deliver, and make growth decisions before the consequences hit cash. SHOW NOTES Strategic Focus Growth can create the illusion of progress while quietly weakening the business underneath it. Natalia breaks down the financial decisions founders often delay, from raising prices and hiring the right people to recognizing when a loan is funding productive growth versus covering a deeper cash problem. She also explains the practical difference between a bookkeeper, controller, and fractional CFO, and why financials should help leaders see where the business is going, not simply document where it has been. Key Takeaways Why revenue can rise while profitability falls when expenses grow faster than the business.How underpricing creates operational pain, and why Natalia learned to quote the right price and then stop talking.Why cash shortages can signal deeper problems with pricing, productivity, overspending, or inefficiency.How forecasting lets founders test hiring, investment, and growth decisions six to twelve months before cash becomes the problem.GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT Natalia Zacharin is the founder of Zacharin Consulting, an Inc. 5000 accounting and fractional CFO firm serving service businesses generating $1 million to $30 million in annual revenue. She grew the firm from a solo practice into a multimillion dollar business and now helps founders improve profitability, cash flow, forecasting, and financial decision making. Website: www.zacharinconsulting.com Listener resources: www.zacharinconsulting.com/BWB LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/growyourbottomline Instagram: @growyourbottomline Facebook: facebook.com/zacharinconsulting TikTok: @zacharinconsulting YouTube: youtube.com/@zacharinconsulting Join the proveHER community and read the companion Blogcast to continue the conversation. --- Subscribe and Review If you loved this episode, drop us a review, share it with a badass woman in your life, and subscribe to Badass Women in Business wherever you get your podcasts. Stay badass. Stay bold. Build it your way. Keep up with more content from Aggie and Cristy here: Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders  Instagram: @badass_women_in_businessLinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in BusinessWebsite: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.comAthena: athenaac.com

  3. Sep 15

    Don’t Just Go for It: Mara Smith on Research, Credibility and Building in a New Industry

    Send us Fan Mail SUMMARY Entrepreneurship celebrates action, but Mara Smith makes a strong case for something less glamorous: do the work before you make the leap. After 16 years outside the traditional workforce, she entered the spirits industry with no tequila experience and built Inspiro Tequila through deep research, deliberate credibility building, disciplined growth, and an unwillingness to accept a product that was merely good enough. SHOW NOTES Strategic Focus What does it take to enter an industry where you have no track record and convince customers, distributors, and insiders that you belong? Mara’s answer is not confidence alone. It is preparation, focus, disciplined execution, and earning credibility one decision at a time. Key Takeaways Mara rejects the familiar “just go for it” advice. Before launching, she studied tequila production, regulations, competitors, distribution, and the customer the industry was overlooking.When Inspiro’s first production run failed to meet her standards, she scrapped it rather than blend it into something acceptable, choosing the long term brand over the sunk cost.Growth does not always mean adding more. Mara uses SKU discipline, focused markets, and carefully chosen retail accounts to protect resources and build demand.Reentering business after years away required more than rebuilding a résumé. Mara deliberately built a network of founders and peers and learned to make specific asks when seeking help.GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT Mara Smith is Founder and CEO of Inspiro Tequila, a premium additive free tequila brand with an all women leadership and production team. After careers in accounting, law, and corporate strategy, she spent 16 years outside the traditional workforce raising her family before entering the spirits industry. Inspiro Tequila is woman owned and B Corp certified. Website: https://inspirotequila.com/ Mara on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mara-smith-inspiro/ Inspiro on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/inspiro-tequila Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/inspirotequila/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inspirotequila/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@inspirotequila Join the proveHER community: https://proveher.com/ Read the companion Blogcast: https://badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com/phblog --- Subscribe and Review If you loved this episode, drop us a review, share it with a badass woman in your life, and subscribe to Badass Women in Business wherever you get your podcasts. Stay badass. Stay bold. Build it your way. Keep up with more content from Aggie and Cristy here: Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders  Instagram: @badass_women_in_businessLinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in BusinessWebsite: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.comAthena: athenaac.com

  4. Sep 8

    Women’s Hair Loss Was an Industry Blind Spot. Shab Caspara Built a New Category

    Send us Fan Mail Women struggling with thinning hair were spending money across salons, dermatologists, products, and treatments, yet no one owned the full customer journey. After seeing that gap from behind the chair, Shab Caspara left a highly paid luxury salon career, became a board-certified trichologist, and created New York City’s first hair preservation studio. Her story shows how deep specialization becomes market authority, why customer trust can outperform advertising, and how to prove a category before scaling it. SHOW NOTES Strategic Focus Shab did not begin with a category; she began with women whose hair loss was being disguised, dismissed, or treated in fragments. The deeper business question is how a practitioner recognizes an overlooked customer, builds authority before infrastructure, and trades the original launch plan for a leaner proof of concept without abandoning the larger vision. Key Takeaways  Why women’s hair loss remains underserved even when customers can access leading salons, physicians, products, and treatments.  How consultations and social media revealed what customers had tried, what they would realistically follow, and what the market was still missing.  Why Shab replaced a $1.5 million flagship launch with a $250,000 friends-and-family round and a lean studio built through strategic partnerships.  How deep specialization helped produce a 90 percent consultation-to-package conversion rate without paid marketing, and why authority must come before scale. GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT Shab Caspara is a board-certified trichologist, hair growth expert, and founder of Caspara Hair Preservation Studio in New York City. She advises beauty and haircare brands and helps bridge clinical hair science with practical consumer education.  Website: https://caspara.co LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shab-caspara-bb464210b/ Instagram and TikTok: @shabhairexpert Studio Instagram: @casparastudio Join the proveHER community: https://badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com/subscribe Read the companion Blogcast: https://badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.com/phblog --- Subscribe and Review If you loved this episode, drop us a review, share it with a badass woman in your life, and subscribe to Badass Women in Business wherever you get your podcasts. Stay badass. Stay bold. Build it your way. Keep up with more content from Aggie and Cristy here: Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders  Instagram: @badass_women_in_businessLinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in BusinessWebsite: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.comAthena: athenaac.com

  5. Sep 1

    When Growth Breaks the Model: Deanna Woodroffe on Choosing Better Care Over More Patients

    Send us Fan Mail What happens when growing your business makes it harder to deliver the work you built the company to do? Deanna Woodroffe explains why Vibrant Health of Colorado moved from an insurance based practice serving roughly 7,000 patients to a direct primary care model capped at 1,000, and how that difficult decision changed patient care, provider burnout, and her relationship with the business itself. SHOW NOTES Growth is usually treated as evidence that a business is working, but Deanna's experience raises a harder question: what if the economics driving growth are quietly undermining quality, capacity, and the people delivering the service? Her transition away from insurance based care offers founders a useful case study in redesigning a business model when more customers, more employees, and more revenue no longer produce a better company. Key Takeaways Insurance reimbursement created a growth treadmill: as expenses rose without corresponding increases in reimbursement, maintaining the practice meant adding providers and seeing more patients.Deanna chose to reduce the practice from approximately 7,000 patients to a planned cap of 1,000, trading volume for time, accessibility, deeper patient relationships, and greater clinical capacity.A business model change can be financially sound and still provoke criticism. Deanna discusses learning to make consequential decisions without allowing the desire to keep everyone happy to determine the future of the company.Healthcare taught her a lesson that applies far beyond medicine: caring deeply about the work does not remove the obligation to understand cash flow, overhead, staffing, pricing, and the economics required to keep delivering it.GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT Deanna Woodroffe is the owner of Vibrant Health of Colorado, a two location Colorado medical practice combining traditional, functional, and integrative care. A nurse practitioner with more than 20 years in women's health, she leads an all female nurse practitioner team serving patients in Denver and Eagle. Website: Vibrant Health of Colorado Facebook: Vibrant Health of Colorado Instagram: @vibranthealthofcolorado Join the proveHER community for continued conversations with women building and leading businesses, and read the companion Blogcast for key ideas from the episode. --- Subscribe and Review If you loved this episode, drop us a review, share it with a badass woman in your life, and subscribe to Badass Women in Business wherever you get your podcasts. Stay badass. Stay bold. Build it your way. Keep up with more content from Aggie and Cristy here: Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders  Instagram: @badass_women_in_businessLinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in BusinessWebsite: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.comAthena: athenaac.com

  6. Aug 25

    Charge From Day One: Clara Ma on Bootstrapping a Profitable Community Business

    Send us Fan Mail Many founders try to build a large audience before asking anyone to pay, but Clara Ma built Ask a Chief of Staff around the opposite premise: prove the value first and let committed customers shape what comes next. She explains how charging from day one, staying bootstrapped, hiring for leverage, and protecting her time helped her build a profitable 500+ member community while keeping the business in service of her life rather than the other way around.  SHOW NOTES Strategic Focus At the center of this conversation is a question every founder eventually faces: are you building a business that depends on more of you, or one that creates enough value and leverage to grow beyond you? Clara’s experience shows how pricing, delegation, disciplined hiring, and a clear operating model can shape both profitability and founder freedom. Key Takeaways  Why charging for a community from day one can strengthen perceived value, attract more committed members, and create a healthier participation culture.  How Clara used recruiting revenue to validate demand, then expanded into a paid community rather than overbuilding the business before customers asked for more.  Why hiring an executive assistant in month three created more strategic capacity, and how she now evaluates whether a problem needs automation, a contractor, or a long term team member.  What a Chief of Staff actually does, how the role differs from a COO, and why the best hire is often the person who complements the leader rather than simply matches a title. GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT Clara Ma is the founder and CEO of Ask a Chief of Staff, a bootstrapped community and recruiting platform serving Chiefs of Staff and the executives who hire them. She previously served as a Chief of Staff at Hugging Face during its Series A and was named to the Inc. Magazine 2026 Female Founders 500. Website: askachiefofstaff.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/clarama/ Substack: askachiefofstaff.substack.com YouTube: youtube.com/@askachiefofstaffJoin the proveHER community and read the companion Blogcast for more conversations and practical insights for women building and leading businesses. --- Subscribe and Review If you loved this episode, drop us a review, share it with a badass woman in your life, and subscribe to Badass Women in Business wherever you get your podcasts. Stay badass. Stay bold. Build it your way. Keep up with more content from Aggie and Cristy here: Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders  Instagram: @badass_women_in_businessLinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in BusinessWebsite: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.comAthena: athenaac.com

  7. Aug 18

    The Risk of Doing Nothing: Stephanie Georges on Midlife Reinvention for Women Over 50

    Send us Fan Mail The most dangerous career risk for many experienced women is not the leap, but staying in roles and systems that keep minimizing their power. Stephanie Georges brings four decades of Wall Street and C suite transformation experience to a sharper conversation about dignity, agency, AI, and why midlife can become a serious entrepreneurial advantage when women stop waiting for permission and start building the conditions for their next chapter. SHOW NOTES Strategic Focus This conversation asks what happens when highly capable women reach the edge of reinvention and realize that competence alone will not protect their purpose, health, or power. For founders and executives, Stephanie’s lens is especially useful because she treats dignity not as a soft idea, but as a strategic operating principle for making decisions, designing better systems, and building platforms that serve women with more precision. Key Takeaways Why the real risk may be staying too long in a role, relationship, or system that quietly drains agency.How dignity offers a broader, less zero sum frame than equity for changing the narrative around women’s power.Why women over 50 carry underrecognized economic, professional, and lived experience that the business world has not fully learned how to value.How AI can become more useful for women when it is trained around women’s language, research, health needs, and workplace realities rather than generic assumptions.GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT Stephanie Georges is a seasoned executive, strategist, Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Senior Fellow, and co creator of The Meraki Dignity Project, a women’s movement and AI enabled platform supporting women over 50 through major life transitions. Website: https://www.merakidignity.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/merakidignity/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/merakidignity/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMerakiDignityProject Substack: https://substack.com/@merakidignity Join the proveHER community and read the companion Blogcast for more conversations and practical resources for women building, leading, and redefining what comes next. --- Subscribe and Review If you loved this episode, drop us a review, share it with a badass woman in your life, and subscribe to Badass Women in Business wherever you get your podcasts. Stay badass. Stay bold. Build it your way. Keep up with more content from Aggie and Cristy here: Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders  Instagram: @badass_women_in_businessLinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in BusinessWebsite: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.comAthena: athenaac.com

  8. Aug 11

    Turning Fandom Into Revenue Without Losing the Brand with Veronica Hart

    Send us Fan Mail Growth in entertainment is no longer just about getting attention; it is about turning emotional connection into live experiences, licensing, merchandise, sports, and global partnerships without diluting what people loved in the first place. Veronica Hart, Chief Growth Officer of RWS Global, unpacks how leaders can build new revenue streams, protect brand integrity, and create momentum in complex markets while making sure women are not waiting for permission to claim their seat at the table. SHOW NOTES Strategic Focus This conversation explores the discipline behind modern brand growth: how companies decide when an idea has enough audience demand to expand, how leaders build alignment across creative and commercial teams, and why women’s perspectives are not a side conversation but a business requirement when companies are trying to reach the full market. Key Takeaways  Brand expansion works when companies understand where fans are emotionally invested, then create products, experiences, and partnerships that feel like a natural extension rather than a cash grab.  Live experiences are becoming a serious growth channel because consumers need a compelling reason to leave the couch, show up in person, and participate in a story beyond the screen.  Women leaders bring a critical lens to growth strategy because companies often leave meaningful revenue untapped when they fail to account for women as consumers, decision makers, and cultural drivers.  Veronica’s career shows the power of taking an opportunity further than assigned, especially for women who have been conditioned to ask for permission when the better move is to take the work, run with it, and raise the standard. GUEST CONTACT & CONNECT Veronica Hart is the Chief Growth Officer of RWS Global, where she leads growth strategy across live entertainment, brand experiences, licensing, merchandise, and global partnerships. Her career includes executive leadership roles at Paramount, CBS Consumer Products, Sesame Workshop, The Jim Henson Company, and HIT Entertainment, as well as service as Chair of the Board for Licensing International. Website: www.rwsglobal.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/rws-global/ Instagram: @rwsglobalofficial Join the proveHER community and read the companion Blogcast for deeper takeaways from this conversation. --- Subscribe and Review If you loved this episode, drop us a review, share it with a badass woman in your life, and subscribe to Badass Women in Business wherever you get your podcasts. Stay badass. Stay bold. Build it your way. Keep up with more content from Aggie and Cristy here: Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders  Instagram: @badass_women_in_businessLinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in BusinessWebsite: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.comAthena: athenaac.com

See All (166)

5
out of 5
18 Ratings

About

Welcome to The Badass Women in Business Podcast, the definitive space for unfiltered, tactical insights into female entrepreneurship, enterprise scaling, and business monetization.  Hosted by seasoned business owners, growth partners, and exit strategists Cristy O’Connor and Aggie Chydzinski, this podcast moves past passive advisory to bring you directly inside the high-stakes execution of building and successfully exiting companies on your own terms. As hands-on growth partners who actively engineer scale and value alongside founders, we deliberately strip away the superficiality of traditional corporate highlight reels. Instead, we dissect the raw, hard-earned operational strategies and profound psychological shifts required to unlock true enterprise value.  Each week, our conversations turn systemic business obstacles into high-velocity execution plans, offering sophisticated, real-world frameworks for ambitious women who are leading teams, optimizing cash flow, and engineering highly scalable, exit-ready companies. Whether you are in the trenches of bootstrapping an innovative startup, navigating complex partnership dynamics, or designing the ultimate monetization strategy for your life's work, this podcast provides the active strategy needed to drive valuation and claim full autonomy over your future. Subscribe now to join a premier movement of women rewriting the rules of modern commerce, one definitive story at a time. New episodes deliver partner-level value every Tuesday.

Information

  • Creator
    Aggie & Cristy
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    166
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Badass Women in Business
  • Show Website
    Badass Women in Business

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