Get Sh!t Done

Get Sh!t Done
  • 5.0 (63)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated 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. 3d ago

    #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/

    1h 3m

  2. 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/

    59 min

  3. 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

    1h 6m

  4. May 6

    150: How She Built an $864 Million Empire (Mary Ellen Pleasant)

    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

    43 min

  5. Apr 29

    149: 150 Employees to Fractional-First: The Operating Model Founders Need as AI Dismantles Corporate America (Amy Sterner Nelson, The Riveter)

    The companies telling their employees "we're a family" are the same ones laying off thousands in a press release. The startups that raised money and hired fast to look sophisticated are now burning through runway and calling it an AI problem. And the founders who came out of corporate to build something different are, in a lot of cases, quietly rebuilding the same broken model at a smaller scale without realizing it. This is the moment that forces the question: if the old operating model is collapsing, what do you build instead? Amy Nelson left a career as a litigator at 37 — two kids, no business background, no marketing training — to build The Riveter. She raised $30 million, scaled to 150 employees, and operated co-working spaces in 10 cities across six states. Then COVID shut it down almost overnight. What she built after that looked nothing like what came before. Fractional teams. AI-compressed workflows. A membership model for women learning to generate income entirely on their own terms. She didn't pivot within the system. She rejected the operating model. What We Break Down: Why the social contract is structurally dead — not weakening: How corporate's "family" framing was always a compensation strategy, what that means for founders who've inherited that language, and what an honest agreement with your team actually looks likeAI as scapegoat vs. AI as actual disruption: Why a lot of what's being called AI-driven restructuring is really overhiring correction — and why that distinction matters for how you buildThe fractional-first operating model: How companies like Lettuce Financial are building entire teams on contractor relationships, why VCs are starting to align with it, and how to map your own team against actual outcomesHeadcount as performance vs. headcount as strategy: The hiring math that tells you whether a role is closing a real gap or just making the company look seriousAI as a time sovereignty tool: How Amy cut a 10-hour content workflow to 90 minutes, what she does with the time she gets back, and why the goal was never productivityIn this week's paid playbook, we break down the fractional-first operating model, the exact sequence to run before any hiring decision, and the workflow mapping exercise that tells you where AI can give you your time back. The Collective is where you take this work and actually apply it alongside other founders building in real time. Become a paid subscriber and get this week's playbook here: https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/subscribe⁠

    52 min

  6. Apr 15

    148: How to Turn What You Do for Free Into Paying Clients

    Let's be honest about something. When revenue slows down, the instinct is to go build something new. Like a new offer, product, etc. And meanwhile, people are already coming to you repeatedly, for free, for something you've been doing for years without charging for it. That's not a coincidence. That's demand. And in this episode, we're getting into exactly what to do with it. This is a community episode pulled straight from a recent collaboration circle inside Get Sh!t Done. We stopped asking "what should I build to make more money" and started asking "what do people already ask me for that I'm not getting paid for?" We break down: The Easy Money Filter: How to know if an expertise offer is actually worth pursuing or just more work you don't have bandwidth forWhy Your Expertise Buyer Probably Isn't Your Primary Customer: The real estate founder in our community who had two completely different buyers and didn't know it. Once she separated them, the revenue got real.How to Build the Offer Without Building a Business: The e-com founder who has multiple paying clients with no website, no brand, and no business plan. Because she stopped saying "that's just something I do" and started saying here's what I charge.The Question That Changes Everything: What we asked in the collaboration circle that made the whole room shift and how to run it yourself this weekWhat's Actually Not in Your Control: The systemic stuff that makes this harder for some founders than others and why that's not a personal failureThis episode is for you if you're in a revenue gap right now, if you're building something new and need income while you do it, or if you've been giving away something valuable and haven't quite let yourself charge for it yet. 🔥 Want to go deeper? This week's paid Growth Playbook breaks down the full framework including the exact questions to ask yourself, who to talk to first, and the copy-ready message to send to make your first ask this week. Paid subscribers also get access to The Collective, our private WhatsApp community where founders are working through this exact play together right now. 👉 Become a paid subscriber and get this week's playbook here: https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/subscribe⁠

    33 min

  7. Apr 8

    #147: How to Build a Product Customers Will Fund Before It Exists (Morgan Hewett, Devin Toys)

    Meet Morgan Hewett, 2X founder with 1 exit under belt, and now, CEO of Devin, an AI-powered sex tech company rethinking how women experience pleasure, connection, and autonomy. After building and exiting her first AI startup, Morgan changed how she builds. Instead of raising fast and figuring things out later, she focused on something most founders avoid: getting customers to pay before the product is fully built. In this episode, Morgan breaks down how she’s using customer co-creation, social media, and pre-sales to validate demand, move faster, and build a company that can be funded by customers, not just investors. From turning content into a real-time focus group to challenging the obsession with fundraising, this is a masterclass in building with signal instead of assumptions. 💡 Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode: How to Validate Demand Before You Build: Why Morgan skipped the waitlist and went straight to pre-sales—and what that unlocked for her business.How to Turn Social Media Into a Growth Engine: The exact way she uses content to recruit, validate product decisions, and stay top of mind with customers.Why Overraising Can Hurt You: What she learned from raising millions in her first company and how it impacted her outcome at exit.How to Build With Your Customer (Not Just for Them): How she uses social media as a live feedback loop to co-create her product in real time.How to Move Faster With Less Risk: Why getting to payment earlier changes how you make decisions, prioritize features, and launch.🔥 Want the exact frameworks behind this episode? Get the weekly Growth Playbook where we break down how founders actually grow, with step-by-step frameworks you can apply immediately, and a community you can connect with to get feedback 👉 Subscribe here: https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 3m

  8. Apr 1

    #146: How Smart Founders Make Money While Their Business Is Still Growing (Dawn Dickson)

    Meet Dawn Dickson, founder of PopCom and one of the first Black women to raise over $1M through equity crowdfunding, who has raised over $7M and helped other founders raise $50M+. While most founders are told their business should eventually “take care of them,” Dawn took a different approach. After navigating venture funding, stalled momentum, and market shifts, she realized something most people don’t say out loud: your business isn’t always built to support your life in real time. So instead of forcing it to, she built income alongside it. From scaling her consulting business from $300K to $3M, to selling founder shares for personal liquidity, to building multiple income streams and investments, Dawn created a model that allowed her to keep building without putting herself on the line financially. In this episode, Dawn breaks down how she separated her business growth timeline from her personal financial stability, and what founders can do right now to stop putting all the pressure on one company. 💡 Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode: How to Make Money While Your Business Is Still Growing: Why relying on one company to fund your life creates pressure and what to do instead.How to Turn Your Expertise Into Real Income: How Dawn scaled consulting and partnerships into a multi-million dollar revenue stream.How to Create Personal Liquidity (Without Waiting for an Exit): The exact move she made to sell founder shares and secure her financial future.How to Build Income Streams That Support Your Business: Why parallel income changes how you operate and make decisions.How to Reduce Financial Pressure So You Can Build Smarter: The connection between personal stability and better long-term business decisions.🔥 Take the Free Traction Quiz: Feeling stuck or scattered? Discover your next best move to gain traction based on where you are and where you're headed. 👉 ⁠Take the Quiz HERE⁠ https://form.typeform.com/to/j6LscUHF 🚀 Get weekly Growth Playbooks and access to a community designed to help you collaborate, get unstuck, and make meaningful progress. 👉 Subscribe & Join: https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 1m
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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
    171
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Get Sh!t Done
  • Show Website
    Get Sh!t Done

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