Wings of Inspired Business

Melinda Wittstock
  • 4.9 (148)
  • ENTREPRENEURSHIP
  • UPDATED BIWEEKLY
Wings of Inspired Business

Women entrepreneurs are changing the game of business, stepping into our authentic feminine power and growing consciousness to start and scale great companies. Listen to Wings to learn from women who've "been there, built that" with 7, 8 and 9-figure businesses, even billion dollar Unicorns. You'll learn how to manifest the mindset, mojo and money to create, grow and scale a business aligned with what makes your heart sing. Wings is hosted by Melinda Wittstock, a 4-time serial entrepreneur, tech visionary and award-winning journalist. Melinda focuses where personal and business growth meet, her insightful interviews with inspiring female founders and businesswomen providing actionable tips to help listeners to real and tangible results. These innovators, influencers, and investors all share their success secrets, epiphanies, and practical advice on how to get the confidence, connections and capital so you too manifest the success of your dreams in life and in business.

  1. 6D AGO

    Writing Your Next Chapter: Entrepreneur Nina Sossamon-Pogue on Resilience and Overcoming Adversity

    Nina Sossamon-Pogue is a sought-after speaker, two-time bestselling author, and entrepreneur whose journey through elite gymnastics, TV anchoring, and Corporate America from startup to IPO defies the ordinary. An Olympic hopeful on the USA Gymnastics team with Mary Lou Retton, an injury crushed her dreams before becoming a catalyst for a 20-year career as an Emmy Award winning journalist and anchor. Another transformative challenge led her to technology and a journey navigating startup growth to a highly successful IPO. Drawing on her expertise across communications, corporate leadership and resilience research, she now helps others conquer life’s obstacles to reach new levels of success. Author of This Is Not the End: Strategies to Get You Through the Worst Chapters of Your Life and But I Want Both: A Working Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life She Loves, Nina also founded the innovative online coaching company Now What Workshop. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 🏆 🏋️‍♀️ What Athletes Teach Entrepreneurs about Resilience: Athletes bring essential skills to business: persistence, discipline, coachability, and the ability to get up after a fall. These skills are game changers in entrepreneurship, where failure is part of the journey.  🌟✊Past the Pain There’s Gain: From life-changing injury to horrific public tragedy, learn how radical changes in circumstance brought about by unexpected events or challenges can help us all emerge stronger, revitalized and thriving in life’s new chapters. 💼 🚀 Adapting in Business: Sometimes external happenings like tariffs, recessions and pandemics force a change in business strategy and operations. Nina shares how her newly launched public speaking career got sidelined when Covid struck, and how she found the resilience to pivot quickly to grow an even bigger business.  🌱🔍 The Now What Workshop: If you're in a "now what" moment, learn how Nina’s online coaching provides actionable strategies to help you navigate through crises and find paths forward, no matter the situation, so you do better than “bounce back” by growing stronger and more capable with each new hurdle.  🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings921   More about Nina at Nina Sossamon-Pogue https://www.ninasossamonpogue.com/ and Now What Workshop https://nowwhatworkshop.com

    44 min

  2. MAR 11

    Transforming Gardening with AI: Entrepreneur Donna Letier on Cultivating Wellness with Container Gardens

    Donna Letier is the CEO and founder of Gardenuity, a fast-growing company merging gardening with the wellness sector through personalized container gardens and AI-powered gardening experiences. Donna has raised $8 million for her company so far, innovating Gardenuity Match, which uses AI and weather tech to custom-craft gardens around lifestyles, climate and environment. With over 20 years of retail experience, spanning public and private companies, Donna has worked in the areas of operations, brand marketing, and product development, and takes a data-driven approach with a consumer point of view. Previously, she was CMO for a home furnishings brand with over $500M in annual revenue. She has also been part of the marketing team at Neiman Marcus, MGM, Barneys New York, and United Artists. Donna has been featured in Story of a Brand, Cheddar News, Forbes, Tech FW, WFAA #UpWithHer, Growing Spaces, and The Grow Network. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 🌿🌐 Gardening for All: Learn how gardening is being democratizing so that anyone can experience its nutritional and mental health benefits—whether you're in a high-rise, have a backyard, or live in an urban apartment. 🌍🤖 Grounding in a Digital World: Discover how gardening can improve your mental health by grounding you in the present, away from the hustle and bustle of technology and constant connectivity. Learn the holistic wellness benefits that come with getting your hands in the soil. 🌱💡 AI and Gardening: How AI is being used to personalize gardening experiences, from weather tech and predictive alerts to understanding what plants most align to climate, lifestyle and circumstance—to ensure your success, no matter where you live. 🔥🛠️Entrepreneurial Insights: What gardening can teach us about the entrepreneurial process – resilience, innovation and adaptability – from sprouting to pruning and seasons of growth. 🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings920 More about Donna at Gardenuity

    48 min

  3. MAR 4

    Tax Time: Entrepreneur Melissa Broughton on How to Be Proactive with Tax and Accounting

    Melissa Broughton is a tax and accounting specialist and the founder of Busy Bee Advisors, helping business owners and entrepreneurs get savvy about complex, even frustrating, tax and bookkeeping situations. Her background in corporate accounting and auditing complements her desire to serve as a financial translator, of sorts, to sole proprietors and small business owners so that they feel confident in their financial decisions. With her husband Eric, a tax professional, Melissa co-hosts a popular podcast, The Real Buzz: Taking the Sting Out of Taxes. She is a member of Business Network International, Rotary, FU Nights, Women in Consulting, and previously served as finance chair on the Sacramento Children's Receiving Home Board of Directors. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 🚀 🌱Why Tax Time Is An Opportunity: Learn to be proactive about your taxes and get early advice from tax professionals. 🤔💭Understanding Uncertainty: With the shifting political landscape, tsunami of Presidential executive orders, and DOGE cuts, make sure you verify facts before making any business decisions based on news or social media. 📈 💡Proactivity over Reactivity: Understanding potential deductions and credits, like R&D tax credits or ADA compliance credits, can result in significant tax savings. 💼🔥Choosing the Right Business Structure: Whether it’s a sole proprietorship, LLC, S Corp, or C Corp, each business entity has different tax implications, and these can change depending on the state. 🛠️✨Tools in Your Arsenal: Why it’s vital to develop a robust toolkit of trusted advisors – including a tax professional, a business attorney, and a financial advisor. 🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings919 Get a complimentary copy of Melissa's new book, The 4-Hour Bookkeeper Listen to Melissa’s podcast The Real Buzz: Taking the Sting Out of Taxes

    44 min

  4. FEB 25

    Tactical Harmony, Unleashed: Entrepreneur Rebecca Fitzsimmons On Mastering Leadership, Mindset and What We Can Learn from Dogs.

    Rebecca Fitzsimmons is the founder of Tactical Harmony, an online business dedicated to mentoring ambitious professionals and businesses on holistic leadership and mindset strategies. She is also the host of the Tactical Harmony podcast, in which she shares game-changing tactics supporting her community to gracefully navigate their career and homelife, while enjoying freedom, abundance and bliss. Over the last two decades, Rebecca served as an NCIS Special Agent and as a senior leader at a technology company. Throughout her global experience living and working around the world, Rebecca saw first-hand why holistic leadership answers every challenge. Rebecca is also author of the new book, Unleashed: Holistic Leadership Insights from Our Canine Companions. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 ✨ 🌱 Holistic Leadership: Discover the core pillars of Tactical Harmony—planning, alignment, execution, and receiving—designed to balance professional and personal life so you can achieve wholeness, peace, and freedom, aiming for genuine fulfillment. 🐾 🦋What Dogs Can Teach Us: How our furry friends can teach us mindfulness, gratitude, discipline, love, and resilience. 🌟💡Tactical Harmony's Dual Approach: Learn the two-track approach for mastering mindset to overcome limiting beliefs, enhance leadership skills master conflict resolution. 🧘‍♀️🔄 Mastering Self-Leadership: Why it’s vital to envision success to achieve it, plus the secrets of mental preparation, and following your intuition no matter how illogical it may seem to others. 🚀 💪Entrepreneurial Challenges: How to transition from the hands-on “doing it all” start-up founder roles to building and aligning a team for growth, and why strategic focus always beats multitasking. 🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes here: https://bit.ly/wings918 More about Rebecca at Tactical Harmony Get 50% off Tactical Harmony’s Essential Guide For Busy Pro's: How to Lower Stress, Boost Productivity and Operate At Peak Performance. Use code WINGS50 Subscribe to Rebecca’s podcast Tactical Harmony

    34 min

  5. FEB 18

    The Authenticity of You: Entrepreneur Lauren Bayne on Building a Differentiated Personal Brand to Grow Your Company

    Lauren Bayne is a personal brand creative director, advising entrepreneurs and executive leaders in building personal brands filled with personality and creating intellectual property that makes her clients money. Coming from the advertising industry, Lauren brings creative expression and pizazz to personal branding that gives her clients confidence to stand out from the crowd with bold and entertaining presence. She specializes in helping entrepreneurs, speakers, coaches, authors, consultants, and professionals express their unique personal brands through distinctive, brag-worthy marketing assets. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 🌍🌙Power of Polarization: Not everyone is going to love your brand, and that's okay. Learn why repelling as well as attracting can be an asset in attracting your ideal audience and customers. Hint: Embrace self-love and stop caring about being liked. 🌐🔄Conformity is Your Enemy: Authenticity is the key to branding success in a world where trust is at a premium, and if you try to conform to something you’re not, you’ll never succeed at building a trusted brand. 👩‍🔬 🤟 Start With Your Who (Not Why or What): Learn why self-knowledge is vital to building a successful brand. When you know yourself and your values, you’re more likely to attract customers who resonate with you and developing offerings and messaging that attracts your ideal buyers. 🚀 🎙️ Aligning Visual with Voice: Make sure your visual identity rhymes with your brand voice so you can stand out in the noisy “attention economy”. 🔥 💼 Balancing Personal and Business Branding: For those concerned about tying their brand too closely to their personal identity, learn how to create a legacy that can live on even if you step away. 🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/wings917 More about Lauren at Lauren Bayne where you can get a free 30-minute Dreamcatcher Call

    46 min

  6. FEB 11

    Data Dashboard Diva: Entrepreneur Kari Poppleton on Actionable Insights for Business Growth

    Kari Poppleton is the CEO and founder of Kari Poppleton Consulting, specializing in digital marketing metrics, data, and custom interactive dashboards. A Certified Director of Operations and Certified Dashboard Designer, Kari helps online entrepreneurs, course creators, coaches, and anyone with memberships and subscriptions, leverage actionable data analytics to make informed real time and strategic decisions.  Kari also founded the handmade kids accessory e-commerce business, Snugglywunkins. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 📈 🚀 Know Your Numbers: How your data tells the story of your business, and why it’s vital to have systems in place that monitor your KPIs in real time to help you make the right decisions to grow your company. 🖥️ 💰Dashboards to Dollars: Learn how Kari’s custom dashboards provide easy-to-understand visualization for accessible and integrated analytics that consolidate information from multiple platforms so you can optimize marketing and sales. 🧠✨Overcome Data Overwhelm: Start small, with specific questions, and track the impact with foundational tools like Google Analytics and UTM parameters so you can get comfortable tracking your numbers as you test, measure and learn what works best for your business. 🤖 💡 AI in Data Visualization: AI hasn't revolutionized data visualization just yet, learn some practical AI uses for writing complex formulas and analyzing data to identify growth opportunities.  🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings916 More about Kari at Kari Poppleton Get Kari’s free guide "5 Questions Your Data Can Answer for You"

    40 min

  7. FEB 4

    Own Your Own Journey: Entrepreneur Somia Sadiq on the Power of Failure and Overcoming Risk Adversity

    Somia Sadiq is an award-winning entrepreneur and peacebuilder who has developed a pioneering practice in impact assessment and conflict transformation rooted in storytelling. Somia is the founder and CEO of Narratives, a planning firm that emphasizes human-centric, trauma-informed dialogue, lived experience, and celebrating ancestral identity. She’s also the founder of Kahanee, a non-profit organization that works nationally and internationally interweaving stories to support peacebuilding efforts. Somia is a published author and a keynote speaker, offering insights on trauma-informed leadership, and fostering resilience in a rapidly changing environment. Recognized for her contributions to the Planning practice in Canada and globally, Somia was recently inducted into the Canadian Institute of Planners' esteemed College of Fellows, the highest honor for a planner in Canada. Her new book Garajah will be published in August 2025. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 🛑 💪Failure is Not a Taboo: Learn why failing is a vital prerequisite for success as an entrepreneur. (Hint: If you’re not failing you’re not taking enough risks and playing too small a game).   🚀 💡Overcoming Risk Adversity: Playing it safe often kills entrepreneurial dreams, so learn how to effectively balance risk and reward and operate from a spirit of abundance rather than scarcity.   👩‍🔬 🤟Own Your Journey:  No one can walk your path for you, you have to do it. If you want something, dream it, chase it, ask for feedback, ask to be on that exciting project, show that you are keen, make it happen. If you fail, figure out why, reconfigure and keep wading. Expecting the world to do it for you won't work.   🤝 🤎Fostering Dialogue and Inclusivity: With inspiration from Rumi and an emphasis on positive storytelling, Somia shares how her company, Narratives, and her nonprofit, Kahani empower people through Indigenous stories, community planning, and peace-building efforts.   🌍❤️ Building Communities: Learn how to create effective allies who inspire, challenge and teach you, plus how to apply Somia's experience uniting diaspora communities in Canada through storytelling events that address conflicts, racism, and a sense of belonging. Learn how to create effective allies who inspire, challenge and teach you   📚 Somia’s Upcoming Novel: Dive into the themes explored in Somia’s forthcoming novel, "Gujarat," a journey through justice, forgiveness, and trauma narrated by a young girl and interwoven with poetry and prose. and spiritual growth.   🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings915   More about Somia at Narratives Inc www.narrativesinc.com and Somia Sadiq    Get 20% off for a virtual or in-person Trauma Informed Practices workshop. Email info@narrativesinc.com and provide the reference code *WINGS20*

    39 min

  8. JAN 28

    Agentic AI: Serial Entrepreneur Susan Sly on Ethics, AI Transparency, Future of Work and How thePause.ai is Transforming Menopause Care

    Susan Sly is an award-winning AI entrepreneur, author, keynote speaker, and the Founder and CEO of thePause.ai, an AI-driven platform revolutionizing menopause management with personalized, gamified solutions. In November, thePause.ai won first place in the HITLAB x Versalie™ Innovation Challenge. Susan also co-founded RadiusAI, a visual intelligence company specializing in the retail and healthcare sectors. RadiusAI earned the prestigious AI Innovator at The Edge award from VentureBeat in 2022 for its cutting-edge computer vision technology. Susan also hosts two podcasts, Raw and Real Entrepreneurship and The Menopause Health Podcast. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 🔥 🤖 Transformative Power of Agentic AI: How autonomous “AI agents” are revolutionizing business operations and decision-making processes, enabling smaller teams to achieve more by process immense volumes of data and interact with each other to assist humans in decision-making, and what it means for the future of work. 🏥 🌱 AI in Health and Wellness: How thePause.ai is personalizing solutions for menopause management, from tracking symptoms to offering lifestyle recommendations. 💡 🌈 AI Ethics and Transparency: Who trains the AI? What biases lurk in the data? Why transparent, unbiased, inclusive and validated data is vital for the responsible deployment of AI solutions, so AI models are fair, equitable, and representative of the diverse populations they serve.  💡 🧑‍💻 Company Policies: It’s time to move beyond just the Company Employee Handbook. Learn why all companies need clear AI Mission Statements to align their AI initiatives with ethical standards, the advantages of having an AI steering committee comprising diverse perspectives. 👩‍🔬 💪Empowering Women in AI: Why women’s leadership in AI is vital, both in the architecture of the underlying data models and their application. 🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings914 More about Susan at ThePause.ai

    59 min
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4.9
out of 5
148 Ratings

About

Women entrepreneurs are changing the game of business, stepping into our authentic feminine power and growing consciousness to start and scale great companies. Listen to Wings to learn from women who've "been there, built that" with 7, 8 and 9-figure businesses, even billion dollar Unicorns. You'll learn how to manifest the mindset, mojo and money to create, grow and scale a business aligned with what makes your heart sing. Wings is hosted by Melinda Wittstock, a 4-time serial entrepreneur, tech visionary and award-winning journalist. Melinda focuses where personal and business growth meet, her insightful interviews with inspiring female founders and businesswomen providing actionable tips to help listeners to real and tangible results. These innovators, influencers, and investors all share their success secrets, epiphanies, and practical advice on how to get the confidence, connections and capital so you too manifest the success of your dreams in life and in business.

Information

  • Creator
    Melinda Wittstock
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2025
  • Episodes
    925
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Wings Media LLC 2019
  • Show Website
    Wings of Inspired Business

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