Badass Women in Business
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.
Episodes
When Dr. Maheen Musoof Adamson watched her father lose his ability to speak after a stroke, her life’s work became deeply personal. In this episode, she shares how that experience led her to build Soof Solutions, an AI-enabled communication platform helping stroke, ALS, and non-speaking patients express their needs through eye movement, while challenging what healthcare innovation can look like when science, e...
Most entrepreneurs view legal support as something they need when problems arise, yet the most successful founders understand that legal strategy is one of the earliest and most important investments they can make in protecting enterprise value. In this conversation, Hillary Hughes shares how thoughtful contracts, intellectual property protection, governance structures, and investor readiness can help founders avoid...
Tiffany Carter’s story challenges the polished mythology of entrepreneurship by exposing how trauma can quietly shape the way high achieving founders earn, sell, lead, and stay visible, even when they appear successful from the outside. In this deeply honest conversation, Tiffany reframes money mindset as more than a confidence issue; it is a nervous system, identity, safety, and self trust conversation that d...
Shan and Erika built Shades By Shan from a San Francisco garage into a nationally distributed cosmetics brand carried in more than 600 JCPenney Beauty stores, but the real lesson is not simply how they scaled, it is how they protected their mission while navigating the pressure of national retail. This conversation is a sharp, deeply human study in founder discipline, radical honesty, community-led growth, and the k...
Caregiving is one of the most universal experiences in life, yet it remains one of the most overlooked problems in healthcare, technology, and the workplace. In this episode, Nicole àBeckett shares how her own experience caring for both parents became the foundation for HeroGeneration, an AI powered platform designed to help families organize care, reduce overwhelm, and build real support before crisis takes over.
Sh...
After divorce left Nancy Benet with four children, no income, five failed businesses, and more than $650,000 in debt, she had to rebuild not only her finances, but her confidence, judgment, and sense of personal agency. In this conversation, Nancy shares how women can move from avoidance and overwhelm into financial clarity, sustainable business ownership, and a more grounded definition of success.
Show Notes
Th...
Scarlett Leung, co-founder of Pretty Tasty, joins us for an honest conversation about what it really takes to build a modern consumer brand. From turning around retail businesses and launching companies from scratch to rebuilding after founder heartbreak, Scarlett opens up about the realities behind entrepreneurship, leadership, fundraising, and growth.
Scarlett never planned to become a founder, but after care...
What if success is not about balance, but about building a life with purpose, curiosity, and impact? In this episode, Soon Hagerty shares how fleeing Vietnam as a child shaped her entrepreneurial mindset, why “business for good” has to be built into the model from day one, and the biggest mistake women founders make when chasing growth. This conversation is packed with honest insights on leadership, resi...
What happens when a seasoned entrepreneur steps away from building brands and decides to solve something far more human?
In this episode, Rebecca Matchett shares her journey from launching fashion brands like alice + olivia to co-founding Synchrony, an AI-assisted platform designed to help neurodivergent adults build real connection. What started as a gap she couldn’t ignore has turned into a mission-driven bus...
There’s a point in your career where being good at your work stops being enough.
You’re experienced. You deliver. You’re trusted. But growth slows, and the path to real influence or ownership becomes less clear.
Deborah Farone has spent her career inside that reality.
As former Chief Marketing Officer of Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Debevoise & Plimpton, and now CEO of Farone Advisors LLC, she ...
What if the solution to hunger isn’t more aid, but empowering women? Shannon Fernando, Founder and CEO of Alabaster International, is working on the frontlines of healthcare, food security, and female entrepreneurship across East Africa and South Asia. In this episode, she shares what she’s learned from nearly two decades in the field, why most approaches to impact fall short, and how women are the key t...
What happens when the system meant to support you leaves you with more questions than answers?
In this episode, Aggie and Cristy sit down with Cristina Bernardo, co-founder of Avocado Health, to share the deeply personal story behind the company and the mission driving it forward.
After losing her daughter Aviva following months of medical uncertainty, Cristina and her husband made a commitment no parent should ever h...
There’s a phase of life no one prepares you for.
You’re raising kids, supporting aging parents, managing a career or a business, and somehow expected to hold it all together. Most women don’t even realize there’s a name for it. The Sandwich Generation.
In this episode, estate planning attorney Candace Dellacona breaks down what’s actually happening in this stage of life and why so many wo...
Missy Wright did not plan on a career in franchising, but once she got in, she saw the impact it can have on people’s lives and never left.
In this episode, Missy breaks down what really makes a franchise successful, what separates the people who thrive from the ones who struggle, and what most people misunderstand before they invest. We also talk about what it takes to scale a brand the right way and what happ...
What if the safest path is not actually the safest one?
In this episode, Aggie and Cristy sit down with Melissa Anderson, President of Search.com, to talk about building a career by trusting instinct over convention. Melissa shares how she turned bold, uncertain choices into major opportunities, from moving to Ireland after college with no job, to scaling startups, leading innovation, and navigating acquisitions.
This...
What happens when life forces you to step away from the business you built?
In this episode of the Badass Women in Business Podcast, Aggie and Cristy sit down with Natasha Golinsky, founder of On Purpose Projects, a custom web and e-commerce development agency based in Vancouver, Canada.
Natasha has spent more than a decade building her agency without ever being a web developer herself. Along the way she learned the h...
What does it actually take to leave a secure job and build a company from scratch?
In this episode of the Badass Women in Business Podcast, Aggie and Cristy sit down with Kirsten Liston, Founder and CEO of Rethink Compliance, to talk about the reality of becoming an entrepreneur and the mindset required to build something new.
Kirsten shares how she went from a career in journalism to spending more than two decades in...
In this episode of the Badass Women in Business podcast, Aggie and Cristy sit down with Meredith Farley, founder of Medbury, an agency that helps executives and founders turn their real world experience into credible thought leadership on LinkedIn.
Meredith shares her journey from being a writing major during the 2009 financial crash to spending 13 years inside a fast growing content agency, eventually stepping into ...
In this episode of the Badass Women in Business podcast, Aggie sits down with Denver-based photographer and TruBlu Images founder Rebecca Todd. Rebecca shares her journey from studying photography at LSU to rebuilding her business after relocating from New Orleans to Denver.
They talk about carving out a niche working with mission-driven brands and nonprofits, why relationships matter more than marketing tactics, and...
Anna Perks is the founder of Perks Deconstruction, a Denver based company proving that sustainability and profitability can coexist. What started with walking her dog past a bulldozed historic home turned into a seven year journey building a 20 plus person company that diverts massive amounts of construction material from landfills. In this episode, Anna shares how she built a business in an industry she did not com...
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