She Built It® Podcast

Hosted by Melanie Barr

Business Careers

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Episodes

308

Latest episode

Oct 2026

Language

EN-US

About the show

Welcome to the She Built It® podcast. Join me as I talk to women who have successfully built it - a life and business that they love. We dive into the topic of “how” they built it and talk about everything from having the courage to make career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively, build teams, implement growth strategies, and infuse tech innovation. Magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so let’s dive in.

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60 recent

October 20, 2026Episode 30820 min

AI Gives You Averages: How a Physician-Founder Gets A-Plus Work

AI will give you an answer in seconds, and most of the time it will be an average one. Dr. Jessica Wu , a Beverly Hills dermatologist building a physician-delivered women's health practice, calls that C-plus work. Here is how she uses AI for speed and research, and what she keeps for herself. Key Takeaways: Treat AI output as a rough draft Give AI the full story before you ask for an answer Use AI to compress research time Build around what customers keep asking for Make hospitality a leadership priority Hire by showing a different way to work Dr. Wu went from one doctor to four in three months and says finding doctors and support staff, not demand, is her biggest scaling friction. Her proof point is her own practice: 25 years, a long waiting list, and 3 doctors hired, with more to come. Connect with Dr. Jessica Wu: Dr. Jessica Wu Website Dr. Jessica Wu Instagram Dr. Jessica Wu TikTok Dr. Jessica Wu LinkedIn Feed Your Face: The 28-Day Plan for Younger, Smoother Skin and a Beautiful Body by Dr. Jessica Wu Connect with us: Work with She Built It® Media She Built It® Instagram She Built It® CEO, Melanie Barr Instagram Melanie Barr LinkedIn She Built It® LinkedIn

October 13, 2026Episode 30731 min

The Human Middle: What AI Can't Solve in Your Workplace

Most employers want to be good bosses, and most employees want to do good work. Most of them still walk into the next relationship carrying the last bad one. For Alex Tieu, CEO of JLG Lawyers, that gap is the part of business AI can't solve, and closing it is a leadership decision. Key Takeaways: Name the baggage you bring to every hire. Keep seeing possibility in people after being burned. Start before you have all the answers on AI. Treat AI as an affirmation machine and build safe space for dissent. Design the architecture of your AI workflow. Build career paths around where people are in life. Alex grew JLG from 15 cases and six employees to more than 2,000 cases and 80 people in five years. She credits designing different roles (support attorneys, trial attorneys, lead attorneys who build mini firms) and a paid apprenticeship around where people are in their lives. Connect with Alex: JLG Lawyers Website JLG Lawyers LinkedIn JLG Lawyers Instagram Alex Tieu LinkedIn Alex Tieu Instagram humanmiddle.ai Work with She Built It® Media: She Built It® Media Website She Built It® Instagram She Built It® CEO, Melanie Barr Instagram Melanie Barr LinkedIn She Built It® LinkedIn

October 6, 2026Episode 30625 min

What a Dermatologist and a Mayor Didn't Know About Running a Business

Dr. Whitney Hovenic removes skin cancer for a living. She still didn't know what ROAS meant when she co-founded a sunscreen brand with Reno mayor Hillary Schieve. Two years in, she says she's basically earned an unofficial MBA the hard way. Key Takeaways: Know that expertise builds the product, not the customer base. Budget for the real runway to cash positive. Protect your brand voice from AI, even while using it elsewhere. Build products from what you personally notice, not a spreadsheet. Skip the viral-moment chase and go where your customer already is. Lead with flexibility, not a rigid system, when your team is small. Whitney had assumed that selling inventory would immediately fund more inventory. The real education came in learning how much a new brand has to invest upfront in PR, marketing, and free product before it becomes cash positive, a gap that turned out to be the steepest part of the founders' learning curve. Connect with Spooge: Spooge Website Spooge LinkedIn Spooge Instagram Dr. Whitney Hovenic LinkedIn Dr. Whitney Hovenic Instagram Hillary Schieve LinkedIn Hillary Schieve Instagram Work with She Built It® Media: She Built It® Media Website She Built It® Instagram She Built It® CEO, Melanie Barr Instagram Melanie Barr LinkedIn She Built It® LinkedIn

September 29, 2026Episode 30517 min

She Had to Fight to Say the Word "Period" on Every Platform

Lauren Schulte Wang has had to fight every major ad platform, Meta, Instagram, YouTube, Google, Amazon, just to say the word "period" in an ad, while men's sexual health brands face no such resistance. She's built the #1 selling menstrual discs and cups anyway. Key Takeaways: Knowing the platforms won't give you clear rules. Lauren's team has repeatedly asked ad platforms what their actual content guidelines are for period-related ads, and been told there aren't any, only vague, inconsistent enforcement. Recognize the double standard, and keep building anyway. A competing founder's own investor admitted the industry knows women's health brands face restrictions men's health brands don't, and it hasn't stopped The Flex Co. from becoming the category leader. Don't chase retail before your flywheel is ready. Lauren turned down Target for two years, twice flying out to say "not yet," until DTC marketing, supply chain, and finance were strong enough to support the shelf space. Build AI adoption around personal benefit, not company mandate. Lauren got resistance from team members afraid to admit they weren't using AI, so she reframed it as a career skill for their future, not just a company requirement. Learn to trust your own instinct, not just your team's. Lauren says the moments she regrets most in building The Flex Co. are the ones where she deferred to her team instead of trusting what she already knew. The Flex Co. grew tens of millions of dollars in revenue through DTC alone before entering retail, a deliberate sequencing that let the brand build a cost-effective marketing flywheel and the supply chain and finance infrastructure retail requires, rather than rushing into big-box shelf space it wasn't ready to defend.

September 22, 2026Episode 30422 min

They Tried Letting AI Do Their Books. Here's What Happened.

Business owners keep telling Melissa Broughton the same thing: they tried letting AI fully handle their bookkeeping, and a few months later they were back, books wrong, no one to call, and no idea why. Key Takeaways: Reconcile your books at least quarterly: automation causes real errors, duplicated or tripled income entries, and the only way to catch them is to actually check, not assume the software got it right. Overstated income costs you at tax time: founders worry about improper expenses, but overstated revenue means paying taxes on income your business never actually made. Never give an outside bookkeeper signing permissions on your accounts: vet for licensing, bonding, and background-checked staff, and keep control of your own money regardless of how much you trust them. Document anything you do more than once: a simple habit Melissa says has saved her thousands of hours over the years, from client emails to onboarding steps. AI removed the worst part of bookkeeping, not the need for it: AI has eliminated most manual data entry, freeing bookkeepers to actually analyze numbers and act as a true financial partner, but the client relationship and explanation are still where the value is. The founders who try to fully replace their bookkeeper with AI tend to return within three to four months, at which point they've often already filed inaccurate numbers or missed a fraud pattern a human would have caught, making the "savings" from skipping a bookkeeper a false economy.

September 15, 2026Episode 30319 min

You're Not Growing a Business. You're Growing a Bottleneck.

Revenue climbs. So do the hours, the stress, and the number of decisions only you can make. Allison Maslan has built 10 companies and mentored over 150,000 founders, and she says the growth ceiling almost everyone hits isn't a revenue problem. It's them. Key Takeaways: Recognize the bottleneck pattern early. Founders keep trying to have their eyes on everything long after the business has grown past what one person can hold, and it quietly chokes growth instead of protecting it. Watch for delegation guilt, especially as a woman founder. The instinct to "get in the trenches" to prove you're working as hard as your team can actually block your team's own creativity and ownership. Shift from giving answers to asking questions. Replace "here's what to do" with "what would you do in this situation" to train your team to think for themselves instead of training them to think like you. Pick one scalable model and build the foundation first. Chasing every new scalable idea (shiny object syndrome) before the foundation is strong is what causes growth to collapse, not a lack of ambition. Name what AI could make irrelevant in your business within a year. Allison tells her own clients to identify the parts of their business AI could take over, and reinvent proactively instead of waiting to be disrupted. Allison has personally experienced the cost of not fixing this: she says she "nearly imploded personally, emotionally, and financially" from staying the bottleneck in an earlier business, before building the team-managed, scalable model that became her signature SCALEit Method and the foundation of Pinnacle Global Network.

September 8, 2026Episode 30228 min

The Two Numbers This Founder Watches Above Everything Else?

Lillian Rafson got caught up in the press, the awards, and the pressure of "what's next," and grew her team faster than her demand could support. When growth plateaued, she had to lay people off to save the company, and then had to learn the hardest lesson of her career: she is not her business. Key Takeaways: Watch for validation-driven growth: press coverage and awards for growing quickly pulled Lillian into hiring ahead of actual demand, a trap that's easy to miss while it's happening. Track two KPIs, not one: profitability and client satisfaction have to stay in balance, a business that's profitable but has unhappy customers won't last, and neither will one that's loved but not profitable. Separate yourself from your business's hard decisions: Lillian had to consciously untangle her self-worth from the layoffs she made, reminding herself the decision wasn't a reflection of her as a person. Make financial transparency a habit, not a crisis response: after the layoffs, Lillian started sharing monthly profitability and margin updates with her whole team so no one is blindsided again. Build the business so it survives without you: documenting SOPs and training backups before her maternity leave meant Pack Up + Go kept running while she stepped fully away for the first time in ten years. Pack Up + Go's decision to stay fully bootstrapped, funded entirely by customer prepayments rather than outside capital, forced Lillian to keep profitability and client satisfaction in constant balance instead of chasing growth for its own sake, a discipline that ultimately saved the company when demand plateaued after the pandemic travel boom.

September 1, 2026Episode 30122 min

The Pivot That Launched Pizza Girl, Inc.

For seven years, Caroline D'Amore built Pizza Girl around one model: get it into supermarkets. Then a tragedy she never saw coming, the LA fires, handed her the business she'd actually been missing the whole time. Key Takeaways: Watch your crisis response for a business signal: Pizza Girl's turnkey B2B event program came directly out of the community pizza donations Caroline organized during the LA fires. Separate your personal story from your market research: Naming and building her first product around personal reasons instead of what the market wanted cost her early traction. Close a product line before it compromises your values. Caroline shut down her supermarket sauce division rather than water down the ingredients to hit retail margins. Filter every idea through one question. "Does this directly correlate to a sale" now decides what her team spends time on, not what's fun to market. Take outside capital when it lets you move faster. Caroline gave up full ownership for investors who let Pizza Girl scale its facilities and trucking instead of growing at a slow uphill pace alone. Revenue / Growth Insight: The B2B turnkey program, tabletop ovens and subscription par-baked pizzas sold directly to hotels, offices, and event venues, grew from one hotel account to 30 venues across LA in months, a faster and higher-margin path than the original supermarket retail model Caroline spent seven years building. Pizza Girl Website Pizza Girl LinkedIn Pizza Girl Instagram Pizza Girl Facebook Pizza Girl YouTube Caroline D’Amore Instagram Caroline D’Amore LinkedIn Gordon Ramsay Food Stars Caroline D’Amore Work with She Built It® Media She Built It® Instagram She Built It® CEO, Melanie Barr Instagram Melanie Barr LinkedIn She Built It® LinkedIn

August 25, 2026Episode 3006 min

Would AI Find Your Business? Here's the Test

Episode 300 feels like the right time to talk about something every CEO and business owner needs to be paying attention to right now. The way people find you is changing. Someone can open Claude, ChatGPT or another AI platform and ask who leads your industry, who they should hire, or what they need to know before making a decision. They get an answer in seconds. The question is, are you part of that answer? In this episode, I’m talking about what owned media really means in 2026, why the right content keeps building value long after you publish it, and why AI is making your original ideas and expertise even more important. And really, it comes down to one question: If someone went looking today for the thing your company does best, would they find you? Connect with us: Work with She Built It® Media She Built It® Instagram She Built It® CEO, Melanie Barr Instagram Melanie Barr LinkedIn She Built It® LinkedIn

August 18, 2026Episode 29927 min

How Do You Build a Skincare Business That Lasts 20 Years? with Rachel Lee Lozina

On She Built It®, Rachel Lee Lozina, founder of Blue Water Spa, licensed esthetician with 23 years of experience, and owner of two locations in New York, shares the skincare truth that most people never hear: the facials that actually change your skin, the ingredients that are marketing ploys, and why slow and consistent beats aggressive and trendy every single time. This conversation goes well beyond skincare. Rachel gets candid about what it actually took to open a second location an hour and a half from home, the cold calling, the free facials, the rejection, and the loneliness of being the new kid on the block after 18 years of established credibility. She also shares the pay structure mistake that kills most beauty businesses, why she stopped worrying about being liked by her team after 40, and how she uses AI to analyze her business metrics in ways she never could before. This is for anyone who’s ever wondered what it really costs to grow a service business from one location to two. Connect with us: Blue Water Spa Website Blue Water Spa LinkedIn Blue Water Spa Facebook Blue Water Spa Instagram Rachel Lee Lozina LinkedIn Rachel Lee Lozina Instagram Work with She Built It® Media She Built It® Instagram She Built It® CEO, Melanie Barr Instagram Melanie Barr LinkedIn She Built It® LinkedIn