
Episodes: 174
Frequency: Biweekly
Rating: 5.0/5.0
Estimated listeners: 1k-10k
Gender skew: Female
Location: USA
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Alex Batdorf - Three-time founder and entrepreneur who has built and scaled businesses, including one successful exit.
Nicole Wood - Scaling High-touch Services, Technology-enabled Coaching, Bootstrapping, Customer Retention, And Preserving Human Relationships While Growing.
Ellen Leikind - Negotiation, Strategic Confidence, Power Dynamics, Women In Business, And Recognizing When To Take Risks Or Walk Away.
Shawna Ruff - Government Grants, Equity-free Funding, Grant Proposal Strategy, Eligibility, Compliance, And Progressing From Early-stage Funding To Commercialization.
#156: The Multi-Million Dollar Service Model: How to Scale a High-Touch Business (Nicole Wood, Ama La Vida) 202
July 08, 2026
You built a business people actually need a human for. Then you started treating every part of it like a problem to automate, or you got so scared of losing the human touch that you wouldn't touch technology at all.Neither one is a strategy. There's a more precise way to decide what stays human in your business, and almost nobody teaches it.This week Alex talks with Nicole Wood, cofounder of Ama La Vida, about exactly that. Plus why she thinks the word "coach" has become alm...
#155: Play to Win: How Women Entrepreneurs Can Stop Leaving Money on the Table (Ellen Leikind, PokerDivas)
June 24, 2026
You may be one of the smartest people in the room. You work harder than anyone else, you have done everything right, and yet it still feels like it is not translating. The deals are not closing the way they should. And then you start coming down on your price before anyone even asks, out of fear you asked for too much. Yes. The system was not built for you to win and it has done a number on how we see ourselves and what we believe we are allowed to ask for. But sometimes we are also the barri...
#154: How to Write a Winning Grant Proposal to Access $5B in Equity-Free Funding (Shawna Ruff, Inten
June 10, 2026
Shawna Ruff was five days into writing government grants without sleeping when she ended up on her couch at 3am, crying into a bowl of cereal. She made it to her whiteboard instead. By morning she had the first version of what became Rayla AI.That's the version of this story nobody tells you when they say "go get equity-free government funding."The money is real, especially from SBIR, NSF, the America Seed Fund. This is non-dilutive capital available right now when most VC doors...
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