Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur | Start and Grow Your Own Business

In this special Collab Week episode of Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur, six founders come together to answer one deeply personal question:
What's one thing you faked… until you made it?
You'll hear from Sheri Roder of Get UnStuck HQ, Bill McCumber of Rowan Elder, Wendy Votroubek of Integrity Legal Nurse Consulting, Sara Reece of Workmind, Patricia Ballivian of Altura Strategies, and Jane Alexander of Emma Advisor. Each of them talks about a moment when they had to show up before they felt ready.
For any wantrepreneur or entrepreneur wondering whether they really belong in the room, this episode will help. You'll hear how six founders moved from feeling like impostors to feeling like themselves, and why the "faking" part was never really pretending.
✨ What You'll Take Away
In this episode, you'll learn:
Why acting with confidence before you feel confident is how real confidence gets built
How to choose the kind of leader you want to be without turning into someone else
Why nearly everyone in the room feels the same impostor syndrome you do
How asking for help and investing in yourself can close skill gaps faster than faking it
Why being publicly visible is part of the job when you lead a company
How to stop borrowing someone else's version of leadership and own the one you've earned
What changes once you have real customers and can say your title with conviction
🎙️ Meet the Collab Week Contributors
Sheri Roder — Get UnStuck HQ
Sheri Roder is the founder of Get UnStuck HQ, a career and leadership coaching and advising practice for accomplished professionals at an inflection point. She spent more than 40 years in corporate life, including leading a department in London for the first time. Then she stepped away to build a practice around the work she loved most: helping people make decisions they've been circling for months, see options they couldn't see before, and trust their own judgment again. Today she helps clients turn messy, complicated situations into something they can act on.
Connect with Sheri: https://www.getunstuckhq.com/
William "Bill" McCumber — Rowan Elder
Bill McCumber is the founder of two ed-tech companies, Rowan Elder Productions and Applied Erudition. Rowan Elder is an async faculty development program that teaches professors to build studio-quality online lectures that feel more like YouTube than a stale slideshow. Applied Erudition is a platform that measures real capability rather than seat time.
Connect with Bill:
https://www.rowanelder.com/home
https://appliederudition.com/
Wendy Votroubek — Integrity Legal Nurse Consulting
Wendy Votroubek, RN, BSN, MPH, LNC, founded Integrity Legal Nurse Consulting in 2010. She leads a team of more than 20 legal nurses who translate complex medical data into legal strategy for civil and criminal defense attorneys nationwide. She is in the fifth decade of her nursing career and has written three nursing textbooks, including The Path to Legal Nurse Consulting. She taught at the University of Portland School of Nursing from 2011 to 2021 and now speaks on personal injury, medical malpractice, and criminal defense matters.
Connect with Wendy: https://legalnursepdx.com/
Sara Reece — Workmind
Sara Reece is the CEO and Co-Founder of Workmind, which helps growing organizations use practical, operations-first automation to remove friction and grow without adding headcount at the same pace. Over the last seven years she has implemented automation for nonprofits, small businesses, franchise systems, and Fortune 500 enterprises. Before that, her career ran through journalism, TV broadcasting, environmental research, and tech. She is the author of The Practical Path to Operational Automation and speaks regularly on automation, AI, and sustainable growth.
Connect with Sara:
https://workmind.cloud/
https://www.saralreece.com/
Patricia Ballivian — Altura Strategies
Patricia Ballivian is the founder of Altura Strategies, where she helps founders bring clarity and structure to the messy realities of scaling. She is originally from Bolivia and built her career across luxury retail and startups, working where strategy, people, systems, and customer experience meet. She has always been the person searching for the real source of friction, and that instinct became the foundation of Altura's systems-forward, people-centered approach to turning growing pains into sustainable growth.
Connect with Patricia: https://www.alturastrategies.net/
Jane Alexander — Emma Advisor
Jane Alexander is the founder and CEO of Emma Advisor, an AI platform that helps families get from high school to college with more clarity, strategy, and confidence. Her own path was unconventional: she was homeschooled in rural Idaho, went the community college route, and later did graduate work at Harvard. She then spent more than a decade advising leaders at over 200 colleges and universities. Emma Advisor grew from her belief that opportunity shouldn't depend on social capital or expensive consultants.
Connect with Jane: https://emmaadvisor.ai/

Are you so focused on growth that you're accidentally breaking the very things that made your business special? In this episode, we sit down with Jeri Larsen, a former C-suite executive turned founder of Manage for Good. Jeri reveals why the traditional, siloed approach to people, operations, and growth is a recipe for disaster during scale. She provides a masterclass on how to navigate the painful but necessary "inflection points" of growth by building a solid foundation first. This episode is a must-listen for any founder who wants to scale intentionally, keep their best people, and create a high-performing organization without losing its heart and soul.
💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business
How to spot the critical "inflection points" in your business and make the leap without crashing.
The high-stakes decision between promoting an internal star vs. hiring an external expert (and the framework to get it right).
Why building your operational infrastructure before you need it is the key to catching, not chasing, growth.
A powerful daily leadership practice to ensure you show up as the intentional, empowering leader your team needs.
How to stop "squeezing more blood out of the turnip" and adopt an abundance mindset that creates loyal teams and happy clients.
The secret to using an objective, third-party perspective to see and solve problems you're too close to notice.
📝 About Jeri Larsen
Jeri Larsen is the CEO of Manage for Good, a management consulting firm dedicated to helping companies scale without chaos. With a powerhouse career as a Chief Operating Officer, Chief Customer Officer, and Chief People Officer across SaaS, Fortune 500 consulting, and more, Jeri has seen it all. Her unique expertise lies at the intersection of people, operations, and growth, where she helps leaders build organizations that perform exceptionally well without sacrificing the culture that makes them great. She is the author of the new book, Manage for Good: Signals of Impact, a playbook for identifying and fixing the hidden red flags in any business.
🎯 Jeri’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs
"Figure out if you're the problem and figure out how to fix it, because so often we are only in our own way."
📢 Memorable Quotes
“As companies grow and scale, there's such a tendency to squeeze more blood out of the turnip… Instead, we're not thinking, ‘If I'm growing, I want loyal, incredible people who enjoy their day-to-day work.’” – Jeri Larsen
“It is that moment where I need to jump off the cliff, but I'm scared. That's the moment you have to jump.” – Jeri Larsen
“As the leader, my job is to get out of their way and just give them everything that they need to be empowered.” – Jeri Larsen
💡 Actionable Takeaways
✅ Start your day with intention. Before diving into work, decide what kind of leader you need to be for your team today.
✅ Audit your next key hire. Are you hiring for potential and cultural fit, or just for a resume with past experience? Think through the long-term impact on your team.
✅ "War game" your operations. Ask your team: "If our biggest dream client signed tomorrow, what parts of our process would immediately break?" Start fixing those gaps now.
✅ Get an outside perspective this week. Ask a trusted mentor or peer to look at a persistent problem in your business. Listen to what they see that you don't.
🔗 Links & Resources
Website: https://www.manageforgood.com
Get the book on Amazon: Manage for Good: Signals of Impact
Connect with Jeri on LinkedIn
Follow Manage for Good on LinkedIn

Ever felt like your corporate experience puts you in a box? Think again. This episode features Ali Benslimane, a tech veteran from Google and Stripe who channeled his experience into solving a deeply human problem: the bureaucratic nightmare of moving to another country. Ali shares how he and his co-founder built Aelos, a company that combines high-tech efficiency with a high-touch concierge service to help Americans relocate to France. This episode is a masterclass in leveraging your background in unexpected ways, using technology to enhance human connection, and the critical importance of sweating the small details to build unbreakable customer trust.
💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business
How to turn personal pain points (like moving countries) into a scalable, mission-driven business idea.
Why your corporate background is a superpower, not a limitation, for starting your own venture.
The 3-part "executive filter" every founder needs for making product decisions: simplicity, sweating the details, and speed.
How to use AI to enhance the human touch and build trust, not replace it, creating a superior customer experience.
The power of doing "unscalable" things (like sending handwritten notes) to build a loyal customer base that becomes your biggest advocate.
How to overcome "wantrepreneur" paralysis by taking small, incremental steps that build unstoppable momentum.
Why talking to 150+ potential customers before you build is your greatest competitive advantage.
📝 About Ali Benslimane
Ali Benslimane is the co-founder and CEO of Aelos, a company dedicated to helping Americans relocate to and retire in France with confidence and ease. Before becoming a founder, Ali spent over a decade building and scaling international operations at tech giants like Google and Stripe, where he worked on the game-changing Stripe Atlas product. Having personally lived in five different countries, Ali combines his deep expertise in global systems with a first-hand understanding of the challenges of building a life across borders, making him uniquely equipped to solve this complex problem.
🎯 Ali’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs
The biggest struggle for wantrepreneurs is just getting started. The best way to overcome this is by taking small, incremental "baby steps" that demystify the process and build confidence until you're hooked on the feeling of creating value and getting customers.
📢 Memorable Quotes
“I think business is all about execution ultimately. I think ideas are cheap. We all had ideas and we see someone do them and we're like, oh my God, I had this amazing idea… It could have been me. Yes, it could have been you, but no, that person did it.” – Ali Benslimane
“Every hour spent talking to a customer is essentially a chance for you to refine your product, your value proposition.” – Ali Benslimane
“The way we see it is technology and AI enables humans to do things much faster. And to focus on things that they do best... [like building] that relationship of trust.” – Ali Benslimane
💡 Actionable Takeaways
✅ This weekend, take one "baby step": talk to two potential customers or use an AI tool to create a mock-up of your business idea.
✅ Review your own business's customer experience. Are you "sweating the details" and removing all friction, right down to making sure your website's copyright year is current?
✅ Identify one repetitive, low-value task in your workflow that could be automated, freeing you up to focus on building deeper customer relationships.
✅ Brainstorm one "unscalable" thing you can do for your next 5 customers to create a memorable, human experience (e.g., a handwritten note, a personal video message).
🔗 Links & Resources
Website: https://www.aelos.net
Connect with Ali on LinkedIn
Follow Aelos on LinkedIn

Are you making marketing decisions based on gut feelings and chasing "good ideas" that never seem to move the needle? In this episode, growth strategist Izzy Sapien breaks down why this intuition-driven approach is the very thing keeping so many businesses stuck in the $2-5 million "no man's land." She reveals the critical shift from relying on grit to implementing disciplined, data-informed frameworks that create real momentum. This episode is a masterclass for any founder feeling the pressure of tight cash flow, showing you how to tie marketing directly to your P&L, make better strategic decisions, and build a profitable, scalable brand without burning through your budget.
💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business
🧠 Why the "gut feelings" that got you to your first $2M will prevent you from scaling further, and when to switch to a data-driven framework.
Momentum vs. Movement: Learn the critical difference between being busy and making strategic forward progress that makes your business unstoppable.
💡 How to tell the difference between a "good idea" and a "right now idea" to avoid wasting time and money on strategies that won't deliver results.
💰 The simple formula that connects marketing directly to revenue (Traffic x AOV x Conversion Rate x LTV) and how to manage it for profitability.
💧 Why neglecting top-of-funnel marketing is like letting your well run dry, and how to invest in awareness even when cash flow is tight.
🗣️ The power of predictive questions to unlock breakthrough growth ideas within your own team and move past feeling "war-torn" by financial pressure.
📝 About Izzy Sapien
Izzy Sapien is a growth strategist and fractional Head of Growth with over a decade of experience helping beauty, wellness, and supplement brands scale. After founding and growing her own successful agency, she now specializes in guiding founder-led, cash-flow-pressured companies through the challenging $2-5 million growth stage. Izzy masterfully combines marketing strategy with financial acumen and founder psychology, helping leadership teams move from chaotic, intuition-driven tactics to disciplined, data-informed decision-making that fuels sustainable and profitable growth.
🎯 Izzy’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs
"Gut feelings are for moments when you lack evidence or experience."
📢 Memorable Quotes
“A lot of brands get stuck at this $2 to $5 million mark... It's because a lot of the decisions and way that we make decisions up to the $2 million mark depends on things like grit and gut feelings.” – Izzy Sapien
“There are plenty of strategies that are perfect on the outside—great strategies—but they're not right now strategies.” – Izzy Sapien
"I'm not a big believer that people are the reason that a company fails. I'm always a believer that decision-making is at least one of the front runners for it." – Izzy Sapien
💡 Actionable Takeaways
✅ Audit your decision-making process. Are your marketing plans built on evidence and data, or are they a series of reactive gut feelings?
✅ Protect your top-of-funnel budget. Dedicate a healthy portion of your marketing spend to awareness, even if it doesn't have immediate ROI, to prevent your customer pipeline from drying up.
✅ Focus on your customer journey. It's cheaper to nurture existing customers than to acquire new ones. Invest in your email marketing and automation to maximize Lifetime Value (LTV).
✅ When evaluating a new idea, ask "Why here, why now?" to determine if it's a "good idea" or a "right now idea" that aligns with your current resources and goals.
🔗 Links & Resources
Website: https://www.izzysapien.com
Inquire as a brand at https://www.chiral-marketing.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/izzysellscpg/
Connect with Izzy on LinkedIn
Follow Chiral Performance Marketing on LinkedIn

In this episode, Brian sits down with Drew Alexander Forde, the world-renowned musician known as "That Viola Kid" who has masterfully blended artistic excellence with sharp entrepreneurial instincts. Drew shares his incredible journey from playing viola in NYC subways to performing with legends like Adele and Kanye West, and how those experiences forged his business mindset. This isn't just a story about music; it's a masterclass in turning a passion into a multi-faceted career, building a personal brand, and creating a tech solution (DTLA) to solve the biggest pain points in your industry. For any wantrepreneur or entrepreneur, especially those in creative fields, this episode is a powerful lesson in valuing your work, building systems, and dropping the "starving artist" mentality for good.
💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business
How to build a powerful personal brand by sharing your process and journey, even before you have a product to sell.
The subway busking mindset: how to find the audience with a problem you can solve and focus entirely on serving them.
Why creative labor must be quantified and valued, and how to shift your mindset from "artist" to "business owner."
The strategy of scratching your own itch: how Drew identified the administrative pains of freelance musicians and built a tech company (DTLA) to solve them.
How to use "loading screen" moments (like commutes) for intentional strategic thinking to grow your business and diversify your income.
Why developing a non-negotiable work ethic in your core skill allows you to handle the unpredictable challenges of business with ease.
The "compound interest" effect of consistent practice and how it applies to building both skills and business expertise over time.
📝 About Drew Alexander Forde
Drew Alexander Forde, known online as "That Viola Kid," is a Juilliard-trained violist who has transformed his classical music career into a modern entrepreneurial empire. He has performed and recorded with some of the biggest names in music, including Adele, Kendrick Lamar, Alicia Keys, and Kanye West. Refusing to be just a performer, Drew embraced social media to build a massive personal brand and co-founded two businesses: Whole Soul, a hip-hop and R&B string quartet, and DTLA, a software company designed to eliminate administrative and financial headaches for freelance musicians. Drew is a shining example of how to merge world-class talent with a savvy business mind.
🎯 Drew’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs
"Don't be afraid of pain... It does not matter how slow you go as long as you do not stop."
📢 Memorable Quotes
"The role as an entrepreneur is to find the people who have the problems that you can solve and then quickly and deeply try to solve those problems." – Drew Alexander Forde
"Creative labor is real. It must be measured, it must be quantified because at the end of the day you only have 24 hours on the planet." – Drew Alexander Forde
"If I get sick and I can't move my arms anymore... I lose all of my income. And to me, that scenario was unacceptable. So when I would sit in the subways or I would sit in the car and I would think about that possibility, it would drive me to read more books." – Drew Alexander Forde
💡 Actionable Takeaways
Identify your industry's biggest "painful administrative problem" and brainstorm a simple tool or system to solve it, just as Drew did for musicians with DTLA.
Start building your personal brand today by documenting your process. You don't need a finished product to start providing value and owning your audience's attention.
Audit your "loading screen" time (commutes, waiting in line) and dedicate it to intentional thinking about your business goals and strategy.
Stop accepting the "starving artist" narrative. Start tracking your time and quantifying the value of your skills to confidently charge what you're worth.
Reframe a past rejection or failure. Instead of a verdict on your ability, view it as a necessary step that pushed you toward a more authentic and successful path.
🔗 Links & Resources
DTLA website: https://getdtla.com/
Whole Soul Music website: https://www.wholesoulmusic.com
That Viola Kid website: https://thatviolakid.com
Connect with Drew on LinkedIn
Follow DTLA on LinkedIn
Follow Whole Soul on Instagram