Episode 15: "She Survived A Brain Haemorrhage, Then This Serial Entrepreneur Started Again." cover art

Episode 15: "She Survived A Brain Haemorrhage, Then This Serial Entrepreneur Started Again."

Episode 15: "She Survived A Brain Haemorrhage, Then This Serial Entrepreneur Started Again."

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Length: 1 hour 4 minutes | Released: September 29, 2026Thea Brook on what happened when everything was stripped away, what she realised really mattered, and how she built her next business around it.Thea Brook is a serial entrepreneur with multi-million business successes to her name.Now she's also a brilliant business coach, helping other entrepreneurs move from six to seven figures.But that's not what's most interesting about her.It's how she got here.Never one for half measures, Thea's story is not your typical burnout narrative.Thea has always hustled hard, even though she knew she should rest more.Then nearly dying, not once but twice, forced her to stop. Not just for a bit. For a considerable period of time.In this episode of Radical Recentring, we get into what happens when life gets in the way of your entrepreneurial plans and forces you to reconsider everything.We explore how a spell in a dark room informed how Thea rebuilt her life from scratch, and what that means for her work today.Guest bioThea Brook, Founder, CALMMThea Brook is the founder of CALMM, which helps founder-led businesses build the structure, rhythm and financial clarity they need to scale profitably without the founder becoming the ceiling. She spent over a decade in finance, as a CFO for high-growth startups scaling into the tens of millions, and has built her own businesses across restaurants, products and services. That means she has sat at the CFO table and in the founder chair.Thea brings financial rigour, commercial pattern recognition and a deeply human understanding of what growth can cost when the business relies too heavily on personal effort. After burnout and a brain haemorrhage forced her to rethink the conventional hustle playbook, she built CALMM around a different belief: calm is not the opposite of ambition, it is the source of sustainable growth.In this episodeTimestamps approximate, from the transcript, confirm against the final edit.00:19: Who Thea Brook is, running CALMM, and rating her own life a 12 out of 1009:08: The 26-person food business, and two years of what she calls pure stress,12:20: Coming out of the business, going away for a week, and realising she couldn't focus on a single page of a book13:22: The brain aneurysm and the emergency surgery that followed16:19: Weeks in a dark room, unable to tolerate light or sound, and the pain she describes21:11: Gratitude, and the conversation with her husband before she went into surgery33:46: The desk cleared down to two things, and rebuilding from there53:13: Her advice for staying on track, and where to find her nowMentioned in this episodeCALMM, Thea's business helping six figure founders shift into operating at seven figuresToggl, the time-tracking app she recommends to the founders she works withConnect with TheaWebsite: theabrook.comFree workshop, on what's making a business heavier than it needs to be: theabrook.com/workshopLinkedIn: Thea BrookYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@calmm_coConnect with NonieTake the Leadership Identity Quiz: https://noniewhite.com/leadership-identity-quiz/Find out more about the Unshakeable Method, Nonie's four-month 1:1 coaching programme: https://noniewhite.com/becoming-unshakeable/Next episodeNonie talks to Ella McKay, who isn't trying to build a nice little chocolate company. She's building Fatso with the ambition to hit £100 million and join the challenger brands that have changed their categories. But Ella cares just as much about how Fatso gets there, wanting the scale without losing the kindness and humanity the company was built on. This conversation is about Ella's journey from hustling startup founder to the confident leader her scaling business needs now.
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