A business that is working is usually boring. Same offer, same model, same delivery, quietly making money. Which is exactly when founders start looking for a reason to blow it up.

Adrienne calls this an epidemic in the small business space. This episode picks up two threads from earlier conversations, the Be Bored and Rich episode and Adrienne's interview with Denise Duffield-Thomas, and goes deeper on why boredom is so expensive.

What they cover:

• Denise Duffield-Thomas has launched the same program, in the same business model, for fifteen years, and the question the community most wanted to ask her about it
• Why your brain will find entertainment somewhere, and why it picks your business when you have no hobbies
• The two reasons Adrienne sees clients miss their goals, both of which come down to focus
• Where your consumption should point, whether that's a business book, a webinar, or a new prompt
• Why tinkering undoes years of incremental improvement, and how boredom becomes a recipe for being broke
• Emily on the belief that business has to feel hard, and what founders do to themselves when it stops feeling hard
• The interior designer who felt guilty raising her rates because the work came naturally to her
• Adrienne's rule on business books, which is to read as few as possible and then actually implement one
• Hobbies clients have actually picked up, from African drumming to weekly Spanish lessons
  

Homework from this one: find a hobby. Then tell Adrienne and Emily what fiction book you're reading. They have recommendations if you need them.

Referenced in this episode: the Be Bored and Rich episode, and Adrienne's interview with Denise Duffield-Thomas.

⏱️ Time Chapters

00:00 What do we even call you

06:47 The same program for fifteen years

11:00 Solving the wrong problem

15:20 Bored is a recipe for broke

19:37 The book count is not a trophy

24:04 Your homework is a hobby

Surprise! Most teams don't go over capacity on purpose. It happens slowly, and then one day that's just your culture.

Worse, by the time someone says out loud that they can't take on one more thing, they've been carrying it for months.

Adrienne has spent the last few months in conversations with business owners who are all hitting the same wall. In this episode, she walks Emily through what a maxed-out team actually costs, and it is a lot more than the clients you had to turn away.

What they cover:

• The obvious cost of a maxed out team, and the four costs underneath it that almost nobody prices out
• Why hearing "I can't take that on" from a team member means you are already well past capacity
• The job description red flags that quietly advertise a drowning team
• Why most people are carrying work that should have come off their plate a year ago, and how often to rebalance
• The joy metric, and why putting people on work they actually like is a retention strategy
• The six figure specialist hire that usually solves nothing, and the cheaper move that opens capacity immediately
• Bloated team, bloated process, and why adding people to an inefficient system just buys you more chaos
• Why a team at capacity can never actually adopt AI, and the four hours a week that changes it

If this is ringing true for your team, message Adrienne. She will tell you honestly whether the assessment is a fit.

⏱️ Time Chapters
00:01 Summer, sleeping teenagers, and a 90s childhood detour
08:16 The real cost of a team at capacity
12:36 Nobody dies if we ship three fewer cars
16:51 Burnout, turnover, and lighting money on fire
21:23 Rebalancing plates and the joy metric
25:42 Bloated team, bloated process
30:22 Zero learning time and where to start

Denise Duffield-Thomas recorded 32 podcast episodes in three days. Then she booked ballet class instead of finding more work to do. Then she felt guilty about it,

Denise is the money mentor behind Money Bootcamp, a program she has now run for 14 years and taught to over 10,000 students. She wrote Get Rich, Lucky Bitch and Chill and Prosper.

She and Adrienne have known each other a long time, so this conversation goes places a normal guest interview does not.

What they cover:

• Why Denise batches to an extreme degree, and her answer to people who say batched content is not authentic
• The golden goose problem, and her realization that there are actually two of them
• What changed when ADHD and perimenopause hit at the same time, and how she rebuilt her workload around a smaller capacity
• The moment she realized she had made herself financially responsible for her husband, her mother, her mother-in-law, and a business partner
• Why she stopped trying to change her own behavior and started building systems that work around it
• Why every plateau feels completely real and almost never is
• Her entire marketing strategy, which is two steps and has never been written down

  
  Find Denise at denisedt.com
  Money Bootcamp: denisedt.com/bootcamp
  Instagram: @denisedt
  Books: Get Rich, Lucky Bitch and Chill and Prosper
  
  00:00 Welcome and fourteen years of Money Bootcamp

  02:55 Thirty-two episodes in three days

  07:23 Batching is not inauthentic

  11:44 Where the ideas actually come from

  16:23 A smaller capacity than she used to have

  20:52 The assistant who quit before Denise could

  25:38 Work harder or let them take responsibility

  30:03 When you know the pattern and still can't break it

  34:17 Every plateau feels real and isn't

  38:46 Energetic ceilings, not logistical ones

  43:36 Share what you know, make offers

  46:12 Your business is not there to entertain you

  53:12 There are two golden geese

  56:32 Where to find Denise

Everyone online is selling the same thing.
More sales, more revenue, hit the next milestone.
It makes a clean ad and an enticing screenshot.

It is also pointing you at the wrong metric entirely.

This solo episode is the actual math on what a business is worth.

What Adrienne covers:

• Why revenue advice is so popular.
• The due diligence tip. If someone's only case study is themselves, buyer beware. Doing it and teaching someone else to do it are two different skill sets
• Why "easy internet money" is the part you can see, not the part that's work
• The client who scaled zero to $23 million in under three years and showed up unable to sleep or eat
• Why you can't scale chaos, and why working harder is not the fix for this
• The $165,000 in cost savings found inside one team's calendar, before touching a single system
• The 30 day test. If you disappeared, would the business grow, coast, or collapse
• Two businesses, same million dollars in revenue. A $750,000 difference in value and zero extra sales
• The short list of cases where revenue maxing genuinely is the right move
  

Take the free exit readiness diagnostic: level11leaders.com/exit

⏱️ Time Chapters
00:00 The growth gospel is a lie
04:05 Sample size of one
08:05 Zero to $23 million and drowning
12:15 Revenue is a vanity metric
16:25 Two businesses, same million dollars
21:40 When revenue maxing is actually right

You can pack the bags, take the flight, check into the hotel, and still end up sitting on the beach answering Slack. Most founders call that freedom because it happened somewhere new... but working in a new location does not equal freedom.

Adrienne spent this Tuesday on the golf course and spent this week getting a biopsy she almost put off. Both of those are the same story.

This solo episode kicks off a run of episodes built around one question: can your business actually run without you?

What she covers:

• Why "I can work from anywhere in the world" is a sentence worth hearing yourself say out loud
• Two out of office moments from Adrienne's week: a Tuesday tee time, and the doctor's appointment she came close to pushing off again
• Location freedom is about where your body is. Mental freedom is about whether the business is still running in the back of your head while you're there
• The client who asked whether he was still allowed to think about his business during his four week unplugged, and the answer he got
• Why the big ideas only show up once the day to day noise clears out
• The client who worked from the labor and delivery room and told herself it counted as freedom
• Why remote work got optimized so well that your body can be anywhere while you stay completely trapped
• Where to start: a free diagnostic that scores owner dependency across six categories
  

Take the free out of office diagnostic: level11leaders.com/exit

⏱️ Time Chapters
00:00 The beach, the Slack, the lie
04:05 The appointment she almost skipped
08:58 Location freedom is not freedom
13:10 You optimized for the wrong one
17:15 Find out where your business needs you

Emily showed up with a list of questions and Adrienne had no idea what was coming. What followed was one of the more honest conversations they've had on the show.

In this episode, Emily puts Adrienne in the hot seat for a rapid fire Q&A. No prep, no filter, and some answers that surprised even the person giving them.

What they cover:

• The best advice Adrienne ever got and then ignored for years, and why she's finally living it this year
• How this has genuinely been one of the harder financial years in the business, and what the monthly conversations between Adrienne and Emily actually sound like
• The leadership mistake Adrienne had never said out loud until now: stepping back so far it became abdication, and what it cost the team
• What Emily told Adrienne at the end of last year that changed how they work together
• A belief about hard work and success that Adrienne has completely reversed after years of watching other people build differently
• What Adrienne's team does better than her (almost everything, and she says so)
• Why rest still feels wrong when you're in a build phase, and the reframe that matters anyway
• The difference between needing a vacation and needing spaciousness, and why no-call weeks might be more valuable than either
  

Submit your own Dear Bossy question: sortabossypodcast.com

⏱️ Time Chapters
00:01 Sunkissed, frizzy hair, and heat waves in Canada
06:27 Emily has rapid fire questions and Adrienne knows nothing
08:16 Best advice ever gotten and completely ignored
10:39 The hardest conversations this year
12:32 Every month ends in a hype session
14:11 What the team does better than Adrienne
16:03 The leadership mistake Adrienne never admitted
18:55 What Emily told Adrienne that almost made her quit
22:08 A belief about hard work she's completely changed her mind on
24:03 The hat maker and Alex Hormozi in Kentucky
26:21 What does rest actually look like for you
28:50 You don't need the big picture ideas until you have the space for them
30:32 You don't have to earn rest

Middle management is the loneliest role in any organization.

In this Dear Bossy episode, Adrienne and Emily respond to a listener who manages a tight-knit team of three, does all the invisible work of protecting them from above, advocates for their growth, and still ends up feeling like she's not really part of the group.

It's a more common feeling than most managers will admit.

What they cover:

• Why your team bonding without you is actually a sign you're doing something right, even when it doesn't feel that way
• The invisible work of middle management: shielding your team from pressure, advocating behind the scenes, handling problems before they land on anyone else's desk
• Why the middle is often the loneliest layer of any organization, and why that is by design, not failure
• The difference between needing community and needing your team to provide it
• Emily's honest take on being the only person in the middle and what she did to navigate it
• How to ask your organization for development, mentorship, or coaching and why your leadership is already spending money on exactly that
• Practical ways to close the connection gap: therapy, peer networks, lunch and learns, industry events, and what happens when you just introduce yourself to the person next to you
• A teaser for something Adrienne and Emily are building specifically for operators and middle managers who need their own community

Submit your own Dear Bossy question: sortabossypodcast.com

⏱️ Time Chapters
00:01 Periscope, Clubhouse, and the graveyard of dead platforms
04:15 Summer House, audiobooks, and brains with nothing left in them

09:55 The listener question: am I being unreasonable for feeling left out of my own team?

13:05 Your team bonding without you is actually the dream

14:01 The invisible work nobody sees and nobody thanks you for

15:07 Emily's take: the middle is the loneliest layer

17:54 Middle management is the most burned out role in any org

20:13 Ask for the development your leadership is already investing in themselves

22:07 Lunch and learns, industry events, and a little like dating

24:07 Stay tuned, something's coming for operators and middle managers

Most personality frameworks collect dust after the first quiz.
Lisa Cumes & Mario Teran use the Enneagram as an operating system for their business, their team, and every hard conversation they have to have.

Mario and Lisa are a married couple who work together and coach other couples in business on how to build real alignment, not just a functioning working relationship.

What they've figured out applies whether you're running a company with your spouse or just trying to lead people better.

What they cover:

• Why alignment between partners, not hustle, is what actually makes a business run well
• The ARC framework as the foundation of any high-functioning partnership, personal or professional
• How to use the Enneagram as a shared language with a business partner, your team, and even clients you've never asked to take a personality test
• Why understanding yourself has to come before you can effectively lead, communicate with, or support anyone else
• What happens when couples in business put the revenue goals first and the relationship second, and why that order always backfires
• The walk and talk habit: a structured daily check-in that keeps small frustrations from becoming big blowups, and how to make it work with a packed schedule
• How to parent, lead a team, and manage client relationships using the same framework without ever asking someone their number
• The 30-day walk and talk challenge and where to find it
  

Connect with Mario and Lisa and download their FREE 30 Questions for your next Walk & Talk PDF Guide: marioandlisa.com

You can also grab their free enneagram guide here.

Or connect with them on Instagram!

⏱️ Time Chapters
00:00 Introducing Mario and Lisa
04:15 What a real power couple actually looks like
05:54 Radical responsibility: you are not responsible for each other's happiness
07:01 Awareness and the Enneagram: how Mario found himself in a framework
11:44 Adrienne's Enneagram origin story and Ryan Levesque's team Slack
14:03 Understanding yourself first, then your partner
17:11 When two whole people leverage their differences together
21:27 You don't have to do it twice to get it right
25:32 Stop waiting for the business to be better before investing in the relationship
27:28 The walk and talk habit and why it works
31:36 If you can't walk 30 minutes with your partner, you have a bigger problem
36:09 Borrow 30 minutes from social media
37:30 Using the Enneagram with your kids
41:40 Where to find Mario and Lisa and the 30-day challenge