PODCAST · business
Beyond Founder-Led
by The DeVain Collective
Running a business is complicated. Balancing it with the rest of your life? Even more so. I'm Sheena Hunt, and Beyond Founder-Led picks up where my previous podcast, Beautifully Complicated, left off — but with sharper focus. This show is for women founders ready to stop being the bottleneck and start building businesses that don't require their presence in every room. With 20+ years in Fortune 100 operations and close to 15 years as an entrepreneur, I've lived the chaos and found the path through it. Now I help mission-driven businesses scale sustainably — growing revenue without growing burnout. Weekly episodes with tactical frameworks, client stories, and honest conversations about what it really takes to lead and live well. Powered by The DeVain Collective | thedevaincollective.com 🎧Listen. 👍Like 📱Subscribe. 🗣Share. The DeVain
Episodes
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Pricing is Personal
You can learn every pricing framework there is and still discount your way back down, because underneath the framework is a number you believe, and belief beats spreadsheet every time. In this episode, Sheena names the tell — that the number you say out loud is always slightly lower than the one...
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Paying Yourself Well
Your compensation is a cost of the business, as real as your best employee's salary, and almost every founder has it filed in the wrong place. In this episode, Sheena opens a four-part arc on the worth conversation by showing what the misfiling does to your financials: a margin subsidized by...
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The Loneliness of Leading
Founder loneliness scales with success, which is the part nobody warns you about: more people around you can mean fewer people you can be honest with, and the two moved in opposite directions without you noticing the crossing point. In the final episode of the arc, Sheena walks the three doors…
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The Loyalty Question
Early loyalty creates a real debt, and unsettled debts exert enormous force on judgment. In this episode, Sheena gives that debt its full due before complicating it: the willingness to do everything badly at speed with no structure is a genuine and rare skill at five people, and precisely the…
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Letting Someone Go With Grace
Founders almost never have a clarity problem about who needs to go; they have a delay problem, and the delay is where nearly all the damage lives. In this episode, Sheena walks the three stories that keep someone employed long past the decision — they are loyal, they are going through something…
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Hiring For The Business You're Becoming
Every role you open is a confession about the company you are trying to become, which is exactly why so many founders cannot write the job description. In this episode, Sheena opens a four-part arc on the people part of scaling by taking apart the right-now hire — the role you write by listing…
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The Version of You the Business Outgrew
The cruel math of founding is that the exact qualities that took you from zero to a million are the ones keeping you from three — the speed, the omnipresence, the personally enforced standard, the whole business held in one head. In the final episode of the arc, Sheena explains why this has never...
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Knowing When to Step In
Every overrule is a withdrawal from an account your team is keeping, and most founders have never noticed they were spending. In this episode, Sheena describes the two failure modes — the founder who overrules everything and trains her team to stop finishing work, and the founder who overrules...
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Real Authority
Responsibility without authority is blame with extra steps, and it is the most common structural injury in a founder-led business. In this episode, Sheena separates stated authority from revealed authority — what your team learns from what actually happened the last time someone decided something...
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Making Yourself Optional
Founders spend years looking for the broken process, the wrong tool, or the missing hire, because any of those would be easier than the truth. In this episode, Sheena takes apart the comfortable lie that once the system is fixed the work will flow, and explains why a better tool simply gives the...
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Letting Go of the Reins
Most founders believe they have delegated far more than they actually have. In this episode, Sheena opens a five-part arc on decision-making authority by drawing the line between a loan and a transfer: letting someone decide, versus letting someone decide until you disagree. She walks the three...
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Delivery Beyond the Founder
Everything in the after-the-yes arc comes down to one shift, and it is the hardest one a founder makes: moving from being the person who delivers the experience to being the person who designs it. In the finale, Sheena takes on the identity resistance underneath founder dependency — the fear that...
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Value Where it Matters
There is a difference between being busy on behalf of a client and being valuable to them, and most founders are exceptional at the first one. In the fourth and most pivotal episode of the after-the-yes arc, Sheena names the pattern of over-delivering by volume — more meetings, more documents…
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The Backend that Holds it All
Good delivery is invisible to the client and effortful for the founder, and the difference between the two is the backend. In the third episode of the after-the-yes arc, Sheena goes beneath the surface of the client experience to the systems, workflows, and documented knowledge that hold delivery...
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The First Ninety Days
The first ninety days of a client relationship teach a client more about working with you than anything you said to win them. In the second episode of the after-the-yes arc, Sheena reframes onboarding from paperwork to belief-building, and shows how an improvised onboarding teaches clients that...
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After the Yes
We spend enormous energy learning how to earn a client's yes, and almost none designing what happens right after we get it. In this episode, Sheena opens a five-part arc on the part of the business most founders never systematize: the delivery experience. She names the gap between selling and...
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The Pricing Problem: Pricing as a Leadership Decision
A founder does the hard work — she diagnoses her underpricing, she reverse-engineers better numbers, she raises her rates, and it works. And then eighteen months later, she’s drifted right back. Costs crept up. New offers got priced with old logic. The fear quietly returned. She treated pricing...
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The Pricing Problem: How To Raise Your Rates Without Losing Your Best Clients
Once you’ve done the math from part two, you run straight into the fear that stops most founders cold: your best clients will leave if you raise your rates. In this episode, Sheena takes that fear apart — carefully and honestly — and replaces it with an actual process for moving your existing...
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The Pricing Problem: Pricing For The Business You Actually Want
Most founders build pricing the wrong way around. They pick a number, find clients at that number, and let the business become whatever the math adds up to. Pricing ends up designing the business by accident — instead of pricing being a deliberate decision in service of a clear goal. In this...
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The Pricing Problem: Why You’re Underpriced (And It’s Not Your Fault)
If you’ve ever flinched right before sending a proposal — rounded the number down, added a discount no one asked for, or held your breath waiting to hear back — this episode is for you. That flinch is not a character flaw, and it’s not a confidence problem you need to fix in the mirror. It’s a...
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Summer-Ready: The Operational Architecture That Lets You Take a Break
Summer is a stress test for your operational architecture. Every gap that exists in April becomes visible in July. Overlapping PTO. Clients disappearing and reappearing in a surge. A founder who wants to actually rest — and a team that doesn't know how to hold the business without her. In the…
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Culture as Operational Architecture
Most founders think about culture and operations as two different disciplines. Culture is the soft side. Operations is the hard side. Culture is values and vibe. Operations is systems and spreadsheets. That framing is wrong — and it's the reason so many founders end up with cultures they did not...
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The Gap Between What You Say and What You Reward
Most founders have no idea how wide the gap is between the values they say the business is built on and the behaviors their business actually rewards. Not because they are dishonest — but because no one has taught them to look. Your team is not listening to what you say. They are watching what…
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The Expertise Trap—When Being Good Keeps You Stuck
You are the best at what you do. Clients come to you specifically because of your expertise. Your team defers to you on the important decisions because you know more than anyone else. This feels good. You worked hard to develop this expertise. It is your competitive advantage. It is why the...
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The Performance Conversation—Feedback That Works
You have a team member who is missing deadlines. Not by a lot—just enough to create friction. Projects are slipping. Clients are asking questions. And you are covering for them. You know you need to say something. But you keep putting it off. Because what if they get defensive? What if they quit?...
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The Meeting Problem—Less Time, Better Outcomes
You spend your entire week in meetings. Status updates. Decision meetings. Alignment meetings. Problem-solving sessions. By Friday, you have been in back-to-back calls for 30 hours and accomplished almost nothing strategic. Most productivity advice tells you to just say no to meetings or block...
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Decision Rights - Who Decides What
Your team keeps asking for approval on things they should just do. You keep making decisions people assume you have already made. Projects stall because no one is clear who has authority to move forward. This is the decision rights trap. Not bad decision-making—unclear decision authority. When no...
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When to Hire vs When to Systematize
When to Hire vs. When to Systematize (The Decision Framework That Saves You Time and Money) You're buried. You think: 'I need to hire someone.' You post the job, interview candidates, make an offer. For two weeks, you feel relief. Then reality hits—you're spending hours training, answering...
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Building a Team That Thinks Like Owners
What would change in your business if your team cared as much as you do? If they saw problems and fixed them without being asked? If they thought about the business's success like it was their own? If they made decisions like owners instead of waiting for you to decide? Most founders dream of…
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The Loneliness of Leadership — Finding Support as a Founder
I want to talk about something that does not get discussed much in business podcasts. Something most founders experience but few admit to. The loneliness. You cannot fully vent to your team—you are supposed to be the steady one. Your spouse or partner tries to understand, but they do not really…
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The CEO Weekly Rhythm — Structuring Your Time for Strategic Work
Tell me if this sounds familiar. You start the week with big plans. This is the week you are finally going to work ON the business. You are going to think strategically. And then Monday happens. Emails. Fires. Client calls. Team questions. By Friday, you have been busy every single day, but that...
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Stop Delegating Tasks, Start Delegating Outcomes
"I have tried to delegate but it is just easier to do it myself." If you have said this even once in the past month, this episode is for you. Most founders approach delegation backwards. We hand off tasks, expect people to read our minds, then jump back in when it does not go perfectly. The…
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The Difficult Conversations Your Growth Requires
Running a business means having conversations most people avoid. The performance discussion that has been brewing for months. The client boundary you keep postponing. The role transition that everyone knows is coming but no one wants to say out loud. Every difficult conversation you delay creates…
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From $500K to $2M — What Actually Has To Change
Last week we covered the 5 signs you've outgrown founder-led operations. That was the diagnosis. Today is the treatment plan. Knowing you need to change and knowing HOW to change are two very different things. The jump from $500K to $2M isn't about working harder, hiring more people, or finding...
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5 Signs You've Outgrown Founder-Led Operations
If you're working harder than ever but your business isn't growing proportionally, you haven't hit your capacity as a leader. You've hit the ceiling of founder-led operations. And there's a difference. In this episode, I'm walking through the 5 signs that tell me a founder is ready to transition...
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Relaunch — Welcome to Beyond Founder-Led
Welcome to Beyond Founder-Led — the podcast for women founders who are done being the bottleneck in every decision. I'm Sheena Hunt, founder of The DeVain Collective. After 20+ years in Fortune 100 operations and close to 15 years building my own businesses, I've watched the same pattern play out...
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Scaling is Complicated
Scaling is Complicated - in this episode we're focusing on key strategies to undertake as you begin to scale. ________________________________ Make sure you subscribe to the show to join us for every new episode. "Like" it on your app and share it with friends & family! Help us spread the word 😊...
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Prepping for Change is Complicated
Prepping for Change is Complicated - in this episode we're focusing on some key things you can do to prep your business for an economic shift. ________________________________ Make sure you subscribe to the show to join us for every new episode. "Like" it on your app and share it with friends &...
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Customer Experience is Complicated
Customer Experience is more than just a marketing buzzword of the 2010s. It's a value-add for your business when done the right way. Let's talk about how you can implement better customer experience in your business operations! ________________________________ Make sure you subscribe to the show…
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In the Moment - Know Your Money
In the Moment - Know Your Moment In this bonus special episode, we're talking about your business finances and you getting intimate with them. We want you to KNOW YOUR MONEY. When you know your money, you make decisions on how best to leverage where you are to get where you want to be. LET'S TALK...
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Annual Planning is Complicated
Annual Planning is Complicated It's a new year! That means it's time to work on your plans to reach those new year goals for your business. This episode will walk you through what is needed to have a successful annual planning meeting to see the success you want in your business this year.…
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In the Moment - From Now to Next
In the Moment - From Now to Next We're headed into a new year! Before you roll out your 'new year, new me' mantra, let's do some introspective exercises to look back and ahead to realize our vision for ourselves. We're guiding you through 2 exercises in this In The Moment episode - Rear View…
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In the Moment - Jumping In
In the Moment - Jumping In You've been dreaming about it. It's been burning in your belly. You're ready to birth your next. You're ready to start your entrepreneurial journey. Stop talking about it and let's do it! This episode is a message to those who have been on the fence. We want you to jump...
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Systematizing is Complicated
Systematizing is Complicated Let's talk SYSTEMS! A business with rock solid systems is a business that's positioned to succeed. Listen in to this episode to learn 5 watch outs that customers experience that shows a business lacks systems and 5 tips on what you can start doing now to get on track…
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Growing Pains are Complicated
Growing Pains are Complicated It's time to talk about growth! A growing business is always great. It means more customers, more revenue, and the ability to add more team members. You're seeing your vision on a larger scale. Who doesn't want that? Unfortunately we're not always prepared for growth...
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In the Moment - From Purpose to Impact
In the Moment - From Purpose to Impact In this In the Moment special, we're taking a moment to introduce you to The DeVain Collective (the company behind the pod) founded by the host, Sheena. Sharing her why, Sheena details the motivation and mission behind the business, the framework, and the...
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In the Moment - Leading with a Message
In the Moment - Leading with a Message A great leader usually has a great message - a clarion call that resonates and connects with those who end up following them to help affect change. In this In the Moment special, let's chat quickly about crafting the transformational message that centers…
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Leadership is Complicated
Leadership is Complicated Running a business is one thing. Being a great leader and displaying leadership is another. This episode explores what leadership is, 5 key characteristics of a good & effective leader, and building a team of leaders. Using the example of an event that happened at...
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In the Moment - Creating your A-Team
In the Moment - Creating Your A-Team In this In the Moment special, the focus is on your personal team. We like to think of it as your A-team. These are the folks in your life who inspire & motivate you to live fully. They pour into you and you pour into them. This is our chosen team who can help...
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Team Building is Complicated
Team building is Complicated Growing a business starts with not just having the right offer, but really with having the right team. You can have a business and run it well by yourself, but you’ll eventually hit a wall. If you want to see it grow and go to new levels, you need to hire! The right...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Running a business is complicated. Balancing it with the rest of your life? Even more so.
I'm Sheena Hunt, and Beyond Founder-Led picks up where my previous podcast, Beautifully Complicated, left off — but with sharper focus. This show is for women founders ready to stop being the bottleneck and start building businesses that don't require their presence in every room.
With 20+ years in Fortune 100 operations and close to 15 years as an entrepreneur, I've lived the chaos and found the path through it. Now I help mission-driven businesses scale sustainably — growing revenue without growing burnout.
Weekly episodes with tactical frameworks, client stories, and honest conversations about what it really takes to lead and live well.
Powered by The DeVain Collective | thedevaincollective.com
🎧Listen. 👍Like 📱Subscribe. 🗣Share.
The DeVain
HOSTED BY
The DeVain Collective
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Beyond Founder-Led have?
Beyond Founder-Led currently has 115 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Beyond Founder-Led about?
Running a business is complicated. Balancing it with the rest of your life? Even more so. I'm Sheena Hunt, and Beyond Founder-Led picks up where my previous podcast, Beautifully Complicated, left off — but with sharper focus. This show is for women founders ready to stop being the bottleneck and...
How often does Beyond Founder-Led release new episodes?
Beyond Founder-Led publishes regularly with 115 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Beyond Founder-Led?
You can listen to Beyond Founder-Led on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Beyond Founder-Led?
Beyond Founder-Led is created and hosted by The DeVain Collective.
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