Unfinished Business

👋 We're Alex and Lee, serial entrepreneurs and multi-exit founders. Our journey has made us magnets for the challenges ambitious women face in career, family, and personal fulfillment.We're launching a platform for honest discussions about conscious entrepreneurship, career growth, and holistic success. We'll explore topics like mastering self-promotion authentically, transforming imposter syndrome into career catalysts, balancing work, family, and well-being, innovative strategies for entrepreneurial success, and much more.

Unfinished Business is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 44 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Unfinished Business, a business show with 44 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Unfinished Business

  The Minimum Viable Company: How We Run a $50M Brand With Just 7 People

  Jul 28, 202625 min

  For most of their careers, Alex and Lee believed a bigger team meant a stronger company. Now they believe the opposite, and they've got the receipts: $50M in revenue last year with seven full-time employees and payroll running at just 4%. In this solo episode, they make the case that in the AI era, headcount has flipped from a status symbol into a warning sign. They break down what they call the "minimum viable company," where maximum revenue per employee beats a swollen org chart every time. The model runs on three layers: lean in-house leadership, a network of agencies for specialized work, and an AI layer where every team member has their own assistant handling the project management that used to go to junior hires and interns. The engine underneath it all is a company "brain" built in Notion that their agents plug into. In this episode: - Why Alex and Lee now read "I have 30 employees" as a sign a company is doing it wrong - The exact numbers behind their claim: $50M, seven people, 4% payroll - How the AI layer replaced the junior hires and interns they used to rely on - Why they built their company "brain" in Notion, and how their AI agents plug into it - The hiring rule they live by: wait until you literally can't, then demand a clear ROI - Why speed, not headcount, is the real driver of winning (and losing) - The honest downsides of a tiny team, from taking out the trash to dropped balls Subscribe to Unfinished Business for candid conversations with founders who've actually done it. Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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  Unfinished Business

  How This CPG Founder Went From a Kitchen Experiment to 7,000 Stores

  Jul 14, 202631 min

  Katie Lefkowitz was a lifelong Snickers fanatic when a colon cancer scare and a doctor's orders to cut sugar should have ended that relationship. Instead, she went home and started experimenting with date-based caramel in her own kitchen. Katie is the founder of Harken, the better-for-you candy brand now in nearly 7,000 stores including Walmart, Costco, Sprouts, and Kroger, with Whole Foods launching this fall. Before Harken, she was COO at CAULIPOWER, the original cauliflower-crust pizza brand, and that food-world network is how a printed-out prototype with stickers on it turned into Harken's first national retail deal. In this episode of Unfinished Business, she walks through how that deal happened (including a calendar invite with no explanation attached), why she skipped the usual direct-to-consumer playbook entirely, and what she's learned running a five-person team through a Costco launch. Our biggest takeaways: - How a colon cancer scare turned into a national candy brand - The unmarked calendar invite that got Harken into Walmart - Why she walked into her first retail pitch with fake, printed-out packaging - The case for skipping DTC and going straight to retail - Running investor relationships through a monthly two-hour office hours block - Why Harken is overhauling its packaging in Q3, and what drove the change - The fiber stat she says is moving more product than any ad Subscribe to Unfinished Business for more unfiltered founder stories. New episodes weekly on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

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  Unfinished Business

  How TUSHY Turned a Taboo Category Into One of DTC's Strongest Brands with Justin Allen

  Jun 16, 202634 min

  Justin Allen co-founded TUSHY a decade ago to solve a problem most Americans didn't know they had. No roadmap, no comparable brand, no playbook… just a bet that if you made toileting joyful enough, people would come around. They did. Now, ten years in, Justin is asking harder questions: What does brand even mean when the media landscape has completely fractured? How do you build creative at scale without losing what makes you you? And when do you trust the data, and when do you just flip the table and build? In this episode: - How TUSHY created a category from scratch and what the "toothpaste out of the tube moment" actually means for retention - Why Justin went "kicking and screaming" into founder content and what made him change his mind - The performance creative orchestra: what it is, why volume isn't enough, and what strategic diversity in creative actually looks like - What brand meant in 2015 vs. what it means today and why Justin has stopped pretending he knows - Learning velocity vs. just "moving fast" - When failure is an option, and when (with plumbing under pressure 24/7) it absolutely isn't - His take on retail, TikTok Shop, and how to innovate for a channel instead of force-feeding itSubscribe to Unfinished Business on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes every week.

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  Unfinished Business

  Going From $50M to $100M: How We Use Partnerships As Our Biggest Growth Levers at Hulken

  Jun 2, 202619 min

  Two things have been true at Hulken since year one: no dropshipping, and only say yes to collabs that actually earn it. On the eve of launching their most complex product development yet (a full pattern collab with Posh Peanut), Alex and Lee sit down to work out, on camera, what they actually think now. This is a solo episode. No guest filter, no rehearsed takes. At $50M, the playbook isn't finished. The most honest thing you can say is that we’re still breaking rules we set when we were smaller. If you're building a product brand somewhere between "we're figuring this out" and "we've figured this out," this is the real version of that conversation. What's in this episode: - The reason Alex and Lee said no to dropshipping for years (and the exact conditions that finally changed their minds) - Alex's 3 non-negotiables for every brand collab - Why Lee won't say yes to any retailer that won't buy inventory upfront - How the Beautyblender collab landed Hulken backstage at the Grammys and the Oscars (the bag, not them) - The "position of power" test that tells you when your brand is actually ready to dropship Subscribe to Unfinished Business on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

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  Unfinished Business

  The DTC Trap That Built Juliet Wine's Retail Empire | Allison Luvera

  May 26, 202629 min

  Most founders building consumer brands think DTC is the goal. Allison Luvera knew from day one it was just the testing ground. Getting into Whole Foods, Costco, Safeway, and Total Wine with five employees and a patented box wine format was a three-year plan built on intentional price testing, customer research, and unit economics priced for retail before she ever walked into a retailer. Allison is the co-founder and CEO of Juliet Wine, one of the fastest growing wine brands for women in the US. She came up running luxury marketing for some of the biggest names in spirits, and took everything she learned about how big brands operate to build something they couldn't easily copy, a patented cylindrical format that creates a brand moat in an industry that's notoriously hard to protect. This conversation covers the full journey: why beverage alcohol never had a DTC golden age, how she navigated the skepticism from distributors even after proving DTC traction, the copycat wine brand that literally used her co-founder's hand in their marketing photos, and why she thinks fundraising should come with a warning label. Highlights: - Why Allison priced Juliet for retail margins on day one, even while selling DTC only - How 70% of Juliet's customers had never considered box wine before they found her - The three-tier alcohol distribution system and why it makes DTC structurally difficult at scale - The story of a major wine corporation stealing Juliet's photography and her public LinkedIn response - Why exits in alcohol happen earlier than most industries and how that shapes her fundraising strategy - What it actually takes to get into Whole Foods as a five-person team - The Sephora analogy: why women in wine have always been forced to choose between quality and brand Subscribe to Unfinished Business wherever you listen to podcasts and if you loved this episode, make sure to leave a review. Learn more about Juliet Wine at julietwine.com.

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