Leadership after the old role stops fitting.
Wickedly Smart Women is a business and leadership interview show centered on women at career inflection points. Angel B. Hartwell speaks with founders, coaches, strategists, and innovators about leaving misaligned roles, rebuilding confidence, and turning earned expertise into useful work.
PRESS PLAY
Wickedly Smart Women is a career-development and leadership interview show for women standing at the edge of a major professional change. Angel B. Hartwell speaks with women who have left corporate roles, exited businesses, rebuilt after burnout, or turned specialized experience into independent work. The show has a polished coaching-room feel. It is encouraging, but it is not vague. Guests are asked about money, timing, confidence, family responsibilities, mentors, layoffs, business infrastructure, and what it actually took to move from recognition inside an organization to ownership outside it. Recent episodes range widely. Sandra Coker discusses people-first business and the hard lesson of buying a membership community with fewer paying members than expected. Stacey Bailey talks about reluctant leadership, golden handcuffs, financial planning, and taking a break with young children after leaving work. Meredith Oke brings women's health, light, nature, screens, and personal sovereignty into the conversation. Heather Moore represents subscription-based veterinary care as a business model built around real access problems. Gloria Felt brings gender parity and leadership training into view. Dr. Melanie Gray connects burnout, emotional safety, confidence, data, and the willingness to start before everything is perfect. Aanchal Dasoar Arora speaks from the terrain of maternal recovery, pelvic health, postpartum depression, and digital care. Ginny Priem frames letting go as a leadership strategy through boundaries, coaching, speaking, and her Unsubscribe framework. Across those examples, the show keeps returning to a core audience: accomplished women who sense that the next chapter needs more autonomy and clearer value. There are recurring invitations toward consultancy building, but the episodes are broader than a sales funnel. They function as case studies in transition. The best moments come when guests name the private calculations behind public reinvention: the credit line, the runway, the coach, the family negotiation, the nervous system recovery, the imperfect first website, the business plan made before the job disappears. Wickedly Smart Women suits listeners who want leadership talk with real biography attached. It values wisdom, contribution, and earned discernment over corporate status alone.
Made for: Designed for accomplished women questioning a corporate role, exiting a business, or shaping expertise into consulting, coaching, advocacy, or independent leadership work. It will especially fit listeners who want practical transition stories rather than abstract career advice.
What sets it apart: The show pairs affirming leadership language with unusually specific transition details: money runway, mentors, burnout recovery, business models, family tradeoffs, and the first imperfect steps. Its guests make reinvention feel operational, not merely inspirational.
Wickedly Smart Women® is a multi-award-winning, internationally ranked podcast featuringconversations with women who have left high-level corporate roles or exited businesses and arenow discerning what comes next.Each episode explores leadership, visibility, value creation, and the transition from corporateidentity to independently owned impact. Guests share candid stories, hard-earned wisdom, andreal-world insight drawn from lived experience.This show is for women who know they are in — or approaching — their final corporate chapterand are beginning to explore how their expertise, leadership, and discernment can be structuredinto a high-value consultancy, advisory path, or independent body…
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Angel B. Hartwell makes career transition concrete by pressing guests on money, preparation, business mistakes, boundaries, and the realities behind independent work.
Wickedly Smart Women turns career change into an operating question. Angel B. Hartwell interviews women about leaving corporate roles, building consultancies or businesses, and deciding how money, family, and leadership should fit together.
Angel B. Hartwell asks what the leap costs, and your brave resignation draft suddenly meets a calculator.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Sandra Coker recalls an 88-member first billing, a mentor's blunt advice, and the business she later sold.
Sandra Coker expected to take over a paying community of 300 members when she bought a membership business with a credit line. Then she learned that one-year memberships had been presold. Her first billing brought in 88 members.
Stacey Bailey explains how planning her finances made room for a break after leaving her corporate role.
Leadership coach Stacey Bailey wanted to leave her corporate role, but worried about putting her family's stability at risk. She tells host Angel B.
Dr. Melanie Gray links confidence to learning new skills, accepting failure, and starting before everything is perfect.
Dr. Melanie Gray ties confidence to the willingness to try something before she knows how it will turn out. After more than 25 years in healthcare, education, and organizational leadership, she decided to change careers.
A maternal health founder discusses recovery, changing family roles, and the path to a digital care platform.
Anshel Dasore's work in maternal recovery grew out of her own experience. After managing hospitals early in her career, she faced postpartum depression, pelvic health challenges, and a loss of her sense of identity. Angel B.
Ginny prepared to leave corporate work before her division closed.
Ginny's account of leaving corporate work is grounded in what she did before she left. She published a book while still employed. About a month or six weeks later, half her division was laid off after the launch of a product she says was struggling.
Leslie Pyle talks family time, lean years and the support behind her business.
Leslie Pyle wanted a business that left room for family. Speaking with Angel B. Hartwell, she traces her path from freelance work and Home Based Working Moms during her first marriage to launching HireMyMom.com in 2007, the year she had a baby with her second husband.
Career power without apology.
Career confidence with a leadership edge.
Career clarity with backbone.
Robin Goad discusses how ambitious women can master corporate success while staying true to themselves.
Celeste Lawson shares her journey of relocating to Costa Rica and how she empowers women of color, veterans, and entrepreneurs to embrace international living and build freedom-centered lives.
Angel B.
Wickedly Smart Women features Angel B.
["Wickedly Smart Women features Stacey Bailey on leaving a COO role and redefining leadership after 12 years in agency operations.", "Angel B.
Meredith Oke discusses her journey from burnout to leading a movement in quantum biology and holistic wellness for women.
Heather Moore discusses building Petcentric Health, a subscription-based business that solves real problems in pet health care for vets and pet parents.
Gloria Feldt discusses the persistent lack of women in leadership parity and offers strategies for change.
Angel B.
Aanchal Dasoar Arora tells Angel B.
Ginny Preem says her letting-go work began when a friend arranged a 10 p.m.
Leslie Pyle describes building Home-Based Working Moms in 1996 and HireMyMom.com in 2007 after motherhood exposed a need for flexible work.
Angel B.
Kerri Hummingbird discusses alchemizing pain and finding inner power through ancient traditions and self-love.