Monica Nassif grew up in a town of 600 people in Iowa, one of nine kids, raised to cook, clean, sew, and garden. She turned every one of those skills into Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day and Caldrea.

She started at age 43 out of a spare bedroom with maxed out credit cards, two daughters, and a backup plan to drive a UPS truck. She grew to 20,000 stores and sold both brands to the multi- billion dollar household cleaning empire, SC Johnson.

And Mrs. Meyer is real. She's Monica's mom, Thelma, who is 93 and still out in her garden tending to her geraniums.

In this episode, Monica takes us inside the messy business of building. The moment in a store in Atlanta that turned into a business plan on the plane home. Why she decided cleaning products should be personal care for the home. The decision to knock off her own successful brand before someone else could. And the investor who told her he hated consumer deals but liked her anyway, and became her greatest champion.

She also gets honest about her daughter's cancer diagnosis while she was building, and what her mother said that got her back to work. The two companies out of four that flopped, and what each one taught her. Why she kicked her own brand out of Target before Target could. And what it feels like eighteen years later to have sold her own mother.

Monica now sits on the board of Barkeeper's Friend, coaches early stage consumer brand founders, and just published her memoir, “I Bottled My Mother.”

Her motto: Bet on Yourself.

Connect With Monica

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monica-nassif-686876335/
• Website: monicanassif.com
• Book, “I Bottled My Mother”: available at Amazon, Walmart, and Target
• Recommended in this episode: The Experience Economy by Joseph Pine, and his new book, The Transformation Economy

AI can generate a thousand flawless options in seconds. John Trotter will tell you exactly what that flawlessness costs you.

John is the founder and chief creative officer of 4040, the design-led brand consultancy he started at the age of 40. With roots at Nike and Landor, he has spent three decades building brands across sport, tech, financial services, and consumer, and he built 4040 on a conviction that lands at the heart of this show: the most enduring brands are built at the intersection of culture, design, and belief.

In this episode, John gets into what still matters as everything automates. What is taste and judgment, and why they become your real competitive advantage. Why a brand built by AI can be beautiful and still have no life in it. And the line every founder needs to hear about knowing when you are ready to build.

He also opens up about the partnership with his wife, Michelle Bowler, that put 4040 into the best growth of its history.

Connect With John Trotter

• Website: 4040agency.com
• Email: john@4040agency.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johntrotterbrand
• Michelle Bowler, co-founder and CEO of 4040, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-bowler-brand-growth

Wandia Chiuri is in the business of turning a leader's authority into measurable business results. She is the CEO and founder of Reactionpower, where she works with executives at the highest levels of corporate America. She has spent more than two decades at the intersection of AI, leadership, and strategy, taking her from Medtronic to Eli Lilly to Google, Samsung, and Johnson & Johnson, with a company she built and sold along the way.

What she discovered at those companies drove why she built her business. Audiences had become blind to ads. Great products were going undiscovered. And she noticed that when a leader spoke, something measurable happened: products would sell, customers would get inspired, leads converted into sales. A leader's authority was outperforming advertising by 10x. So she focused her new company Reactionpower on executives.

In this conversation, Wandia and Sarah get into the failure that taught her the power of a brand, and what stays irreplaceably human as AI reshapes leadership. Wandia shares the story of selling her first company with $1.39 in her bank account, watching the buyer resell it within three months for close to 40 times what she was paid, and spending the next 10 years learning exactly why. She talks about her mother, who came of age during the state of emergency in Kenya and still built a life of adventure, optimism, and service at scale.

Two friends and fellow Entrepreneurs Organization members, talk about what it takes to build authority, trust, and a life that is authentically yours. Recorded live on LinkedIn.


Connect With Wandia

• Reactionpower: reactionpower.com
• Personal site and all social channels: wandia.info