Hey, beautiful boss mom. Pull up a chair.

This week I sat down with two women who have built and sold two companies together, are building a third, and are about to release a book that took every mistake they ever made and turned it into a framework so you don’t have to make the same ones. Victoria Sivrais and Beth Mazza have known each other for 20 years. Beth was Victoria’s boss. Then her mentor. Then her business partner. And somewhere in that evolution, they built the kind of relationship most women building businesses tell me they wish they had.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re doing this alone, this episode is going to hand you a framework for changing that. It’s called finding your kitchen cabinet, and by the end of this post you’re going to know exactly who belongs in yours.

About the Guests: Victoria Sivrais and Beth Mazza

Victoria Sivrais and Beth Mazza are serial founders and collective moms of nine who built and exited two successful professional services firms that advised S&P 500 leaders through make-or-break decisions. Equal parts boardroom powerhouses and chaos managers, they’re now on a mission to help 10,000 women build seven-figure businesses.

Their forthcoming book, Entrepreneur Like a Mother, publishes September 22nd through Wiley, and it’s part memoir, part framework: the awesomeness, the struggles, and everything they’d tell you to do differently if they had it to do over. You can follow them at @femalemavericks on Instagram.

Why Now, and Why Together

I asked them the obvious question first: why write this book now, and why write it together?

The “why now” is a number. In 2025, for the first time in U.S. history, women starting businesses outnumbered men. Victoria and Beth had just stepped back from their second company, started talking to other women, and realized something was missing.

“All these brilliant women, all these brilliant moms starting businesses, and they not only don’t have enough mentors around, but they don’t have a source.” — Beth

The “why together” is a 20-year story. Beth was eight months pregnant with twins, ball-busting every man in the room at her first firm, when Victoria walked in as her newest hire. Victoria describes herself as glue. “Some would call it stalkerish,” she told me. “I called it loving.” Boss became mentor became business partner, and through every stage of that, they kept teaching each other. Beth brought the research and the thoughtfulness. Victoria brought the “yep, totally, let’s go.”

“It was a very yin to the yang.” — Victoria

The Kitchen Cabinet: Your Cheerleaders, Connectors, and Compensators

Here’s the framework I want you to walk away with.

Victoria and Beth call it your kitchen cabinet instead of a board of advisors, because “board of advisors” sounds stuffy and corporate, and what you actually need is three kinds of women around you:

• Cheerleaders — the ones who believe in you before the evidence exists
• Connectors — the ones who open doors and make introductions
• Compensators — the ones who are strong exactly where you’re weak

The name came out of Victoria’s actual kitchen in Chicago, where a lot of the early conversations happened. But the construct matters more than the name. Most women trying to build something on their own don’t have this. They came from corporate environments that called themselves communities and weren’t.

“We entered a corporate environment where we were like, ‘everyone’s a community,’ and no one was a community.” — Beth

Their advice isn’t just “find your people.” It’s find them thoughtfully, and surgically. Not everyone gets a seat in your kitchen cabinet. That’s kind of the point.

The Mommy Mayhem Matrix: Picking the Right Business for the Life You Want

The whole premise of Entrepreneur Like a Mother is this: design your business for the life you want, not the other way around.

Their first company together was built to sell. That meant they already knew, going in, that they’d accept high mayhem for a high return: full-time childcare, 80-hour weeks, no version of “balance.” They call the tool they used to figure this out the Mommy Mayhem Matrix, borrowed loosely from a business-strategy concept called the Gartner Matrix. You plot your tolerance for mayhem against the return you actually want, and that tells you what kind of business you’re building before you build it.

“Figuring out the balance between mayhem and return is how you figure out the business model that you’re gonna create.” — Beth

Not everyone has full-time childcare. Not everyone has the capital to go balls-to-the-wall from day one. The matrix isn’t a judgment. It’s a jumping-off point — a way to name your real goal before you build a business that doesn’t match it. Victoria and Beth admit that with their third business, they defaulted straight back to their old gear, high mayhem, before catching themselves and asking a different question: how do we actually want this one to feel?

If you only read one chapter of the book, Victoria told me, read the one with the Mommy Mayhem Matrix in it. It’s the fastest way to figure out the total addressable market of your business and whether 1% of it is enough to build the life you actually want.

Neither of Them Is Fearless (Even Though One of Them Looks Like It)

Here’s the part of the conversation I think every mom building a business needs to hear.

Victoria says she doesn’t feel fear. She’ll walk into a boardroom underprepared and just know it’ll be fine. Beth is the opposite. While writing the book, Beth found herself questioning whether she was even the right person to tell this story, and she had to sit down and write out a list of her own business accomplishments just to convince herself she belonged in it.

“I actually had to write down a list of my business accomplishments to reinforce to myself, not anyone else, that I do have a story to tell.” — Beth

They’ve been through near-bankruptcy from a bad early business partner, a lawsuit from a former employer that landed the Friday before Victoria gave birth to twins, and a stretch during COVID where Fortune 500 clients stopped paying and they took cash advances on their own credit cards to make payroll.

The point isn’t that fear disappears once you’ve built and sold two companies. The point is that it doesn’t have to stop you either. If you’re the Beth in your own story right now, that’s not a sign you’re behind. It’s just information about which character you need to grow into next.

Your Business Is Your Growth Engine

This is the line from the conversation that’s staying with me.

Victoria admitted something that surprised even Beth: for years she told herself being a working mom made her a better mom, mostly to offset the guilt. Now, with some distance, she thinks it’s actually true, but not for the reason she used to say it. Building a business forces a level of self-reflection that motherhood alone often doesn’t leave room for.

In the middle of raising kids, there’s rarely time or appetite to ask who am I and what do I want. But building something makes you ask it constantly. Can I walk into that room? Can I write that book? Am I willing to trade this hour with my kids for this meeting? Is it worth it?

“Your business is the growth engine for you.” — Dana

That kind of self-development isn’t a detour from motherhood. It’s part of what your kids get to watch.

What Your Kids Actually Remember

Beth’s kids are 21 through 25 now, and she told me something I want every mom reading this to hold onto: they’re resilient, they’re entrepreneurial in their own ways, and they’re funny as hell. Not despite watching her build two companies while raising them. Because of it.

Her own advice to herself, echoed back from her own mother years ago: “Your kid’s a miscreant for other reasons today. It’s not because you’re a working mom.”

Victoria’s daughter, now almost 15, remembers the pre-COVID years when Victoria and Beth were on the road constantly. A boy she was talking to once told her, confused, “I just don’t get it, you’re so close to your parents.” Her response: “Yeah, I am. They’re fun.” That’s the version of resilience this framework is actually building toward, not kids who don’t notice you worked, but kids who watched you work, watched you take a breath when it was hard, and came out the other side wanting to be close to you anyway.

Your Next Step

If any of this landed:

• Grab Entrepreneur Like a Mother, out September 22nd from Wiley. It’s the mistakes, the framework, and the full story, no punches pulled.
• Follow Victoria and Beth at @femalemavericks for more of this.
• Come build your own kitchen cabinet inside the free BossMom Community. This is exactly where that surgical, thoughtful “who’s actually in my corner” work happens, alongside other moms doing the same thing.
• Ready to go deeper? BossMom+ is where we help you turn your own Mommy Mayhem Matrix into an actual plan for your business.

Victoria and Beth are trying to help 10,000 women build seven-figure businesses. If this one hit, go build your kitchen cabinet, and tell me who’s already in it.

I’ll see you next week.

xo, Dana