Jess Sato

Reader, I've been a little quiet lately. Part of that is because I've been prepping for a much needed vacation (Yay! Italy and the Netherlands with Jeremy, my hubby and teammate for life) and part of it has been me, deep in my own business, reworking a few things behind the scenes, so that what I offer truly matches the work I most want to be doing. I've also been guesting on a bunch of podcasts and in a lot of client conversations, and I keep hearing so many women say some variation of the...

Reader, I just finished watching the final episode of Outlander, and whether you believe in time travel or not, there's a version of time this October where you're standing inside a temple in Luxor that has been there for thousands of years, finally far enough away from your everyday life to hear yourself think again. Today is the day you decide whether that's your October or not. Doors to Built to Last Egypt close tonight. This is the retreat I've spent four years building. Two weeks in...

Reader, Have you ever been paralyzed by the sunshine slowdown? There's a stretch of road near my house where, at a certain time of day, the sun is so blinding I genuinely cannot see. I've lived here almost 10 years. I know every curve, every stop sign, and every spot where the traffic merges, and none of it matters when the light hits just right. I flip the visor down, lift my hand, and slow to a crawl, because moving forward when you can't see what's ahead just feels so unsafe. I'm guessing...

Reader, I want to share something a little different with you today. I'm a founding member of G-Woman Media, a global digital multimedia company amplifying the voices of women who are (G)ifted, (G)enius, and (G)amechangers, and they recently published a piece I wrote for their magazine on Goodwill. It's more personal than most of what I put out into the world, because it's really the story of how I came to believe what I believe about business, and the people and experiences that shaped me...

Reader, Let me tell you about cupcakes. Before I left my corporate career at Boeing, I built a baking business called When Cookie Met Cupcake. In the beginning, I worked entirely from other people's recipes. The ones from my decorating classes, others I found in cookbooks, and even on dedicated cupcake blogs. They got the job done, but they were everyone else's recipes, not mine. So I started experimenting, ran taste tests with trusted people, married their feedback with my own growing...

Reader, Every successful woman I know is the keeper and holder of all the things. You’re the one who plans and anticipates what could go wrong and proactively solves it before anyone notices. You’re the one holding the logistics, the people, the business, the family, the calendar, the contingencies, and evvvvvverything else that makes things run like a well oiled machine. You’re so used to being the master carrier that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to set it down. That’s one of the...

Reader, "I should be able to figure this out on my own." I just spent the past two weeks at the Climbing Collegiate National Championships and the Para Climbing World Cup, and not once did the athletes make a statement like this. Every elite athlete on those walls, climbers who are genuinely among the best in the world at what they do, had access to coaching. Before they got on the wall - in between their attempts - and in the debrief after. I have an elite climber of my own, so I spend a lot...

Reader, I posted something on LinkedIn today, and I wasn't totally sure how it would land. It was about AI, and more specifically, about the costly mistake I watch founders make with it. Too often, women are using it to try and answer the big, hard, deeply personal questions about their business that it was never actually designed to answer. There were a ton of great comments, all who recognized, in some form, that we all do this, and how challenging it is to navigate these big questions for...

Reader, I have long been a massive advocate for menstrual equity, so when Dallas Travers invited me to be one of 40 experts coming together to give away their best resources while also actively donating to Period.org, I was a big full body yes! In case you're not familiar, Period.org is a teen-founded nonprofit actively fighting against period poverty in the US (yes, we have it here, too)! And for each sign up, $1 gets donated... that's a whole lot of $$ for an organization that is fighting...