For Women Who Refuse to Be Underestimated, Underpaid and Undervalued

I have done nothing the conventional way. My mother had my older sister when she was sixteen. I was the first person in my family to go to college. Then I went to law school and moved across the country, while the friends I made in undergrad stayed exactly where we'd all met. I stayed single while those same friends got married, one by one, and then I had children entirely on my own. No husband. No partner. No one else's name on any of the paperwork, medical, legal, or otherwise. Just me, deciding I wanted to be a mother badly enough to do it without waiting for anyone's permission or company.

At almost every one of those turns, someone told me I shouldn't. Often it was my own immediate family. Were they worried about me? A little, sure. But mostly, my choices made them uncomfortable. It wasn't what I was supposed to do. Have you ever taken the nontraditional route, spoken up when you were expected to stay quiet, built something your own way, and gotten questioned for it, not because anyone thought you'd fail, but because watching you do it differently made everyone around you uncomfortable with their own choices? Why does a woman doing things her own way get scrutinized like she's committed an offense, while a man doing the exact same thing gets called a visionary?

Supposed to do, according to who? I never actually treated that rule as binding, I broke it every single time. But I spent a long time absorbing the discomfort of everyone around me as though it were evidence I was doing something wrong, instead of evidence I was doing something they'd never risk themselves. This week's guest on Takin' Care of Lady Business, Lindsey Boyd, understands that discomfort intimately. She left a coveted job at Chanel to bootstrap The Laundress, a company nobody thought would work, built it for fifteen years with no investors, sold it to Unilever, and then did the whole unconventional thing again with her new brand, Lindry Lab.

With Love & Lady Business,
JJ 

In today’s edition:
1. She Bootstrapped The Laundress for 15 Years, Then Sold It to Unilever - with Lindsey Boyd
2. The Number That Isn’t Real Yet
3. TJD Power List
4. Lady Bits

1. She Bootstrapped The Laundress for 15 Years, Then Sold It to Unilever - with Lindsey Boyd

Lindsey Boyd was in her twenties, working at Chanel, when she realized her dry cleaning bills were higher than her actual paycheck could sustain. So she started hand-washing cashmere in her own bathtub with baby shampoo, and out of that came The Laundress, the company she and her co-founder bootstrapped for fifteen years with no outside investors, before selling it to Unilever in 2019.

Now she's doing it again with Lindry Lab, this time with two decades of hard-earned lessons about money, ownership, and which advice was actually worth listening to. This episode is for anyone who has ever been told the nontraditional route was a mistake, right up until it wasn't.

In this episode, you'll learn:
 — How Lindsey and her co-founder bootstrapped an entire company using a soap splash fundraiser, credit cards, and an SBA loan, and never took a salary for the first five years
— The exact moment an investor told her and her co-founder to sell "before you become unsexy," and what she said back to him
— Why a $100 million exit does not mean anyone actually walked away with $100 million, and the one number founders should ask about before they sign anything
— Why she's building Lindry Lab around three non-negotiable pillars: formula, fragrance, and packaging, instead of chasing speed

🎧 Listen here: Spotify | Apple | YouTube
Explore Lindry Lab: lindrylab.com

2. The Number That Isn’t Real Yet

We've all read the headline. "Company X sold for $500 million." That number, the one splashed across the press release, is called the purchase price, or what I'll call the headline number for the rest of this. It's the total dollar amount the buyer agreed to pay for the company. That's what gets reported. That's what everyone celebrates.

I've sat at tables with founders who get offered deals built exactly like this, and here is the first thing I need you to understand: the headline number is almost never the amount of cash that lands in the founder's bank account on closing day. A big piece of it is usually structured as something called an earn-out.

An earn-out means part of the purchase price is not paid to you at closing. Instead, it is held back, contingent, meaning "dependent on," on the company hitting specific performance targets after the sale goes through, usually measured over one to three years. If the company hits those targets, you eventually get that money. If it doesn't hit them, you may get little or nothing, even though you already handed over the company and no longer control how it's run.

So when you read "sold for $100 million," what actually happened might be: $50 million paid to the founder on closing day, and $50 million promised later, only if certain goals get hit, goals that are now controlled by the new owner, not the person who built the company.

Here is what makes this worse than it sounds. Earn-outs result in a full or partial payout only about 59 percent of the time, get formally contested in nearly 3 in 10 deals, and even when something does get paid, sellers on average collect only about 21 cents on every dollar they were promised. That is not a rare bad outcome. That is close to the median experience. And women get sold this particular fantasy more often than men do, because we are also the ones most often told to be grateful the offer came at all. Gratitude is not a deal term.

So here is the only number that matters when you're evaluating an offer: the guaranteed cash you receive on the day you sign, before any earn-out, before any promise, before any performance target. Look at that number alone, strip away everything attached to a future condition, and decide whether you can live with it by itself. Because everything past that number is, at best, wearing a very nice suit. Many of you reading this are building your companies specifically to sell one day. Save this section. Remember it when someone finally slides a number across the table at you, because that is exactly the moment this knowledge needs to already be in your head, not something you're learning for the first time under pressure.

Hire a corporate attorney before you even start thinking about selling, not after someone slides a term sheet across the table. Make sure you can be completely honest and transparent with them. Make sure they actually listen to you instead of just narrating the deal at you. And make sure you know what these terms mean before they have to explain them to you, because a client who understands the deal gets a lawyer who can actually fight for her, instead of one still explaining the basics while the clock runs out.

1. Separate the headline number from the guaranteed number. The headline number is what gets printed in the press. The guaranteed number is what's actually yours the day you sign. Those are two different figures, and only one of them is real yet.

2. Ask who controls whether the earn-out targets get hit. If the buyer controls headcount, budget, marketing spend, or how a metric gets measured after you no longer run the company, you are not being paid based on your own performance. You are being paid at someone else's discretion.

3. Get the measurement method spelled out in writing, in detail, before you sign. Vague language like "commercially reasonable efforts" has cost sellers real money in real courtrooms, because a judge, not a handshake, ends up deciding what that phrase actually meant.

4. Build in an acceleration clause. This means: if the buyer turns around and sells the company again during your earn-out period, your full remaining earn-out becomes due immediately. Without that clause, a buyer can flip your company and walk away owing you nothing.

REAL TALK
The headline number is the story everyone reads. The guaranteed number is the only one that's true. Ask what you're actually walking away with before you sign, not after, because once the ink is dry, "I assumed" is not a number anyone will pay you.

Have a decision you're navigating and need a second set of eyes? Reach out to The Justice Dept.

USE THIS AS THE VISUAL FO THE LESSON : Clip 2 — "The Truth About Earn-Outs"]

3. TJD Power List: Joanna Strober

Joanna Strober Just Turned Menopause Into a Billion-Dollar Business

Joanna Strober co-founded Midi Health in 2021 after spending a year being dismissed by doctor after doctor while she was actually going through perimenopause. Anxiety, insomnia, memory lapses, weight gain, not one doctor mentioned menopause because she still had her period. One finally did, and Strober decided no woman should have to stumble onto that answer by accident.

Going all in on a company built specifically around women's midlife health wasn't the obvious move, and for a while it was a lonely one. Investors weren't exactly lining up to fund menopause care. Look at her now. This year, Midi Health crossed a $1 billion valuation after raising $100 million, becoming the first menopause startup to reach unicorn status. The company has since expanded beyond menopause care into its own branded supplement line, treating tens of thousands of women a week, insurance-covered, in all fifty states. As Strober put it herself: "We didn't invent demand in women's health care. It's always been there." Capital is just finally catching up to what women already knew.

She joined me on this podcast once before, back when Midi was still building toward this moment. It's worth revisiting now that the moment has arrived.
And that is why Joanna Strober lands on this week's TJD Power List.

💋💋 Lady Bits

💰 A 2026 survey asked people carrying real debt what they've actually used a credit card for lately. Groceries beat gas, utilities, and even rent.

⚖️ There's a federal law protecting women from a specific kind of loan discrimination that's younger than a lot of the women reading this newsletter.

📊 Two people with identical ambition hit two very different ceilings, more than a decade apart, and it has nothing to do with how hard either of them worked.

😳 A former sex worker in 1800s China ended up commanding a fleet of over 1,800 ships and 80,000 pirates, more successful and more feared than Blackbeard ever was. History mostly remembers him.

🧠 The highest IQ ever officially recorded on a standardized test belongs to a woman. She spent her career writing an advice column answering reader questions in the newspaper.

Hi, I’m JJ

Since starting the Justice Dept, we have increased women's wealth by over $100MM in just over 5 years. Want to know what inspires me to do this work, other than making women money? My clients' surprised reaction when we manage to get them much better terms for themselves and their companies, whether via talent agreements, employment, severance, partnerships, asset sales or investments. They often admit that they never thought they could get that result. Not even hoped. This blows my mind. As we know at The Justice Dept. you are all worth everything you ask for and more. Reach out and we’ll show you how!
x TJD