Brandi Dugal is the Founder and CEO of The Fidget Game, a company that creates curriculum-aligned learning games to make reading and literacy practice effective and fun. The company's resources are used in more than 50,000 schools. A former teacher with classroom experience in multiple countries, Brandi developed The Fidget Game after working with students who were struggling to read. Through the Fidget Forward program, she makes educational tools more accessible to classrooms and families in need.

Scaling an e-commerce brand often requires a counterintuitive move: letting go of the metrics you once used to measure growth. Yet when growth stalls, how do you know whether to pull back or push harder?

Brandi Dugal's answer is to zoom out, measure the whole business, and keep testing until the system reveals what works. As an educator-turned-e-commerce founder, she recommends looking beyond platform-level ROAS and using marketing efficiency ratios (MERs) to assess overall marketing efficiency. Brandi also suggests separating campaigns by product, tagging ad angles carefully, testing high volumes of creative, and staying close to customers through real conversations, feedback loops, and founder-led storytelling. Sustainable growth comes from pairing disciplined measurement with authentic, customer-informed creative.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with Brandi Dugal, Founder and CEO of The Fidget Game, about scaling through creative testing and whole-business measurement. Brandi shares how MER changed her Meta strategy, why authentic founder-led ads outperform polished UGC, and how gamified classroom insights shaped her product development.

Rita Ainsworth is a Human Potential Coach at Rita Ainsworth Coaching, where she helps high-performing professionals and teams reduce stress and improve resilience through neuroscience-based, body-centered coaching. As a trauma-informed coach, she specializes in guiding clients out of chronic stress and into greater clarity, energy, and balanced performance. After spending a decade in marketing and media-buying, Rita spent years studying human performance, neuroscience, and somatic practices to understand sustainable success.

You can have all the experience, data, and strategy in the world and still make the wrong call in a critical moment. Under pressure, even top performers freeze, overreact, or spiral into unproductive action. So what's really driving those decisions when everything is on the line?

According to Rita Ainsworth, a human potential coach specializing in nervous system regulation and performance, it's not your intelligence or skillset — it's your physiological state. When stress takes over, the brain defaults to survival mode, limiting creativity and decision-making. Rita recommends starting with body-based resets like slowing your breath, scanning your environment for safety, or taking short movement breaks to discharge stress. By building awareness of your patterns and practicing regulation techniques consistently, you can shift from reactive to intentional thinking — even in high-stakes situations.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris sits down with Rita Ainsworth, Human Potential Coach at Rita Ainsworth Coaching, to discuss how stress impacts decision-making and performance. Rita explains how nervous system states affect outcomes, why high performers fall into burnout cycles, and practical ways to regulate stress and think clearly under pressure.

Jay Steinfeld is the Founder and former CEO of Blinds.com, the world's largest online retailer of window coverings, which was acquired by The Home Depot in 2014. Under his leadership, Blinds.com grew from a bootstrapped startup in his home to a billion-dollar enterprise, earning a reputation for innovation in e-commerce and technology-driven growth. Jay is also a Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Lead from the Core: The 4 Principles for Profit and Prosperity and the Entrepreneur in Residence at Rice University's Graduate School of Business, where he shares business insights.

Building a company is challenging, but building one that thrives without losing its soul is even harder. Leaders may talk about culture, growth, and decision-making, yet few manage to scale while keeping people engaged and energized. How can you create a business that grows sustainably, empowers employees, and thrives even after major transitions?

According to entrepreneur and leadership expert Jay Steinfeld, the answer lies in focusing on people and constant improvement. He emphasizes creating an environment where teams evolve continuously, experiment without fear of failure, and feel empowered to express ideas openly. Leaders should hire people who embrace change, reward contribution without artificial limits, and encourage constant reflection on daily improvements. By making thoughtful decisions despite incomplete information and designing systems that prioritize learning and growth, organizations can build enduring cultures.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with Jay Steinfeld, Founder and former CEO of Blinds.com, about building a culture-driven company that scales effectively. Jay explains how personal challenges shaped his entrepreneurial mindset, the Four E's framework for company culture, and the partnership strategy that helped position his company for acquisition.