April 2026 Quarterly Connect @ Tetherow, featuring Julie Harrelson & Diane Bradley
On Leverage, Letting Go, and 200 Women in One Room
Notes from our Quarterly Connect with Cate Havstad-Casad, Julie Harrelson, and Diane Bradley
What happens when you stop trying to optimize and start looking for leverage?
That was the question underneath last week's Deschutes Women in Business Quarterly Connect at Tetherow, our biggest event to date. More than 200 women filled the room. Founders, fractional executives, marketers, mothers, makers, and those figuring out what’s next. The energy was electric and we are so grateful for this community.
Q2's theme is leverage. Our thesis: what if the thing standing between you and your next level isn't more effort?
The night was built around that question, and it showed up in every part of the program.
Nutrition as infrastructure: a company update from Cate Havstad-Casad
Before the panel, Cate Havstad-Casad of Casad Family Farms and Range Revolution offered a piece of leverage thinking most of us never apply to our own bodies. Her framing: food is the most overlooked form of leverage. For women building businesses and raising families, it either compounds your capacity or quietly taxes it.
She backed it with third-party verified data on nutrient density, fatty acid profiles, and heavy metals testing that was super impressive to see.
Reserve your beef share at Casad Family Farms →
The panel: Julie Harrelson and Diane Bradley on building, rebuilding, and what holds
Julie Harrelson is a thought partner to more than 100 CEOs and former Managing Director of Cascade Seed Fund with over 100 investments. She brings rare depth across investing, building, and the human side of leadership.
Diane Bradley is CEO and Managing Partner at Jemini, where she guides global organizations through complex change. She has driven strategy and innovation for iconic brands including Nike, Target, McDonald's, and Carhartt, as well as growth-stage startups. She is known for making things real when the stakes are high.
Both showed up to talk about what scaling, leading, and living actually look like when you're navigating real change in real time.
Three themes kept surfacing.
Theme 1: Leverage isn't optimization. It's letting go.
Diane opened with a confession most high performers will recognize.
"I had optimized myself out of optimizing. I had to find a new way."
For most of her career, optimization was the move. More efficient systems, tighter calendars, sharper outputs. Then it stopped working. Leverage, she said, is something different. It's the wedge that makes one shift change everything else. It's about going toward your energy, not just managing your time.
Julie put it another way, using the image of a pole vaulter.
"You're running, running, running, running, and then you take a little stick and you go whoop over the thing. And you didn't think you could do it, but you did it. And then when you land, it's a soft landing."
She also named midlife as the inflection point that demands a different operating mode.
"It's not that you have less energy. It's that everything needs to be deeper, so you have less energy for BS."
In a room of women navigating multiple businesses, kids, aging parents, and career transitions, the recognition was immediate.
Theme 2: "You can do anything" has an expiration date.
Julie named the limit of an idea most of us were raised on.
"You can do almost everything you want to do, but you can't do it at the same time. There's a period of development where we say yes to things, yes, yes, yes, and then there's a point in life where you have to start saying no. And that is a point of leverage."
The first half of a career rewards saying yes. The second half rewards knowing when to say no. The pivot is uncomfortable, especially for women who've been told their whole lives that they're capable of anything.
Diane named the version that shows up for her: the fixer trap.
"I'm not really a pleaser, but I am a fixer. And that addiction to being the one who fixes things is totally in the way for me, constantly."
Her current practice in response is a piece of language her team gave her after a 360 review. DNR. Do Not Reply. Do Not Resuscitate. She doesn't have to save everyone. Neither do you.
Theme 3: Trust is the real multiplier.
When asked what one thing now multiplies everything else they do, neither speaker named a productivity system or a software tool. They named relationships.
For Diane, it's trust, both in her team and in herself.
"All people are more capable than we believe. We just have to give them those tools and access to do it."
She told a small story that captured the whole philosophy. After years of being the one who matched her family's socks, she put out a matched bin and an unmatched bin and trusted her household to figure it out. She hasn't matched a sock in months.
Julie's version of the multiplier is what she calls a kitchen cabinet, an idea she borrowed from Madeleine Albright.
"There's probably 20 mostly women that I can call, and they're like, what do you need? What's going on? Some of them are experts in HR, some of them are CEOs, some of them are just friends of mine no matter what."
Different angles on the same idea. The leverage is the people you trust enough to lean on.
Practices worth stealing
The conversation produced a long list of tactical moves both speakers swore by.
Hand-written weekly planning. Diane sits down each week and writes it out by hand, even in the age of AI. Making her brain visible to her family and team is half the value.
Day-of-week energy design. Julie keeps Mondays and Fridays light on meetings. Tuesdays through Thursdays are where the real work happens. Friday afternoons also incorporate a gratitude scan, where she texts specific colleagues something she's grateful for.
Charge for the coffee. Both speakers normalized putting a price on "pick your brain" requests. Your time has a value. Acting like it doesn't is a tax you pay every week.
Solve sideways. Julie's framing: stuck on a problem at work, look at how you'd solve it at home. Stuck at home? Borrow from work. The reframe shakes loose answers you couldn't see straight on.
Build the uniform. Diane rents her wardrobe through Armoire, and Julie's advice was simpler: wear the damn comfortable shoes.
The through-line
Leverage isn't a productivity hack. It's about getting honest with what you're ready to set down so you can build what actually fits who you are now.
Or, as Julie put it in her closing words, borrowing from Rumi:
"There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Let the beauty of what you love be what you do."
A massive thank you to the partners who made this possible
This kind of night doesn't happen without the businesses and people who support our community.
To Tetherow, our venue partner, for hosting 200+ women in their beautiful space - and Julie during her Bend stay.
To Stoller Wine Group and Melissa Burr, for sharing their incredible wine with us. Visit them at Stoller Wine Bar in the Box Factory.
To Reverb Films and Jen Lee Photography for capturing the night so we can keep reliving it. (Photos coming soon!) And a big thank you to Jen for sharing her incredible 40 over 40 project with us.
To our additional sponsors Washington Trust Bank (Development Partner), and Community Partners Lagree High Desert and BBSI.
Thank you to Julie and Diane for showing up authentically and transparently, and to every one of the 200+ women who filled the room.
And secure your spots for next month:
TUESDAY, May 19th: Learn & Connect - Vibe Coding
Vibe coding: your unlock to building exactly what your business needs, no technical skills required.
You've probably heard the term by now. Maybe it sounds too technical, or like something meant for engineers and developers. It's not. Vibe coding is simply using AI to build working tools and products by describing what you want in plain language. No code. No technical background. Just you and an idea.
At our next Learn & Connect, we're going to show you how it works and you're going to try it yourself. Whether it's a client portal, an internal workflow, a calculator for your services, or a product idea you've been sitting on for months, you'll walk out with something real.
Every industry. Every stage. Every skill level welcome.
