The Leadership Code works because it sits at an intersection almost no one else occupies: a founder who has actually lived the pressure, and a clinician who has spent a decade treating it.
Sarah makes it real. Maddy makes it work. One of us has been in the fire; one of us knows the science of getting through it.
Neither of us could have built this alone — and that's exactly why women trust it.
Sarah Larson Levey
Sarah knows the weight of leadership from the inside. She built Y7 Studio from a single basement studio into a national fitness brand — and from the outside, it looked like a clean success story. From the inside, it was constant questioning and investor conversations and reorgs and a pandemic and the particular loneliness of being the person everyone turns to for answers she didn't yet have.
What got her through wasn't hustle. It was learning — slowly, and often the hard way — how to stay grounded when everything was on fire. The Leadership Code is the thing she wishes someone had handed her years earlier, so the next woman doesn't have to learn it all in the dark.
Sarah Larson Levey is the founder and former CEO of Y7 Studio, who built a national brand from a basement - and learned, the hard way, how to lead without losing herself.
FOUNDER
Dr. Maddy Ellberger, LCSW, PhD
Maddy knows that weight from the other side of the room. For over a decade, she's been the person clients trust with their most overwhelmed moments — and she kept noticing the same thing: how many of the most capable, high-functioning women were quietly struggling under pressures no one around them could see.
Grounded in evidence-based practice, she has the tools that work. What she wanted was to get them to more women before the breaking point, not after. A licensed clinical therapist and founder of Downtown Behavioral Wellness, she's the voice behind the Are We Okay podcast and she's the one who makes sure every tool in The Leadership Code is clinically sound before it reaches you.
FOUNDER
Dr. Maddy Ellberger, LCSW, is a clinician who has spent over 11 years treating the exact pressures women in leadership carry — and decided to build the tools beyond the therapy room.
TOGETHER
We built the thing we both wished had existed. The Leadership Code is what happens when the founder who lived it and the clinician who studies it put everything they know in one place — and hand it to the next woman before she has to learn it all the hard way.
Because we've both watched too many brilliant women burn out in silence. And we refuse to let "strong" keep meaning "alone."
[Note: the Brand Foundation leaves your real origin story — how you two met, and the moment you decided to build this — for the two of you to fill in. That's the most trust-building paragraph on the whole page, so it's worth dropping in when you have it. I've left it out rather than invent it.]