It’s been 6 months since my last newsletter. I promised to write you at least once a month and broke that promise. I’m sorry and appreciate you staying subscribed despite my absence.

Here’s what I’ve ben working on and how I want to say thank you for your loyalty.

I made two mis-steps in Q4 of last year.

One - I forgot that before I can start getting inbound leads from my bestselling book, I need to give people time to buy it and read it. What a concept, but I’m telling you it just didn’t occur to me that it would take 6 months for the lead funnel from Profit Generating Pipeline to start flowing.

Two - I asked myself - what work really fills your cup, gets great client reviews and also pays well. The answer was IRL sales workshops and keynotes. As a result, I pivoted my entire focus and business model to make in-person speaking my primary revenue stream.

By the end of Q1, I realized that I needed to abandoned my BHAG of doubling my number of speaking gigs from 13 in 2025 to 26 in 2026.

I adore working with teams in person and sharing knowledge from the stage, but I understood a few months in that 26 IRL gigs would be at least 10 too many. I become a gremlin when I’m on the road for too long and I don’t want to lose all of the progress I’ve made developing healthy physical and mental habits.

I found myself in office at the start of Q2 a bit exhausted from SKO season and wondering if spending SO much time and money publishing a book was a mistake.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. I’m just deeply impatient.

What I needed was more predictability in my revenue and more control over my funnel. « does that sound like a familiar problem? lol

Prior to pivoting to speaking as a primary revenue stream, for 3 years most of my revenue came from consulting and advisory. To find the balance I was seeking, I knew I needed to reimagine my Done-With-You Advisory product so that I could sell and deliver it in a way that still made space for IRL speaking.

I spent two weeks locked in my office reviewing case studies and testimonials and deliverables. I got honest about why previous gigs had scope creep and how to avoid it in the future while still providing great client value. I completely reimagined and rebuilt my Done-With-You Advisory product during that time (and I’m super jazzed about the outcome).

Now I had the product to bring MRR predictability back into my revenue mix, but what the heck was happening with my inbound pipeline inconsistency?

That answer was more complicated - inbound is down for service based businesses across the board, my fight with LinkedIn that caused me to be unsearchable and untaggable for a month sure didn’t help and I’ve still not bounced back fully, switching product focus made it harder for folks to know when to refer me…. I’d created a bit of a perfect storm.

Luckily, I’d started making strategic investments in an AEO & GEO strategy in late October 2025. It takes about about 6 months for the LLMs to pick up what you’re putting down so right when I started wondering if the strategy and the book credibility were working, leads from AI search started flowing in. Praise be.

After spending so much time heads down reimagining my Done-With-You Advisory Product, I also had a clear idea of a handful of accounts that would be a perfect fit. I didn’t want to sit around waiting and hoping that they’d find me. It was time to outbound for the first time in 4 years and that got me super excited.

But first, I popped off for a 3 week holiday in Italy.

I did not bring my laptop with me to Italy and I cut my phone screen time by 84% during the 3 week trip. Isn’t that something?!

I’ve been back for 10 days playing catch up and setting myself up for what comes next. I also want to see how I can set you up for success as a thank you for sticking around the past 6 months.

After seeing how big of an impact the AEO / GEO strategy has been on my lead flow, I want to share my top 3 strategies with anybody who wants to make sure they show up in AI search.

Snag a time here and I will give you the run down: https://meetings.hubspot.com/leslie-venetz/salesledgtm-15minconsult

Another big project I’m driving towards is FINALLY recording the audio book for Profit Generating Pipeline - WOO HOO. It’s done and I can’t wait to share this with you.

That will launch in July and another thank you for being so patient!!

I’ll send an email when it launches because I’m going to do a super deep discount for only the first 24 hours and want to make sure y’all get first access.

Thank you again for sticking with me.