Hi friend!
Long time no hear - we are 100+ days in into 2025, I thought I could share an update and hopefully get your news back :).
Let’s pick just up where we ended last year.
This is how I wrapped 2024 in last update:
“✅ I guess I indeed am a professional speaker now.
☐ It does not make enough - yet - to say I speak for living…
🔮..but I kinda sense I will do a lot of selling - myself, my speaking and who knows what else in 2025 😀.”
And that was a pretty damn good prediction where I am at right now :).
1. Speaking IS working.
TL,DR I have done 2 big keynote speeches so far this year and a bunch of smaller, workshop-like sessions.
It’s no longer my pipe dream…
it’s just another revenue stream,
just another thing I know how to do.
Where do I get business from, you ask?
I have some inbound leads (from people who saw me speak/ attended a workshop I led before)
I “buy” some leads from Bark (platform similar to Thumbtack) where people looking for some service submit what they are looking for and Bark then offers the service providers this person’s contacts for ~$35/ pop
I started a cold email outreach to organizations similar to those where I did my 2 big gigs, I have Linkedin Sales navigator for the account & contacts identification, Apollo for data enrichment (= getting people’s emails) and Hubspot for tracking it all + now playing with a lot of automation, letting me send out personalized emails at scale.
Sales 101, 102 & 301.
And yes I have a promo video - finally that speaker reel :).
2. I figured out my sustainable business model - and it’s growing + I got a job!
You can imagine speaking doesn’t make enough to be the primary source of income.
For that I returned back to my roots in working as an external business consultant - just now I am w2 employed in my own LLC!
Yes, I need to biz dev and sell to make the payroll 😅.
It’s a lot of conversations with companies in my network, I am helping now one company with their US market go-to-market strategy and another one setting up their Biz Ops as they are being spun off from a larger entity.
But you can also imagine that here you only “eat what you kill”.
A few weeks ago it looked like for a little while that I am going to “outsell“ my capacity and I was excited and panicky at the same time.
If I agree on all this work, I will
a) need to deliver it !) and
b) have no more time or capacity to do the selling part 😱!
And boy of boy do I enjoy that 🙂 : It’s a rollercoaster of great highs when a good deal gets through and frustrated lows when it doesn’t. But I am in for the ride itself hehe.
I am just thinking now how to develop this further, how to scale it up. A few ideas in my head, testing it out and I will report back!
3. Sharing thoughts & ideas is fun - I guess I found my voice?
Finally, a few weeks ago I started posting more regularly on LinkedIn and I hope to further ramp up to consistent 3-5 posts a week.
Setting up a Notion Content Calendar has been a huge unlock for me - highly recommended!
✅ It’s a great conversation starter + tool to reconnect with my past colleagues & friends
✅ it’s a source of leads for my consulting work and
at the end of the day - as cheesy as it is - ✅ “your vibe attracts your tribe”. It attracts to my orbit who like what I represent and repels the opposite 😄 .
Sharing my updates and thoughts with you regularly in the fall last year made that “coming out“ easier and less scary.
If you are thinking of being more public and you think I could help, please reach out - I had multiple people who had helped me getting where I am now and I am happy to pass it along 🙂 .
Katka
PS: Picture up in the title is from a recent Argy concert at Cow Palace in South San Francisco; we got tickets for a (sober!) rave with my husband and I loved it and felt 22yo again… for like 3 hours!
Being immersed into my current fav DJ’s beats I had an epiphany - there are no shortcuts to figuring things out, the only way how to get “there” faster is to:
💡 Make mistakes faster.
To trying out things, learning lessons and getting better every day 🥂!
