Hi friends,

You've seen and heard very little from me over the last year, and I'd like to share why.

This email is going to pull back the curtain on some things I haven't shared publicly. I hope you'll find it useful, or at least validating, if you've ever wondered whether everyone else has it more figured out than you do.

Also, it's hella long. Alright, let's dive in:

Today actually marks my 13th year in business.

It's also the anniversary of the day I got laid off from my last job. I came in to find a cardboard box HR had left on my chair while a VP explained that the new CMO would be rebuilding the team in her image, and I wasn't it. The CEO I'd worked closely with didn't even have the balls to show up and deliver the news himself.

I took a lot of that hurt and anger I felt from that layoff, and used it as fuel to start my first business.

I'd felt so beaten down by my experience with startups, that I told myself I only wanted to work with large companies that really understood my value. I didn't want to constantly sing for my supper. So I decided I was going to consult for large tech companies instead.

If you haven't already heard that story, I ended up getting my first corporate contract about six weeks after I was laid off, working with Intel. I loved the team there, and felt so valued and appreciated. I worked with them for nearly 5 years. In that time I also found work with Twitter, Intuit, and GE.

The blessing and curse of getting the business up and running so quickly, has been that over the last decade, I've taken it as a personal failing that all my future ventures haven't "stuck gold" as easily.

Speaking of which...

Around 2018, I felt a calling to do something different and help women who also felt diminished by their workplaces, build the skills to be compensated fairly. I did a mix of executive coaching and public speaking, but I felt like I was spinning my wheels. I had no idea how to charge for these new ventures and let's just say, I was profoundly underpriced and struggling.

I tried lots of things:

I joined a female coworking space and began to give talks on a variety of life coaching topics in hopes of drumming up business. This didn't really go anywhere, I wasn't hitting the right demographic, and the owner of the space hated me and spoke poorly of me to other members. I still don't know why!

Then I launched a membership for $47 a month. I only needed to get a couple hundred people in to make money, and the online gurus made that sound easy.

Spoiler alert - it was not easy.

I did have about a dozen cool women who joined, but I realized I'd make more working the drive-thru line at McDonalds, so I shut it down.

A few months later I worked with a consultant who told me she'd help me launch another membership. She made it sound easy.

When the membership failed to get off the ground, as she had guaranteed, she ghosted me.

I ended up having to issue a chargeback through PayPal, which I received, but she'd blocked me everywhere online and shut down her business.

I spent a good 16 months trying to build my public speaking business, with limited success. Just as signs of it were starting to take off, March 2020 came and the contracts got cancelled as we plunged into the pandemic.

Why am I telling you this?

Because no one likes to share the underbelly of business. It can feel embarrassing and unglamorous.

Worse yet, it is so emotionally defeating to go through these experiences. And it can feel like a pile of failures that is just weighing you down.

I felt very much like I was suffering to be an entrepreneur. I also knew I wasn't suited to anything else, but DAMN, why did it have to be so hard when it looked so easy for everyone else? Why couldn't this evolution in my business be as easy as when I started consulting?

That was the main mantra in my head as I whined my way through 2020.

Late in 2020, after I finished my months long pity party, I joined a mastermind program that really helped me to turn things around.

I met some wonderful people there (shout out to Kathryn and Karla) and it became a lifeline to me as I began to figure out what to do next. The coaches helped me to refine my ideas and IP around Elevate and slowly but surely it took off.

If you don't know, Elevate is my program where I work with folks to help them grow their consulting businesses with larger deals.

I learned how to "launch". I learned how to write emails that sell and I learned how to charge for coaching.

This summer marks five years in business with Elevate.

Elevate has always been an intimate program, because I work 1:1 with my clients and in September of 2023 I was on a professional high! We held a retreat here in Detroit and many of our members joined.

Later that month, I officially hit my goal of having 25 members and considered Elevate "sold out".

I was on top of the world.

You know what comes after you hit a peak? Yeah... the other side...

Being a coach online gets you thrown in with a lot of snake oil salesmen who don't know their head from their ass. It also means you meet a ton of people who have been burned and look at you like you might be trying to scam them.

To try and address this, I'd built up client case studies, screenshots of wins, video testimonials and quotes that showed I was reputable.

But Elevate remained a hard sell. I'd launch to "crickets" and found that the best clients came to me through referral.

By April 2025, the rise of Chat GPT and the slashing of contracts by corporations reeling from tariffs and unpredictability, members of Elevate began to leave.

I tried to launch offers, but very few purchased and the people I did talk to were more and more hesitant to buy anything.

I took a step back to think about what I really wanted, and I realized I was burnt out and tired of trying to convince anyone to work with me.

While all this was going on, we had a major family crisis brewing, which took whatever energy I had left to "push through" and just drained me completely. Suffice to say, I was in crisis by Spring 2025. Emotionally drained, reactive, tired, and beat, I got professional support to help me through this.

That support ended up changing my life over the last year.

One of the biggest things I worked on was learning how to do things "just because". I was so focused on business, I found it very hard to relax.

Dungeons and Dragons had been the only thing that helped me to “let go” and felt like a true break from the difficult time I had been facing.

In fact, I couldn't help but notice how good it felt to play D&D. It felt like a true break from my troubles, and as if the characters I played in game, were giving me the strength and confidence I needed in real life.

I got curious about that, so I began to research. And I was very surprised to learn about a body of research around D&D (and roleplaying games, broadly) being used in therapy, in law schools, with autistic kids and much more.

I started setting up calls with researchers in the field and learning more and more.

My wheels got turning.

What if we applied D&D principles to build skills that help teams? I had a new business on my hands. My energy returned and I launched Once Upon a Roll last summer.

But unlike my previous ventures, where I'd "suffered" to build them, I set some expectations.

I was introducing a brand new concept into the market - D&D for team building. I knew this was a novel sell, that had enormous potential, but also required a lot of knowledge and education to sell.

So instead of thinking I'd make it work overnight ("why isn't it happening immediately" could be described as my most useless belief), I told myself this was a project that would take years to get into the zeitgeist.

Essentially, I was building a new category and I was lowering the bar for myself.

I didn't know how to find my target market. And if you've worked with me, you've heard me talk about most business problems being target market problems. So I threw tons of spaghetti at the wall, trying to figure out what would stick.

Nine months later and we have gained contracts in pharmaceutical, manufacturing and the biggest one to date -- the CDC.

For the first time in 13 years, I'm building something that doesn't feel like suffering. It feels more like playing a game of Monopoly where I'm just trying to figure out how to advance around the board, pass Go and collect my $200.

That shift didn't come from finally figure it all out. It came from finally having a different relationship with the journey itself.

I attribute a lot of that mindset shift to infusing my life and business with play.

The highs are real and worth celebrating. But they are also temporary. Learning how to ride those waves and accept their impermanence is where I'm at these days.

Your business grows to the degree you can regulate your nervous system.

What carries me through the good days and the bad is maintaining the feeling of momentum. Interestingly, momentum is determined by what you do in the prior 72 hours. This time around, I've been intentional about doing things that keep that momentum going.

So what's happened to Elevate? It's still chugging along, smaller and more intimate than it's been in years, and I love it that way. I haven't launched it in over a year and we rely on referrals and people who find me reaching out.

You know that old line, "Those that can't do, teach?" Well, I call hogwash because my clients get to watch me build Once Upon a Roll in real time. Every call is a live proof of what I teach inside the program.

So what’s’ going on with this newsletter?

I'll continue to email you periodically with marketing insights as I continue to grow my new business. And I’ll be sharing offers from my business friends who I believe in.

If you're in a quiet stretch, a hard stretch, or a rebuilding stretch right now, I see you. I've been there more times than I've talked about publicly. And if this is the email that reminds you that redefining yourself isn't a failure, it's a feature, then today was a good day.

Laura

I help consultants design and sell bigger corporate contracts. I'm an ex-Silicon Valley startup gal and Fortune 500 consultant, helping clients scale businesses that give them more freedom, not less. For more, tune into my podcast, Big Deal Energy​