I used to know what it felt like to wait.
For years, while I was building Charli Jane Speakers, my husband Mark was on the road climbing cellular towers 100 to 350 feet in the air, gone for six to eight weeks at a time.
And I was home with our four daughters, holding the fort, building something, waiting for the season to shift.
There were days I felt like I was just sending things out into the world and hoping something would come back.
Hope is not a strategy. Love can be the reason. But hope alone doesn’t build a pipeline.
I see this same pattern in speakers all the time.
They do the work. They build the website, write the bio, put their one-sheet together, and then they wait. They wait for the referral. They wait for someone to find them. They wait to be discovered. And the waiting feels productive because they did all the right things to get ready.
But getting ready and getting booked are two very different seasons.
After 24 years of helping speakers build their businesses, I can tell you with everything I have: the speakers who get booked consistently are not the ones who wait the best. They’re the ones who build a pipeline. A real, intentional, working pipeline, and then work it with consistency.
What a Real Speaking Pipeline Actually Looks Like
A speaking pipeline starts with knowing who you’re looking for. Not just “event planners” in the abstract, but the specific kind of events that serve your specific audience. Healthcare conferences. Women’s leadership summits. Faith-based retreats. Corporate sales kickoffs.
When you know your lane, you stop throwing wide and start fishing where your fish actually swim.
From there, it’s about building a simple list that I like to call your Dream 25.
Twenty-five real organizations, events, or decision-makers that are a genuine fit for your topic and your audience. Not a wishlist of the biggest stages in the world. A grounded, researched, reachable list of opportunities that are actively looking for speakers like you.
The Part Most Speakers Skip
And then — and this is the part most speakers skip — you reach out. Not with a cold, generic pitch. With something warm and specific that shows you’ve actually done your homework. You know their audience. You understand their event. You have something genuinely useful to offer the people in the room.
That’s it. That’s the pipeline. Dream 25, consistent outreach, specific pitches, followed up with grace and persistence.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not passive. But it is completely doable, and it works.
I spent years holding the fort and waiting for Mark to come home. What that season taught me, more than anything, is that purposeful action — even small, quiet, consistent action — is what moves things forward.
Not waiting. Not hoping. Showing up every week and doing the one next thing.
Your speaking business deserves that same intentional energy. You don’t need to be everywhere. You don’t need to pitch a hundred events a month. You just need a list, a rhythm, and the willingness to keep going even when the replies are slow.
Consistency wins over all. I’ve said that for 24 years, and I will keep saying it because I have watched it be true over and over again in the lives of the speakers I’ve had the honor of walking alongside.
The bookings follow.