PUBLIC SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS
Katie LeDoux doesn’t speak at audiences.
She connects with them.
Katie has built a business and a life she loves while navigating serious illness, loss, uncertainty, and plans that fell spectacularly apart. She helps audiences identify what’s holding them back, trust themselves, set boundaries, and take courageous action toward the life and work they want.
At the heart of it all is her commitment to becoming the kind of leader she once needed.
Why Katie?
Warm, candid and genuinely funny, Katie brings the same approach to the stage that she brings to her work and leadership: tell the truth, make it useful and never pretend the hard parts didn’t happen.
Her presentations pair compelling personal stories with practical ideas audiences can use long after the event is over. She is willing to talk about the messy middle—the career decisions that didn’t work, the boundaries she learned to set too late, the business mistakes, the unexpected pivots and the moments when she had to choose courage before she felt confident.
Katie believes the best presentations should make you laugh, think, feel seen—and want to do something differently when you leave.
Katie’s presentations
SIGNATURE KEYNOTE
Choosing Yourself:
The Courage to Build a Life That Fits
What happens when the life you worked so hard to build no longer feels like yours?
Learn more
Katie LeDoux knows what it means to have a career that looks successful on paper—and to realize that success is costing you too much. In this candid and deeply personal keynote, Katie shares her journey from accomplished arts professional to unhappy leader to entrepreneur, and the decision that changed everything: choosing herself.
But Choosing Yourself isn’t a talk about quitting your job. It’s about learning to recognize when something no longer fits, trusting what you know, advocating for what you need and giving yourself permission to make a different choice.
With warmth, humor and hard-earned perspective, Katie explores the boundaries, difficult conversations, unexpected detours and courageous decisions that allow us to build lives and careers that actually belong to us.
Audiences will leave ready to: recognize when success and fulfillment have stopped being the same thing; advocate for themselves without apologizing; set boundaries that protect what matters most; navigate change without having every answer first; and identify one courageous next step toward a life that fits.
Ideal for: women’s leadership events, professional associations, employee retreats, emerging-leader programs, entrepreneurship conferences and organizations navigating change.
GRANTS & NONPROFIT STRATEGY
Grants: All the things!
What Actually Makes Organizations Fundable
Grant writing is about a lot more than writing grants.
Learn more
After helping organizations secure more than $21 million in funding, Katie has seen the same truth again and again: the strongest grant applications begin long before anyone opens the application.
In this practical, engaging presentation, Katie pulls back the curtain on what funders are really looking for—and why outcomes, budgets, boards, sustainability, storytelling, relationships and organizational readiness all matter.
Whether an audience is brand-new to grants or has been chasing funding for years, Katie demystifies the process and helps organizations stop treating grants like a lottery and start approaching them strategically.
And yes: all the things really do matter.
Audiences will learn how to: determine whether an organization is truly grant-ready; identify what makes an application compelling; strengthen outcomes and impact storytelling; understand what budgets communicate to funders; build a smarter grant pipeline; and avoid common mistakes that cost organizations time and opportunities.
Ideal for: nonprofit conferences, community foundations, associations, chambers, economic-development organizations, nonprofit boards, small businesses pursuing grant opportunities and professional-development programs.
This topic can be customized from an introductory keynote to a deeper interactive workshop or training.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Zero to Hundred:
Building a Business When You Have Absolutely No Idea What You’re Doing
Learn more
You do not have to know exactly what you’re doing to begin.
Katie certainly didn’t.
She started Sunflower Grant Writers with expertise in grants, a vision for doing the work differently—and a whole lot she didn’t know about actually running a company. What followed was an education in pricing, hiring, firing, cash flow, leadership, saying no, making expensive mistakes, taking bigger risks and figuring things out approximately five minutes before they needed to be figured out.
In Zero to Hundred, Katie offers an unpolished look at what building a business actually requires. She shares the lessons that don’t always make it into entrepreneurship success stories: the experiments that flop, the decisions that terrify you, the moments you wonder what on earth you’ve done—and the extraordinary things that can happen when you keep going anyway.
This isn’t a presentation about having the perfect business plan. It’s about building while learning, leading before you feel ready and refusing to let not knowing become a reason not to try.
Audiences will leave with: permission to start before they feel ready; practical lessons about pricing, growth, hiring and leadership; a healthier relationship with mistakes and experimentation; strategies for recognizing when the business needs to change; and greater confidence in their own ability to figure out what comes next.
Ideal for: entrepreneurship conferences, chambers of commerce, small-business programs, women-in-business events, accelerators, universities, emerging entrepreneurs and leadership programs.
What audiences can expect
Stories, not speeches.
Katie is a natural storyteller who brings audiences into the experiences that shaped her rather than simply telling them what they should do.
Substance they can use.
Inspiration matters. So do practical next steps. Every Katie LeDoux presentation gives audiences ideas, questions and tools they can take back to their lives, careers, businesses or organizations.
Honesty without the highlight reel.
Katie talks openly about uncertainty, reinvention, mistakes, resilience and figuring things out along the way. No perfect-success-story mythology required.
Humor and humanity.
Even serious conversations can have joy in them. Katie creates an atmosphere where audiences can laugh, reflect and recognize a little of themselves in the stories she tells.
A presentation built for your people.
No two audiences are exactly alike. Katie works with event organizers to understand who will be in the room and tailors her message, examples and takeaways accordingly.
Ready to learn more? Reach out to Katie with any questions. Get in touch »
“I don’t want people to leave thinking, ‘Katie did something brave.’ I want them to leave thinking, ‘Maybe I can, too.’
Katie LeDoux believes one decision can change the course of your life:
Choosing yourself.
After an accomplished career at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Kennedy Center, Katie found herself in leadership roles that looked successful from the outside but no longer aligned with her values—or brought her joy. Rather than accept that disconnect as the price of success, she made a courageous choice: to advocate for herself, walk away and build the life and business she had imagined for herself.
Today, Katie is a speaker, entrepreneur and founder and CEO of Sunflower Grant Writers, a firm that has secured more than $21 million in funding for nonprofits, communities and businesses across the country. Drawing from her own experiences with leadership, entrepreneurship and reinvention, Katie gives audiences practical tools to advocate for themselves, establish healthy boundaries, navigate change and build careers, businesses and lives rooted in purpose rather than burnout.
Katie speaks with warmth, candor and humor about the moments when life doesn’t go according to plan—and the choices we can make about what comes next. Through honest storytelling, actionable insights and hard-earned lessons, she invites women, entrepreneurs, emerging professionals and workplace leaders to stop waiting for permission and start choosing themselves.
Book Katie for your event
Audiences leave Katie’s talks not simply inspired, but ready to act: to trust their instincts, embrace change, speak up for what they need and take the next bold step toward a life and career they genuinely love.