Jessi Bixler: Two Businesses, One Book, and Learning to Be Led

This episode is releasing during SAAM, Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and that timing is not incidental. Jessi Bixler’s memoir, The Story We Share, is about surviving sexual assault. Her advocacy work through MOCSA, where she serves as Immediate Past Board Chair, is part of how she is extending that story beyond the book. And she is doing all of it while running an eight-year-old consulting agency and raising a family. This conversation is about what that actually looks like operationally and spiritually.

Jessi has three titles on paper: author, speaker, CMO. In practice, her week looks different every single time. Some weeks are heavy on The Story We Share and the advocacy work surrounding it. Other weeks pull her back into Bixler Consulting, the marketing and AI-driven sales agency she has been running for eight years. She is also a mom and a wife. She said it plainly at the top of the conversation: no week is typically the same.

That kind of setup, two businesses with different audiences, different goals, and different emotional weight, requires a very specific kind of infrastructure. This episode is about how she built it, what she is holding right now, and the question she is still sitting with.

How She Built a Business That Gives Her Options

Bixler Consulting started eight years ago as a digital marketing agency and grew organically into a niche Jessi did not plan for: website builds for dermatology practices. She credits that to God’s direction and says she never would have picked it herself. But the thing that actually gave her staying power was a structural decision she made at the very beginning.

She never hired full-time employees.

At the time, she said, that felt counterintuitive. The standard advice is that growth requires staff. But Jessi had been in the corporate world. She knew what that kind of infrastructure did to family life and she did not want it. So she built a contractor network instead, website designers, writers, content producers, people who were building their own businesses at the same time. Many of them she has known for nearly two decades from her previous career. Several came through LinkedIn. Most came through relationships she invested in before she needed them.

The result is a business stable enough to give her options. That phrase, stable enough to give her options, is the one worth sitting with if you are earlier in your build. It does not mean everything is solved. It means she does not have to chase every opportunity, which is what allowed her to write a book.

The Book: Why She Wrote It the Way She Did

The Story We Share is a memoir about surviving sexual assault, and its release during SAAM is no accident. Jessi experienced the assault about twelve years ago and says the idea to write about it had been sitting with her for a long time. The moment that moved her from thinking about it to actually doing it came in November 2023, in a conversation with her therapist, who was in the process of dying and was talking about writing her own book. Jessi described it as a nudge, a tickle. She had been waiting to feel that kind of direction from the Holy Spirit and that conversation was the first time she thought it might actually be time.

She started by talking to a writer friend and just took the next step and the next step and the next step. The full process from that first conversation to release took about a year. The book came out in November 2025, intentionally timed to the anniversary.

What makes the book structurally unusual is that it is not just Jessi’s account. She interviewed her husband, her parents, her brother, and close friends and then gave each of them their own chapter in their own words. Not paraphrased. Not quoted within her narrative. Their chapters.

She said she wanted to capture their emotion exactly, because the length and tone of each chapter is itself a reflection of who that person is. But there was another reason too. When trauma happens, attention goes to the person in crisis. The people around them, what Jessi calls secondary survivors, are often overlooked. She wanted to give them a place in the story.

What she found when she did the interviews was that many of them had never talked to anyone else about what they went through. They were carrying it quietly. She said it was healing for them, and healing for their relationships. The feedback she gets most often from readers is not about her story. It is about hearing from those secondary voices and feeling seen in that role themselves. During SAAM, that is exactly the kind of conversation worth amplifying.

The Pivot Into AI and What That Actually Means

On the Bixler Consulting side, Jessi and her husband Chad, who recently joined the business, are restructuring their services. Chad has been in sales for over twenty years, and together they are building out AI-driven lead recovery as a new offering. The target market is blue-collar industries: home builders, HVAC companies, garage door businesses. The kinds of businesses that generate a lot of customer inquiries and often lose potential revenue by not following up fast enough or at all.

She described it as tapping into the intersection of AI and AIO, artificial intelligence optimization alongside traditional SEO, and using that combination to help businesses improve their sales outcomes, not just their marketing presence. The marketing foundation remains the core. The AI layer sits on top of it.

Bringing Chad into the business has also changed what Jessi can do. With him handling more of the consulting and outreach side, she has had capacity to put more of herself into the book, the advocacy, and the speaking work, including training police cadets in Warrensburg, Missouri, which she did just weeks before this episode recorded.

Discerning Where to Spend Her Time

This is the question Jessi is genuinely sitting with and she does not pretend to have it resolved.

She described the shift she has tried to make in how she evaluates opportunities. Instead of asking what she should be doing to grow the business, she has been asking what the next right thing to be obedient to is. She acknowledged it makes her feel antsy to say out loud because it sounds passive, and she is a doer by nature. But she said that approach has made her work more sustainable and more grounded.

Right now, the majority of her time is on the publishing side, the book, the advocacy, and the speaking. She is still feeling what she described as the weight and the importance of that work, not a burden, but a pull. As long as she is feeling that nudge, she is going to lean into it.

What Leaders Can Do When Someone Is Carrying Something Invisible

During SAAM, this part of the conversation carries extra weight. Jessi spoke directly from her own experience when Courtney asked what leaders should do when they sense someone on their team is going through something they are not saying out loud.

Jessi went back to work days after her assault. She closed in. She had two people she trusted enough to say something to, and that trust made a real difference. What leaders can look for, she said, is behavioral change. If someone who is normally outgoing goes quiet, or if someone starts reacting in ways that seem out of proportion, it is probably not about you.

Her practical advice: pause. Show empathy. Create a safe opening and give the person control over whether they take it. She said something specific about why control matters: after trauma, a major part of what a person loses is control. A leader who can offer a soft opening and then step back, letting the person decide whether to come forward, is giving something important back.

That thread, invisible weight and how it shows up at work, is one of the places where Jessi’s two worlds connect. The book is about it. Her consulting work puts her in rooms with business owners and teams. She sees it in both. Her work with MOCSA extends it further. This is not abstract for her. It is the throughline of everything she is building. #SAAM

Where to Find Her

The Story We Share is available at www.thestoryweshare.com and on Amazon. She and her team have also just launched a blog on the site with content around the intersection of leadership and life. She is on Facebook at www.facebook.com/thestorywesharebook.

For more from Courtney, visit www.monarchcoo.com or find her on Instagram at @monarchcoo