My recent chat with Fabienne Fredrickson was a blast! Fabienne is an expert at scaling businesses and I wanted to share with you her insights on how to build and scale with Fabienne.
For the past two decades, Fabienne has been a business mentor to thousands of women business owners, as the founder of boldheart.com. The Bold Heart Business Program is based on her experience and has created a model that predictably helps you grow your revenue from five to six figures consistently. Her program also teaches you how to leverage your six-figure to seven figures.
Fabienne likes to say that she sprinkled self-worth teachings on top of all the business teachings as one-word fairy dust. Not only does she teach you to fight self-doubt, but she also shows her clients how to become infinitely more confident as a woman, the importance of believing in yourself, valuing your unique brilliance, and getting out of your comfort zone so you can succeed at a much bigger level in your business.
The Leveraged Business
Fabienne Fredrickson is the author of the new book, The Leveraged Business, which I have absolutely devoured to find out more about scaling. She started scaling her business as she soon hit a roadblock with time. “I could not grow because there was no more time and no more of me to go around.”
After scaling, Fabienne was able to double and triple her business, earning seven figures in 2008. At this point, she only works about two or three hours a day while maintaining multiple seven figures.
Start with a Positive Shift in Mindset
If you want to scale, the first item you need to start with is feeling that you are worthy of participating at this higher level of business, says Fabienne. Throwing more time towards your business to make it grow isn’t a well-thought-out plan. To succeed, you need to scale, which entails creating processes, systems, and strategies that will boost your business.
“Even when my business model was leveraged, I still held the belief that every single client needed an hour a week with me, and pulling yourself out of being overly accessible in your business is excruciating.”
She reminds us that we can’t make everybody happy. “You’re going to have to disappoint somebody, if not a lot of people. The sooner you can build in a leveraged business model, the sooner you can leverage a team and set boundaries around your time with your family and friends. You make and leverage your time by setting firm boundaries. And part of that means that you have to be okay with not being liked all the time.
Exponential Growth Activities
These activities are the ones you usually don’t have time to work on because they take several hours. The more EG activities you can set up from the beginning, the faster you will scale to six or seven figures.
You need to find your visioning strategy – the projects that will catapult you onto the big stage. Remember, these activities can take months or sometimes years to complete. These scaling processes also take a different kind of thinking. “It’s about predicting yourself into the future.”
Fabienne stresses that we have been socialized ‘to be nice’ and to say yes to any request made of us as women. Women need to pivot and put a line in the sand. Prioritizing is extremely important if you want to scale. “If I’m putting everybody else’s needs before my own, when is my life going to be about me? I know how incredibly arrogant and selfish that can sound. What I see women doing all the time is putting everybody else’s needs and preferences before their own, to their detriment.”
“There’s a point at which you have to say, this is my business and this is what I’m doing – unapologetically.”
Bump Up Your Self-Worth if You Want to Scale Your Company
She reminds us that it comes down to an issue of self-worth and believing that you are innately valuable. Remember, you don’t need to be liked to be a nice person. “The majority of people love me rather than dislike me.” If you like and appreciate yourself, accept yourself ‘as is’ with blemishes. It doesn’t matter whether you are okay with me because I’m okay with me.
Fabienne’s advice is to set up your business and life around strong standards for what’s acceptable and not acceptable. Make sure to uphold your value system with solid boundaries.
Support Feminine Energy and Women In Business
If you run into a whiner and complainer client, it’s best to let them go. She says that they don’t get the significance and love anywhere else in their life, so they will gripe at you. When you are working on yourself, you can increase your mindset, which results in better financial results. This is why that the people who are more advanced in their mindset usually make more money.
“The reason I live in Paris, is that Paris is a feminine country – and here the feminine is revered, not just women, but all things feminine. In many Anglo-Saxon countries all around the world, the feminine is tolerated at best. Therefore, we need to encourage women to have their own business; because our society at large doesn’t have that high of an opinion of women.” She feels that women need to make their own money because she doesn’t need to depend on anybody when a woman has her own money. She has a voice and a choice.
Creating Activators to Grow Your Business
When she first envisioned activators, she came up with an image in her mind of eight light switches on a white wall in a dark room. This image translated into the business sense that when you are in a dark room and can’t see the switches, you can’t turn them on to see the light.
“But if we flip one switch on there’s a little bit more light in the room.” Now you can see more clearly. “Each of the leverage activators is part of those switches.” The more switches you flip on, the more precise you will be on making it to seven figures and getting your life back.
Activator #1: Leverage Your Team. If you think there’s such a thing as a self-made millionaire, think again! You need help to get to your goals. This could be mentorship, your belief system, or getting help from a team. “Most people don’t invest enough in their team because they’re hiring for where they are now, not for where they want to be.”
Activator #2: Leverage Your System. Anything you’re doing more than once per year in your business needs a system around the activity.
Activator #3: Leverage Your Business Model. Lose the one-to-one and start creating group memberships to scale your business. If you do have a 1:1, charge accordingly. You need to start thinking about how you can show up and be on surround sound in your ideal client’s lives – without you doing the showing up yourself.
Activator #4: Leverage Your Accountability.
- Get your team to be held responsible in a loving way.
- Make everybody responsible for three to four daily tasks in addition to the regular list of responsibilities they were hired for.
Providing Value and Goal Setting
Your team has the responsibility to grow your business with you every month. You choose a target and reverse engineer responsibilities to meet your target. Everybody on your team is held responsible for your goals.
Remember to provide value that people can’t get anywhere else. Provide a feeling they can’t get from another business. This is part of the feminine energy, not just transactional.