The Monday Morning Marketing Podcast is brought to you byEsther of IPA Group, bringing premier online promotion to your business.
And Melanie of STOMP Social Media Training, who empowers business owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves. Welcome back to another episode of the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. Today we're joined by Fabienne Frederick son of Boldheart.com. For 20 plus years, Fabian has power fully mentored tens of thousands of women business owners to grow, then scale their businesses, earning them tens of millions collectively each year, while increasing their time off to enjoy lives they love. Welcome, Fabianne.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's great that you can be here.
That is quite a powerful intro, isn't it? Wow.
Right, hands up. Who wants to earn millions?
Me.
All hands are up in the room. I'm sure your hands are up at home as well. So empowering women business owners is something that we hear a lot about these days on many different platforms and many different places. Why is it so important to do that?
Oh, my gosh. I mean, do we have 7 hours?
Just 20 minutes? Go.
Can I go straight to the stuff I usually leave for the end?
Sure.
I really believe that the masculine has been rewarded. I love the masculine, but it has been rewarded for thousands of years whereby the feminine has been conditioned to take second place. And here's what I've learned. I've been a business coach for women for 21 years. Thousands and thousands of them have shared their stories with me and transformed. And what I have noticed is that before a woman makes her own money and lots of it, she doesn't have much of a voice or a choice. Even in the most abundant, affluent, loving situations, when she makes her own money and lots of it, there is a deep sense of confidence, safety. She takes up more space because now she has a choice and a voice. She can speak up. And while I was in corporate working inNew York for more than eight years. And I know that some women make good money in corporate, I have as a whole only seen women make extraordinary amounts of money being self employed, where they dictate how much they make by how much they're willing to market and learn how to grow their businesses. It's about making their money their way. So we can talk about empowerment. I've written a couple of books, one on personal empowerment, one on business empowerment, butI believe it goes, if I may, beyond simple empowerment and allowing them to control their destiny by controlling their money, if that's okay to say.
Well, it goes so much more than just a set of skills, though, isn't it? There's something innate in your customer, in the women that you work with, and they have to learn a whole set of personal skills as well as business skills to be successful. So where do you feel you tap more and which one is more important in order to make it successful.
They work hand in hand, Melanie but let me explain to you.So I have a business called Boldheart. We have something called the LeveragedBusiness Programme, and I need to give you some context to help you understand.The first program me that we offer is called Growth, and it helps women get to10K a month consistently. And there we deal with just two topics sales and marketing, sales and marketing, sales and marketing. Because when you're not yet at 10K a month, really, you should not be doing anything else other than finding your people and lovingly bringing them in to work with you. There though we need to deal not just with the strategy, because the strategy you can get online there's at the library, on the Googles, all the strategies for marketing and sales are there. What needs to happen is the mindset, the beliefs that we have around closing the sale, about being a marketer, especially as a woman, about how much we can charge, about is marketing bragging? Is itappropriate? There's so many different beliefs. Fear of success, fear of failure, fear of overwhelm, fear of being criticised, fear of visibility. All of that is a set of mindset issues that most people don't deal with. Which is why more women don't get to 10K a month consistently. Once they're there, they're at six figures. Some of them want to get to multiple six figures and even seven figures. Although in the beginning I did not even have that as a thing that I thought was possible for myself. They have a new set of strategies. It's not so much about marketing and sales, it's about team and systems and reducing access and setting boundaries and changing their business model to work one to many and then going exponential with their marketing and their accountability, bringing on a second in command. That is what gets you to multiple six figures and eventually seven figures. The eight steps are outlined in my book, TheLeveraged Business how you can go from overwhelmed at six figures to seven figures and Get Your Life Back. But here's the thing. Once again, these are strategies. And I could say to any woman in business, okay, it is time to shift your business model from one to many. If you do not deal with the mindset that is in place, she will never do it.
Yes, it is a mindset issue. And when you were saying visibility is a mindset issue as well, I look straight at Esther because she's got a serious mindset block there when it comes to being on video. But I think that as much as you say that people can be ready for this, I do think you have to be in the right space to do it. I've wanted to grow and build my business for years, and then a set of circumstances came about and I had to do some thing in order to keep my business alive. And I stopped being complacent and the situation was just fertile enough for me to take advantage of. So what kind of set of circumstances do you think your ideal customer reading this book has to be in to actually jump in and make it a success?
When she cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel. When she is working evenings and weekends. When she says to her children, one moreemail and Mommy will be right there covered in guilt. When she puts the kids in the bathtub with only this much water a couple of inches and sits on the closed toilet with her laptop to try to get through the Todo list, she starts thinking, this is not sustainable. I'm not paying in myself enough. I'm working evenings, weekends. I'm not present with the people that I love and who want my attention. I can't grow my business because I'm putting out fires all day. I'm not sure if it's worth it to be self-employed
And that's the point.
That's the point. Now, when my person reads the introduction to the Leveraged Business, it's not too unusual that she gets tears in her eyes.But the person who has not reached that point yet should also read this book even if she's not at 10K a month yet, because you don't want to get to that point and feel guilty and dream of taking a spa day or dream of being able to take your family on vacation or all of those things. Reading and studying what it takes to create a self managing business while you get your life back is what I believe, especially as a woman, is what I believe we should all be doing unless we want to stay stuck. And I don't mean to be a Negative Nelly, but I was in that place where my husband said to me, are you sure you want more clients? We never see you.
Yeah. We're not as females, especially as mothers. We're not good at letting other people take over and do the job that we obviously knowhow to do perfectly, even if that's stacking the dishwasher at home, the expression is thrown out there all the time. You can have it all. Have it all, have it all. Can we?
Okay, yes. And let me explain what makes my version of this different than perhaps somebody else's version. There are some people who say you can have it all, just not at the same time. And I have a different point ofview. You can have it all, whatever all means to you, based on your values, based on what matters to you, based on the life that you want. So here's what I mean. If you want to have it all jet set around the world on your private jet and you have triplet toddlers at home, it's probably somebody else's vision and value but not really your own. So the reason I called my company Boldheart is because I believe in taking your ear to your heart and listening really hard.The things you are passionate about are not random, they are your calling, they are the things that you want to have in your life. And I ask you to listen really hard to what your heart is saying and then boldly go after that. And here's the when people talk about having it all, often they're talking about these private jets and the fourth Lamborghini in the garage and who cares? AndI often say to people who ask me that question, you don't actually want fourLamborghinis in your garage as a woman in business, I've never met one who really does. What you want is freedom. What you want is to make an impact, do meaningful work you love. You want that financial security. You want to put your head on the pillow at night and say, I helped somebody today, I helped a group of people today, I was a catalyst and somebody realising their dream today. Yes, you want to make money, sure, maybe you want that fancy bag or that bigger house, but in the end you want to do what you want with whom you want,the way you want it, when you want it. You want work that matters and down time and perhaps to grow yourself, to grow your spirituality, to grow your fun andjust to be happy and of service. When you get clear on that, you can have it all. Especially when you have your own business and you are taught how to grow it and remove yourself from the day to day operations of it so that it can run mostly without you and you can enjoy your life at the same time.
Yeah, that's one of the first things you're told when you start a business is don't expect to get much sleep for the next three to five years. If you want your business to grow, you have to be there 24/7. You have to be not even to grow. If you want it to survive the startup phase, you have to be there, you have to be on, you have to be available 24/7 for the first three to five years. Some people extended to eat. That is tough on anybody, but especially if they also have a family. I'm talking men and women here as well, especially if they have a small family or going through health issues, difficulties. In your book, you talk about working less and still learning more. Does that also apply to startups?
Absolutely. Here's how. If you understand the Perettoprinciple, which is also called the 80 20 rule, you understand that 80% of the things you are working on in your business are providing only 20% of results.So let's just take a ten hour day just to make it a rounded number. Eight of those 10 hours that you're plugging away at your computer doing all the thingsare only creating 20% of revenues. Conversely, 20% of your activities are producing 80% of your revenues. That's 2 hours out of ten. Most of us aretaught to work on everything. We're not being strategic. We're like, oh, I've got to be on TikTok. Okay, let me be on TikTok. Let me do a thing, let me do that. And then at the end of the day, if you were to analyse, I talk about thisin chapter five of the book called Leverage Your Marketing. If you were to actually analyse where you get your clients and how you make your money, youwould flash about 80% of the activities that you're working on, most everybody.So in our program me, we do process called the Unique Brilliance Process, whereI ask you to go over everything that you did over the last couple of weeks and just write down, okay, so I booked the podcast guests and I put them in mycalendar and I answered emails and all manner of things. I wrote this blog post and I did this and I did that. And if you were to look at the things thatyou're uniquely brilliant at, the things that you're excellent at doing, the things that you're competent, meaning you could do it, but somebody could do it better, and it's really not bringing money. And the things you're actually in competent at, you would notice that about 80% of the things that you do are bringing in zero money. What we do at that point, now that it's four nice little quadrants is we delegate, eliminate, or automate the bottom two quadrants and have you focused only on your unique brilliance activities - the things that come to you, that people are fascinated that you do so, so well, and that, you know, bring in money and your excellence quadrant as well. And this is a game changer because you don't need to then work evenings and weekends. You can focus on the 20% that's bringing in 80% of the results at the expense of practically everything else. And if you're really into creating compound effect that 20%, you can grow to 30, 50, 80%. So at this point, 80% of the way that you use your time, the activities that you focus on are the ones that are actually producing results and money. You don't need to work more. You need to work on better things.
So it sounds like you're describing a lean business model, basically, where you're getting rid of all the crud that is not really beneficial to you. And that's actually a really great way to create a program me. But is it enough to show people how to do this or do they need some level of accountability as well? Do you feel that helps?
Yes, more so than you realise. So part of having worked with so many women business owners is that I've seen all members of the LeveragedBusiness Programme take two assessments. I see these assessment results, I've seen thousands of them. And what they point to is that we entrepreneurs are high risk takers and high idea generators. In fact, 95% of us, based on myobservation over the last few years, 95% of us are high idea generators.There's no shortage of, oh, we could do this and what if we did that? And Ijust took this course and I just took this webinar and I think we should do that. And we are also not wired to follow through. When I'm speaking in frontof hundreds of women entrepreneurs, it's a lot of nodding and laughing because they know. So if you think about the word "entrepreneur" comes from the word verb, "entreprend", which means to initiate. We are greatinitiators and we're not great finishers. Through no fault of our own. We have different gifts. And what I realised, looking at the work of Gretchen Rubin,and most of us are people who are obligers or rebels. Obligers will followthrough if they are being held accountable by someone else outside ofthemselves. So in our programme, for example, we have daily accountability. Not the kind that daily loving accountability in two different forms, but lovingaccountability. Not like "you loser, you didn't do it", but more like,"so how did it go, tell me, did you get done what you said you were goingto do yesterday?" And you do this for someone? We call them AB's -accountability buddies and we just talk five minutes a day and then she does this back for you. And you form an incredible bond that by speaking everyweekday for five minutes with somebody who's got skin in the game, she, too, has invested in getting mentorship and being in a community of dozens of otherwomen who are serious about growing, who want to get they understand they can't do it on their own, which is a very healthy way to look at life. Instead ofsaying, you know what, I should be able to if you could have, you would have, right? So if you can just call a spade a spade and say, I'm not a finisher, but,man, I really do want to make more money to increase my impact, just have more time with my kids, I'm just going to be smart enough to get some help. And whenat first you hear accountability and you're like, oh, I don't want anybody to hold me accountable. Until you realise that it's a loving thing. It's an act ofself love, radical self love, to say, I know myself. I know what I'm great at.I know my shortcomings. I will accept myself with my shortcomings and I willget the help I crave to follow through on my promises, to follow through to my self, to follow through on my goals and to see just how far I can go with thehelp of other wonderful women who've got my back. That's how it works.
I don't think I could personally cope with daily that would but since having an accountability partner I've had an accountability partnerof some description for three years. I had one person sorry, four years. Had one person for three years, and I've got another person since the beginning ofthis year. And we speak to each other for 30 minutes once a week, and we also have a secret group on Facebook, and we ask three questions what went well for you this week? What didn't go well for you this week? And what can you do about it? So we come away from that 30 minutes with a solution, hopefully, or at least an idea of a solution. We have this scheduled and booked in. And it's not that we don't speak to each other throughout the week. If I say I meant to speak to a supplier tomorrow, she'll send me a message after the phone call is due and say, how did it go? What happened? That sort of thing. And honestly, I could not agree with you more having an accountability partner. And I bet you there's people all over the globe who's listened to these podcasts going, yeah, that's me. I'm an initiator. I'm an initiator. I'm not a finisher. And there's people going, God, why didn't I think of that? So what makes a good accountability partner, in your opinion, Fabienne?
Somebody who's got skin in the game. And here's why Imentioned it just a moment ago. They also have a business. They also have biggoals, healthy ambition, and they've got skin in the game in the sense thatthis is not blow off a book. They have invested money, time, resources. Andbecause of that, there's this energy of, you know what? I'm tired of seeingyear after year my results not increase. And she has come to this point whereshe says, you know what? I'm just going to take personal responsibility at thispoint. And I want someone, a peer, who is also willing to take personalresponsibility where excuses, and I don't mean it like on a really masculineperspective, "you either have results or excuses or excuses andresults." No, it's more like I'm just going to show up for those fiveminutes. And one small thing that I'm working on every day, not a huge project,and I know that the equivalent of, let's say, 300 blips a year are better than52. Because with that little loving nudge from somebody we care for and whocares for us, this little urgency just bing, bing, bing bing bing, as opposedto, okay, what is that other law, not the parreto principle, but the other onewhere it says the time that you complete something will expand to the time yougive yourself.
If you give yourself a month to write a blog post, you'llwrite it on the last day of the month.
If not a day later?
Yes.
But if you give yourself a day and you have that lovingaccountability. If you respect that person.
So is that why I do a presentation the day before I'msupposed to deliver it?
Every time Melanie, every time.
And you tell yourself that things will change, that if yousit down and do it today when it's due next month, things can change. Like, wework in the social media business, Fabienne, and things change daily,constantly. So that's what we use as an excuse to say, there's no point indoing it now when I won't be presenting it for a month, because Twitter couldhave disappeared by then.
Probably, will.
You could also be hit by a bus by then? There's all sorts ofways we could look at it.
But this has all been very interesting and fascinating.Unfortunately, we have come to the end of our time. How can people contact you?How can they read your book? How can they find out more?
I'll give you a few different websites. The first one is youcan find my book. It's actually available for free on a website calledtheleveragedbusinessbook.com. There is a small shipping fee. This is where Ijust ask you to meet me halfway, right? I took eight years to write this book.People are shocked that a woman that I saw on an event I did a month ago said Iturned my 80K business into a half a million business. She was in Scotland.Just by following what's in your book. And the reason I wrote this book is Iwant to normalise for women this crazy idea of making a lot of their own moneyand having downtime like the fact that we had to discuss that today means thatit's not normalised enough. And my intention is very transparent. If you likethe book, maybe one day you'll want to work with us. If you don't, then youwon't. It's really just my way of providing results in advance. The secondthing I would recommend is go to Boldheart.com and go to the Success Storiespage only so you can see video after video after account after account of womenwho are normal people that you would, if they were in front of you at thegrocery store with their two little kids in the cart. You would never know thatshe's making 80,000 a year. Again, I want it to be normalised that this happensto regular women. So boldheart.com success stories. And then I would say if youwent to YouTube and you put Boldheart Business Documentary in the search bar,you would see a nine minute documentary that was made by a filmmaking team thatspent a week with me and our members. And most women have a hard time goingthrough the nine minutes without being deeply inspired and maybe having alittle tear in their eye. Those are the three things I would recommend.
Brilliant.
Brilliant. Thank you so much.
You can find me on LinkedIn and all the things. Follow mewherever you are.
Great. They'll all be going in our show notes as well. Ifyou didn't get a chance to write those down, you can check them out on the shownotes. Thank you so much, Fabienne, for taking the time and speaking to ustoday and speaking to our audience. Like, Melanie and I are just sitting,nodding away the whole time, so it's hitting home, definitely. And we will begetting the book and figuring out how we can scale up and work less for more.So thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.
We'll be back next week, guys, with more Monday MorningMarketing. Until then bye bye.