The Leveraged Business

Ange Dove (00:01)
Welcome to You're the Boss podcast show. And today I have a special guest with me, Fabienne Fredrickson, who is a beloved mentor to thousands of women in business. As the founder of the Leverage Business Program, she has reverse engineered how she scaled her business to several million annually while remaining powerfully feminine. So Fabienne, welcome to the program.

Fabienne Fredrickson (00:29)
Great to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Ange Dove (00:32)
Yeah, you’re welcome. So as we talked a little bit earlier, I had a look at your book, The Leveraged Business, and I absolutely love the topic. It’s so important. I think this is a book every woman needs to read, whether she’s in business or not.

I think as women, we tend to do too much. We overpromise, overdeliver, and over-leverage our own time rather than outsourcing, getting others to help us, and asking for help as well.

As I said, this book is so important. And I promise you, if you’re a business owner and you implement the things in Fabienne’s book, it’s going to change your business for sure. I know from personal experience of running a business that when I applied these principles and started leveraging my resources, it completely changed everything.

So Fabienne, explain to us a little bit about the journey that took you through to creating your system, because I know it came from pain, right?

Fabienne Fredrickson (01:54)
So many dark nights of the soul.

I started my business 25 years ago. I had been a holistic nutritionist, and I wasn’t getting as many clients as I wanted to. To make that part of the story really short, I ended up creating a client attraction system for myself.

I realized I’m unemployable, and I cannot not figure out how to get clients.

So originally, 25 years ago, I became known as the business coach who created the client attraction system. I started teaching other people my system, and I got to six figures rather quickly following that system.

Then I started burning out.

I raised my fees, but it didn’t seem to matter. There was demand. I started taking on more and more clients. I remember my husband — well, he’s still my husband — but at the time we had a small child, and he said, “Are you sure you can take on any more clients? Because we never see you.”

I was working evenings and weekends. Then we had another child.

I knew I was meant for more, Ange, but I just didn’t know how to do it. I was completely maxed out.

I started seeing other people making $50K a month, and I wondered, “How are they doing that?”

Eventually, I started investing in myself. I joined programs with all the big names in the male coaching industry. I heard good ideas, but I had to translate them because there was so much “bro marketing,” “bro selling,” and “bro leadership.” I thought, “I can’t do that. That feels completely inauthentic.”

So essentially, I translated everything into what a woman would naturally do, and I scaled my business within seven years to a million dollars. At that point, I had two children.

All these other women started asking me, “How are you running a business in a way that allows you to take 14 weeks of vacation?”

So I sat down and reverse engineered everything. Instead of teaching the client attraction system, I started teaching how you can scale — how you can go from overwhelmed and burned out at six figures to seven figures while taking 14 weeks of vacation and still having time to pick your kids up from the bus stop.

And that’s how it all started.

Ange Dove (05:06)
Right. And this is why it’s needed. You go to all these male-dominated seminars and learn their strategies, but balancing a home and children doesn’t really come into that for them, right?

Fabienne Fredrickson (05:27)
Exactly. There’s all this invisible work that women do — dinners, laundry, birthdays, organizing everything. Even if you have a housekeeper, there’s still all the mental load.

The guys seem to think that’s not part of their role. So women end up with double jobs.

Ange Dove (05:42)
Exactly. So take me through your system. What are some of the common pitfalls women tend to make? When women come to you, what’s usually going on with them?

Fabienne Fredrickson (06:12)
How many hours do we have?

I’ll start by saying this isn’t just a business thing, but it affects business entirely. Women are raised in society to take care of everything.

We’re also raised to be people pleasers and to put others before ourselves.

If you think about this in business, we tend to put clients’ needs before our own. We tend to over-function. Even when we have a team, we don’t fully delegate. We go in, fix things, rescue situations.

We have a hand in everything.

Ange Dove (07:06)
Yeah. When I first learned to delegate, I had a team already, but I was still working around the clock.

I had two beliefs:

1. I can do it best.

2. By the time I explain it to someone else, I could have already done it myself.

I only truly learned delegation because I broke my shoulder. I physically couldn’t move because the pain was unbearable.

My team said, “Stay home. We’ll take care of everything.”

And they did.

After that, I realized I needed to let go.

Fabienne Fredrickson (08:18)
I actually just did a podcast episode on this exact topic called They Won’t Do It Like I Would.

When you learn to delegate — and sometimes when you’re forced to delegate — your business grows.

I’ll give you two examples.

One former client of mine was diagnosed with cancer. Because she had already applied the first four leverage activators — team, systems, time, and business model — her business actually grew while she was receiving chemo treatments.

She came back eight or nine months later, and her business had grown without her being part of it.

The following year, her business reached seven figures.

And I had another client whose business grew to $750,000 while she had stepped away from daily operations.

Ange Dove (09:57)
Sometimes it takes a disaster to force you out of your own business so it can finally run properly, right?

Fabienne Fredrickson (10:09)
Exactly.

What got us here won’t get us there.

If you’re overwhelmed at six figures, you can’t use the same methods to reach seven figures.

And I’ll give you a process to start thinking about leverage in your business: the Pareto Principle — the 80/20 Rule.

80%\text{ of results come from }20%\text{ of activities}

If you analyze your revenues and results, you’ll notice that:

• 20% of your activities generate 80% of your revenue.

• 80% of what you’re doing produces only 20% of your results.

When you start thinking that way, it changes everything.

You begin asking:
“Why am I spending time on activities that barely produce results?”

And what if you doubled down on the things already working?

That’s leverage.