Seven Figure Consultant with Jessica Fearnley

I want to start a new conversation about something I've been exploring this year: joy. Do you believe in joy? After the last few years of Covid, any of us could be forgiven for not believing in joy! So often we come into business with the expectation that it will be hard. As high-achieving women, we got the school grades and the university degrees and our corporate promotions because we worked har...

Have you seen that drawing of A Day In The Life As An Entrepreneur before by Derek Halpern? It's a line with peaks and troughs charting your inner voice as you go from 'I'm excited!' to 'ugh this is hard', then 'it's working' and back down to 'I messed up'. And this is how so many of us see life as a consultant. Does it resonate with you? Growing a consulting business from 6 to 7 figures is one of...

Do you like sales conversations? No matter what stage of business you've reached, sales calls are unavoidable.   You might have got them down to a fine art, or they might make you squirm. Regardless of whether you are comfortable in a sales environment there are always tweaks to be made. You can probably get a good outcome, but small changes can make a big difference to your close rate - and how y...

Have you set goals for yourself, come up with how you're going to achieve them, and then when things don't go as planned, you feel like that was the outcome you expected? You wrote down one thing, and your subconscious mind planned for another. You told yourself this was a practice run, or that that client was never going to work with you anyway, or that actually, not having that work is better be...

We often get into situations in life and in business where to be quite honest, we don't know what to do. This is what happens when we're in a season of personal growth or business growth. If you listen to this podcast regularly, you'll know that we don't usually do just one of these, we do both, personal growth leads to business growth and the two are massively connected. When you're growing, you'...

One of the big transitions women go through when they are at six figures and looking to get to seven, is shifting from being the person who does all the stuff to needing to be the CEO. You've grown your company this far. You know all the ins and outs of it, exactly how you want everything done. And you have so many ideas! You also now have a team - and it's growing! Other people are executing your...

Has life taken an unexpected turn recently? Whether in your business or in your life, no matter what you had planned, you can get thrown off course by events you had no way of knowing would happen. There has been some heavy, bad and scary stuff going on in the world lately hasn't there? You may have been affected, directly or indirectly. Or something else might be happening in your life. We don't...

Think back 5 or 10 years, did you know what your life would look like then? Could you imagine who you would be working with, or the projects you have completed? What about where you live? As a high achieving woman, you will have done your utmost to succeed in every situation you faced. You will have studied what worked for others, you will have practised your pitches, you'll have made sure you wer...

Are you trying to look like you've got it all together while in reality there's a whole lot of things going on you're scared of telling anyone about?   You're not sure if you're offering the right services. You can't work certain hours or in certain ways and what if clients think you're not committed enough because of that, or that you can't be trusted to handle the work?   You've always known you...

When your business takes off and you start growing a team of people to support you it's exciting - and challenging. You've always been the CEO of your business, but now you have more management responsibility than before, and you have to learn how to work with more people in your business. It used to be that you only needed to communicate with one or two people, now you need to share your vision w...

Are you feeling unhappy, overwhelmed and demotivated by your consulting business? It can be very unsettling. You've put your heart and soul into building your consulting business and now you find yourself wishing it was different. It's likely that all the things you wanted to do when you started your business still light you up. And you know your work is well received by your clients. Why do you f...

It can be extremely scary to put yourself out there. When you run your own business you have to make big decisions. You started your business for a reason, but in the early days, you can lose sight of that as you focus on getting the work in. But then you get to a point where the impact and difference you make to your clients becomes tangible. You can see the change you have made just by being on...

Getting to six figures as a consultant is a really good validation of your service, market proposition and your ability to sell. Now you've set your sights on the next level and you might think seven figures in revenue, one million dollars or pounds or Euros, requires huge amounts of hard work and hustle. But reaching seven figures doesn't have to be scary. It doesn't mean even longer hours. Or ma...

Are you good at switching off from work? Or do you find yourself working into the evenings, or even, in your 'free time' thinking, 'Oh I could just do [insert work activity here]'. When you love what you do, you can get absorbed in it. It can be hard to switch off. You get used to overworking, just as you get used to being a little bit sleep deprived and stressed. You might even feel like somethin...

We so often believe business growth has to be hard. All too often as high achievers, we have cultivated a deep belief that we need to put in the hours, the blood sweat and tears, to get the results. If we can do everything perfectly - or to the highest standard possible - we will get the grades. That's how school and university, and to a certain extent, our corporate careers worked, right? Except...

Are you thinking of quitting your corporate role? Or maybe you've got an idea for a business, but you don't know whether it will support you and you would like to test it. A way of bridging the gap before you leap full time into being the CEO of your own business is to start a 'side hustle', a business you run alongside your job. If this is the first you have heard of it, or you know people who ha...

I'm going to let you in on a secret: you don't have to be a Seven Figure Business Owner to start thinking like a Seven Figure Business Owner. You might have done a double take at that, and thought, 'but Jessica, that gorgeous country house with a swimming pool isn't going to buy itself'. Or, 'it's all very well for you to say that, I'm currently in the low six figures'. I get it but this isn't abo...

Do you love to surprise and delight people? Or would you like to, but don't know how to go about it? Some people are super good at buying presents for people, but for many of us, it can be fraught with uncertainty. What if they don't like it? What if they think it's weird to get a gift from me? Perhaps you are simply wondering what to send in the first place. If you see other people giving (or rec...

You know when you go to your favourite cafe with your friends and just have a laugh and set the world to rights, wouldn't it be great if business networking was like that? Far too often, it's a soulless room with people thrusting business cards at you and asking what you do. And then blatantly losing interest as soon as they discover you're not their ideal client and moving on. You're standing the...

Do you get a slight feeling of panic and overwhelm when you look at your diary for the week ahead? You've got to do so much in a tight time frame. It feels as if your consulting business requires you to operate at 100% capacity all the time. You've got to the place you really wanted to get to - your consulting business is taking off and you're experiencing that level of success. But you have the u...

Are you reluctant to ask for help even though you are overstretched? So often we can be reluctant to pass on the baton. Rather than thinking about the fact we're not so keen on an aspect of running our business, or that bringing on additional team members is going to help us, we see it as cheating in some way. At school if you had outsourced your homework or asked another child what the answer was...

What do you think when people talk about 'overthinking'? If you're like me, you'll be puzzled about why considering all the angles and focusing on the details is considered a bad thing. When you run your own consulting business, even if it isn't your name on the invoices, it's your reputation, framework and processes people are getting. That matters and you want to be sure every client is getting...

Do you talk down your desires? You've built your business to a comfortable level and you know you want to do more, but it feels greedy somehow. You'd like more time, more fun, and a 7 Figure consultancy to make that happen without feeling like you have to work long hours speaking to clients all day, every day. You have a vision of what your life could be like. How do you bring more of yourself int...

Many of the women I speak to come to the topic of building a team from a really negative place. There are lots of reasons for that but if you have aspirations to grow past 7 figures, you are going to be working with a team. Often we are thrown into leadership situations without any preparation or experience. As you transition from a solo consultant to a CEO your leadership style and performance wi...

Some things in business we are led to believe are 'the way' to get results. One of those is writing sales copy where you focus on your clients' pain points. You think about what's keeping them up at night and then you emphasise that negative and present your solution. One of the things my clients say most often when we talk about copywriting and marketing is, I've seen it done this way and I don't...