About me
If you are reading this page, you probably like to know who you are working with before you decide anything. I am the same. So here is the longer story, and next to each part of it I have written what it means for you and your business, because in the end that is the part that matters.
Where it starts
School did not go well for me, mostly because I did not put the effort in. In the seventh grade my maths teacher took me aside and told me I was not stupid and only needed to trust myself. My marks changed, and I even came to enjoy maths.
Years later I sent more than a hundred applications for an apprenticeship and collected rejection after rejection. Then the owner of a fitness studio looked at my poor school report and invited me anyway. She put me into a step class I had never done before, watched me push through to the very end, and gave me the three-year apprenticeship because, as she said, I reminded her of herself.
“You need someone who truly believes in you, and then magic can happen.”
That is the sentence I live by, and it is why I work beside my clients rather than above them. The women who come to me have usually proven a great deal already. Part of my work is to say out loud what they have proven, and to stay beside them while they do the next hard thing.
Twenty years in one line
Each stage of my working life left me with something I now use in every conversation with a client.
2002 to 2005
I trained as a Sport- und Fitnesskauffrau, a three-year state-recognised apprenticeship (Ausbildung) in fitness business administration, at a studio in Hanover. I learned the business from the floor up: the members, the schedules, the invoices and the people who keep it all running.
What it means for you
I understand a business the way the people inside it experience it, long before it shows up in a report.
2005 to 2010
At nineteen I took over the leadership of the studio. I managed the course trainers, did the invoices, trained team members into new roles and helped open a second studio. I said yes to everything and figured it out as I went, and that became my pattern for the next fifteen years.
What it means for you
I have held the operational detail of a business together since I was nineteen, and I recognise the “say yes and figure it out” pattern quickly, because it was mine for a long time.
2007 to today
Because I did not yet trust my own competence, I collected qualifications in training, nutrition and performance testing, and later in sleep, stress and recovery coaching. Two of them are current today.
Also: Ausbilder nach §30 BBiG, IHK Berlin, 2013.
What it means for you
Your capacity is part of the structure of your business, and I read both together. A plan that ignores your time and energy does not hold, however good it looks on paper.
2010 to 2017
I opened the Hanover store as store manager, built the team and trained it to run the store without me. Then I became the first area manager for Germany and moved to Berlin with a few suitcases and our bicycles. Seven and a half years and four promotions later I was leading retail across Germany, Switzerland and Austria: more than 300 people and, with my teams, more than 100 store openings.
What it means for you
Hire well, train well, write it down and leave the room. That is the heart of Build the Container, and I learned it store by store.
From 2013
I was asked to come to Switzerland at a difficult moment for the team there. Coming from a direct German-British way of leading, I learned what it means to value and understand the people in a team, and how differently the same message lands in another culture. It was my biggest transformation, and a leadership assessment there showed me something I already suspected: I was made to run my own business.
What it means for you
I never read a business without reading the people inside it, and we work in English or German, whichever lets you think most clearly.
2017 to 2022
Motherhood changed how I lead. When I asked the employment office for a leadership role at sixty to eighty per cent, I was told I was now “a manager second class with a child”. I ripped up the papers, used my savings and built a personal training business, with a small gym in our house so I could train clients in the hours our son was in childcare.
What it means for you
Capacity is a design decision. Your business is allowed to fit the life you have right now, and to change when your life changes.
2020 to 2024
I joined an online business programme as a client to build my own course. Because I kept helping the people around me, I was invited to become a mentor in 2020, then assistant coach, head coach, programme manager, programme director and, in 2022, Chief Operating Officer of a multi-seven-figure European online business education company. Along the way I coached more than 1,500 entrepreneurs and led the operational execution of a launch worth more than USD 2 million.
What it means for you
I have run launches from the inside, with the team and the numbers in my own hands. When we read your launch together, I know what launch week feels like on your side of the screen.
6 December 2023
A big launch was beginning, and I had said more than once that it was too much. I collapsed at my computer and was taken to hospital. A colleague I had trained stepped in, my husband left his job to care for me and our son, and the way back was long. I own my part in it, and I have written about it in the Journal.
What it means for you
This is why I read every launch as a test of the structure underneath, and why your capacity is never an afterthought in our work.
Since July 2024
I began again with a few hours a week, helping friends within the capacity I had, and built the business slowly from there. What came out of it is Simplify & Reset™, the method I now use with established online business owners across Europe.
What it means for you
You work with a method I built at a pace I could hold, which is exactly what I will help you do with your business.
What I believe
Everybody is allowed to build a business their own way, because everybody’s life, capacity and goals are different.
My hundred per cent today is allowed to look different from my hundred per cent tomorrow.
There is never a perfect moment to change the way you launch. Sometimes the most powerful decision is the decision to stop and change something.
Change is messy and hard, and I say so up front. It is worth it, because in the end you have a structure and a business you enjoy.
The healthiest sign of a business is an owner and a team who both stay, and stay well.
“You can build an ambitious business and live a full life at the same time, but only when you stop building on autopilot and start building on purpose.”
The life behind the work
The best next step depends on where you are. If you would like to see first what your last launch was telling you, the free Launch Stress Test takes about five minutes. If you already know you would like to work together, the Work With Me page shows the four ways and what each one costs.
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