Transforming Careers With Confidence – Exclusive Interview With Fabienne Prevoo
- Oct 9, 2023
- 6 min read
Updated: Oct 18, 2024
Fabienne Prevoo is a Career Coach, who empowers corporate senior leaders to lead with confidence and transition to their dream careers. Her “Dream Career Coaching Program” is a customized system for leaders who feel unfulfilled or stuck in their current careers. She partners with corporate senior leaders through individual coaching and a group program. She also provides assessments and energy leadership training to companies. Her mission is to lead her best life and help her clients lead theirs with balance, passion, and fulfillment.
Fabienne Prevoo, Career Coach for Senior Leaders
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
Hi, my name is Fabienne, and I am a mother of two. I work as a certified career coach and leadership trainer. I have sound experience in the corporate world, where I worked for almost two decades in various finance & accounting roles and held senior leadership positions.
In addition, I am a Supervisory Board member and Audit Committee member for several non-profit organizations. Also, I co-organize one-day retreats for women together with a breathwork coach. As of now, I am also a writer of articles as an Executive Contributor for Brainz Magazine!
I live in the Netherlands and work from my home office with corporate senior leaders all over the world through online coaching. I empower them to lead with confidence and transition to their dream career, using my signature methodology named the “Dream Career Coaching Program”.
On a personal note, I am a people person and enjoy social interaction, but also love being on my own occasionally. Outside work, I love spending time with friends and family, ideally over a cozy dinner or drinks. You will also find me walking in town or nature, reading inspiring books, and practicing yoga.
My passion – next to coaching – is traveling. Whether it is a city trip with friends, a family holiday to the beach, or exploring other cultures in far destinations. Plus, I love to make and share pictures of my travels!
What is the primary mission or purpose of your business, and how did you get started in this field?
My mission is to lead my best life and enjoy it to the max! My purpose is to help my clients lead theirs with balance, passion, and fulfillment.
I started my coaching career as a leadership coach because of my own experience in the field but soon had leaders approach me for coaching around career transitions. They noticed I had taken the leap myself, and assumed I could coach them around leadership AND career transitions, too.
Once I also realized that the average person would spend 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime, I decided that I wanted to help leaders spend those hours doing something they love. My signature program is designed to achieve exactly that.
Can you tell me about the products or services you offer in your business, and what sets them apart from competitors?
Next to career coaching for leaders, I offer leadership training for companies, and I co-organize one-day retreats for women to have more inner peace and balance in their lives.
The “Dream Career Coaching Program” I developed is a customized system for corporate senior leaders who feel unfulfilled or stuck in their current careers. Through this signature program, I take them from being nearly burnt out and exhausted to a life and career that energizes and fulfills them.
What sets me apart is that I have my special daughter as my greatest inspiration in life. Due to her neurodivergence, she always reminds me of the importance of living in the moment, focusing on what makes people unique, and truly embracing everybody’s talents and gifts.
With this in mind, I will help my clients choose a career they are passionate about AND fit into their ideal life, based on their uniqueness, because life is better when you are you!
Could you describe your target audience or customer base? What strategies do you use to engage and retain them?
I empower unfulfilled corporate senior leaders to lead with confidence and transition to their dream careers so they can wake up feeling energized, motivated, and passionate about what they do.
I work with corporate senior leaders who are ambitious and successful in their careers but lack a true sense of purpose and fulfillment in their current leadership roles.
Some of them want to transition to a career that will provide more balance and less exhaustion, whereas others mainly strive to step into a career that allows them to bring their “authentic self” to work.
Most of my clients engage with me on LinkedIn or are referred to me through my international network. Once clients have completed the initial coaching program, they usually stay around for the long term with periodic coaching sessions to support them in whatever they get to experience in their journey.
What are some of the biggest challenges you've faced in running your business, and how have you overcome them?
After I had spent almost a decade in the corporate world, becoming an entrepreneur was completely new to me. Of course, there were advantages right from the start such as freedom of time and flexibility to work with whom I want, when I want, and where I want.
On the other side, entrepreneurship brought some challenges around time management, too. When you do what you love, it doesn’t feel like work, and as a result, I have caught myself multiple times spending more hours working than I was aiming for.
In addition, solo entrepreneurship is different than working in a company with direct reports, peers, and other colleagues around you all the time. I quickly realized that being a people person, I could only thrive if I built a strong network. Having a community of like-minded people around me, helps me elevate my business to the next level.
Finally, I realized that my background in accounting and finance together with my leadership experience and coaching certification could get me started but did not make me the perfect entrepreneur. Sales and marketing skills were something I felt I was lacking, and as such I enrolled in a 1-year program to master these skills.
And of course, I hired a business coach for myself, because what is a coach without a coach?
If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?
Although it was essential to me to enroll in a professional coach training program and become a certified coach at the International Coaching Federation, there are still too many self-named coaches offering their services without a license or decent training.
So yes, if I could change one thing about the coaching industry, it would be industry regulation to protect clients from harmful experiences.
“Coaching is an art, " one of my mentors repeatedly told me. I truly believe a good coach can make a huge difference in people’s lives. It is an increasingly important profession, that should be protected accordingly.
Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
Some years ago, I constantly felt I was living in two worlds. One world was my career. It was a world in which I felt successful, enjoyed what I was doing, held a senior leadership position, and worked with many inspiring people globally.
My other world was at home, where I often felt powerless. Finding my way to raise my daughter, who is a special needs child, was very challenging and my role as caregiver was taking a lot of my energy.
Then one day, when my daughter had a severe meltdown just before I had to start a presentation to our CFO, I realized I no longer wanted to live in two worlds. It took a lot of courage, but I decided to take the leap and change course. Soon I left my corporate career. Things started to turn around from that moment onwards.
Today I am enjoying coaching leaders from across the globe on various career and leadership topics while having the freedom and energy to spend time with my family and enjoy my life!
