Frédéric Etienne Philippe Bodin , 30 years

From Sales to Building an International Consulting Business

I'm Frédéric Bodin, the founder of La Lumière Consulting. I'm half French, half Belgian, and I'm 30 years old. I work with businesses across industries ranging from agriculture to real estate.

I founded La Lumière Consulting seven years ago. My path to entrepreneurship wasn't built around a single business idea. It grew out of my experience working with interesting people, learning how businesses operate, and looking for ways to create value for them.

Why I Named My Company La Lumière

Seven years ago I founded a company and called it La Lumière. The reason is threefold:

First, LED. At the time I was learning B2B sales for a company that sold it… and la lumière is the French word for light.

Secondly, enlightenment. Meditation and consciousness are very dear to me. I translate my life into six elements of purpose, and everything I do has to contribute to at least one of the six. The first is what I call theosis, the process of becoming one with God. In other words, everything I do, every moment, needs to be an opportunity to learn about myself and to try to become a better person. Step by step, I do what I can to become more conscious, or whole.

Thirdly, my aunt Catherine, the one I called when I was 8. She was always a great inspiration to me. She was always there for me and always had my back. She also had an impressive political background: she was a minister in France and, from 1989 to 1994, Secretary General of the Council of Europe, the first woman to hold the post.

Her last name is Lalumière.

Learning Directly from a Founder Generating Over $1 Billion in Revenue

How Did the Business Idea Take Shape?

Whilst most businesses have one goal, stick to it and then scale that one goal… this one was an extension of my life, which has been working with very interesting people and always looking for the value I could give them.

For my mentor, that meant being his right hand in a lot of things: whatever he needed, I got it for him. I was also building some of his companies. Not anymore.

Sales

What Skills Were Most Important in Launching Your Business?

I mean, you just go to the notary and launch the business.

Key skills… let's say sales.

The First Years

What Were the Three Biggest Challenges You Faced in the Early Years?

- Dependence on a few key clients.

- Consistency.

- Over-engineering.

The Blocked Cards

What Crises Has Your Business Faced, and How Did You Overcome Them?

Five or six years ago I was very arrogant. (I'm still very arrogant sometimes.)

I had been pursuing one thing and it finally worked: 80k USD in one month, on my own. I thought, okay, I figured it out… so I decided to move countries, to switch to a completely different offer, to skip whatever way I had got my customers before and to go straight into investing in marketing, building the websites and everything.

Obviously, I didn't make any money with that. What's funny about this? My lifestyle, which was adapted to the idea that every month I would now make 80k. That was really fun.

Then I came out of a meditation retreat… and my bank had blocked my cards. I didn't know. Somebody at a hotel where I had stayed had taken money from my account without my permission, I had no money to pay the toll or the fuel, and I had to drive for 10 hours on bad roads.

I had exactly one week to find 5,000 USD, and that whole week was pasta and egg yolks. I contacted the wealthiest person I knew and made him an offer.

We made a deal for 75k USD.

Reverse Engineering

What Strategies Have Been Most Effective in Growing Your Company?

Two decisions and one mistake. The first decision is to challenge every status quo, even of successful people. Especially of successful people.

The second is to reverse engineer everything. I ask what the outcome is and where I am today, then I look for the one thing that gets me the fastest from where I am to where I want to go, and I do that one thing, over and over again.

The mistake was preparing. Tell yourself you're going to be as good as you're going to be, and then review what you tried instead of trying to perfect what you haven't tried yet.

Preparation is useless.

From Selling Pens as a Child to Making $20,000 in One Week

How Did You Earn Your First $100?

I was 7 years old. I went door to door, selling pens.

How Did You Earn Your First $1,000?

I had a job as a kids' animator, entertaining children.

How Did You Earn Your First $10,000?

I read a book about sex. I mean I skimmed it, in 10 minutes. Then I thought: I can make a coaching programme out of this. I sent voice messages to 20 people I knew, gave a 30-second pitch, and found 10 buyers at $2,000 each. I made $20,000 in one week of work.

How Did You Earn Your First $100,000?

In agriculture. A Belgian company was selling sensors to farmers, and for that company I moved to France. In the morning, I looked for a farm on Google Maps, drove there and asked whether they knew anyone. I drove around everywhere with no idea what I was doing, but somehow I kept going… until I had a meeting with all the biggest tomato farmers in the south of France. I made them a group offer.

I don't enter a meeting with a preconceived solution of how things should be done. I try to understand what the outcome or the purpose is, and where they currently are. We can then very often solve the hidden bottleneck in a much simpler and more effective way than doing the thing they hired me for in the first place.

Many people think it's not possible… so I like to prove to them that it is.

A Saturday Morning

Your Expertise: How Do You Systematize a Business?

If you own the business, you test every process until it's proven that it works, then you find people who can take ownership of the result and improve the process for you, and you keep doing that, over and over again, until you understand the whole business and all your attention can go to the biggest bottleneck.

I learned this from my mentor. He does more than a billion in revenue, in different industries, and I just looked at how he does it.

I remember a Saturday morning. We were sending 10 outreach messages, him and me, and I was teaching him how to write them. The week after, we were cold calling together.

The guy has all the money in the world… there's no reason he has to do cold calling.

Zero to One

Your Expertise: How Can a Business Double in Size in One Year?

The companies I work with don't double in size.

They can 10x their profit margin, because we improve things, but they aren't at a stage where revenue is twice as high from one year to the next.

Where I do have experience is zero to one, which isn't really doubling either: somebody has no product-market fit yet, and I get them there the fastest way possible. For me this is always the biggest satisfaction. A person I believe in has never made more than 2k USD in one month, I help them out… and they make their first 10k. And then their first 100k USD month.

This is just the best feeling.