Fabulous F Words of Business Ownership

When Fabi Preslar entered the world of business ownership, she never knew how powerful F words could be. Twenty years later, she’s sharing what she’s learned in Fabulous F Words of Business Ownership: Redefining Choice Words to Fuel Your Small Business. Throughout the book, we journey along with Fabi through her forefather’s lessons in business ownership to the fear and facade we all experience as business owners and finally into flourishing in the spaces we have built. With probing questions in each chapter, she invites readers to dig deep into their own business journeys to find the fuel to move forward successfully.

We asked Fabi a few questions about Fabulous F Words, her second book.

“If you don’t like your business or parts of your business, or the money being made, it’s yours to change—so change it.”

What do you most want potential readers to know about Fabulous F Words?

The goal is for entrepreneurs and business owners to know that launching, growing, and sustaining a business is a journey with many, many revealing moments. Those moments reveal our fears, our family history, and any strengths, weaknesses, or beliefs we may personally have. The mistakes, failures, and hard lessons we encounter and often create can be redefined into actions toward strong success. As business owners, we are 100 percent accountable for the successes and failures of our businesses. If you don’t like your business or parts of your business, or the money being made, it’s yours to change—so change it. And of course, though we often feel like it, we are not alone in this growth process.

What inspired you to write this book?

I’ve encountered many of those moments and hard-earned lessons. This book was inspired by having a stirring deep inside me that said to shine a spotlight on everything I’ve gone through, the wisdom I’ve learned, and the gifts I’ve developed—they are no longer for me to keep in my small bubble. For me, it began in June 2017 when I had a dream about the outline of this book. I jumped out of bed at 2:00 a.m. to write it down. As the theme developed, the outline became a table of contents, which changed and was reorganized at least six times. No different than business ownership, a professional book and manuscript have many evolving steps.

What do you hope this book will do for your business?

We’ve helped hundreds of business leaders and business owners create their independently and custom-published titles. The need for them as well as for me is to fuel or “do” something specific for our businesses and platforms. SPARK Publications is growing and expanding into new markets while serving business owners, high-level leaders, and organizations. We’ve gone the majority of our history without a sales person or sales team. Positive exposure has always been important to the referrals we receive. Besides providing value and a positive impact on small business owners, the book’s purpose is to generate further exposure and awareness in new markets so that I may share the level of work we produce for our SPARK Publications clients. It has also launched FabiPreslar.com, my personal brand, which is establishing opportunities for me to keynote at more conferences and events as well as share the Fabulous F Words™ story via numerous media opportunities. I am using the same publishing and marketing processes we successfully use for our clients, as well as test marketing a few new vendors and sources to increase the successes for each client. (Some have been very successful, some not so much.)

How was writing this book different from your first book?

The first book, On Heaven’s Couch: My Journey with a Masterful Mentor, was a memoir. This book has autobiographical aspects, but it’s really about “us”—business owners—and how we can succeed through redefining our fears, failures, and the things that hold us back from fulfillment.

What surprises did you encounter along the way?

Fabulous F Words of Business Ownership was written from a vulnerable truth-telling perspective of the many mistakes made throughout my business ownership journey. I thought for sure I’d dealt with and chipped away at the big ego-rightsizing stuff. The soul-exposing process of breaking down my ego and even more deeply reflecting on the steps to growing my business actually provided a great gift.

I’d had to become extremely independent, self-reliant, and resilient in my life. I moved to Charlotte by myself without my parent’s support at age seventeen with no money and no car, and I knew no one around me as I started my adult life. I held on to that story for several decades. Then I started being asked where did I learn to have such courage and strength to leap and do the things I do. I never really saw it as courage; I just had to.

The gift came around the manuscript’s fifth rewrite when I became overwhelmed by a mixture of gratitude and shame. I was writing about foundations and family and had actually never given my family, my parents, credit for the amazing gifts they gave me. It often came in a backwards roadmap or hardship. My new story is now accepting that my parents actually handed me a golden gift that would make for an amazing life of seeking and accepting challenges to propel me forward. I dedicated this book to them. They both, with their new spouses, for the first time ever came to one of my events, and I took the opportunity to celebrate and thank them publicly. That was my big surprise.

The other is how gosh-darn long it takes to create and produce a really valuable manuscript for your audience. The fabulous design and book production part was beautifully created by the SPARKlers. The marketing and promotion is the focus for the next twelve months. Then I’ll get started on the next step in the Fabulous F Words™ series.

What’s your favorite F word?

I came into this world as an F word and apparently really like F words. Choosing one would be like picking a favorite child (although that would be quite easy for me). There are twenty-one chapters all with an F word as a title and many more in the subtitles. Oh, don’t cover your ears! The chapter titles include “Foundations,” “Faith,” “Fear,” “Failure,” “Facade,” “Focus,” “Fraternizing,” “Fortunes,” and “Flourish.” My editor tells me the book contains over 259 F words throughout the pages. I’ve had several kind readers share that F-a-b-i was their new favorite four-letter F word. That’s pretty funny. I really like them all, and the ones I didn’t much care for, I’ve redefined. If I must pick just one, today I’d say it’s flourish.