BECOME AN FBMC COACH

The founders you believe in are trying to change the world. Help them build businesses that can.

You work with feminist and activist entrepreneurs because you believe, like they do, that a business can be a force for change. The Feminist Business Model Canvas™ is how you help them prove it, guiding them through the real decisions about who they serve, what they refuse to compromise, and what their enterprise exists to change.

This is your activism too. And coaching people on the FBMC will make your activism formidable: deeper in Feminist Business, sharper at business-model design, fluent in a way of guiding others you’ll carry into every project.

Want to use the FBMC for your own business? Start with the Workbook →.

WHO BECOMES A COACH

You're closer to this than you think.

Coaches come from all over. You might be a coach or mentor who wants a tool that goes deeper than the usual business-plan template. An educator looking for a way to teach business that treats customers as whole people and takes values seriously. Someone inside an incubator, accelerator, or economic-development program, especially one serving women, gender-diverse, and historically marginalized founders. Or a community or nonprofit practitioner supporting people who are building something meant to make a difference, not just make money.

You don’t need to be an expert in Feminist Business or business-model canvases to begin. Plenty of coaches come to the FBMC new to both. What matters is that you care about the people you work with and want to help them be bold.

Here to design your own business rather than guide others? You want the Workbook →. Come back when you’re ready to teach it.

WHAT COACHING THE FBMC ASKS OF YOU

Guiding, not lecturing.

You already know how to support clients and students, helping them think and decide. Coaching the Feminist Business Model Canvas™ asks you to do that at full depth.

You’re not lecturing on a framework and sending people home with a worksheet. You’re guiding real people, a founder, a team, a room of students, through the decisions that define their enterprise, and helping them hold their nerve while they make them. Your job isn’t to tell them how to fill out the canvas; it’s to create the conditions where they can design a smart business, well.

I think of it less like explaining how a bicycle works and more like running alongside while someone finds their balance, pushes off, and steers toward where they actually want to go.

The work has three parts, and they build on each other:

You help them build a real business.

Product, customers, revenue, costs, the FBMC covers the fundamentals every enterprise needs. You bring enough business sense to catch when a conventional assumption is holding your people back, and help them move past it.

You help them build a feminist business.

You show the people you work with how their values and perspectives can be the engine of their whole business: the source of their best ideas, the reason their products meet needs others ignore, the way their enterprise pushes for change instead of only turning a profit.

You help them stay human, and stay bold.

This is the part conventional business coaching usually skips. The FBMC surfaces what people care about, what they're afraid of, what they dream of, what they'd never compromise. You help them name it, build it in, and resist the urge to shrink their vision too soon. The boldness is theirs; you hold the space for them as they step into it.

That third part is what makes this different from ordinary business coaching, and it's why building a business is a political act. Every choice about who to serve and what to refuse is a stance. When you coach the FBMC, you help founders take their unique stance deliberately, and you advocate for it too, through them.

WHY IT WORKS

The questions ordinary business planning never asks.

Most business tools were built to answer one question: how will this make money for the people who own it? The FBMC asks a bigger set of questions, and helps the people you work with answer them in a way that actually holds together.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

In Practice

A team supporting unhoused neighbors doesn’t stop at “serve hot meals.” Working through the FBMC, they find that their guests need to be offered foods from their own cultures, that being served the taste of home is its own kind of dignity, and that their whole enterprise should be built around this insight.

In Practice

A doula might expect to offer physical support during a home birth, then realize that what her clients really want is warmth, welcome, and family at the center of their birth experience, and redesign her service to include pre- and post-birth emotional and educational support for the whole extended family.

These are the decisions the FBMC draws out, the ones ordinary business planning never thinks to ask about.

When you coach the FBMC, the people you work with can:

See their whole enterprise at once, how their strengths, their customers' real needs, their products, and the change they want to create all connect on a single page.
Say what they do with confidence, to a funder, a teammate, a skeptical relative, because they've done the thinking and have the words.
Get a team on the same page, literally, with shared language for what the business is and why.

None of this comes from filling in a diagram. It comes from the design process you guide them through. The canvas is where it all lands, visible, durable, and ready to share.

WHAT COACHING GIVES BACK TO YOU

You'll become a stronger practitioner.

Guiding others through the FBMC changes what you’re capable of.

Understand business model design

You’ll come to understand business-model design from the inside, not as a template you apply, but as a way of thinking you can bring to any venture you touch.

Go deeper into Feminist Business

You’ll go deeper into Feminist Business than most people ever get to: what it really takes for an enterprise to hold its values, serve people as whole humans, and build change into how it works.

Grow as a guide

You’ll grow as a guide, because the FBMC runs on feminist process and feminist pedagogy, and coaching it sharpens how you hold a room, draw people out, and help them arrive at their own answers.

The founders you work with build stronger businesses. You become a stronger practitioner. Coaching the FBMC helps you and the founders you work with grow, together.

HOW YOU'LL WORK

The tools your people will use.

The people you coach will work through the FBMC using the Workbook, which I wrote to walk founders and teams through the whole design process, with room to think and space to draft their canvas as they go. There’s also a self-paced online course, Building Your Values-Driven Business with the FBMC, that covers the same ground.

Which tools you reach for, Workbook, course, or a mix, is a choice you’ll make as you design a program for each group. Different people and different settings call for different approaches, and you’ll find what fits as you go.

HOW TO BEGIN

Steps to becoming a confident, skilled FBMC coach.

You don’t need to have all of this figured out before you begin. The best coaches keep learning, about business, about feminism, about the people they work with, long after their first workshop. What follows isn’t a set of hurdles to clear before you’re allowed in. It’s the path, and you can start it today.

Learn the FBMC by doing your own.

The fastest way to understand what your clients and students will experience is to go through it yourself. Take an enterprise you care about, your own, or one you know well, and work through the full FBMC. You'll feel where it's hard, where it surprises you, where the insights land. That firsthand experience is worth more than any amount of reading, and it gives you a real example to teach from later. (Working through the whole process takes roughly 12 to 20 hours, the same journey you'll be guiding others through.)

Read the Coach's Guide, and sign up for a free workshop with me.

Use these free resources to get started.

See the FBMC coached.

Watch how someone else holds the room: how they set context, ask the questions, handle the moments where people get stuck or emotional. Sit in on a workshop, watch a recording, or work through videos where I'm coaching designers. You'll pick up moves you can make your own.

Design a program that fits you and your people.

There's no single right way to run the FBMC. You'll shape a program around who your participants are, how much time you have, and what you're most confident teaching. Start where you feel strong; stretch where you're curious. You can right-size the experience to what you can deliver well.

Coach, and keep growing.

You'll learn the most by doing it. You won't have every answer, and you don't need to, some of your best moments will come from working things out alongside the people you're guiding. Every program you run deepens your understanding of the FBMC, of feminist enterprise, and of your own craft.

And you won’t be doing it alone. I work directly with people who want to coach the FBMC. More on that below.

START HERE

Get the Coach's Guide.

If you want to see exactly how this works, every element, every conversation, the moves that help people go deeper, the Coach’s Guide is where to start.

I wrote it as the complete manual for guiding others through the FBMC: how to set the context, how to lead each step, how to stay steady when people get stuck or emotional, and how to adapt it all to the people in front of you. It’s written for people who want to help others design their FBMC, and it gives you what you need to do that well.

Want to talk it through? Get free support directly from me.

Coaching the FBMC is real work, and you don’t have to figure it out alone. Whether you’ve come through the Entrepreneurship Program of the Canadian Women’s Foundation or through your own interest in feminist business, if you’re ready to explore becoming a coach, reach out, I’ll help you find your way in, at no charge.

Not ready yet? Stay in the loop.

I send occasional notes on coaching the FBMC: new videos, ideas worth trying, and news as the work grows. No pressure, unsubscribe anytime.