The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi

Derek Fredrickson was very good at making other people win. That was his gift, his lane, and for sixteen years his entire identity. Wall Street first, Deutsche Bank, Lehman, UBS, running project management and doing what analytical, disciplined, systems-minded people do well inside a machine that rewards exactly those traits. Then the train ride that changed everything. He looked across at a man in his mid-seventies on the five forty-one commuter rail from Connecticut to New York, exhausted, and thought: is that who I want to become?

He did not run. He made a calculated decision, the only kind he makes, and left Wall Street to join his wife Fabienne's coaching business. He worked his way up from the mailroom. He paid himself the same salary from day one so the ego had no ammunition. He became the string to her kite, the one who landed the plane, who finished what she started, who took a vision and built the execution from A to Z. Then he helped scale it to multiple seven figures. Then he did the same fractionally for other founders. For sixteen years he was the best number two in the room and he was proud of that.

What he did not know until he stepped out was how completely he had wired his identity into someone else's vision. In 2024, he made another calculated decision, the kind that take him time and thought and spreadsheets and pros and cons lists, and launched The COO Solution, a fractional COO and second-in-command placement firm operating from Paris, France, where he lives with Fabienne and their three children. Twenty-five people on the team. Multiple seven figures. A ten year vision he looks at constantly. A weekly metrics review he does every single Monday without exception. And a mantra from his wife that has carried him through every low: no small children will be harmed.

This is episode fifty of the Grit Factor. It is the right episode for the milestone because Derek's story is not about the founder. It is about the person behind the founder who finally stepped in front of their own vision for the first time. This episode is for every operator, every second in command, every engine behind someone else's dream, who has quietly wondered if there is a dream of their own waiting.