Stop Building Your Business Like a Tech Bro
- Jun 7
- 3 min read
By Anne-Héloïse Chavin
Brand Strategist, Agency Founder & Multi-Brand Entrepreneur
I knew I wanted to live in America since I was 14, growing up in France watching my parents build lives that proved betting on yourself was always the right call. So when I finally arrived in Miami at 21, I was not nervous. I was ready.
The first company I worked for tried to use my visa as leverage to pay me half the market rate. I walked. When a second situation felt the same way, I stopped a visa application mid-process and left the country entirely rather than build my life on someone else's terms.
I went back to France, completed my second master's in Marketing, Brand & Business Development, then moved to Switzerland, where I spent the next years at P&G in Geneva and Nespresso in Lausanne, learning what it looks like to build world-class brands from the inside. Premium positioning. Global campaigns. Fortune 500 rigor. I took everything I could from those years, saved what I needed, and in 2018 I came back to Miami. No visa sponsor. No safety net. No one holding leverage over me. I launched AHBC Group on my own terms and never looked back.
Today I lead a global branding and marketing agency, run Dream Brand Club, a branding academy for women entrepreneurs, and own Patagonia Proteins, a plant-based nutrition brand built around the same wellness philosophy I live by. I run all three from Miami, where I am also a wife, and mother to my son Sasha, born in 2024.
That last part is where the real story begins.
The year Sasha was born, I was terrified my business would fall apart. I had been building AHBC Group for six years. I had a team, I had clients, and suddenly I could not work more than two to three hours a day. I kept waiting for everything to unravel.
It did not.
Last year was my most profitable year ever. More revenue. More profit. Less time worked than in any of the seven years before it.
Here is the only explanation I have found that makes sense: when you have less time, you stop doing the things that do not matter. You get ruthlessly clear on what actually moves the needle. You delegate faster. You make decisions without overthinking. Clarity, it turns out, is more valuable than hours.
This is the thing nobody told me before I became a mother. And it is the thing I wish someone had told every woman I know who burned herself out trying to build a business the way she was taught to.
Stop trying to build your business like a tech bro.
There is a version of entrepreneurship celebrated everywhere online: 5am alarms, cold plunges, 16-hour days, sleep when you are dead. And it works for some people, in some seasons, with some support systems. But most of the women I know who tried to build this way hit a wall. Not because they were not tough enough. Because this model was not designed for how women create.
We do not build wealth through exhaustion. We build it through attraction. And attraction starts with a brand so clear and so true that the right people find you, trust you, and buy from you without you chasing anyone.
Rest is not the opposite of productivity. It is often the condition for it.
A business that only works when you are exhausted is not a business worth building.
That is the work I do. And the life I am living proof of.
If this resonated with you, come find me on Instagram. I share the unfiltered version of building businesses, enjoying my son, and proving every day that clarity beats hustle. Follow along at @anne_heloise I would love to have you there.
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