Beate Chelette founded Chelette Enterprises after she sold her company to Bill Gates in a multi-million dollar deal. The sentence is always powerful and impressive, but it was a long and difficult road to figure out her strategy and blueprint for success before that.
Below are highlights of the interview:
Describe your background and what you did do before founding Chelette Enterprises, Inc?
I am originally from Germany, and as you would expect, everything is taken very seriously in Germany. including your aptitude tests. When I filled out all 16 pages of the aptitude test, I was recommended to become a roofer because I was not afraid of heights, didn’t mind physical work, and liked being outside. It was then that I realized that a lot of the things people told me worked for most people did not work for me.
My dream has always been to be in the creative industry. I could see the project while come to life while I was working on it. I decided I wanted to be a photographer and went to photography school in Germany, only to discover that I’m better at the business side of things. So I became a photo editor at Elle Magazine. After I immigrated to the US, I continued to work in photography and overcame a decade of bad luck. I call myself disaster-proof as I had to find a way to overcome fires, floods, an earthquake, 9/11, a tsunami, and a lawsuit. Eventually, I ended up as a broke single mom with $135,000 in debt. And then my father died, and we were thrown out of our home.
Because desperate times require desperate measures, I wrote a letter to the President of the United States. When I received an answer, this letter put me in touch with the Small Business Administration, who assisted me in finding a bank that restructured my debt. This freed up my line of credit, and three months after funding, we began breaking even. Eighteen months later, we were the global leader in our industry, selling in 97 countries worldwide. That is how we got on the map and got a Bill Gates company interested in acquiring us. The rest is history.
Tell us more about Chelette Enterprises, Inc.
We provide visionaries and leaders with strategies, blueprints, and results-oriented, tangible tools and techniques that give clear steps to improve business systems, leadership skills, and teams so that our clients can scale their impact and grow their authority.
Who is your target audience? How do you create services that align with what they’re looking for?
Our audience is primarily service providers who need to sell different services to the same clients. We are constantly updating and adjusting what we offer and how we offer it based on what we see that our clients need. For example, much of our strategy work has typically been delivered in laser-focused strategy days. We get done in one day what others need months to do. However, we have found that after the initial strategy session, we need to add an accompanying model to ensure consistent implementation. That is why we are adding a mastermind program.
What gets you up in the morning? What are your responsibilities as the Growth Architect and Founder of the company?
Helping my clients, serving more people, and scaling impact—that is what gets me up. I love what I do, so for me, it is not work. As the Founder, I am still involved in many aspects of my business, but we are automating more and more. We are working on building up a workflow VA service where we help other business owners master and execute their workflows. Because we set these workflows up ourselves, and I do less time-consuming tasks. Most of my time is spent optimizing our client attraction and conversion systems and launching our new service offers.
Kindly describe how you will specifically know what success looks like for you.
Because I had a good exit before, I am already financially successful. For me, this next level of success is about making a much bigger impact. My impact is measured by how many others we can help scale their impact. One of our clients, Roman Slawinsky, is the owner of a nationwide tutoring company, A+ Tutoring. He helps students to recover from the learning loss that literally all children experienced during the pandemic. Success is when I can help him develop strategies to allow him to help more families. It’s a ripple effect. We are a mission-driven company.
What advice would you give to the next generation of female leaders?
Women, generally speaking, have been raised differently than men. The “good girl” ways sit very deeply in our core programming. Being liked is still more important than being successful. Taking our own needs and putting them above everyone else’s is still considered frivolous and selfish.
My advice, therefore, is that many of the things we worry about are not worth our time as they will be insignificant very quickly. Make sure you don’t drown in a puddle; make it worth it when you put your weight behind something. The second piece is something my father taught me when he greeted the janitor in the company he ran, on a Saturday when he was stopping to pick something up, by name. Every single person is critical to your success, and every person matters—always remember that.
What are your future plans to sustain your and the company’s success?
Our team just finished a company transformation. Our goal was to review everything under the umbrella of clarity, make sure we were clear on who our Airtight Avatar was, and remove everything unnecessary—those things that don’t produce results or clog up the system. We removed redundancies and got laser-focused on the things we could provide our clients the most help with. We launched our strategy-focused podcast, The Business Growth Architect Show, and are having a lot of fun inviting and talking strategies with industry leaders in sales, marketing, business growth, franchising, mindset, and other areas we want to bring to business owners globally.
We are launching monthly masterclasses on business growth strategies. One of the things I am most proud of is my Growth Authority mastermind for podcast hosts to teach them how to increase their reach, monetize their podcast, and grow their authority with an Instagram strategy. In addition, we finetuned our Growth System that is helping service providers to organize their knowledge under one umbrella so that they can sell more—more often—to more clients.
Finally, we are taking our Growth Strategy Optimal Alignment program and moving it to a group program to accompany our client’s growth over a period of three to six months. Given the changes in the economic environment, we are encouraging all business owners, creators, founders, and entrepreneurs to take a good hard look at all of their offerings and strategies to make sure they optimize what works and let go of what doesn’t. We are in a pivotal time, and those who remain focused and growth-oriented will outperform, outsell, and outshine those who want to play it safe. The only thing a business has is its growth strategy.
Website: www.beatechelette.com
