About Beate Chelette: Beate Chelette is the Growth Architect and Founder of The Women’s Code and provides visionaries and leaders with proven strategies, blueprints, and growth maps that provide clear steps to improve business systems, strengthen leadership skills and teams so that our clients and audiences can maximize profits and scale their impact. Beate is known as a straight shooter, and she can inspire, empower, and overcome adversity. Her super skill is working with unique personalities and big thinkers and building executable systems. A first-generation immigrant with $135,000 in debt as a single parent, Beate bootstrapped her passion for photography into a global business that licensed content in 79 countries. She exited in a multimillion-dollar deal when she sold the company to Bill Gates. She is listed among the “Top 100 Global Thought Leaders” by PeopleHum and “One of 50 Must Follow Women Entrepreneurs” by HuffPost. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Beate.
In this episode, Nancy and Beate discuss the following:
- Meaning of “Happy Woman, Happy World”
- Three essential elements for becoming an authority in one’s field
- Beate’s insights on strategically growing authority as an expert, seeking recommendations
- Common mistakes hindering leaders from expedited authority growth and how to avoid them
- The role of mindset in achieving success
- Experience selling a business to Bill Gates
Key Takeaways:
- Your strategy must align with your market and your unique expertise.
- Failure isn’t personal; it’s an opportunity to reassess and pivot.
- Your understanding of the problem isn’t always the actual problem.
- Mindset isn’t about wishful thinking; it’s about decisive action.
“When we take care of our women who are the mothers to our children, who are the responsible gender for the preservation of the human race, the nurturers, the first thing a child sees when it’s born, if we take care of women, the world is probably in a much better place.” – BEATE
“A lot of times when people talk about: “I want to be successful. I want to be an authority”. They’re unclear about what authority means or have a strategy to become an authority. Let’s investigate that an authority is not a celebrity or an influencer. An authority is a subject matter expert. Most of us are not celebrities. Most of us are not influencers we might want to be, but most of us are experts in what we do. Authority building is specific to your expertise. People often get wrong about this because they look at what other people are doing and promising, especially in the internet marketing world. Then, they are not sure why their TikTok videos are not going viral because TikTok is often used for a particular audience. So, if you are an authority with a particular audience that might not be on TikTok, then you can do whatever you want on TikTok, but it’ll never take hold as an authority. So, you have to have a strategy in place that is very specific to who you are, what you want to achieve.” – BEATE
“In the actual studies of mindset, the objective is it’s not wishing, and it’s not dreaming. It’s deciding this is what I’m going to do. Then, take action and allow God’s birth, the universe, whatever you want to call it, to put the right things in front of you because the path is never what you think it is. A higher power always determines the path. Otherwise, we all be successful, but most people think they know best. We don’t. We can decide, but we need to let energy spirit guide us in the direction because we have control over our vibration, not how we get there. We keep making the decisions that we believe get us there. And then, as things happen and unfold, my path has never been exactly as I thought it would be. My path has been completely different. And yet I have gotten to places that I never thought I could get.” – BEATE
Connect with Beate Chelette:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beatechelette/?locale=de_DE
- The Growth Architect: https://beatechelette.com/
- What’s Your Talent Worth?: https://quiz.whatsyourtalentworth.com/sf/c666d9e3
Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/
Connect with Nancy Calabrese:
- Twitter:https://twitter.com/oneofakindsales
- Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/One-Of-A-Kind-Sales-304978633264832/
- Website:https://oneofakindsales.com
- Phone: 908-879-2911
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ncalabrese/
- Email: leads@oneofakindsales.com
Voiceover: You’re listening to The Conversational Selling Podcast with Nancy Calabrese.
Nancy Calabrese: Hi, it’s Nancy Calabrese, and it’s time again for Conversational selling – the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today. And it always starts with the human conversation. Today we’re speaking with Beate Chalet, the growth architect and founder of The Woman’s Code, a professional development company specializing in guiding organizations to be an enhanced ROI through balanced leadership. Beate has been named one of the 50 must follow women entrepreneurs by HuffPost. A first-generation immigrant who found herself $135,000 in debt as a single parent, Beate bootstrapped her passion for photography into a highly successful global business and eventually sold it to Bill Gates in a multi-million dollar deal. Beate is the author of the number one international award-winning Amazon bestseller “Happy Woman, Happy World: How to Go from Overwhelmed to Awesome”. You are a true inspiration, Beate. Welcome to the show.
Beate Chelette: Thank you so much for having me, Nancy. I’m excited to be here. [1:27]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, so happy woman, happy world. What do you mean by that?
Beate Chelette: I think it’s exactly that, is that when we take care of our women who are the mothers to our children, who are the responsible gender for preservation of the human race, the nurturers, the first thing a child sees when it’s born, if we take care of women, the world is probably in a much better place. [1:58]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, well, I am all for that. And I’m sure many of the listeners agree with you wholeheartedly, possibly all of them. So, what are three elements to become an authority in your field?
Beate Chelette: Yes. So, the three elements to become an authority are the first thing is strategy. And what I mean by that is you must be very clear where it is that you want to go. A lot of times when people talk about, I want to be successful. I want to be an authority. They’re not clear what the term authority means or have a strategy to become an authority. And let’s investigate that an authority is not a celebrity and not an influencer. An authority is a subject matter expert. Most of us are not celebrities. Most of us are not influencers we might want to be, but most of us are experts in what we do. And authority building is specific to an expertise that you have. [3:12]
Nancy Calabrese: Right.
Beate Chelette: Now, the second piece people get often wrong about this is that they look at what other people are doing and promising, especially in the internet marketing world. And then they are not sure why they, why their Tik Tok videos are not going viral because Tik Tok is often used for a particular audience. So, if you are an authority, with a particular audience that might not be on TikTok, then you can do whatever you want on TikTok, but it’ll never take hold as an authority. So, you have to have a strategy in place that is very specific to who you are, what you want to achieve. [3:57]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. Well, how do you strategically grow your authority as an expert in your industry? What are your recommendations?
Beate Chelette: Well, I mean, you must be very, you must do some research. So, I was just on, I was just talking to somebody who is a realtor. So let me just give you an example, Nancy. And she is in an area of the country in Kansas City where the average home price is $300,000. And a lot of the people that are selling homes right now are baby boomers that are downsizing their homes. And she wants to make a transition to moving to Los Angeles where she’s building up a, you know, a second division, so to speak. And the average sales price in Los Angeles is $4 million. Now, if you want to build your authority in both markets, you must be a different authority on different things, because there’s a difference between a $300,000 property to a $100,000 couple that’s been married for 60 years that are now thinking about downsizing, or somebody who’s buying a $4 million home with an ocean view. You must network in different places. You must dress differently. Your branding must be very different. For a $4 million home, a mom-and-pop branding isn’t going to work. It will have to be a sophisticated, excellent executive. You must wear different things. So, you know, the strategy on becoming an authority depends also on the kind of market that you want to go after. [5:43]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. I think that’s a real interesting point. So, you really need to position yourself to the market that you’re targeting, correct?
Beate Chelette: Yes, because the question is what do you want to be the authority in? So, she can have an office in Kansas city where she is the authority in that particular genre. She can have an office in Los Angeles where she is the authority in something different, if from the branding perspective, she would need two different websites. Otherwise, people go like, why is she selling $300,000 homes in Kansas City? And then she’s she thinks she can sell $4 million homes in Los Angeles with a very sophisticated clientele. That’s not going to work. But you must decide. And that’s why I always talk about strategy. What is your business model? Who are you going after? And then we get to the second part of the second element of growing your authority. And that’s mindset. And that piece then simply means once you have that strategy clearly identified, you are deciding. That’s the decision then to implement that strategy and become that. [6:57]
Nancy Calabrese: Huh, so what is the best strategy for business owners?
Beate Chelette: It depends on what business it is because there is not anyone, one way to do things. There are a million ways to be successful. What will work for you depends on your personality type. It depends on your age, your gender. It depends on where in the country you are. It depends on how much you want to work. It depends on what you want for work life balance. My strategy for somebody who is 28 and who is leaving their corporate job to set up their own business. And as a young man, it’s going to be very different than a mother of two who is 45 and is going to be an empty nest the next year and needs to now turn up the volume for the next couple of years. It’s going to be very different. So, the strategy is driven by what you want to achieve, but we must first determine what that is. [8:01]
Nancy Calabrese: Huh. And what would you say is the best and fastest way to grow your authority?
Beate Chelette: Well, as I said, you need to decide where you want to go. And then once you know where you want to go, then we reverse engineer that strategy into action items. Because then that determines on how are we building the authority? Are you then speaking? Are you writing a book? Are you going on the podcast circuit as a guest? Are you going to start your own podcast as a host? Are you inviting people to the show for a particular purpose? How are you, are you going to networking event? What conferences are you going to? Building your authority is entirely driven by what the business model is, because we need to first figure out what are you going to be the authority in? [[8:54]
Nancy Calabrese: Right, wow. So, I’m guessing that many leaders, if not most, make mistakes that prohibit them from growing their authority faster. What are some of the mistakes and how do you avoid them?
Beate Chelette: The mistakes always are the same. The mistake is to kind of not know what you don’t know. And what I mean by that is I give you an example to put this into full perspective. So, we created a quiz, a growth blocker quiz. And if anybody’s interested in checking it out, you can go to growthblockerquiz.com. And the idea of this quiz was that we asked people, if you’re stuck in your business or it’s not growing, or you want to really accelerate the growth, why don’t we remove what’s blocking your growth? Find your number one business growth blocker. And so, a woman took the quiz and the answer was that she was lacking strategy. And she was so upset by that, that she reached out to me, and she says, I don’t need a strategy, I need more clients. [10:06]
Nancy Calabrese: Well, you must have a strategy to get more clients, wouldn’t you agree?
Beate Chelette: That’s exactly the point. But what it illustrates, Nancy, to your point, what do a lot of people get wrong, is that they insist that their understanding of the problem is the actual problem. Most of the time it’s not. And I’m sure you see this all the time in your work, in sales, that people insist that it’s one of a bad lead. And you’re like, no, honey, it’s not the lead, it’s you. It’s the way you talk, it’s the way you sell, it’s the way what you do. So the answer to it is you need to find a subject matter expert who you pay and hire to take a look at what you do and then trust that they are the subject matter expert, the authority in helping you to become your own authority so you can remove these blocks that are in your way because we can never see them. I mean, I bet you have coaches, I have coaches. We work with the people that help us to see what we can see. But that’s, I think the number one thing is insisting that your understanding of the problem is the understanding of the problem. Your understanding of the problem is not the understanding, otherwise you wouldn’t have it. [11:25]
Nancy Calabrese: Right? So, when you work with clients, how quick are they to grasp their strategy? How long does it take for an owner to really get the light bulb going off in their head?
Beate Chelette: We do this often in a day. My, yeah, yeah. It depends on, it depends on the program. We have three different programs that we work with, that we provide. So, if you look at a client transformation journey, Nancy, and you take a bread and you cut it into three pieces. So, the client transformation that we provide has three different pieces. The first one is How do you turn your talent into a business? And that’s all about where do we go? What do we do? How are we different? Why do we do what we do? Why are we the right ones to do this? Who are our clients? And why would they buy from us? What’s different about our solution? And what is it that we’re solving? So that’s the basis where you get really clear what it is that you do. The second piece is then for people that have been doing this for some time and say, well, I now have a pretty good size experience and expertise. And I now need to, I don’t want to niche down, I want to, I want to become an authority in something. So that’s when we then come and build an umbrella over it, like I’m the growth architect. So, I’m I don’t, you know, I don’t specialize in sales, and I don’t specialize in entry level, but I, my specialty is growth architecture, so I can do a much broader range of as support services for business owners. And then the third piece is the strategy, the growth strategy that’s for people that then have, that are humming along, and they now really want to scale the business and then in their plan to do that. So that’s what you wanna look at is, when you clear where on the scale you fall, it is relatively easy to figure out what the next thing is that you need to do. And when you do that, I mean, we have people that are in our programs that while they’re in the program, they start finding clients. [13:45]
Nancy Calabrese: Interesting. Are your industry agnostic? Okay.
Beate Chelette: Yes, yes, we, we do, we do, we do probably, I want to say 75% service industries, but we do have clients and other industries. We have had people in fashion. I’ve worked with a lot of creators, photographers, um, you know, ultimately, they’re in the service industry as well. But yes, pretty much. I mean, the one thing I don’t do is restaurants and foods around, uh, around that type of stuff, but I do help people to figure out why they are different and what the strategies for them to build their business. [14:25]
Nancy Calabrese: Mm-hmm. Well, so you say this could happen in, say, a day, which is interesting. But shouldn’t there be some ongoing work so that they remain focused? Or do your people just stay a day and then they go?
Beate Chelette: It really depends on, on the client. So, we have to your point. Because we’ve seen the market shift more into the ongoing implementation. So, we ask our clients, we ask them on, so there’s a core piece of the work that we do. So, for example, and turn your talent into a business as a, there’s a core curriculum that has six modules. And then we have another six modules that are specific for the implementation. Because to your point I think people are really overloaded right now. They don’t just want the information, but they want to know how to implement it. So, we’ve been adding implementation on all of our programs. [15:21]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. You know, you mentioned mindset earlier, and I think that’s so important in life in general, you know, certainly in sales. But how does mindset play into being successful in your opinion?
Beate Chelette: You make a decision. That’s how I mean in the, in the actual studies of mindset, the objective is it’s not wishing and it’s not dreaming. It’s deciding this is what I’m going to do. And then taking the actions and allowing God’s birth, the universe, whatever you want to call it to put the right things in front of you because the path is never what you think the path it is. The path is always determined by a higher power. Otherwise, we all be successful, but most people think they themselves know best. We don’t. We can make the decision, but we need to let energy spirit guide us into the direction because we have only control over our vibration, not about how we get there. We just keep making the decisions that we believe get us there. And then as things happen and unfold, I mean, my path has never been exactly like I thought it would be. My path has been completely different. And yet I have gotten to places that I never thought I could get. [16:51]
Nancy Calabrese: Well, it’s because you set your mind to do it. So, what was it like for you? No, I said, so you set your mind to do it. You said your path was, it didn’t turn out the way you thought it was going to turn. And I said, well, yeah, but you set your mind to do great things. Yeah.
Beate Chelette: I’m part, pardon me, can you repeat? That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. I and I wasn’t going to give up. I was going to keep going and going and going and going until I found the way to get me there and I did.
Nancy Calabrese: Awesome. Bravo. What was it like when you sold your business to Bill Gates?
Beate Chelette: It’s an interesting feeling because you struggle for so long. And I was in 13 years of just brutal, brutal adversity and night, my God, Nancy, I can’t even tell you how many times I thought I wasn’t going to make it. And then the day comes, and you sit there, and you see this number in your brokerage account and you go, Holy smoking macro. I, I can’t believe I did that. And it’s an indescribable feeling. [18:02]
Nancy Calabrese: Ha! Wow, amazing. You know, we’re about up with time. What is the one takeaway you want to leave the audience with?
Beate Chelette: I probably would say, you know, obviously I’m a business strategist, so make sure you’ve got a strategy in place, and you sit down, and you map that out because otherwise you just keep repeating the same thing repeatedly. And the second thing would be, don’t take failure personal. It’s not. I think about when I went to talk about failure, Nancy, I always think about the example of if you have a GPS in your car and the software has been telling you to update and update and you just don’t do it because you’re too busy and you’re always running errands and you got to be somewhere and you’re always whatever in a rush. And then one day the road that you usually take under the freeway is closed, they’re building something else there. So, you’re going to stop, you’re going to get out of the car, you’re going to throw yourself on the ground in front of the construction crew. You’re going to say things like. That is, it. I’ll never drive another car in my entire life. I’m the worst driver in the world This is never going to happen for me does no one ever You just sit in your car you tap your head, and you go. Ah should have updated the GPS Why because you know your destination is still There, so you wave at the guy with the hard hat and the neon stripe, and you find another way. [19:25]
Nancy Calabrese: Bravo. How can my people find you?
Beate Chelette: You can find me as the Growth Architect literally everywhere and all social media. You can also visit my show. I have a podcast called the Business Growth Architect Show and I’d love for you to check us out there. And if you are interested in finding out what your talent is worth, we actually just launched a brand-new quiz and it’s called the Profit Formula, What’s Your Talent Worth? And you can find it at What’s Your Talent Worth dot com. And if you heard something, I must speak to Beate, please mention this show and go to uncoveresession.com and schedule your complimentary 15-minute uncovering session. And then we’ll give you priority treatment. And while we’re at it, finally, wherever you pick up the show, please go there now and give Nancy a five-star review and write a little comment. And that’s our way to thanking Nancy for doing this labor of love. [20:33]
Nancy Calabrese: Oh, my goodness, you are delightful, Beate, and we could go on and on. Folks, take advantage of this wonderful expert and take advantage of those quizzes. I’m going to do it too, so I want to find out more about myself. Beate, I hope that this is the beginning of future conversations. You’re a wonderful guest, and for everyone out there, make it an awesome strategic, day out there. Happy selling! [21:05]
