The short answer
Beate Chelette shares how she overcame significant adversity, built a successful business, and sold it to a Bill Gates-owned company, including the resilience and exit strategy lessons that made the outcome possible despite the odds.
Key takeaways
- How to reframe roadblocks to unlock growth
- How opportunities are often disguised as challenges
- How to identify strengths in a diverse leadership team
- The calculations Beate used to determine her number
- Hiring for diversity – and meaning it
Listen to the podcast
1 hr 2 minWatch the full interview
About this episode
From growing her business to $1M then spending it all on a lawsuit, seeing her business fall apart on 9/11, having her father die six weeks later, and losing her house on the very same day as the funeral, it’s needless to say, Beate Chelette has faced her fair share of adversity.
Despite it all, as a single parent, German immigrant who has started and stalled several times in business, she grew her business, Beate Works. Until 2006, the year she sold Beate Works to Bill Gates for 5x earnings.
This episode is a rollercoaster of ups and downs, diversity and triumph. Tune in for insights on the art of bouncing back, transforming setbacks into growth, and achieving a life-changing exit.
Chapters
- 9:52From a mother who shut her down, to a culture that wanted her to conform, Beate believes that those who are here to make a really big impact tend to have gone through adversity to a much larger degree
- 15:28Beate Works was formed at a time when she was laid off, with a small child, no family, living as an immigrant, not knowing what to do or how to do it, with no money
- 20:00After a terrible lawsuit, Beate found herself $135K in debt with the September production season as her only glimmer of hope on the horizon. The date was September 11, 2001. In 24 hours, she lost everything
- 25:31After getting a letter from the White House, Beate was back on track with a bank that helped restructure her debt and freed up her line of credit. Three months later, she has broken even, and 18 months later, she was the world leader in her category
- 48:20After selling to Bill Gates for 5x gross earnings, Beate now operates as a Growth Architect turning her experiences into a mechanism to help others on their journey
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About Beate Chelette
Beate Chelette is the Growth Architect and founder of The Women’s Code. She creates strategies, designs process maps and blueprints for visionaries and leaders who want to maximise their profits and scale their impact.
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 Corbis (owned by Bill Gates) in a multimillion-dollar deal.
Beate is “One of 100 Top Global Thought Leaders in 2021” by PeopleHum and “One of 50 Must-Follow Women Entrepreneurs by HuffPost. She is the author of the #1 International Award Winning Amazon Bestseller “Happy Woman Happy World – How to Go from Overwhelmed to Awesome” – a book that corporate trainer and best-selling author Brian Tracy calls “a handbook for every woman who wants health, success and a fulfilling career.”
Recent clients include Amazon, Chevron, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Johnson & Jonson, Merck, the Women’s Legislative Caucus of California Cal State University Dominguez Hills, the Greater Los Angeles Realtor Association, Advertising Agency Tracy Locke, and thousands of small businesses.
Connect with Beate Chelette
About the show
Buy Grow Sell is hosted by Simon Bedard, founder and managing director of Exit Advisory Group, a boutique mergers and acquisitions advisory firm that helps Australian business owners value, prepare for and navigate a sale. Every conversation draws on real deals and the patterns behind them.
