Ep. 12: How Beate Chelette Scaled and Sold a Photography Business to Bill Gates

Transcript

This episode is brought to you by Equilibria, Inc. Equilibria provides training to assist fast-growing companies in documenting and improving their key processes for maximum operational performance. Visit EQBsystems.com to stop the chaos of fast growth and start flowing today! EQBsystems.com.

Welcome to Scale Tales – the business storytelling podcast where entrepreneurs, executives and experts share firsthand accounts of those magical moments when they achieved something bigger than they could have imagined.  

I’m Alicia Butler Pierre, host and producer of Scale Tales and lover of mythology stories, like the one about Hercules and all the trials he endured to eventually become a god. It’s a great analogy for the next tale you’re about to hear. It comes from someone who, like Hercules, overcame what oftentimes seemed like insurmountable challenges, but in the end…she won!  

This is Ep. 12: How Beate Chelette Scaled and Sold a Photography Business to Bill Gates.

My name is Beate Chelette, and I am the Growth Architect as well as the founder of the Women’s Code.

I’m originally from Germany. I am an immigrant, first generation immigrant. I started out in the creative aspect of work. I’ve always liked creative, big thinking, big ideas, nonconforming people. And so, I became a photographer. And from there on I realized very quickly that I was better at the business side of things. And it just came really easy to me and so I say this in the context today that I help people “land planes,” because a lot of people like to go to 30,000 ft and they have all these ideas, and then they are unable to ever land a plane and then eventually crashes because you have to refuel it or you have to have some sort of a plan to land it somewhere.

And I was then a photo editor at Elle magazine, went to the United States, became a photographer representative, a photography producer, went through what I call my 13 years of just brutal hardship and survival and bad luck and tragedies from September 11, where I lost a half a million dollars in a day to a lawsuit with an employee that had a business idea which was my business without me, and a tsunami that killed one of my key vendors, earthquakes, fires, floods, riots…I mean, stuff where you go, Okay, I mean, one of these is fine, two of these maybe, but like, eight of those? And now I added a pandemic to my ever-growing repertoire.

And I was at this point where I had this great idea. I had the stock photography syndication, and I built it, and I was just in a lot of debt because I didn’t have money. And so I’m $135,000 in debt. I’m going to Germany to drum up some business. My father had pancreatic cancer. My father dies six weeks later. And then I am having a complete meltdown. At the funeral my office calls and says, “We’ve just been served a notice” and I’m losing the house on top of everything.

And that’s it.

I mean, it’s game over in everybody’s book. And I had to really learn how to surrender in this moment. I had done everything. There was nothing else I could do. I was physically not able to do anything more. I was financially not able to do anything, there was literally nothing I could do. And then I get a letter from the White House. And in this letter from the White House a couple of months later, it says, The President sends his best wishes.

Beate wrote this letter at the persistence of her former mother-in-law.

She kept telling me, “You know just go write a letter to the president. If anybody can help you, he will.” And that was so outrageous and so ridiculous to me that I wrote the letter just to not have to talk to her about this anymore. And so I get the letter from the White House, which really changed my life, because it put me in touch with the Small Business Administration here in Los Angeles. And because the letter came from the White House, they also got a letter from the White House.

And that means I got to talk to the second in command, because he thought, Who is this nutcase that writes to the President of the United States instead of calling me? And so he says, “Well, why don’t you call me directly?” I’m like, “Never even occurred to me.” That’s my mindset. And so they helped me restructure my debt into a ten-year fixed loan that freed up my line of credit. That brought me to break-even three months later. So between bankruptcy and break-even was three months. And then 18 months later, I’m the world leader in my category.

And then a Bill Gates company comes and says, “Can you tell us how you do it?” And I said, “No, you want it, you buy it.” And they said, “How much do you want?” I said, “A couple of million.” And they said, “Okay.”

Now you understand why I said you should pay close attention to Beate and her story. As entrepreneurs and leaders, how many times have we wanted to give up? The burden can be so heavy sometimes. Yet, something deep inside of us keeps calling us back. It’s a calling that we cannot deny.

I asked Beate if you have to be a bit mad or manic to keep going despite the challenges.

Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a series of questions I ask myself. The first question I ask myself, Is what I’m trying to do possible? Do I know anyone who is doing what I’m trying to do? Does it exist? So, in this particular case, that would have been, Are there successful stock photography syndications? Absolutely, there are. Good. So then if it exists, then it must be possible for me. Then the answer to that is Yes.

Then the next question isn’t, Can I? But the next question is, How can I? And so when you ask yourself these questions in the right order, is it possible? If it’s possible, it’s possible for me! If it’s possible for me, then the question is how? Then suddenly the whole thing changes. And so, yes, I could have given up, but I knew there were people that did it. And I had a friend who’d had a $70 million exit. Now, I didn’t have a $70 million exit, but he had a $70 million exit. So I knew it was possible. It literally happened right before my eyes. And he says, “You’re going to be next.” I said, “What are you talking about?” And I was next.

Indeed she was.

I took a job at this Bill Gates company, and I became the global director of photography. And I realized on what really happens in Corporate America, and I thought it was repulsive. And how women are treated in Corporate America, how the whole Men’s Code works, and how the women don’t have a code. And that’s when I sat down and I wrote a book, The Women’s Code, where I realized that it’s not just the men, it’s a lot of times the women that are the worst with each other. How can we expect that the world is going to support us if women don’t even support other women? And frankly, how can I be mad at a man when a man says, “Look, if half of my competition takes each other out, why should I get involved?”

And I looked at this and I said, that’s what’s happening. Women are at each other’s throat. They’re so busy with taking each other out. And they go like that, Wants my job!

When men go into an organization, they say to the boss, “You do know that the only reason I’m taking this job is because I want your job?”

And then that guy is going to say, “Great, that’s what I was hoping you were going to say, because I want my boss’s job!”

Women don’t do that. And so I really got involved in the Women’s Code and wrote the book Happy Woman, Happy World to outline for women what it’ll take to have a code and then to help men, also to understand on how to help women.

And I am really sad to say that not much is changing, unfortunately, and that we are reverting back to things that I fought for, what, 20, 30, 40 years ago? I never thought I have to talk about women’s rights again. I never thought I had to talk about equality again. I thought we already had all these conversations. We keep going back to the same thing over and over and over again. And it is because people don’t like to change and people don’t like to move ahead,  this is all about change and it is all about, Now what are you going to do with that?

Because garbage in, garbage out. False information in, false information out. So what is our responsibility as we are going into this new world? A moment only comparable to when the Internet first came out.

I remember when I got my first computer, I used to be on a floor with a telex machine and it was only reserved for absolute emergencies. And there were two in the entire building of the big publisher and I had access to one of them so I was very privileged that I could do that. And then one day, somebody brings me, well, first the fax machine that was game changing, and then a computer. And from there on, and then the whole Internet exploded. And I think we are in a moment, very much like that right now.

And that brings us to where Beate is today, the owner of yet another successful business. Coming up after the break, Beate will share more information about how she’s leveraged the lessons learned from building, scaling and selling her photography business to help other entrepreneurs and small business owners.

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We’re back and before the break, Beate Chelette described those trials of Hercules she fought and grew through to ultimately sell her business to Bill Gates. Now, she’s focused on helping other business owners scale their businesses through specialized programs and a podcast. Here’s Beate.

Primarily today I work as a growth architect to work with people that need one out of three things. They either want to turn their talent into a business – that means they need to build the business and the business model. Or they need a system with a differentiation factor where all their knowledge is neatly put under one umbrella, which we call the Signature Growth System, or they have a business and it makes money, and now they really need to seriously scale. And that’s when they come for optimal growth alignment, and we’re building out this plan on how to scale a company. So that’s the three pieces that I primarily work on. The Women’s Code is always going to be my love child, because I do love working with women, and I certainly have a lot of experience in shortcuts and understanding of what can happen.

We looked at the Business Growth Architect Show, and we said, well, the only reason we would want to do this is because we need some sort of a system behind it, or process behind it has to do something. The people that go on the show are either potential clients or people that elevate us.

There is nobody else that can go on the show because there’s no reason I need to give somebody a platform where I have no benefit from that. So you have to be very clear about when you do that. Yes, the quality of the conversation is really important, but you also need to think about, do you want to be liked or do you want to make money? And between the two of them, I probably take the let’s make some money, and then we can figure out if we like each other.

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The guesting is very much a lead generation piece where we select podcasts where we do believe that the host could use one of our programs. When we go on the podcast, we offer a brainstorm session, because I have a lot of credibility in the market and people pay a lot of money to talk to me. So when I go on a podcast. Oftentimes the podcast is a live coaching session, where you let people really see how you work.

And oftentimes stuff already comes up and I can’t help myself and this is what I do, where then the host says, “Oh my God, this was amazing! Thank you so much for that.” And then after the show, I say, “Listen, there’s a couple of things you talked about. Why don’t we get on a brainstorm session? I’ll be happy to put my brain into your business and let’s talk for like 15, 20 minutes, 25 minutes, and whatever we come up with, it’s yours. If I can help you, I’ll tell you. If I can’t help you, I will tell you. If I know somebody who can help you, I will tell you.” And then it becomes a warm conversation that is not so threatening to a lot of people like a cold call.

Beyond her experiences in scaling businesses, Beate has mastered certain technologies along the way. First, it was transitioning to the internet. But now there’s another emerging technology that she leveraged to streamline and scale her current business’ operations – it’s AI.

Number one, I mean when the internet first became the Internet, people were like, Well, why would anybody need a website? And now, unless you have a website, it’s nothing. I use AI for everything. I have a process in place, and we’re constantly looking for other tools where I now take the work that I do on the higher end level, where I do the growth strategies, and I take conversations that I have with clients over weeks, often months, and then I take these and I build entire plans, launch plans, just based upon what we talked about.

And I run it through AI, and then I do a six months launch plan based on that. Yesterday, I had a conversation, I had a brainstorm with a new client, and we went through what it could be, what it couldn’t be. We literally were brainstorming. Then I ran it through AI. I say, run me a SWOT analysis on the different ideas. Tell me what these different ideas were. That would have taken me normally at least an hour to write. I had that thing written in ten minutes.

And it’s no secret that doing more in less time means more revenue…

I have found that AI sometimes goes and it just comes up with something really random, and it’s still kind of like a child. So when I then say, “That was really terrible, you misunderstood.” Then it says, “Oh, I’m sorry I misunderstood.” But then on the second, suddenly, magically, it figured out what I wanted. So there’s definitely some intricacies in there where I’m very curious, sort of on the programming side of things, on OpenAI, how that kind of worked. But I love it. I use it every day. I use it for everything. It’s always open.

Besides her podcast, there’s also other entry points for working with Beate.

We literally just launched a quiz and we realized that a lot of people are very concerned about should we go in business? What’s my earning potential? How much money can I make? So I came up with a quiz. I came up with a profit formula. So you go to WhatsYourTalentWorth.com and take the quiz, and it will give you the actual number of your earning potential. Now, what people will find is that there’s going to be a discrepancy between what their earning potential is and what they’re earning right now, which is exactly why you and I are in business. Because if you can make this much money and you’re not, you need a business growth consultant to help you to do that.

I also have a group, The Women’s Code, also on LinkedIn. And we have now a Facebook group called Turn Your Talent into a Business. Because we’re really realizing the potential in the market right now that people wanting to go out on their own or figure out what entrepreneurship might look like.

And if it turns out entrepreneurship isn’t for you, that’s okay! You can instead opt to become an intrapreneur wherever you’re working. Before we wrap up, here’s a recap of some important lessons learned from Beate’s scale tale:
1.     Believe in yourself and trust your abilities.

2.     Be bold. You may not write a letter to the president of your country but challenge yourself to do something that makes you uncomfortable or might seem completely ridiculous. It might just pay off.

3.     Don’t fear change. Embrace it! Figure out how to make it work for you.

4.     When you’ve achieved things you didn’t think were possible, go back and help others. Remember, a rising tide lifts all boats.

5.     Ignore emerging technologies to your detriment. Practice using them so that you can do things faster, better, and cheaper.

Thank you, Beate Chelette, for sharing your scale tale with us! Check out Beate’s podcast. It’s called The Business Growth Architect show. You can access a quick link to that as well as other resources she shared in the show notes at ScaleTalesPodcast.com. Again, that’s ScaleTalesPodcast.com.

Thank you for listening! If you learned something valuable from this episode, please leave us a five-star rating and review wherever you’re listening.

I’m Alicia Butler Pierre and I produced and narrated this episode. Music production and original score by Sabor! Music Enterprises. Video editing by Gladiola Films. Show notes by Erika Ve Revilla.

You’ve been listening to Scale Tales, a podcast by Equilibria, Inc.