Beate Chelette is the Growth Architect® and Founder of The Women’s Code® and provides strategy development blueprints and results-oriented, tangible tools and techniques for Entrepreneurs, Workplaces and Organizations that unify your teams, give you clear steps to improve your business systems, and strengthen your leadership skills.

In this conversation we discuss creating a signature system, defining your customer avatar, and Beate’s 5 Star Success Blueprint. She also drops so much knowledge about why knowing your customer avatar is so important in your business and she gives an incredible tip on how to structure your business — it’s the same system she used to sell her business to Bill Gates. You won’t want to miss this one!

Discussed In This Episode:

• Beate’s concept of egorythm and how to know which egorythm you are in
• the single most important thing you should know in your business
• the system she used to create her million dollar business and sell it to Bill Gates
• why it’s important to create a system that’s uniquely yours

Links Mentioned In This Episode:

• Happy Woman Happy World: The Foolproof Fix That Takes You From Overwhelmed To Awesome, Beate Chelette
• Airtight Avatar
• 5 Star Success Blueprint
• Uncovery Session (mention this podcast for one of the 7 free sessions!)
• Asana
• MURAL
• Kajabi
• Lead Delta
• Radaar
• Keap (Infusionsoft)

Connect with Beate

Website : https://BeateChelette.com

Instagram : https://instagram.com/beatechelette

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GrowthArchitecture/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beatechelette/

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/GrowthArchitect

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Join The Systems Lab if you would like to: Learn how to create systems, to-do lists, and methods to help you stay on top of your work, and beat overwhelm throughout the day, even if you’re the queen of procrastination and avoidance.

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The Systems Lab: https://www.mirandamerten.com/systems-lab

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Welcome to Coffee Powered Systems equipping women with actionable steps to overcome overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I'm your host, Miranda Merton.

Hey, friend.

Welcome back to Coffee Powered Systems. Happy Friday. I hope you're having a fantastic start to you and your year. January is almost over. I can't believe it. How are your systems coming along? How are your goals coming along? Have you revisited everything from that high energy first start of the month that you wrote down? Hopefully you wrote down some goals, got clear on what's going on and what actions you're going to be making moving forward. If you have not revisited that, now is a fantastic time to do so. Reevaluate. If some of that stuff is what you want to keep doing, or if you realize it's not going to serve you, or if you have to pivot already. I have yet to revisit my stuff. I am going to do that probably this weekend. It's on my list. I think I want to go ahead and take a look at everything I've done so far and then make sure it's lining up with what I wrote down because a lot of times we write these things down, we get so excited and then half of them already drop off because they're really just kind of like goals and pipe dreams without action plans.

So I want you to go ahead and revisit those goals, take portions of it, and make an action plan. And action plan means step by step. What am I going to do to get to the next step? So today's episode is really timely because if you haven't created your systems or thought about how you're going to structure your business for 2022, then this interview with Beate Chelette is going to help you immensely. So Beate Chelette is the growth architect and founder of The Women's Code, and you're going to want to grab a pen and paper for this one. Don't say I didn't tell you. And you're going to have to go back and relisten and rewind because she drops so many different ideas and knowledge bombs in this one. And just when you think you've finished writing, the next topic that we go into gives you some more ideas and some more sparks to help you in your business and structure what you're going to do moving forward. So in this conversation, we discuss creating your signature system, how you can do that defining your customer avatar. Beate also explains her five star success, Blueprint. And we talk about why your customer avatar is so important in your business.

She gives a super incredible tip on how to structure your business. And it's actually the same system she used to sell her business to Bill Gates. So you won't want to miss this interview. Let me tell you a little bit about Beate, and then we will go right into it. She is a first generation immigrant who found herself $135,000 in debt as a single parent. And she bootstrapped her passion for photography into a highly successful global business, and eventually it sold to Bill Gates in a multimillion dollar deal. She is amongst the top 100 global Thought leaders by PeopleHum and one of 50 must follow women entrepreneurs by HuffPost. Like I said before, she's known as the growth architect and founder of the Women's Code, and she is also the author of the number one 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. If that isn't enough to get you to want to listen to Beate? I don't know what it is.

This was a wonderful interview, and I hope you enjoy it. So no more waiting. Let's hear from Beate Chelette.

Today I am joined by Beate Chelette, the growth architect and founder of the Women's Code. Beate, welcome to the show. I am so happy and excited that you're here today.

Thank you so much for having me, Miranda. I look forward to spilling the beans.

Absolutely. You are like my kindred spirit because you build systems and processes all day. And the goal of my business and what I strive to do really is to uncover the best ways to help small businesses and small business owners do that effectively. So this is just perfect for me. And I recently picked up your book, Happy Woman, Happy World, how to Go from Overwhelmed to awesome. And I'm so excited to dive into that.

Excellent. Excellent. Yes. I think I jokingly. Say, Miranda, I'm probably the only person who has a system to build systems.

I love that. That's exactly what I want to talk about today, too. I resonated a lot with your story as well, because I am a single mother of a 14 year old right now. And balancing motherhood and business is something that I love talking about. And you were also a single mother and a businesswoman. And I would love to hear a little bit more about how you were able to scale your business and balance everything that you did.

I think that at this point in time, really the term balance is an illusion, as you probably very well know, because the reality of it is there are priorities. And the priority is that unless your child drives, you have to be somewhere at a certain point and pick them up and they have to be at school at a certain time. So the parameters of your life are already set in place, and there's very little you kind of can do around about that. The second piece that's obviously really important is like, how are you going to feed your child? How are you going to feed yourself? Are you going to put a roof over your head? So money making activities and how do I make it through are then your second big priority. And what I learned. And this is what I wrote about in my book, Happy Woman. Happy World is a concept that I call egorithm. And what I found Miranda, and I bet you fell into the same trap like we all did. Like, we look at our friends and we look at Susie, who's got the smoking hot body, she runs the marathons.

And then we look at Julie. Julie is our award winning Baker, and her cookies for the PTA people basically kill each other to get them. And then we look at our friend Miranda, right, who's got it down with the business, and she's pulling in the jobs until we look at everybody around us and we go, oh, she's really good at that. She's really good at that. She's really good at that. And then we believe we should be the impersonation of all of the best attributes of everyone we know in one person, and that's us. So we have to Cook as good, we have to run as well. Our body has to look as good, our relationship has to be that way, our relationship with our kids, our parenting skills. And now we are in crazy making mode because we cannot fulfill that criteria. It's impossible. So algorithm is a concept I developed to help women to really take a breath and say, Where am I really? What's my main focus right now? And I've identified nine main, one of which is mother egorithm. The other one is tragedy, the other one is transition, the other one is career.

So that when you are in a major life event, that takes over everything and all the moms, you probably will know that when you first have a baby, life as you know it is over overnight. Overnight. You are known from here on out as the mother of your child's name. And that is such a shock to the system that it literally takes about three years for you to come to terms with how much of your identity you just lost. And then we spend the rest until they grow up to get that identity back little by little by little by little. And so in this concept of algorithm, the idea just is to simply say, what are you going to balance? You cannot balance all nine algorithms all at once. Like, you cannot be the best version of your ten friends all at once. So you're going to have to set a main focus, your priority. And then I take you through that in the book how you do that, and then figure out which algorithm you're in and how you can manipulate which one you might be in next or which one you want to come next.

And I found for myself as a single working mom entrepreneur, that it was the personal, the love relationships, and the intimacy really suffered until I got the business figured out, and until my daughter basically didn't need me as much anymore.

Oh, that's wonderful. Is it easy to kind of define those different eco rhythms and figure out where you are in that system?

Yes, very much, though. Yes. In the book. I'll take you through it. Sometimes I think we don't want to be in a particular algorithm. We prefer to be in another one. But it is what it is. This is a tool where you are helpless. It's just like, let's take stake of where we are right now. So if you're a brand new mother, chances are you and your mom algorithm and then be that on that because, Miranda, you probably can testify just as much as I can. And once your children are teenagers, that close relationship and that they love everything you do is not exactly as strong as it was when they were little.

Yes, that's true. It's like fighting and clawing, trying to get that relationship and pull it out of them.

Yes, 100%.

Yeah. So when we talk about business, I hear you discuss, like, your customer avatar and knowing exactly who that person is that you're talking to. How important is it when understanding your own business and where to go from there?

I think it's only the single most important thing to know is this exercise is like comparing it to crawling into their heads. So when I work with my private clients, in my strategy sessions or in my growth planning sessions, there's always a point where I have to think about what is going on in the head of the person that I'm trying to speak to. So I literally sit there in the session and I'll close my eyes and I'll go like, okay, so I'm a busy CEO. I just left my house and dropped off my kids. And now I'm arriving at the office, and this is the first report I'm seeing in front of me. What do I need to pay attention to, right? What is it? Or when I do my consulting work or any speaking engagement, I always think about what is the person going through that is sitting in front of me. Because when I know that, then I can find the words that I need to find to tell them exactly how I can solve that problem or their problems. So what I've done is I've created this Airtight Avatar program, which I am happy to make available to all of your audience for completely free.

And you can find this at Airtight Avatar.com. And what I've done is I've literally created, like, a checklist, multiple pages of checklists where I take you through step by step and teach you. How do you figure out what are they worried about? What are they not worried about? What's really important to them? And I'm going to give you one example. Sometimes I find that a lot of the Internet marketing language is very high P and very big promises, or especially when it's a male Internet marketer. It's about toys. The Lamborghini, the Ferrari, the buy the house. None of this is important to you or me. Right? We go like, we want a nice car. Maybe we want a convertible, but it doesn't have to be a Lamborghini or Ferrari. I mean, I don't know if you want actually a Ferrari or not, but I certainly didn't. So you can say to me in a language, well, Miranda, here's how you get to your Ferrari. If a Ferrari is not what we want, what you then would have to say, because we are mothers, you would have to say, what kind of car would we like?

That is fun to drive safe because we are parents, after all. And then you would have to know if we're environmentally conscious or not, because then you can say, do you want to drive a big Mercedes Benz if you or I are environmentally conscious and we would never drive a gas, gasoline. We would only drive a hybrid car, an electric car. But you need to know this. You cannot make these types of assumptions. And that's where a lot of the languaging and business goes wrong, Miranda, where people make these assumptions about their clients and their clients reads the copy and goes, that's not me. That doesn't resonate with me at all.

Yeah, that makes complete sense, because then you lose them. Right? It only takes so long. We only have a few minutes to capture someone. And if you're talking about Mercedes and Lamborghinis and you sound like a used car salesman, you're not for me.

Right.

So I am out.

Exactly.

Speaking in my language. Exactly. So I would love for you to take us through your five star success blueprint. As we talk about the avatar was finding the first step was getting with the Avatar.

Yes. And so the avatar finding is part of the very first step. So the five star success blueprint I created because I've literally built now tens of thousands of businesses. And it's interesting because a lot of business owners always think that everything is different or they have some of the pieces, but they don't know the pieces in order. They don't know how to line them up. Like the Pearl. Right. When you have one, the largest Pearl in the middle, you kind of have to map it out ahead of time and then put the string in through the pearls. So they kind of do a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that. But neither step is complete. And then the business doesn't work or what I say, it's an income sine wave. It just keeps going up and going down. And so the five star success blueprint is step by step what you need to do to make your business work. So the first step is the offer is the first step is the idea. Pardon me, I'm jumping ahead here because we already talked about the avatar. So the idea comes first.

What is it that I'm offering? Why does anyone need it? Why is it unique? And who wants this? That's why I give away the airtight avatar, because it's such a fundamental, powerful piece at the beginning that everybody needs to have that and understand what their problems are because your idea must solve their problem. The second piece is then the offer. Because once you know what your offer is, why they want to buy it and why they want to buy it from you. Now you can package the offer in such a way that it's unique and different. So you can't really make an offer unless you know who they are and what they want. And here's already where most business owners do it wrong, they design the product and the service first, and then they find somebody who wants to buy it. We want to do it the other way around. We first want to be clear what we're going to be selling, to whom. That solves the problem, and then we create the offer. Once I have the offer. Now you and I are in our genius zone because now we are building the systems.

How are we going to get this in front of people? What's the automation? What's our process mapping? What kind of project management CRM? What are we using that can get this out as quickly as possible in front of as many people and systems comes before you build the team because systems take over large portions of your team. So you may not have to hire someone because you have a system to do that. So if you have somebody to have to send email one by one by one, or if you have a system that sends the email, you want the system that sends the emails, because then you don't have to have to pay this one person. It's much cheaper then once you have off the systems. Now you go to who are the people that I now need to scale up my business and to really grow it. And that's why we set up an organizational chart. That's why we set up a plan. Who needs to be in which position? I'm going to give you just a little preview on that. And the one thing you can never do is clone minimes. This is the number one mistake business owners, especially new business owners, makes where they go in and they say, well, I can do all these different things.

I'm just going to need to find more people who are just like me so we can all do the same thing and constantly be in each other's way. No and no. Do not you want to find people that are doing things better in certain areas? I rather pay ten people to do 5 hours a week jobs versus one person doing 40 because it's less vulnerable for my business. And this is the system I use to sell my business to Bill Gates is you need to make sure that your business is strong and has the fewest amount of vulnerabilities as you possibly can, because if I have ten people in each one of them does a small piece. If one person, like my social media manager, goes missing overnight, for whatever reason, she just ghosted me. Your whole operation doesn't fall apart. It's just the scheduling that went. And now you can find somebody for this particular piece much quicker versus having to onboard someone for all the different pieces. It's disastrous.

Right.

That gets you to the fifth and final step of the five star success blueprint. And that is you as the leader. Because once you have the idea you have something to sell, you have systems that sell it people who know what they're doing. Now you need to shift from business ownership into business leadership. And now we need to train you to become really good at what you are best at, which is being a visionary, bringing in the business, and doing fewer things on the time consuming path.

That's awesome. Yeah. Now, you have been doing this for a long time, and you have created your signature system. So if I were to do this for myself, how long do you think it takes of doing it repeatedly over and over again before you really Hone in on your own system?

Well, it's interesting that you say that, because for me, that was sort of the big revelation in Covet. I always thought that everybody else knew how to do this as well as I did, that when they would talk about it, that their head would just spit out these systems. And I realized to my absolute shock that most people don't know how to do that. And so I created a system builder formula, and I have been taking both loads of people. Now that exactly very much like you say, well, I know there's a system to what I do, but I can't articulate it. And when I do, it comes out in this convoluted way. And it doesn't sound like it's unique or special, but to me, it is so clear. But I can't find the words. And so I've been helping people building their systems left and right. And so I had a client I worked with, and nobody really kind of knew exactly what she was doing because she was so in her head. And then once we outlined it and we organized it, her next phone call was with Amazon.

Wow.

And she secured Amazon as her client. And Amazon just looked at her stuff and said, I want that, that, and that after we just organized it. It really is such a game changer when you create the system that is uniquely yours, because then you follow the same method. You take them through step by step. And Miranda I want you to envision this like it's a knowledge. When somebody comes to you, you're going to be inclined to do what I call the knowledge vomit. You want to tell them everything you know because you know what they need, and then they're overwhelmed. And so in your system, what we do is we take your knowledge, we Bake it in this nice long loaf of bread, and then we'll take a knife and then we'll cut it into slices. And so then when someone comes to you and says, Miranda, where should I start? You take them through the assessment, which incorporates all pieces of your system. And then you'll know where they need to start. And then they've done this one part. And then they're going to go and say, but Miranda, I need to know more. And then you say, funny that.

You say that. That's the next step in the system. And so you can do more multiple sales, back to back to back. And your client is always happy because your client goes like, yeah, you have finished this step. I completed it. Now I'm going to the next now I'm going to finish this one. Then what's next? And it just keeps this great growth and training and learning and building idea in front of everyone.

Yeah. And I think that was probably the hardest part for me, too, is trying to figure out the next step and the next step. So an outline is what you suggest. Like outline it all sit down and just go step by step and figure out what do they need to know right now? And then next. And then next.

Exactly. And then you take these pieces and you say, I'm offering this as a webinar. I'm offering this as an online course. This is a live one on one. This is a workshop. This is a group thing. So you offer all the pieces in different ways and versions and at different price points.

Awesome. And for business owners who haven't, let's go back to the team step. So if we haven't had a team or if we're starting with a very small team and we don't have those defined departments, what's the best way to map out the team processes to where you're like, okay, person A, you're handling social media, and this is what you're going to do on this end. Person B, you're going to do human resources, whatever have you. How do we just find exactly those roles within our team?

Well, it depends on the business. And so without knowing what an individual business is, some businesses need learning and development Department. Some pieces need research and some product development. So you have to look at the type of actions or the type of services your company provides and what type of people you need to do that. So in my world, as a strategist and as a consultant, I do a lot of presentations, a lot of speaking. I do a lot of customized development. So I have to have a graphic designer who's at that level whom I can send my ideas and pump this out. So for me, it's a graphic designer, then I write well for someone with English as a second language, but I wouldn't. But I need somebody who can prove, read and write. So I have somebody who just does that. Then I do a lot of video. So I have somebody who just does my video editing. Then I have somebody who just does my YouTube thumbnails. I have somebody who just does my uploading to the YouTube channel and the optimizing. And then we just hired someone to just do the Instagram campaign.

We have somebody who does our LinkedIn campaign. So it depends on the types of strategies that you want to develop. So that will be part of what I map out with my clients in the growth planning strategies to say, which of these strategies do we need to implement to drive your business forward? Where are your clients and then who are the people that you're either going to hire full time to do that or part time to do that or the freelancers you want to do to manage these different pieces?

Okay, that makes sense because then you don't want to get hung up on where can I find this person if you don't need them right now? I won't need a LinkedIn strategist if I'm not working on LinkedIn. Exactly.

Yes, exactly. So you want to keep the cost low in the beginning and the quality high, so it's cheaper for you to get somebody really good on like an Upwork. That's what I use a lot. And then you give them a project, and then once that's up, you give them another project and another project. Another project, and you just participate in the freelance economy.

I love that. Do you personally use a lot of freelancers versus employees then within your business?

Yeah, primarily, yeah. And my subject matter experts are from the Philippines to India to Canada to Europe, America. They're all over the world.

That's great. I love that. I just started with an assistant as well. So she's been doing just a little bit freelancing for me and just taking a few things here and there. So I love it. It definitely takes a little stress off, and I get to dip my toes into having a team and not having to do everything myself. It's like going back to the beginning where we were talking about wanting to be all the things, comparing ourselves to everybody. We don't have to do all the things. So I love that you can piece together your team where you need it.

Yes, 100%. I just want to say that for me because I was in a lawsuit where I had an employee that had too much power and thought that she ran my business, and then she did open her own business which was my business without me. And I learned a very hard, very big lesson that day. And it is that I will never again make sure that somebody will have so much information that they'll feel compelled that they can go and run this on their own. It's just not happening.

Oh, that makes total sense. Yeah. Interesting. And then so for you and your business every day, do you have any business tools that you consistently use and recommend?

Yes. So I am obsessed with Asana. Asana is a project management software, so I'm in the process of getting certified. I love that because I do a lot of process mapping. I use an online program for whiteboarding called Mural, M-U-R-A-L, which I love because when I do my strategy sessions with my clients, I whiteboard in real time. And so as we're building systems, they really literally watch their system being born as we are in the conversation together. It's very powerful. I use Kajabi for my online for my online programs, and I use Lead Delta to get my contacts from LinkedIn organized. And I use what else do I use? I use Radar for my social media scheduling. So I'm always looking for tools. I use Keep, formerly known as Infusionsoft, as my CRM. I've been with them for over ten years, was one of their first clients. And I'm always looking like, what can I do that makes it faster, better and more reliable and more consistent?

Yeah. I'm always looking at new tools and trying to figure out I love seeing what everybody's using. And Asana comes up a lot quicker. Comes up a lot. I have a tip Tuesday where I'll just take one tool and just kind of talk about it really quickly. And so I love that I'm always looking at new things. But you also have to stick with what works. Like you said, you've been with Infusionsoft now keep for Gosh. You're probably like, grandfathered into, like their I am Older quiz. So, yeah, stick with what works, but also finding the new things and testing things as they come out.

Yeah. Because technology is changing so quickly.

So quickly. And then so if somebody listening now wanted to get started on their blueprint get started on their five star Success blueprint this week, what would be their first step that you would suggest that they do?

I probably would go back and listen to your wonderful podcast, Miranda, with a pen and paper and just write down the different pieces about the five star success blueprint and then take a look and what the clarity is that you have around each of the different steps. And then make sure that you go and do the Airtight avatar again. Airtightavatar.com. It is free. It's going to take about 30 to 45 minutes. Do this right. Do this first. And then sometimes I have clients that go so far as they go and cut out pictures of a magazine or they go to a stock photography site and they make a little mural or vision board So they can see what their ideal client looks like so that when they write or when they're on the phone or in a Zoom they'll always see that person so they're reminded this is the person I'm selling to or making my offer to, that's where I would start. And then if you need help, reach out either send me an email, we'll put it in the show notes or if you heard something racist, I must work with her. Fill out an application for an uncovery session.

You'll find that@uncoveryssessionss.com. Make sure you put Miranda's name and podcast in there so I know you come from there. I'll be happy to make seven of these available for free to your tribe. Just make sure you mention the podcast and while we're at it, I just want to remind all the listeners, all your listeners that the reason Miranda and I do this is because our reward is your AHA. So please subscribe to the podcast, leave a message for her. Tell her what you're taking away because I know one thing about Miranda is that she'll probably love that and appreciate that a lot.

Yes, I would. Thank you, Beyonce. And where is the best way for us to connect with you on social media or like you said, send an email. Where should we connect yes.

Instagram or just send me an email. I actually answer my own email and I always love to hear from the audience Because I like to know what you're taking away because again, that's why we do it.

Yeah.

Amazing.

Well, I will drop all of those fabulous links in the show notes. We'll definitely write those up, the avatar, all of it. This has been so amazing, Beyonce, you are wonderful. I would love to keep connected and this has been great. That is all we have for you today. We will see you next time.

Thanks for listening to coffee powered systems. You can find links to everything mentioned in the episode down in the show notes or on the website at Miranda merten.com. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with another bestie who would love it too and join me here next time. Bye.