Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future

Hosted by Beate Chelette

Business Entrepreneurship

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Aug 2026

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About the show

The Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future We are over-optimized, over-scheduled, and running on empty. Every moment has to be productive. Every system has to scale. And yet founders everywhere are crashing — their health, their relationships, their mental wellbeing paying the price for a way of building that was never sustainable to begin with. The old systems are coming down and good riddance, but that leaves a real question on the table: what do you build instead? The Business Growth Architect™ Show: Founders of the Future is where that question gets answered. Hosted by Beate Chelette, The Growth Architect™, this show exists for founders who want to stop forcing and start flowing — to build something that serves their clients, sustains their life, and grows through alignment and resonance rather than strain. We talk to founders in the messy middle, founders who just hit rock bottom and knew something had to change, and founders who came out the other side with a different way of doing business entirely. Because the truth every guest on this show has lived is this: it starts from the inside. Because change is an inside job. 🎧 Listen in and join the conversation shaping the future of business.

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August 10, 2026Episode 22827 min

3,144 Items Into Grief, and Still Focused on Building

Had an AHA or Insight? Share it: A solo episode on loss, faith, and what it takes to keep going. I'm 3,144 items into my insurance list. That's where this episode starts. What cracked me open while I was counting was a photo of the kids stacked in a tower on the living room floor, laughing, my husband Gary looking at them, thinking about adding himself to the pile. A house that doesn't exist anymore. And a question I couldn't shake, will we ever have a moment like that again? This is a solo episode, and the honesty in it is a commitment I made to tell you the truth. I really, truly, deeply, 100% do not want to be here telling this story. I want to tell the comeback story, the glorious coming out on the other side. And that's just not true. So I can't tell that story. I have to honor the lesson I am in which is unbearable, long, drawn out, continuous grief. Eighteen months ago, our home and my office both burned down, four days after I got married and four days after I received a spiritual calling to let go of everything I thought I knew. I declared the hard part of the grief over two months ago. I was wrong. The list keeps growing. Because life is, well... life. One of my gifts is being able to see repeatable patterns and build frameworks around them. When I work with my consulting clients, I'm almost always watching the same transformation pattern play out, and it has three parts: the breakdown, the breakthrough, and the breakout. This year, I had to live inside that pattern instead of just naming it for someone else. Typical business challenges like cash flow, people leaving and arriving, a masterclass format still being tested, and a grief that doesn't move on the timeline anyone promised. If you've gotten a calling that you can't explain and can't ignore, if everything that used to work has stopped working, this episode is for you. I'm not offering you a resolved story. I'm offering you the real one, still in progress, and an invitation to build alongside me while it's happening instead of waiting for the polished version. Listen to the episode and find out why it always takes longer and goes in a different direction than we think. Connect with Beate Chelete Website | LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | TikTok | Podcast | Substack _____________________ We appreciate you, thank you for listening. Let us know in the comments what resonated in this episode, we want to hear from you. Leave a comment, like, share with one person who needs to hear the message our guest shared. Take our QUIZ and find out what your talent is worth in this market: What's Your Talent Worth (http://WhatsYourTalentWorth.com) Follow us on Instagram: Check us out on Tik Tok: Work With Us

July 27, 2026Episode 22834 min

Optimized Out of His Own Identity

Had an AHA or Insight? Share it: Mike Weisman spent thirty years building other people’s brands. As the owner of his own advertising agency, he understood exactly how a performance becomes a product, and he built a career optimizing his clients external image for the world. Then his business disintegrated within six weeks, and he found himself standing alone in his own awards hall, throwing plastic trophies into a trash bin. The moment those trophies hit the trash, so did the version of Mike that had built them. That version was never him, only a performance. That is imposter syndrome, the distance between who you are and the image you have been showing up as. Take the award away, and ask what is left? I brought Mike onto the show because that question follows me too. He spent decades selling the promise that the right image solves everything, then discovered, at the cost of his business that the persona built for an audience and the person who can carry a business through a real collapse are not the same person. This conversation moves through the shame that comes before the clarity, the false idols we worship, the ones he calls the five P’s, and the trust he had to find so he can rebuild from nothing. Mike now runs Higher Ground Life Consultancy, and what he teaches today is the opposite of everything his old industry trained him to sell. Listen to the show for an honest conversation around imposter syndrome and how over optimization fuels you spending years performing an external image of you, that you know deep down is not you. Timestamps 00:00–03:22 Cold open + over-optimization: culture’s performance trap 03:22–08:32 Collapse and awakening: business implodes, trophy-in-the-trash moment, “Who am I?” 08:32–14:08 Shame to stillness: fear, people-pleasing, 18 months of quiet, shift from self to service, image vs. identity 15:42–19:46 Liminal space: staying in the void, quiet confidence, the in-between ends in stages 21:04–24:36 Serendipity, no agendas: vulnerability as the gateway to trust 25:08–27:01 Trust over transaction: core metric, relational vs. transactional, ditch the “personal brand” 28:57–31:05 Growth arc: breakdown → breakthrough → breakout; don’t defer life—be a light; fingerprints and values 32:34–34:21 Redefining success: beyond money; where to find Mike; outro + CTA ABOUT MIKE WEISMAN Mike Weisman is the founder of Higher Ground Life Consultancy, working with leaders on identity, trust, and what he calls the true self beneath the performance. After thirty years running his own advertising agency, he lost the business, went through eighteen months of self-imposed silence, and now writes and speaks on reclaiming identity before the world defines it for you. Website: thehighergroundlife.com Connect with MIKE WEISMAN Website | Facebook | LinkedIn _____________________ We appreciate you, thank you for listening. Let us know in the comments what resonated in this episode, we want to hear from you. Leave a comment, like, share with one person who needs to hear the message our guest shared. Take our QUIZ and find out what your talent is worth in this market: What's Your Talent Worth (http://WhatsYourTalentWorth.com) Follow us on Instagram: Check us out on Tik Tok: Work With Us

July 13, 2026Episode 22731 min

What Should I Charge?

Had an AHA or Insight? Share it: Why That Number Isn't What You Should Be Asking? What does the market bear? What does your competition charge? What do you think you can get away with? These are the three questions most founders ask when they set a price, and Ed Lee has spent the last decade watching them lead people straight into underpricing themselves. Ed is the author of The Last Mile of Trust and has worked with over two thousand companies on how they price what they sell. For years he watched founders carry the same insecurity into every pricing conversation, shrinking the number the moment a client hesitated. Then he started to see that insecurity eroding the very thing that made his clients worth paying for. In this conversation, Ed makes the case that what someone pays is directly tied to what they believe they are getting, not to what the comps say. A consultant pricing at $3,000 because that is what the market shows, while delivering $50,000 worth of transformation, does not read as a deal. It reads as a mismatch, and mismatches make buyers walk away, not the quoted price. Ed shares how to find the right number for your business. It’s not the number he says, it’s how much they trust you. Ed and I have worked together for the last year, and what stands out about him is that he is unapologetic about needing time with his family. His business supports his life, not the other way around, and I watched him live with that friction and resolve it one step at a time. The friction he feels when charging what he is worth is the same friction he faces every time he puts his family first. It’s an investment for him. If you are tempted to price something by asking what everyone else charges instead of what you are worth, this episode is worth a listen. You will walk away with a way to find your number, and proof that facing friction instead of running from it is what makes the number hold. Chapters: 00:00 Cold open — Pricing builds trust, not just numbers. 00:46 Intro — Beate welcomes Edward Lee, author of The Last Mile of Trust. 03:32 The friction myth — How “frictionless” can erode your secret sauce. 04:52 Price as identity — Your number signals value, impact, and trust. 08:39 Adobe case — Subscriptions, AI add‑ons, and when features backfire. 12:40 Pricing as a filter — Qualify ideal customers; repel discount‑seekers. 14:41 Values and balance — Family, presence, and the workout analogy. 23:33 Evolving the offer — How Ed reshaped Hello Advisor’s pricing and model. 27:14 Book + key takeaway — Where to get it, toolkit bonus, and why price is the last mile of trust. About Ed Lee Ed Lee is the founder and CEO of HelloAdvisr, a pricing strategy consultancy, and the author of The Last Mile of Trust. He has advised more than 100 high-growth companies on pricing and monetization, with a combined valuation exceeding $1.4 billion. He teaches at UCLA, serves as expert-in-residence at Oxford University's Saïd Business School, and hosts the Margin for Error podcast. Connect with Ed Lee Website | LinkedIn | X | Instagram | Instagram _____________________ We appreciate you, thank you for listening. Let us know in the comments what resonated in this episode, we want to hear from you. Leave a comment, like, share with one person who needs to hear the message our guest shared. Take our QUIZ and find out what your talent is worth in this market: What's Your Talent Worth (http://WhatsYourTalentWorth.com) Follow us on Instagram: Check us out on Tik Tok: Work With Us

June 29, 2026Episode 22627 min

The Skeptic Strategist Who Became Spiritual

Had an AHA or Insight? Share it: How Maeve Ferguson stopped fighting the inner work and built a business that Harvard professors apply to join. Maeve Ferguson builds diagnostic assessment funnels for the highest end of the thought leadership market. Harvard professors. New York Times bestselling authors. She is data-obsessed, systems-driven, and the last person you would expect to credit her business transformation to weekly identity reprogramming sessions and subliminal audios. She thought hypnosis was training someone to be a monkey on a stage. What Maeve discovered, after years of having the right strategy and the wrong clients, is that the business is her mirror. She was not attracting the wrong people because her offer was wrong. She was attracting exactly who matched the identity she was putting out. When she changed her identity everything changed. I brought Maeve on because her story is the proof of concept for everything this show is built on. You cannot out-strategy an identity that does not match where you are trying to go. The inner work is not the soft option. It is the only thing that makes the outer work land. We also go deep into the messy middle , the void between who you were and who you are becoming. Maeve moved through her transition in a few months. I am in it right now. If you are somewhere in that space of a personal transformation, this conversation will explain a lot. Listen to the episode and find out. About Maeve Ferguson Maeve Ferguson is The Authority Architect, the strategist behind the diagnostic infrastructure that transforms established thought leaders from 'respected but replaceable' to Category of One. Creator of The Client Engine™, Maeve works with 7-10 figure thought leaders, bestselling authors, and industry authorities, including Dr Arthur Brooks, Jen Kem, the Hyatts, Mike Kim and Selena Soo, building the systems that turn intellectual property into infrastructure that qualifies, converts, and scales without them in the room. With a background in Big Four accounting and private equity, Maeve brings data-driven precision to an industry drowning in tactics. Her methodology helps clients build diagnostic authority that rivals Myers-Briggs and StrengthsFinder in sophistication. She runs her consultancy from a working horse farm in Northern Ireland whilst raising two young children. Proof that brilliance with infrastructure actually works. Connect with Maeve Ferguson Website | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook _____________________ We appreciate you, thank you for listening. Let us know in the comments what resonated in this episode, we want to hear from you. Leave a comment, like, share with one person who needs to hear the message our guest shared. Take our QUIZ and find out what your talent is worth in this market: What's Your Talent Worth (http://WhatsYourTalentWorth.com) Follow us on Instagram: Check us out on Tik Tok: Work With Us

June 15, 2026Episode 22533 min

She Never Healed the Wound. She Stopped Letting It Drive.

Had an AHA or Insight? Share it: Alice Kao on daily authorship, childhood trauma, and six climbing gyms. When Alice Kao was three years old, her mother walked out the door carrying two large suitcases and did not turn around. When she was fourteen, her mother dropped her off alone in America near a school with some cash and left. Alice spent the next thirty years running a story about what that meant , that she was not smart enough, not pretty enough, not worth staying for. That story became the engine. It drove her through surviving alone as a teenager in a country where she did not belong, through a devastating heartbreak in Hong Kong, through building Sender One Climbing into six locations across Southern California and raising six million dollars from 115 community investors. Then she found out the way she interpreted her story was dead wrong. The facts were not what she had believed for thirty years. The wound was real. The story was not. And the voice that generated it is still there every single morning. It still wants to tell that story. If you have ever woken up and felt the weight of a story you cannot shake, the one that says you are not smart enough, not ready, not worth the room you are about to walk into , this episode is the one you need to hear. Because Alice did not heal the wound. She built a daily discipline around deciding what it means. Every morning she chooses who is at the keyboard through authorship and it is the most underrated business skill a founder can develop. Write your own story. In this episode we go into the phone call that broke the story open, the morning practice Alice has built around narrative authorship, and why imposter syndrome does not have to be gone before you can build something extraordinary. About Alice Kao Alice discovered climbing while living and working in London in 2008, following a difficult breakup. She was inspired by the healing and self-discovery that climbing brought her, which led her to co-found Sender One in 2011 upon returning to the United States with her business partners. Alice hates following rules but loves rallying people to believe in an idea. She wears her heart on her sleeve and is not afraid to cry in meetings. She was born and raised in Taiwan and moved to the US when she was 14. Alice's superpower is her ability to ask for help relentlessly, because no one has all the answers! Connect with Alice Kao Website | LinkedIn _____________________ We appreciate you, thank you for listening. Let us know in the comments what resonated in this episode, we want to hear from you. Leave a comment, like, share with one person who needs to hear the message our guest shared. Take our QUIZ and find out what your talent is worth in this market: What's Your Talent Worth (http://WhatsYourTalentWorth.com) Follow us on Instagram: Check us out on Tik Tok: Work With Us

June 1, 2026Episode 22426 min

When You Know You're Done But the Next Thing Hasn't Arrived

Had an AHA or Insight? Share it: Tarkan Salar on Living Inside an Unfinished Transformation Tarkan Salar did not lose his business. He dismantled it. Deliberately, painfully, over eighteen months, canceling contracts, unwinding supplier relationships, letting go of nearly 2,000 employees, absorbing millions in losses, all while his marriage fell apart, his father died, and the people closest to him told him he was making a mistake. He had built a $50Mill dollar fashion company supplying H&M and major European retailers. Family members were on payroll. His identity, his relationships, his entire world was wrapped inside that company. He walked away from all of it because he could not do it anymore. He had no plan. He had a one-way ticket to Bali and left it all behind. The hustle part is done. What has not arrived yet is everything else. The people he thought were friends turned away the moment he stopped being useful. The family members he had carried for years are still angry. And Tarkan is in what he calls the void, no identity, no clear purpose, no confirmation that any of it is going to lead somewhere worth going. The next chapter is not here. He is living in the gap. In this conversation, Tarkan shares what it looks like to be inside that gap right now. The Sufism framework that helps him make sense of why everything was taken away. The 5am Club audiobook that cracked something open in Bali. The 12,000 hours of self-development that have compounded into something he is still learning how to bring into the world. And the honest admission that he does not know what comes next. Beate brings her own rawness to this one. Two people in the exact same spot, on different parts of the world, mapping the terrain of an unfinished transformation together. About Tarkan Salar. Tarkan Salar, is a consumer brand strategist, inventor, and operator with 26+ years building and scaling global fashion and consumer goods brands. Connect with Tarkan Salar Website | LinkedIn | Instagram _____________________ We appreciate you, thank you for listening. Let us know in the comments what resonated in this episode, we want to hear from you. Leave a comment, like, share with one person who needs to hear the message our guest shared. Take our QUIZ and find out what your talent is worth in this market: What's Your Talent Worth (http://WhatsYourTalentWorth.com) Follow us on Instagram: Check us out on Tik Tok: Work With Us

May 18, 2026Episode 22332 min

She Built a $100M Beauty Empire. Then She Almost Walked Into Traffic.

Had an AHA or Insight? Share it: Hatch Beauty Founder Tracy Holland on the hidden cost of building at all costs. Tracy Holland built Hatch Beauty into a $100 million beauty empire in five and a half years. Self-funded. Three kids under five. EY Entrepreneur of the Year. A manufacturing facility in Durham, North Carolina. Business with some of the biggest retailers in the world. Every metric of success you could point to and say, she made it. And then she could not keep up with her own success. One morning at 7:15, after another three-hour sleep night, with 14 minutes and 30 seconds calculated to get coffee, use the bathroom and make it to her 7:15 AM appointment, she pulled over on Pico Boulevard and thought three steps into traffic would fix everything.That is where this conversation starts. We talk about secret keeping. About what it does to you when the outside image and the inside reality stop matching. When everyone around you sees the success, the beautiful children, the thriving business, the awards and you cannot find a single person you trust enough to tell the truth to. About perfectionism and the refusal to give yourself any grace. About the identity that gets built around being the one who has it together, who never breaks, who figures it out. And how that identity becomes its own kind of prison. We talk about the cost of the hustle and growth-at-all-cost culture. The real version. The marriage held together with one hand while building a company with the other. And what happens when your life gets tired of waiting and screams back at you. Tracy shares the turning point. The daily practices that recalibrated her thinking. How she rebuilt a $27 million business in 24 months after walking away from everything. And the question that changed everything for her. Listen to the episode and find out. I know Tracy personally. I watched her. She always looked amazing on the outside. Truly an inspiring woman and founder. After this conversation I love her even more because of her raw honesty and willingness to share the hard things from her journey. This is one of the most honest conversations I have had on this show. If you have ever built something and wondered what it is costing you, this episode is for you. About Tracy Holland I’m a founder, investor, and operator who has spent more than two decades building brands and businesses with women who lead. I co-founded HATCHBEAUTY and helped scale it to over $750M in cumulative wholesale revenue, launching and growing brands like Naturewell, Nuance by Salma Hayek, BLISS Color, FOUND Active, and Orlando Pita Haircare. The pod discusses alignment of spirituality and strategy.: My work sits at the intersection of mindset, intuition, and strategic execution. I believe true business growth happens when you align who you are with how you lead, combining inner clarity with smart, scalable strategy. I help women step into their power by strengthening both their mindset and their business strategy. That means building confidence, trusting their instincts, and pairing that with proven frameworks to grow, scale, and lead. It’s not either/or, it’s both. LINKS & RESOURCES Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook | Website _____________________ We appreciate you, thank you for listening. Let us know in the comments what resonated in this episode, we want to hear from you. Leave a comment, like, share with one person who needs to hear the message our guest shared. Take our QUIZ and find out what your talent is worth in this market: What's Your Talent Worth (http://WhatsYourTalentWorth.com) Follow us on Instagram: Check us out on Tik Tok: Work With Us

May 4, 2026Episode 22224 min

AI Will Not Figure It Out. That Is Your Job.

Had an AHA or Insight? Share it: You are using AI. That's the right thing to do. You are enamored with how fast and intelligent it is. But you are getting inconsistent results. And you are worried it's your prompts. You have been using AI. Getting inconsistent results. Pushing back when it ignores your instructions. Telling it the same thing ten times. And wondering if you are just doing it wrong. You are not doing it wrong. You are misunderstanding what it is. Michael Toguchi builds AI systems for universities, nonprofits, and some of the largest mission-driven organizations in the country. Stanford. University of California. Major associations with hundreds of thousands of members. Places where an inconsistent output or hallucinations are not just annoying, they have real consequences. What he has found is that the AI problem is almost never an AI problem. It is a foundation problem. Organizations that struggle with AI outputs almost always have unclear goals, inconsistent data, and no governance before they touched that tool. AI does not fix the crack in your foundation. It runs on top of it. And if the foundation is broken, AI produces mediocre output at extraordinary speed. In this episode of The Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future, Beate and Michael dig into what it means to stop expecting AI to figure you out, and start taking responsibility for what you are asking it to do. We talk about the comprehension shift that changes how you use every tool. The follow-up problem every business owner has and how AI can solve it at every level. When to build your own agent and when to hire a one-time build. And the data protection moves every founder should make before they go any further. Michael also brings a framework most tech conversations skip entirely: the stewardship test. Did you design this system to help the people who will use it, or to bypass them? That question, he says, tells you more about the health of your AI strategy than any compliance framework. This episode is for the founder who uses AI every day and still does not fully trust it. Who has been frustrated by the inconsistency and is not sure whether the problem is the tool or the approach. The answer is in this conversation. About Michael Toguchi Michael Toguchi is the Chief Strategy Officer at eResources, where he leads platform direction for application management systems that streamline complex processes like scholarships, grants, admissions, and accessibility services. With over 25 years of experience driving digital transformation for universities, non-profits, foundations, and associations, Michael specializes in simplifying internal workflows to help mission-driven teams reduce manual work, scale sustainably, and strengthen compliance. His work powers organizations including Stanford, UC Davis, PG&E, the Roddenberry Foundation, and Google’s Certified Innovator Program. At the core of his mission is a commitment to building technology that enables teams to focus less on managing systems, and more on delivering meaningful impact. Connect with Michael Toguchi Websiste | LinkedIn | #AIImplementation #MissionDrivenBusiness #AIStrategy #BusinessAutomation #HumanCentricAI #FoundersOfTheFuture #BusinessGrowth #FounderLife #AIForBusiness #BusinessPodcast _____________________ We appreciate you, thank you for listening. Let us know in the comments what resonated in this episode, we want to hear from you. Leave a comment, like, share with one person who needs to hear the message our guest shared. Take our QUIZ and find out what your talent is worth in this market: What's Your Talent Worth (http://WhatsYourTalentWorth.com) Follow us on Instagram: Check us out on Tik Tok: Work With Us

April 20, 2026Episode 22126 min

How to Stop Building a Business You Hate (Even When It's Working)

Had an AHA or Insight? Share it: Nobody builds a business they hate on purpose. You build it because everyone says follow me, do it that way. So you do. And after a while you realize it is awful. You hate it. Just like the corporate job you left. And at some point you know you cannot do it anymore. If this is you, this episode of The Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future is exactly where you need to be. Copywriter and fractional CMO Rachel Allen built a successful agency because everyone in her industry said that was the right next step. The revenue was there. The clients were there. And she dreaded every morning. When she finally shut it down, she rented a cabin deep in the woods no internet, no cell service slathered on sunscreen so her pale skin would survive, lay down on a picnic table, and sat with the most important question she had been avoiding: who am I, and what version of success am I actually building? In this conversation with host Beate Chelette, Rachel breaks down exactly how she rebuilt quintupling her prices overnight, eliminating the work she resented, and creating a business model aligned with who she actually is. You will learn why so many founders unconsciously adopt someone else's business model, how to identify when the voice running your decisions is your inner critic rather than your adult judgment, what it means to stop doing things behind your own back, and why charging more can be an act of alignment rather than arrogance. Rachel also shares the practical tools she uses to soothe the nervous system in moments of fear-based decision making because knowing the right move and actually making it are two very different things. If you are ready to stop building a business that works for everyone except you, this is the episode to listen to. LINKS & RESOURCES Website: boltfromthebluecopywriting.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelallenwrites/ _____________________ We appreciate you, thank you for listening. Let us know in the comments what resonated in this episode, we want to hear from you. Leave a comment, like, share with one person who needs to hear the message our guest shared. Take our QUIZ and find out what your talent is worth in this market: What's Your Talent Worth (http://WhatsYourTalentWorth.com) Follow us on Instagram: Check us out on Tik Tok: Work With Us

April 13, 2026Episode 22030 min

Trust Is Collapsing. Here’s How You Become Someone People Can Still Trust.

Had an AHA or Insight? Share it: I had to make some hard decisions about someone who has been advising me for the better part of 20 years. One phone call changed how I feel about this person. I had a visceral reaction. My body knew before my brain caught up. I stopped trusting. In this episode I sit down with Dr. Michelle and Dr. Dennis Reina, two PhDs who have spent 35 years researching exactly what just happened to me, and what happens to all of us when trust breaks down. But here’s the question I want you to sit with right now. If you don’t trust the internet, the news, CEOs, or corporate institutions, if you believe social media is littered with AI deepfakes and hidden agendas, then is it fair to assume that someone, somewhere, might not be trusting you either? What are you doing to stand out as someone who can still be trusted? How do you establish yourself as the real thing when everything around you is noise? That’s what this episode is about. Not the trust that’s collapsing out there. The trust you can build right here, in your business, with your team, with your clients, starting today. The Art of Trust | Take the Reina Trust Assessment _____________________ We appreciate you, thank you for listening. Let us know in the comments what resonated in this episode, we want to hear from you. Leave a comment, like, share with one person who needs to hear the message our guest shared. Take our QUIZ and find out what your talent is worth in this market: What's Your Talent Worth (http://WhatsYourTalentWorth.com) Follow us on Instagram: Check us out on Tik Tok: Work With Us