Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future
The Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the FutureWe 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 s...
Social Media Detox and the Atheist Who Met God
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Dr. Amy Albright on negative self talk, prayer and science, in ten minutes.
What would happen if all those negativity bots disappeared overnight? That is the question in this week's newsletter, and my conversation with Dr. Amy Albright is part of my answer.
Dr. Amy is a Doctor of East Asian Medicine, Consciousness Practitioner and Brain Lab Founder at Holon Experience.
She was an atheist studying the brain until an acupuncture table changed what she believed, and today she works in an EEG laboratory an...
An Atheist Found God on an Acupuncture Table
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How to Be Spiritual: An Atheist Found God on an Acupuncture Table.
Dr. Amy Albright was an atheist studying the brain, wanting to understand how it works. She was chronically ill and on lots of medications, and she tried acupuncture. The practitioner put the needles in and left the room, and she felt like she was levitating, sinking and hearing voices that were not audible in the room. She knew there is a God, and she knew science would never be able to explain it. She questioned science...
Money Trauma and the Man Who Walked Away From $3 Billion
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Does your money trauma make your financial decisions? This week's newsletter asks it, and this cut is the answer from a man who had everything money buys and walked away from it.
Nery Gomez, founder, president and COO of Black Sun Private Equity, had the penthouse office in Beverly Hills and a seat at a $3 billion table, and none of it was his. What he built instead treats money as a source of energy, not the purpose. This is my cut of our conversation, the parts every Founder o...
What the Rich Are Doing With Their Money!
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Most people look at money as just that. Money for no other purpose than having money. But what if money is energy you can create, move and attract? That is conscious investing as Nery Gomez, founder, president and COO of Black Sun Private Equity, practices it, and it is the opposite of how most private equity has operated for the last twenty years.
I wanted this conversation because private equity is in the news for the wrong reasons. Funds are sitting on tens of thousands of companies they...
The $20,000 Podcast Scam No One Talks About
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This is The Architect's Cut of my conversation with Josh Elledge, founder of Up My Influence and PodVerified.
In our conversation, Josh explains the level of podcast guesting scams that he's seen, and the one that charges you $20K is particularly infuriating.
He also shares the rule a broadcasting legend taught him early in his career: never lie to your audience.
If you are using AI pitches or are considering them to get on shows, you want to hear what he says about them, bec...
Your AI Pitch Is Getting You Blacklisted
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Media veteran Josh Elledge on the #1 podcast pitching mistake.
Is your AI pitch getting you blacklisted from every podcast?
If you want to build your authority platform, and frankly, you should, because podcast guesting is a must for you. But so it is for everyone else and that is the problem.
Internet marketers have found yet another way for mass spamming through AI slop, flooding every podcaster inbox. And they, myself included are rejecting everything that reads like a template mass pitch outreach with fake hy...
The Corporate Job Was The Ceiling, Not Her
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From Zero to $60K in 8 Weeks
She'd already given corporate every hour she had. The only way to make more was to stop working for someone else.
That is the math Rachel Castro did after eighteen years in corporate. She had a six-figure job, weekends that disappeared into binge sleeping, and by Sunday night she had stitched herself together enough to face Monday. It was the golden cage: paid enough to need it for the lifestyle it funded, while it was killing her one week at...
Crazy Aware, Crazy Good, Crazy Nevertheless
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He loved every minute of the breakdown that made everyone around him want him committed.
Steve Barton loved every minute of his breakdown. That is the part people cannot get past when he tells this story, and it is the part I could not get past either.Steve ran his family's flower business for over thirty years, starting at twenty-two after his father's stroke left him no choice. He built the life everyone tells you to build.
Successful. Respected. Decades in. And he realized he had e...
3,144 Items Into Grief, and Still Focused on Building
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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...
Optimized Out of His Own Identity
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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...
What Should I Charge?
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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...
The Skeptic Strategist Who Became Spiritual
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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 t...
She Never Healed the Wound. She Stopped Letting It Drive.
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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...
When You Know You're Done But the Next Thing Hasn't Arrived
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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...
She Built a $100M Beauty Empire. Then She Almost Walked Into Traffic.
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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.
AI Will Not Figure It Out. That Is Your Job.
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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, an...
How to Stop Building a Business You Hate (Even When It's Working)
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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 be...
Trust Is Collapsing. Here’s How You Become Someone People Can Still Trust.
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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 th...
Revenge Quitting Won’t Save You, Unless You Do This Next!
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Revenge quitting is trending.
Wiebke Tasch did it before it had a name.
It’s 4pm in Berlin. The tram is packed. Everyone around her is doing exactly what they are supposed to do. She just came from an interview. She got the job. The dream job. The one everyone in Berlin would kill for, at one of the biggest publishing houses in Germany.
And she can’t breathe.
Something is knocking on her chest from the inside. Screaming. Get out. Get out now. I...
What Rock Bottom Is Really Telling You!
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The world is burning. Rock bottom is calling. And for the first time, Beate is giving away every secret she has.
The world is shifting fast, markets are down, supply chains are breaking, and founders everywhere are hitting walls they never saw coming. We are entering a war state, and whether you feel it yet or not, it will have real consequences for your business. Rock bottom isn't a sign you failed. It's a signal. And if you're hearing it right now, this episode was made for you.
What If The Inner Work Is Not Enough?
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That is not a question I ask often on this show. But Nick Jain made me ask it.
This is the contrarian episode.
Nick walked in and said it straight. Spirituality is great. And without a clear strategy around the numbers you have nothing. Especially right now. Especially in an environment changing this fast.
And then he said something that made my jaw drop.
His Harvard MBA. His McKinsey career. The dream resume that took decades to build and...
#216: You Think You Have a Money Problem?
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You don't have a money problem. You have a why problem.
You are hustling. Hard. Every decision you make, every hour you put in, every sacrifice you justify, it is all pointed at the same thing. More money. Because once you have enough of it, everything else falls into place.
That is the trap.
Not because making money is wrong. But because money was never going to be the answer to the question underneath it. And most people spend years, sometimes their e...
Ep #215: Charles Gaudet : From Internet Marketer to Impact Driver, Why the Old Playbook Is Dead
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How Gratitude, Polarity, and Purpose Became the New Business Strategy
WARNING - SUICIDE IS MENTIONED
I have a problem with internet marketers.
I've said it on this show before. The hype. The manipulation. The endless tactics designed to separate people from their money. So when Charles Gaudet reached out, founder of Predictable Profits, former internet marketer, I invited him on and asked him directly.
What do you have to say for yourself?
What he said...
Ep #214: Melinda Colon: Why Burnout Nearly Killed Me, And What My Body Was Trying to Tell Me All Along
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When Your Body Knows Before You Do The Breakdown That Became the Breakthrough
She was driving home from work at 65 miles per hour when she passed out behind the wheel.
Bumper to bumper traffic. Rush hour. Foot still on the gas.
She came to, rolled down the windows in 40 degree weather, and kept driving. Because stopping wasn't something she knew how to do.
That night she ended up in the emergency room. Doctors thought she'd had a stroke.
Melinda Colón...
Ep #213: Randy Gage : Wealth Without Apology: Rewriting the Beliefs That Sabotage Your Success
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Why Prosperity Is an Internal System, Not a Number
Money is believed to solve many, if not all, issues.
Most of us don’t consciously reject wealth. We say we want it. We work for it. We chase growth. We build teams, products, and systems. And yet income plateaus. There’s a barrier we can’t seem to break through, even though our capability clearly exceeds our current results.
Then it shifts.
The deal lands.
The raise comes through.
The windfa...
Ep #212: Can You Stay Silent? Leadership, Boundaries, and the Cost of Compliance
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Silence may or may not be a conscious decision. Many of us don’t choose it deliberately but rather let it develop through small, reasonable choices. We are managing risk, protecting credibility, waiting for the right moment to say the right thing. And then that moment doesn’t come and staying quiet becomes our default. It seems to be sensible especially when speaking up puts us in the crosshairs, exposes us to public shaming or cancellation, or creates real personal risk. There are plenty of examples out there when this goes...
Ep #211: Traci DeForge : I Don’t Want to Die at My Desk
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Work Addiction Looks Like Success—Until It Costs You Who You Are
Work addiction doesn’t arrive as a crisis.
It builds through competence, trust, and responsibility.
It receives praise. You are rewarded for it.
You deliver more.
You take on more.
More people rely on you.
Over time, the work expands to fill more of your life. The trade happens in small increments. Stepping away starts to feel unavailable, not because something is wrong, but becau...
Ep #210: Dylan Bost: How To Find Purpose Beyond Hustle
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Does it always have to come to a full rock-bottom burnout before our purpose can emerge? This episode matters now because a new generation of founders is pushing back against hustle culture while still wanting meaningful work, financial success, and a life they actually enjoy. If you feel the pull between your ambition and the reality of wanting a balanced life, this conversation offers insight into how purpose is found and how you might side step the mess all together.
In this episode, I speak with Dylan Clayton...
Ep #209: Jason Clark: Growth Comes in Waves—Here’s How to Ride Them
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Rock bottom is dramatic. It’s embarrassing, disorienting, and painful. For many founders, it becomes the origin story they try to hide while pushing themselves to move forward.
In this episode of The Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future, Beate Chelette speaks with Jason Clark about intentional suffering, the law of polarity, and why business growth moves in cycles.
At 26, Jason was homeless, divorced, coming off heavy psychedelic use, living in a tent in Alaska, and experiencing panic attacks. That period reshaped how he re...
Ep #208: Blair Dunkley: Stop Asking Why — Language Patterns That Keep You Stuck
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If you’ve done everything “right” yet still feel stuck, this reframes how your words drive behavior and culture by shifting attention to the present.
We often don’t realize how often our questions point backward. That moment when something goes wrong and the first words are, “Why is this happening?” You sift through past details, replay conversations in your head, and feel the pull of self-judgment. The rest of the day goes to rehashing.
Over time, the loop shows up as hesitation, slower calls...
Ep #207: Stephanie Sylvestre: Does AI Have a Soul?
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AI is everywhere. And there is real fear..
Fear of being replaced, fear of machines taking over, fear of losing entire job segments. and the fear of losing self, our ability to critically think and what our place in this world is now that something so super smart is taking over.
Because when something can speak like you… think like you… mirror your voice and your worldview… a very critical question emerges: Does AI have a soul?
This episode does not focus on produ...
Ep #206: Success Wasn’t Supposed To Hurt
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A year after everything burned, the pain hasn’t softened.
It’s still back-breaking.
Still soul-stealing.
And there’s a piece of me that will never come back.
This episode is not about moving on.
It’s a one-year-later reflection on loss, identity, and what leadership looks like when nothing is restored—only revealed.
In this solo episode of The Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future, I share what the last year has asked of me—personally, professionally, and spiritually.
After l...
Ep #205: Michele Novack: Laid Off, Broke, and Burned Out—Then She Built Something Better
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What do you do when the life you built disappears overnight?
In this episode of The Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future, Michele Novack shares the moment her career—and identity—came to a full stop.
After 30 years in the same industry, and now in her 50s, Michelle received the call no one is prepared for. The kind that ends a career in minutes and quietly dismantles the story you’ve been telling yourself about your value, your security, and your future.
Michel...
Ep #204: John Stewart Hill: The Moment Life Gave Him A Choice
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SUICIDE WARNING - TRIGGER WARNING
What do you do when you’ve tried everything—and nothing worked?
A note for listeners: this episode includes an honest reflection on a period of deep emotional and spiritual distress, including a moment of asking God to take one’s life. Please take care while listening.
In this episode of The Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future, John Stewart Hill shares the moment his life came to a full stop. At 42...
Ep #203: Todd Hagopian: Burned Out, Brilliant, or Bipolar?
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Can a mental health diagnosis make you a better leader? Todd Hagopian says yes.. After 15 years undiagnosed with bipolar disorder, Todd faced a terrifying tradeoff: sanity or success. When medication stabilized his life but muted the hypomanic edge that powered his output, he did what founders do, he built a system around it.
In this episode of The Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future, Todd explains how he first had to understand his own neurodivergent patterns—and then translate years of operating on edge into the HO...
Ep #202: Holly Porter: Her 70-Day Fight for Life and the Message She Brought Back
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What happens when a mother of seven and a fearless serial entrepreneur—someone who has built 11 companies, and lived life in constant forward motion—suddenly finds herself on her own deathbed for 70 days?
In this episode of the Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future, Holly Porter reveals the 70-day battle that dismantled her identity and rebuilt her purpose from the inside out. Intubated twice, stripped of all five senses, and suspended between life and whatever lies beyond it, Holly expe...
Ep #201: Shelley Goldstein: How to Lead When You’re Afraid to Speak
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Most leaders don’t struggle with ideas.
They struggle with articulating them.
Because how can you be heard if you can’t find the right words?
In this episode of The Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future, I talk with Shelley Goldstein, founder of Remarkable Speaking, about why so many experts choke at the podium, get caught in a rabbit hole, or hide behind a fully written out script when it’s time to communicate from the heart...
Ep #200: The Truth Nobody Admits After Disaster
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You’ve followed the “right” steps and things are not where you’d like them to be.
This is a time of massive transformation, systems are breaking, hustle culture is broken, nobody wants to wait until some point in the future to be happy. If you are questioning your path, your identity, or your place in this rapidly shifting world — this episode is designed for you.
In this very personal 200th episode of The Business Growth Architect Show, I’m going solo and sharing the...
Ep #199: Patrick van der Burght: How They Make You Say YES — The Science of Persuasion
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We’re living through a trust crisis.
Audiences recognize even the best hidden pitch from a mile away, customers tune out, and “ethical marketing” has become a buzzword hiding high-pressure sales tactics.
So what is ethical persuasion — and does it influence without manipulation?
In this episode of The Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future, I sit down with Patrick van der Burght, founder of Ethical Persuasion Training & Consulting, to pull back the curtain on what truly makes persuasion ethical. A touchy subject for me as I...
Ep #198: Christopher Wesley: How Do You Survive after Losing Everything?
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What happens when life strips away everything — your home, your art, your sense of self?
In this episode of The Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future, I speak with Christopher Wesley, a storyteller and transformation coach who lost everything in the Altadena fire. But instead of letting tragedy define him, he used it to rebuild his identity and purpose from the ground up.
If you have had an event where you felt as if your world was falling apart, this conversation will give you ide...
