Lessons from Successful Entrepreneurs: The One Thing You Never Change – with Karen Beattie

When COVID hit, Founder & Managing Director Karen Beattie and her team at The Growth Faculty were two weeks away from delivering their largest live event hosting Simon Sinek – one scheduled for three cities and involving 12,000 delegates.

They pulled the plug and rescheduled.

One year on, The Growth Faculty hosts a top-tier, high-quality online membership platform that aims to “let the best business brains inspire you to act”.

They’ve got live instructor-led masterclasses with world-class speakers, exclusive author talks, interviews, webcasts, videos, podcasts… you name it. Basically, every knowledge-hungry business (or aspiring) leader’s fantasy.

And mind you – this is a business that prior to the pandemic, 98% of relied on live, in-the-room, face-to-face events.

I had been following The Growth Faculty and Founder Karen for years, so I was thrilled to finally get to chat with her and pick her brains for the strategies that have allowed the company to thrive, even through changing times.

We open up this episode by talking about how we both handled having to change our business models radically.

As some of you would know, I’m very grateful and proud of The Coaching Institute’s four-day transition online. After early indicators of how the market was going to shift, including, of course, how only half the room in our New Castle event showed up, we had to forgo face-to-face training. Everyone had to do it, if you wanted to stay afloat.

As mentioned above, the evolution, if you will, for Karen and co began with postponing their largest event yet to February 2021.

“I was on the phone every day to venues. I could see the impacts. I could see it's like a tsunami coming ahead, but in slow motion,” Karen describes. “We just need to deliver this event. And then we can deal with COVID after. But... that did not happen.”

After doing so and unfortunately havi