Brooke Shelton is a dynamic Digital Business Coach and multi 7 figure entrepreneur with a passion for empowering women to build freedom-based business. Raised in Texas, she seamlessly blends her Southern roots with a fast-paced lifestyle in New York City and Connecticut. Brooke studied behavioral economics at Duke University, which laid the foundation for her unique approach to entrepreneurship and performance coaching.
With a diverse background that includes advising Fortune 500 companies at Boston Consulting Group, writing Meta’s Advertising Policies, training Meta’s machine learning models, and even helping found Meta’s Venture Capital incubator team, Brooke has a keen understanding of what it takes to build successful ventures from scratch. She’s a serial entrepreneur at heart, having founded and exited a college prep agency, a real estate investing firm, and now an Instagram business accelerator and AI-powered advertising agency.
What brought you into the personal development space?
I believe personal alignment derives from impact over income, of building for others what I lacked. My upbringing taught tradition versus innovation, leading the home versus leading the boardroom, wife and mom versus CEO. I reject that as too reductive for this new generation of women who are powerhouses in all domains.
We can and are building 8 figure companies in the morning, and going horseback riding or baking with kiddos in the afternoon. While at BCG and Meta, I found myself privately complaining about the zero sum “work versus life” paths offered, even when afforded generous flexibility by my team.
But the best way to complain is to build the antidote. That’s why my mission is to lead a new generation of “OOO CEOs” (out of office chief executive officers), female entrepreneurs free from commutes and corporate ladders as the portrait of success, instead building enduring online empires from home.
Have you wanted to merge these two aspects?
It’s an imperfect balance, one I’m not sure will ever be fully resolved. But perhaps that’s the magic of it. I’ve never felt more aligned or powerful than when I’m in my home office– yes, in my pajamas– overlooking the river in the backyard and my two golden retriever puppies as my “coworkers”– closing real estate deals, hosting live coaching webinars, or building AI tooling.
Do you think this will shape the future of the next generation of women?
Absolutely. That is my founding ethos. I believe there’s a growing realization among savvy, enterprising women that if the existing playbook isn’t working for them, they don’t have to keep passively turning the page—they can get a pen and start writing their own.
What advice would you give to your younger self?
If you can understand pattern recognition better than anyone else, you can’t help but win. The accelerated pace of innovation has proven that acquiring a single skill is no longer enough. Learning how to learn and from whom…. that is the most important, untapped resource. You don’t have to know the answer, but you have to know who does and how to ascertain it.
Were there moments when you needed to do that for yourself?
At Meta and BCG, I was hired to refine and elevate mature companies, but my real passion is building something from nothing—zero to one. It’s beautifully chaotic and definitionally there are no rules, but there are replicable patterns.
Business, regardless of industry or stage, has archetypes. The faster you can connect the dots between two seemingly disparate models or ideas, the faster you win. Playbooks to success are hidden in plain sight. AI and hired teams can provide you leverage, but only you as the CEO can mastermind how the pieces come together.
What advice do you have for women who feel stuck?
My motto is “movement to contact,” simply meaning those who win are the ones who compress the passage of time between idea and execution. I encourage women to find a fierce sense of urgency and resourcefulness, to just experiment and get off the sidelines.
Our greatest competition is not those who serve the same audience, but passive inaction. The worst decision we can make is no decision at all, because that is still a choice, one to prolong your current state. Confidence does not derive from affirmations but from action.
What are your current offerings?
I offer Catalyst Collective, the first ever Instagram business accelerator for aspiring entrepreneurs to start, scale, monetize and automate their business on Instagram. It comprises on-demand courses, live coaching, a gamified community, and AI software to co-build your business.
I’m soon launching Alchemy, a “done for you” social media advertising agency, as well as Elixir, an application-only, high-proximity consulting and investment container for 6 & 7 figure entrepreneurs to uplevel.
When it comes to manifesting, what are you actively calling in?
This year’s focus was about “outsized action,” necessary for early stage growth. But I don’t want to simply lead an industry or business model, I want to build my own. There is freedom in being antifragile. I have proven to myself sustained endurance and grit, which transcends any one business model. Now I am calling forward the courage to declare a new set of rules yet again. And it will be led by “scale in simplicity.” In life, my priorities are to start a family, to invest in a farm upstate for rescue farm animals (and coaching retreats!). I’m intentionally making room for the unknown, as what I used to fear in uncertainty now excites me.
Do you have any daily non-negotiables?
I used to, as a meager defense against busy work environments, but after crafting my own work-life integration, I have already erased anything encumbering me. I learned quickly that chasing metrics we don’t define ourselves is a fast track to burnout. Now I focus on simplicity and freedom as my compass. As long as I can call my parents every morning on my “commute” to the backyard office and walk our puppies on the beach with my husband, that’s all the flexibility I need.
Photo Credit – Shannon Guerrero
