Helping others take it to the B.A.N.K., so they can take it to the beach!
Up Close & Personal: Cheri Tree & Esther Wildenberg
At VIP Global Magazine, it’s our pleasure to draw attention to the incredible achievements of individuals who have harnessed their unique talents and are using their entrepreneurial expertise to impact the world. That’s why we are excited to turn the spotlight on the amazing Cheri Tree and Esther Wildenberg.
Cheri Tree is a best-selling author, professional keynote speaker, and world-renowned entrepreneur. She is the Founder and Chairman of Codebreaker Technologies, Inc., with clients in more than 100 countries worldwide. She is the creator of the revolutionary B.A.N.K. methodology and Codebreaker’s Personality Coding Technology, designed to help business owners close more sales in less time and improve their communication skills and personal relationships. Cheri has spoken to hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs and professionals globally at some of the top business conferences in the world. She has also been invited to speak at Harvard University, the University of California, Google, and the United Nations.
In addition, Cheri has been featured in numerous international publications including Forbes.com and Entrepreneur.com, and has been nominated as Innovator of the Year and Entrepreneur of the Year because of the breakthroughs created from her Personality Coding Technology, including Codebreaker AI, the world’s first Artificial Intelligence powered by B.A.N.K.
Cheri is both purpose-driven and profit-driven, with a goal to create income, influence, and impact for all. Her mission is to crack the code of every human on the planet and ultimately make our world a better place by creating One World, One Language. She is passionate about life and helping others take it to the BANK, so they can take it to the beach!
Esther Wildenberg is the Co-Founder & CEO of Codebreaker Technologies. Esther brings not only years of experience with B.A.N.K. to the role but also significant executive leadership. In fact, she was already the CEO of a financial sales company leading a team of over 800 employees by the age of 33.
Before her current CEO role, Esther worked her way up in the company. After starting as a Certified Trainer, Esther quickly became the top B.A.N.K. salesperson internationally. She was later promoted to Sales Director of Europe, then Senior Vice President of Sales, President, and ultimately CEO. As an ANKB, Esther has endless energy for building the long-term success of Codebreaker Technologies. Her passion for transforming businesses and lives using B.A.N.K. is what drives her to increase the growth of the company exponentially.
VIP: Can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
CHERI: Esther and I met in Amsterdam in November 2013 when I was a speaker at the National Achievers Congress. She was in the audience and I said from the stage I was looking for an amazing leader to work with me and help open up Europe for my company. Esther was inspired by my work with B.A.N.K. and purchased a ticket to our 2-day Codebreaker Summit event. We connected on many levels, personally and professionally. She was the perfect leader for our European market expansion, and we began to work together.
A few months later, Esther arranged a 30-day tour through Europe to expand our company, and we ended the tour in Geneva, Switzerland for a ski trip on Valentine’s weekend. I started to have a lot of feelings for Esther but wanted to make sure she was the right fit for me. So, I took the opportunity to ask her a very important question. I asked her, “Are you willing to be in my shadow?” I speak all over the world and didn’t want to be with an insecure or jealous woman. She took a short pause to process my question, smiled, and then came back and said, “Yes, as long as you’re willing to be in mine!” I smiled. The rest is history!
We fell madly in love with each other and officially started our relationship. We had a long-distance relationship for the next six months and then we got engaged. Esther moved from The Netherlands to America full-time and we found our perfect home in Southern California in Laguna Beach. We got married on August 8, 2015 and we’ve been very happily married ever since.
For the past 5 years, we’ve focused on building our company into a global brand. We travelled all over the world speaking at some of the top conferences and doing business globally. We saw that the future was going to be technology, so we started shifting from being a training company to a technology company with a training division. We’ve come a long way and are proud of our accomplishments. We’ve been nominated for several years in a row at Innovator of the Year, and we were featured in Forbes as the “Future of Sales” with the launch of our artificial intelligence, designed to predict buying behavior in nanoseconds and help sales professionals and business owners close more sales in less time. I was honored with an invitation to speak again in Geneva at the United Nations AI for Good conference in 2019.
While it’s been an amazing life together building our company and traveling the world, in 2020 we expanded our family and had our baby boy, Kai Keanu Tree. He was born 10 weeks early and came out strong and ready to crush it! He never needed oxygen and went home a month early from the NICU. We are certainly not spring chickens, I just turned 48! But we are up for the opportunity to raise an amazing young man and we plan to have him join us on our world travels and be a part of the mission we have to change the world, together as a family.
VIP: Has it been a smooth road? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
ESTHER: If it was a smooth road it would be boring! Every relationship has challenges, but I think we managed them well over the past six and a half years.
When I moved from The Netherlands to the USA, there was a culture shock. Dutch is my native language and I had to improve my English big time. The European culture is way more balanced. People in Europe actually take time off, eat healthier, and value friendships and quality time more. For example, 4 to 5-hour dinners are normal when you hang out with friends. In the USA, it’s chop-chop, bye, see you later.
Being in a same sex relationship is not appreciated by all. In The Netherlands, it’s accepted and normal. Amsterdam was the first city with gay marriage and the first Gay Pride parade. In the USA, there’s still a big group of people who are against same sex relationships. I felt that when I moved here.
We’re living in a modern world and being a women-owned innovative technology company is still an interesting phenomenon, apparently. Other power women love working with us and see the extreme value we bring. It takes highly emotionally intelligent, personally developed men to work with power women and value their skills, expertise, and experience.
Another struggle we had was that men significantly underestimated us. Some tried to con us into partnering with them and getting us to believe we could never make it in a man’s world. They would commonly refer to us as “the girls.” That was a mistake… big mistake! At Codebreaker Technologies, our motto is “people before profits” and we live by the philosophy that sales is not a numbers game, it’s a people game. Women seem to get that immediately, and others not so much. For us, it’s a line in the sand, and if people don’t share the same values, we walk away from the deal or the relationship. It’s that simple.
VIP: Tell us about your company?
ESTHER: We help business owners, entrepreneurs, and sales professionals close more sales in less time with our B.A.N.K. methodology and technology. We teach our clients how to unlock the secrets, the science, and the system to increase their sales up to 300%. Also, we teach them how to improve their communication, strengthen their relationships, and create more influence and impact in their world.
Here’s Cheri’s story:
When Founder and Chairman Cheri Tree started her first business as a financial advisor, she struggled to make sales. In fact, the first year, she made an income of only $700! For the next five years, she studied everything she could to become successful. She read great books, listened to audio programs, attended seminars, and even hired coaches, investing thousands of dollars financed by her credit cards to be successful. Unfortunately, her income peaked at $72,000 and didn’t come close to the 6-figure income she was desperately pursuing, and yet she was devoting almost every minute of her time to her business.
Cheri found herself completely disillusioned by the proverbial “sales is a numbers game” message and realized that she was being led to believe one of the greatest myths in sales when she was told that “in order to get more Yes’s, you have to get more No’s.” This is when Cheri woke up to the reality that this just wasn’t true! The truth, she realized, was that in order to get more Yes’s, you have to get more Yes’s, not more No’s! This thought process led Cheri down a path that ended up changing her entire world.
In an effort to build a thriving small business without working herself to death, Cheri decided to learn everything she could about closing sales and she discovered that in fact, sales was not a numbers game, it was a people game! This discovery shifted her focus from sales to people, including learning several personality typing systems. Cheri found personality science compelling, but difficult to apply to the sales process.
That’s why Cheri dedicated herself to reverse-engineering the personality types, basing