Bethenny Frankel is a well-known entrepreneur and businesswoman who got her start in public in the late 2000s on Bravo’s The Real Housewives of New York.
Frankel’s success is partly due to her “never agree” attitude and the fact that she wasn’t afraid to speak up for herself when things weren’t right. That’s why she’s been “credited” with changing the scope of reality television contracts forever, with a clause commonly known in the industry as the “Bethenny Clause.”
On the subject: Bethenny Frankel on her approach to business and negotiating deals: “I’m good at concepts, not contracts”
In an Instagram video, Frankel answered a fan’s question about how much money she was offered for her original contract with RHONY in 2008. Frankel said the amount was $7,250 and that she “didn’t contest” it.
“I was nobody. It was a lot of money for me,” Frankel explained. “The only thing I crossed out is that Bravo will take a percentage of everything that I earn … Somewhere deep inside me, I conceptually understood that this was wrong, that I was moving around places and was going to do something. and no one was going to own any part of it.”
In 2011 Frankel sold a cocktail part of her now-famous Skinnygirl Beam Global for around $100 million, which caught the attention of the industry as a whole, making TV executives writhe over “lost” money.
Now, some reality TV contracts have something called the “Bethenny Clause,” which requires actors on certain shows to give a percentage of their earnings to “the powers that be,” as Frankel puts it.
“You are smarter than you think,” Frankel told viewers. “I was not a business person. I had no institutional knowledge or experience in this. I read the contract, something seemed wrong to me, and I removed it. And it changed my whole life.”
Frankel said Entrepreneur in 2021 that before closing the original deal with Beam Global in 2011, the company wanted to buy Skinnygirl as a whole, which it negotiated against and was able to retain the Skinnygirl brand name and intellectual property in doing so.
“I said I wouldn’t do that – you guys only specialize in booze, so keep the booze,” Frankel explained. Entrepreneur at the time of purchase. “So (Beam) paid me and bought the brand, which is really unprecedented. It doesn’t really happen… I was just thinking about it logically. And there have been so many things in my career that have been like that.”
frankel stands rated $80 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth.