Starting a business is a big decision, and people do it for different reasons. Maybe you have a passion you really care about, or you just want more freedom in how you spend your time. For some, it’s about doing something different from the usual 9-to-5 job and having control over their own path. But what does it really take to start a business—and is passion enough to keep you going?
In this episode, I have Clara Ansel, CEO and Founder of Business Powerhouse. Clara shares valuable insights into managing business growth sustainably without burning out. The conversation delves into the importance of having a clear destination or ‘Point B,’ the role of mindset in business success, and practical steps to avoid chaos and inefficiency. Clara also discusses the significance of decluttering one’s mind and surroundings, actionable advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, and her personal journey from corporate consultancy to empowering small business owners. Tune in to learn more!
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Starting and Scaling up a Business with Claire Ansell
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidotes to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about starting and scaling up businesses. Now, perhaps you have your reasons for wanting to start a business and, usually, it’s about passion that you have or just the desire to have a life where you have a little bit more autonomy over what you do and when you do it, something other than the corporate life, but maybe you’re looking at these processes of starting a business and seeing how daunting the process is, how much it really goes on, especially if you do end up with an investor that expects you to scale or if you personally have the desire to scale because whatever mission you’re serving, you’re kind of wanting to bring to more or more people. My guest today is Claire Ansell, and she is the CEO and founder of Business Powerhouse and she has some good thoughts about how we could go about managing this whole process without kind of burning out, without kind of ending up doing too much in a more sustainable fashion.
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Claire, welcome to the program.
Hey, Stephen. How are you?
I’m doing pretty well today. It’s actually a nice 70 degrees here.
Nice. That’s good. Summer is coming.
It always feels nice at this time of year. How are you today?
I’m pretty good. It’s been an exciting day with doing lots of –– actually like in the same realm as what you’re talking about. We launched a new kind of series in our hub called Awaken, which is all about mindset so it’s pretty exciting to be jumping on here with you today and kind of continuing the conversation.
Yeah, and that’s a good place to start. We can talk a little bit about mindset because I’m assuming you work with a lot of people who are either starting businesses or have a business and they’re just starting to become overwhelmed as their web traffic, their client base, something kind of picks up.
Yeah, and I think it doesn’t really matter what phase of business you’re in, whether you’re a startup or a ten-million-dollar business, the reality –– or a hundred-million-dollar business. I mean, I’ve seen it right up to 600 million. I mean, at some point, a business owner is overwhelmed in chaos and facing that burnout. It’s just the reality of the way in which we structure and grow our businesses.
Now, given your role in your business, is there any way to prevent that burnout? Is there any way someone that’s starting a business now can adopt either a mindset or a set of operational practical you want to start a business but you don’t want to burn yourself out?
Yeah, 100 percent, and I think one of the biggest pieces the business owners really miss is they don’t understand what their point B is. We talk about point A is where you are today and point B is where are you going in the future and that could be at the end of the month, at the end of the year, in five years or ten years from now.
When you start your business, you have a vision or an idea but you don't necessarily have a destination or a point B. Share on XAnd without that destination and without that point B, you lack direction. And that means –– I mean, the statistics show that a business that doesn’t have direction only has a 10 percent success rate. And so that really shows that the 90 percent of businesses that fail, in my mind, of all the businesses that I’ve seen and understood, really failed because the business owners lacks that direction.
Now, when you talk about point B, how specific does that need to be? Because a lot of people come into a business and say, “I have this mission, I desire to have this impact,” which is, I guess, somewhat vague but do people need to have an exact dollar amount in revenue and exact number of buy-ins or exact type of people and where you’re spending Wednesday at 1:30 PM?
I mean, not necessarily Wednesday at 1 PM. I mean, I always ask a great question to a business owner and I can ask you the same question. It’s December 31, 2025, it’s the end of the year, it’s kind of two hours before midnight, what did you do this year? Do you know what your business will have looked like for the last year? Do you have a clear vision and direction and can you imagine and can you feel it? Can you know what this year will end like before you even started it?
Now, when people come up with that, and I’m assuming that this is most commonly something people do, say, around the New Years, so it’s January 1st and you’re saying, “One year from today, this is where I’m gonna be,” how do people need to balance, say, being ambitious and being realistic? Because I can say something like, “Well, December 31st, I am now the president of Ukraine,” and that’s never going to happen.
Yeah, no, exactly, and we so we have a process that we call a tactical acceleration plan and so that’s basically determining what your point B is going to be. What would you like it to be? Then what’s your point A? Where are you at today? And then what’s the gap between point A and point B? And in that gap, you develop your roadmap. And by developing that roadmap, you can determine and be realistic. I mean, you could turn around and say you want to be the president of Ukraine but if it’s not achievable, then what’s the point? And that’s on the business owner. I can’t control the imagination of what people have. What I can say is, if you truly don’t want to be burnt out, you want to be successful, I would make it as realistic and drive yourself, push yourself a little bit, but know that you can get there and you want to do that, and when you do that, you actually activate the RAS system in your brain and then your subconscious actually starts to do the work here. That’s the cool part, I would say.
So it starts with a conversation, and when you work with your clients, they probably have a more realistic idea around something along the lines of, “I’ll have a dozen clients,” or ––
No. To be honest with you, most small business owners that come to me really have no clue about point B at all. It’s very, very rare, especially the smaller ones, especially like under a million dollars. I mean, they might be setting some budgets and some targets but do they really know where they want to be from a directional standpoint? And it’s not just about a revenue number. It’s not about just getting to a million dollars or $500,000. It’s about what type of business are you actually building to?
And so, if people have more vague ideas, is part of the conversation asking someone, okay, if you say you want to grow the business, why do you want to grow the business? Why does this business need to get bigger as opposed to you just being happy where you are and just wanting to tweak a few other things about the business, say, it’s off boarding some of the tasks that you just really don’t enjoy doing?
Yeah, 100 percent. I mean, most of the time, most business owners don’t actually know what their options are and so we don’t know what we don’t know, but there’s definitely a lack of going out there and doing that research and saying, “Okay, well, what’s the possibility of what –– am I gonna sell this business? Am I keeping it? Am I handing it over to my children?” What are you actually trying to do with the business ultimately is a good starting point to figure that out and then what’s your mission. My mission is to help 100,000 small business owners. I’m very clear on what my mission is. And so, with that, it’s easy for me to determine and work backwards on how I’m going to do that and realistically figure out what the strategy is, helping them understand what is the possibilities and then, from that, their why and, actually, most business owners have limited themselves and when they do the exercise with us, they’re like, “Oh, wow. I can actually do this.”
I see. So you’re saying as much as some people will shoot the moon and come up with something along the lines of, “I wanna be the CEO of Google by next year,” something also is really not going to happen unless something ridiculously crazy happens, but you’re saying more often people are limiting themselves in the sense that what they think they can accomplish is way more small scale than what they’re actually possibly capable of doing.
Yeah, and I think being a small business owner is emotional.
So once they define it and they kind of understand what it is, it suddenly becomes actually achievable. And so we get them out of their head and kind of onto paper is probably the best way to describe it, and by doing that, suddenly, the roadmap really presents itself and becomes very visible. I’m helping them develop the framework to be able to do that.
I see. So I live in Denver, Colorado, so it’s like kind of looking at a map, say, before the United States highway system was built and saying, “I wanna get to Santa Fe, New Mexico,” and seeing, okay, what am I going to do? How am I going to climb over the Palmer Divide and all this stuff? But then after that, being kind of after the interstate highway is built, just seeing this Interstate 25 that you could just kind of take there.
Yeah. And worse than that, as a small business owner, if you don’t know where you’re starting, we call that our point A, if I’m not realistic about where I am today, you don’t even know you’re in Denver, Colorado. You don’t know where you’re starting from. And that’s the problem. Most people start January the 1st, they have these great ideas and they have this vision maybe of where they want to go, vaguely, of what they want to achieve, but they don’t say, “Actually, where am I at today?” If you don’t really have a true point B, you’re somewhere off having a sandwich sat in a cafe waiting for things to happen and your point B just suddenly pop up, you’re not actually even really going in a direction, and that’s the burnout. That’s the constant emails, the posting on Facebook without real purpose. That’s us just doing these tasks every single day that don’t actually drive us anywhere because we don’t know where we’re driving to.
Yeah. And it reminds me a lot of work environments that I’ve found myself in in the past where people will always have their list of tasks, the boxes to check as well as like, right now, your Q2 goals and one of the things that I’ve observed in a lot of larger organizations where. I do think there’s also a lot of this kind of wasted effort is people not even reflecting of, okay, why does this task need to be done?
Yeah, what’s the purpose behind the vision, and I think the companies that do a great job of that really see this rapid growth because they’re not just saying to you, “Hey, I need you to complete these ten tasks,” I’m saying to my staff, “Hey, let’s go help 100,000 people. How do we do that?” It’s a much different conversation than me saying, “Hey, can you go post these ten posts,” that don’t really have any true purpose but then, for me, if I know I want to reach 100,000 people this week, I might be like, “Great. How do we reach 250 this week?” So, as a team, the collective or the conversation is completely different. So when you’re driving them to a mission or a purpose or a vision, the conversation is completely different and people become part of that journey with you.
And is part of it getting out of the mindset of like do, do, do because, although we do want to be productive, sometimes, when you’re not sure why you’re doing something and you’re not sure if this is leading you where you want to go, it does take a little bit of, as you said, like this reflection of even revisiting because you could be point A to point B and then halfway through the year, your point A is now somewhere you’ve gone, which may be on the way to point B, it may be in a different direction or something like that, we have to reassess and say it’s okay for me to take a day and not do any tasks but spend that time figuring out what needs to be done next, where I am, and where I’m going.
Yeah. I mean, I always say to people to do two really key things. One is, if you know what your point B is, try and get it into a sentence or two sentences and write it down every single day. Every single day be the first thing that you do because then every decision you make that day is aligned with the direction in which you’re going, and that direction almost acts like a magnet because it pulls us towards it versus all the chaos that pulls us backwards. And so then the next piece is, if we get that, then we get to go to that next level and really understand how to maximize our time and make different decisions.
And then tell me a little bit about your Business Power Hub, your kind of system, the manner in which you work with your clients, and the manner in which that whole program works?
The Business Power Hub is completely free. It’s a platform that we offer. Our goal with the Business Power Hub is we feel like so many business owners aren’t really awake to what is actually happening in their business and so we decided to give the platform away for free so that people could come in, go to a session, go to a coaching session, see what happens, and just understand that life could be different and then we offer our breakthrough program, which is our main core product, which is a 90-day program where we literally help somebody go from point A to point B in 90 days, building their tactical plan, that takes about the first seven days, and then for the next 90 days, we support them every week with coaching and accountability to get them to a result. So we hold them to the path that they’re on and that really breaks the habits and changes what they’re currently doing.
And where would someone listening right now access the Business Power Hub if they’re interested?
Yeah, they just literally go to businesspowerhub.com and you can log in for free and join and you’ll see me in there, coffee on a Friday or I just did a session in there today. We’re live and active all of the time.
And so thinking about the whole idea from the standpoint of someone that’s first starting a business and so your point A is going to be kind of just, “I have an idea,” and maybe I’ve registered a web domain or done some like rudimentary stuff, is it possible for that person to get somewhere successful without any experience of burnout, overwhelm, or the types of things where you have that day where your brain is just going in 18 different directions?
For sure. I mean, I think that is definitely about really determining where you want to go to start with.
We, as business owners, have these great ideas, but if we don't build the roadmap or understand the tactics that are going to get us there, then how do we know what actions need to be taken? Share on XAnd I think there is a point A for a small business owner even with an idea because they have to really determine what skills do I actually have? I mean, if I’m an engineer and I’m developing an engineering product but I have no sales and no marketing skills, then that’s my point A. If I don’t have any money to spend on a budget, then that’s my point A. So I think no matter where any business starts, they always have a point A and that’s the reality of the situation. And the more real you can be, the quicker you’re going to get them. Like if I think I’ve got $10,000 and I don’t have $1,000 and I don’t have a budget or I’m not taking real action, I’m not getting anywhere, I’m just spinning my wheels.
Let’s just say someone’s in a scenario where they have a job, they don’t hate it but it’s not really doing it for them, it’s not really bringing them that real sense of purpose, that sense of value that we all crave, and they have an idea, maybe it’s not perfectly groomed out but they come and they just think something along the lines of, “I should be a public speaker,” just something a little bit like that, what do you think prevents most people in that particular scenario from ever doing anything to change where they are?
I think that would be the fact that they don’t take action, that there’s this knowing-doing gap that doesn’t get executed by most people. We know we want to do something or we know how to do something but we don’t take the action to do it. And so if you really, truly want to do something, then you’ve got to go explore the options and determine if you do or don’t, and what’s the risk or the reward from doing that and then figuring out your next three steps and deciding if you want to take them. Ultimately, I think people are trying to make two bigger decisions versus, first of all, it’s an exploratory place, “Am I actually going to make money? Is this really going to happen? What would be my obstacles?” and then taking it to the next level, whereas they’re thinking they got to just jump straight out of their job into the fire and then go run a business, and that’s not really the reality of how it should work.
I see. So there’s other actions you need to take because, sometimes, someone might have those doubts, like you said, like, “Am I going to make money from this? Am I actually any good at this? Do I just have this idea in my head?” and so thinking about it, it sounds like what you’re saying is that’s better to take action in an experimental sense of just, say, go up to a bunch of people and say, “Hey, I loaded this video of me speaking onto YouTube. Can you check it out and tell me would you hire me to speak at your event?”
Yeah. Had that exact case the other day, I did a one-on-one call with somebody in the Hub for free and they said to me they wanted to have a headphone company where they were giving business owners really good quality headsets. And so I said to the guy, have you put some stuff on YouTube? Have you put your opinions out there? Are people interested in your opinions? Have you gone onto Amazon and chosen five different headphones and got an affiliate link and been pushing it to see if anybody purchases it based on what you’re saying? Those would be good starting points to just test the methodology to see what’s happening. And most people are waiting, waiting for perfect versus just go test, go do, go see what you can start to create.
So, what would you say to someone who maybe even would be open to the idea of testing a little bit but just feels like really overwhelmed with their life as it is? Say, your job is having a really stressful period and your kids are acting up or all the other things, you have a parent, elderly parent with health problems, etc., so they are just struggling to find the energy to even do something and they’re like, “Well, that little energy I have, I need it to be that ideal situation.”
Well, the point B, if you have a point B that’s strong enough is going to give you energy in itself, because that’s direction. And the second piece is, I mean, you only know how much time you actually have. So if you only have one hour on a Saturday where you can go sit in Starbucks and map out your plan and work on your business, then you need to decide what you can achieve in the four hours in a month that you have and set yourself a goal to say, “Okay, I wanna achieve X,” and see if you can do it. I mean, that would be a good starting point. I mean, people don’t have to start with 40 hours a week, you can start with one or two hours and see what the objective is to go get that.
And I bet it feels better for some people too that even if your reality isn’t specifically changing, you’re still stuck in the job that isn’t really doing it for you or you’re still stuck in the same life patterns that that one hour a week that you’re dedicating to just working on this thing just makes it feel like, well, at least there’s something going toward the possibility of something different.
Yeah. Most people waste 40 percent of their time in their business because they jump from task to task and they don’t have structure and they’re not time blocking and so they’re scattered. Maybe number one step for any business owner is learn to effectively manage your time, where you can gain 40 percent of your time. I mean, I say to small business owners if you don’t time block and you don’t structure your day, in reality, you’re losing 90 days a year. So all the business owners that come to me that say they don’t have the time and they don’t have the money and they never get a vacation because they don’t have time to go off, I always say to them you’re already losing 90 days a year. That’s a massive number. So maybe before you start the business, the goal is to figure out what you can reclaim.
So, theoretically, right now, there’s someone out there, or a lot of people out there, who have no structures to their tasks and lose 90 days per year and are also kind of getting trapped into some of these doom scrolling, infinite scrolling loops on some of these addictive social media platforms and losing another 90 days a year just to like, “Okay, I’m pulling my phone out and letting an algorithm choose what I watch for a couple hours every day.” And so that can actually, 90 plus 90, add up to almost half the year. That’s a lot of time. And so it’s good to just point out that, there are probably some of you all out there listening today right now, having so much time you can kind of reclaim from both the unnecessary social media scrolling and some of these tasks that are kind of thrown aimlessly around with no direction.
Completely. We just literally talked about time blocking and the scrolling, but what about the chaos that people have in their lives that they don’t deal with? I mean, we have a great exercise where I literally say to a small business owner, “List every piece of chaos in your personal life and in your business life,” the emails, maybe the garden’s not clean or the wardrobe’s not good, like list every single thing and tell me how it impacts you, and then we do this cool exercise where I say, “Once you’ve written it out, tell me the date that this started, and then tell me how many days you’ve allowed this chaos to be there,” and there’s suddenly this eye opening light bulb moment where they allowed it to happen, and it happened to them, and that’s a lot of the time life in our businesses, they happen to us versus for us or with us. And you’ve got to flip the script on that. You get to control these pieces. You get to control your time, you get to control your chaos, and you get to control your vision and where you’re going and what your direction is.
So, one of the things I think of a scenario is one of your family members just suddenly, or maybe not suddenly, always has been, but suddenly becomes a chaos factory, a drama factory. Every single minute, they’re ranting about something. They’re ranting about why does this have to exist, why do these people have to be like that. How do you control something like that?
Well, first of all, I call them energy vampires because they’re going to suck the life out of you, literally. And I think first point is acknowledge them, acknowledge that that is what they’re actually doing to them because majority of the time we’re a little bit like the frog in the boiling water, we become immune to these things and we don’t actually realize what’s taking place, and that, I think, by just understanding where your time or your energy gets drained is really key and set some clear boundaries, like don’t get involved in the conversation. Limit what you are willing and not willing to do. But if you have a point B, a lot of these things will automatically come naturally because you will feel as if they’re getting in the way of your progress. When somebody gets in the way of progress, we tend to stop it.
What happens is when we don't really have a clear point B, we allow it to happen because our brain isn't giving us any other filters that say, “Hey, we got something better to do with our time.” Share on XAnd that’s really the cool piece with that point B, when we come back to that is you get to activate those filters and your brain says, “Hey, this is not right. Warning sign, we don’t wanna waste time here.”
So, having that clear point B is going to prevent kind of all the scenarios, right? So one scenario is I opened up Instagram and, suddenly, 45 minutes of my life has gone by and then those people will say, “Hey, wait a second, this 45 minutes of my life hasn’t really helped me. It hasn’t even really been restful,” which I want to acknowledge that actual genuine rest is an important thing for us to have, the same way going to some event where people are just complaining about this, complaining about that, freaking out over every new story that ever happens, etc. And the other form of, talk about clutter around the house a bit, do you oftentimes end up having some of your clients, the people you work with, doing things like, I’m going to set aside next Saturday to just declutter all the mess, do a spring meeting, as we would say at this time of year?
Yeah. I mean, I have people that have come up to me after I’ve spoken on stage and talked about eliminating a chaos exercise, and the next day come up and cried out of relief because they suddenly have just started to deal with the stuff that’s around them that is chaotic and just it becomes this overwhelm, we just seem to build it up and build it up and, suddenly, it becomes this overwhelming task. And I always say with the chaos list, the cool part of this is we break it down to what are all the things that make it chaotic? So it’s not just one thing. But then, if you know the things that make it chaotic, how easy is it to determine the things that make it not chaotic? We call it eliminating the chaos. How do I eliminate it? And then pick one thing every day and trying to eliminate one piece of chaos, and, suddenly, you start to really be focusing on a growth mindset versus scarcity, which is that chaos just creates that scarcity mindset, which is, “I can’t do this. I don’t have the time, I don’t have the money. I feel overwhelmed.” That’s all scarcity.
Now, I do need to ask if people going to this program and trying to eliminate some of this chaos, if it ever leads to breakups?
Of marriages?
Marriages, relationships of all kind, whether someone’s like in a partnership or someone’s just like poly or anything else, but does it ever lead to someone having to say, “I need to end this relationship if I don’t want this amount of stress in my life”?
I mean, it did for me personally. I mean, I had a very, very big consultancy company, I was a turnaround expert, and I just got to the point where I’d built this business and was in a marriage that was very unhappy and I wouldn’t necessarily say it was chaos but I’d say to you that it wasn’t the life that I wanted because I didn’t really have true sight at that point B. I think the piece that I think is key is when you figure out the chaos, the cool part is you can figure out who’s responsible for it, right? And if we allow it, then there is a piece where we’re responsible for it. I mean, my suggestion to anybody would be is clear the chaos and then see where you guys stand from that point forward. It’s very difficult to build anything that’s going to grow or any relationship of any meaning when every single day you’re fighting for everything, your money or time or space or living in that chaos. How does anything healthy grow in that?
Don’t instantly right away go to like blaming your partner, especially if it’s in a longer term relationship, because there might be something about your interpretation of stuff or something about the chaos, but then afterward, maybe you’ll determine that.
I think blame is too easy. People give out blame, I think, reflect on yourself first. What’s your role in it? What’s your responsibility? How long have you allowed it to happen? When did you stop it not happening? There’s a thousand million questions I always think to ask before we get to, “This is your fault, not my fault,” and I think that’s a good starting point.
So you touched a little bit into your personal story but how did you come about to start Business Powerhouse?
I had started my consultancy business where I was probably about 25 years old, and I had run a recruitment headhunting company and got offered the opportunity to go fix a company that was broken and went in there and did it, did a great job, went from London to New York, started to build my consultancy business, moved to the States when I was 30 years old, just had my son, he was about three months old and I had an 8-year-old at the time, and so I’d only been in the United States for about a year, and I had a senior person in my company that didn’t have the same goal as I had or the vision, I guess I maybe didn’t paint the vision clear enough for the business, and he, on the side, was setting up his own business, and so I, at that point, realized I was about to lose everything because he was taking all of my clients and so restarted from scratch. But, at that point, I activated my survival mode because, suddenly, I didn’t have the finances, wasn’t going to get the visa I was here for and so had to really go out there and work my ass off to get to that next level. And I never stopped. And so, eight years later, I kind of just continued and continued working and working never to be in that position again, but had not built a life that I wanted. And so then I was just about to have my 40th birthday and I thought this is not the life I want. This is not the marriage I want to be in. This is not the business I want to build. And so I went to a Tony Robbins event and got a bit of a wake-up call on the life that I actually really wanted and really started to understand that point B and that vision and that I had lost sight of that for myself and started to create that and build that, moved from Texas to Charleston with my kids and I gave up my big consultancy business and I decided I wanted to help small business owners and I wanted them never to be in that position that I had found myself in they didn’t need to be and I hadn’t needed to be, but I had put myself in that position because I didn’t know the answer to that. I didn’t understand the power of mindset. I didn’t understand those frameworks. I had all the tools I needed because I fixed other people’s businesses for a living, but I didn’t get the power of that true direction, and that’s the cool piece. By combining everything that I used to do for the turnarounds and creating these frameworks and plans and tactical plans with this mindset piece, we just create such powerful small businesses. It’s so cool.
And what is the importance of the mindset piece? Is mindset the first thing people need to work on before anything else?
Yes, I think so. I think if you don’t have clarity and you don’t have a growth mindset, it’s very hard to build a business. I mean, I struggle every day to –– I mean, I’m giving the Hub away, there’s an app and all of these things to say to business owners, like, literally, if you spent 15 minutes every day learning something new in your business, what compounding effect would that do? And if all your listeners are out there right now and they put their hand up to be like do you actually spend 15 minutes a day learning something new about a business that you don’t know how to build, and the answer, I would think, for 99 percent of people would be no. And so how do you grow something if you don’t invest time in doing that?
I know people who do more than that much meditating every day, which is also a very good practice.
Very, very good practice, but we don’t spend 15 minutes a day, 1 percent of your day focused on growing your business.
So it sounds like you had your mindset shift probably coincide with this Tony Robbins event that you went to. What did it feel like once you had that? Was it an instant shift in your mindset that led to you building your business or was it something that kind of had a little bit of a gradual step back, step forward type of thing?
No, it was pretty profound. I was in a room with –– there must have been about 15,000 people in New Jersey with one of his like earlier kind of events and we were, basically, he was doing this Dickens Process where you go fast forward 10 years, and in the beginning, he said to people if the person next to you is crying or upset, nothing changes in your life, where will you be in 10 years, and I remember looking around all these people in the room and in the noise in this room just echoed, like it was harrowing, it was like this crazy noise of all these really unhappy people and I turned around and I was looking around, thinking, “What is wrong with these people?” and then I suddenly had this reality check that I had no emotional connection to my future. I didn’t see it as being terrible. I didn’t see it at all. There was nothing there for me. So I remember going to the back of the room and saying to the woman, “What other Tony Robbins events do you have that I can sign up for?” and she’s like, “Oh, we’re not even there yet, love. It’s like day three,” and I was like, “No, I’ve gotta do something like right now. This is not good.” And I remember in that moment knowing for the first time, not I didn’t see a future for myself, I couldn’t see it, like it wasn’t there for me, like I’d completely lost sight of any direction of where I was going. Had a lot of clients. I used to talk on stage and say I used to live in United, I was the girl that sometimes had two meals a day on a United plane. I was traveling from Chicago to New York. I worked for a lot of the private equity companies where they purchased companies. If they were in trouble, then I would go in to fix them. And so I was traveling all the time with this massive amount of responsibility and this massive amount of $500, $600 million companies that I was going in and fixing because they were broken and going to shut the doors and so it was just overwhelming. I was just exhausted. I mean, I was very, very good at what I did but I just didn’t have a life to go with it. For three months, you basically had to save something that was going to fail.
I see. So you were not having any time to just sit and envision what your future is going to be.
Yeah, and I think I was in an unhappy marriage so I didn’t really want to go home. I had two children and so I was trying to manage having two kids in an unhappy marriage and run this business that was incredibly busy and full on and so I think I just lost sight of really what I was trying to achieve at all.
And then somewhere in that, you also decided that you wanted to work with entrepreneurs and small business rather than the big business that you’ve been working with before. Was that a conscious decision? Did something about small business interest you more?
I had worked for a couple of small businesses that some private equity company people that I knew that were client. I was working on big projects for them and they’d asked me to go help them out for some smaller in-person investments. And they just –– I was in front of the business owners. It was just a completely different dynamic. These small business owners, they wanted it. They had the drive. We weren’t trying to get through all the red tape to make changes and we made change real quick and I remember leaving a couple of them and thinking that was pretty cool, like that was actually really fun for the first time in a long time. And so when I started that Tony Robbins journey and over that next eight months when I was kind of figuring out what I wanted, once I realized that I didn’t want to be that person, I couldn’t do my job and be a girl that was on the plane all the time and not be the mother that I really wanted to be and be with my kids, so I knew I had to make change to my life and so I started, my first step was I said, “Okay, you know what? I’m not gonna travel more than 40 nights a year,” and I did that in the first year but I very quickly realized that you couldn’t go and change a $600 million company that was broken and not be traveling, like it was never going to work. And so for that, I decided that I really had this calling to go help these small businesses. And, actually, on my last ever Tony Robbins event that I went to, in the package that I bought, on that last day, I wrote down the Business Powerhouse and made the decision that I was going to go and help the small business owners and that was really my purpose and I wrote down the 100,000 small business owners that I’m going to help.
Oh, nice. And then what has it been like now that you’re helping small businesses into big businesses? Do you feel a very different sense of what your life is?
Yeah, I have an amazing life. I got remarried. I now live in Charleston versus Texas. I definitely live in my purpose every single day and I get the opportunity to help small business owners and it’s a very amazing position to be on. I mean, I literally got off a call with one of my breakthrough groups this afternoon, and one of the girls said to me, she’s like, “You always have everything that I need at the next stage that I need it,” and so, for me, I’ve been used to dealing with these million-piece puzzles and these massive corporations that helping the small businesses and figuring out what they need, it is easy for me to do that, and so I’m able to give them this massive amount of insight.
So, I mean, I’m a business coach but not really in the sense of the word. I’m like almost an evolution guide or a results-driven type of I help get results.
That’s really nice. And a lot of people have also talked about the balance between small and large businesses, market concentration and kind of where things are trending right now with some industries being really solidified with two or three really big companies, big players. Do you have any thoughts on where we’re going given that it looks like big businesses are getting bigger, yet we also seem to have a generation of people coming up now that have more of a desire for entrepreneurship and more of a desire to build the things on their own?
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of change taking place right now. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the marketplace as much as there’s a lot of opportunity. And I think anybody that has a clear plan of what they want to do, as long as you’re in an industry that’s growing and not dying, that’s really the critical piece. It’s very hard to build a business in a dying market. So if you can choose a business and a direction in a growing market and you know where you want to go and you build a tactical plan and you have direction, there is no reason why you can’t be successful. And I don’t think it’s about being a big business or a small business. I think it’s about strategy, determination, and being very clear on where you want to go.
And just for a little gut check for maybe some people listening out there with some ideas, are there any industries that come to mind when you talk about dying markets?
When you go into any industry, you can literally ChatGPT that industry and figure out whether it’s a dying market or not. I mean, I literally had a client last week that’s in the promotional space. And so a lot of the promotional space is starting to be more of a dying market because we’re looking at more environmentally friendly and different things and so this was a big eye opener. For a few moments, she was like, “Oh, this is not good,” and I said, “Well, it is. It’s a good opportunity, because you have the opportunity to pivot at this point. And so why don’t you figure out what the market needs versus just carrying on blindlessly in your market and not knowing?” For you to be a growing business, you have to be 10 percent above the growth rate of whatever industry you’re in.
I also got to ask you, what are Tony Robbins events like? I haven’t been to one personally but I’ve heard people talk about it.
They’re amazing. I mean, I’m very sad he doesn’t really do many live events at all anymore and so everything’s online and it’s not the same, like being in a room with all those people and with him live. Actually, I was very lucky. I went to a ClickFunnels Conference, the last one, a few months ago and he was actually there and he closed the show out for three hours and it was amazing and that was probably five years since I’ve seen him live since COVID. And so he is amazing live, amazing. And he’s great online but it’s not the same energy, like he brings the energy.
Yeah. It’s hard to get the same energy from anything online versus in person because there’s just so many factors, whether you talk about just spiritually around like kind of experiencing the energy or just seeing things with all five senses.
A hundred percent. You get little bit lost behind the screens. I mean, I think it was great for so many people being able to work from home and being in Zoom and we still get to see each other face to face and connect, but it’s not the same as the actual connection that we get to make with other human beings.
Yeah. And, also, you probably get to meet a lot of people too.
So many people. So many people that I’m now friends with. And then not just that, because you’ve been to his events, so many people connect with you because more and more, it’s kind of a snowball effect, which is amazing.
I’m not sure what all exists in every city like Charleston, but I know in Denver, we have like Colorado Startup Week once a year, we have events like founders groups, happy hours, One Million Cups presentation stuff, where you can kind of go and tap into the community of people who are doing similar things. And I think it’s been, from that experience I have, which is a little bit different but somewhat similar, it’s kind of just been wonderful being around those people. The phrase, “Show me your friends, I’ll show you your future.”
Yeah. No, I agree with you. We do have our own networking event called Ignite that takes place every other Thursday. And so that’s online but we have people all over the world, small business owners, connecting with each other, and we do it in this round table environment, which is pretty cool because they actually really get to connect with each other. So we went and did a ton of research on the most effective way to get people to connect online that are not able to be in person so that we can help them really maximize their time.
Nice. And then with respect to anyone out there listening and kind of what people do on a day-to-day basis, now, we’ve touched base on this a little bit about the types of things that really clutter people’s minds, is there anything, any common activities that you feel are just things that people should generally stay away from if they want to be successful?
I think it’s more what you should lean towards than stay away from, but I think the thing you should stay away from is the not having a task list or just randomly doing tasks in any order at any time, not kind of blocking tasks or knowing what the purpose of what you’re trying to achieve on a daily basis. I would definitely say those were things that you should avoid. And if you want to lean into something, lean into gratitude or starting your day with five things that you’re grateful for or energizing your day or movement and just kind of feeding your brain in your growth mindset before you even start the day and seeing how much more effective your day will be because of that.
And then, do you have anything to say for people who are experiencing burnout, given that you experienced it and then start this program to help people either get out of it or never have to deal with it in the first place? But there might be people who are experiencing burnout to the point where maybe they just need to rest or go on a retreat for a while before they actually plan any activities around building or scaling a business.
I think the first thing I say to them is definitely stop. Just have an all stop and figure out where you’re at. But at the same time, you cannot do it alone. It’s very hard to get out of chaos and see perspective and understand what that looks like. Come find us. We are here for free to help you and get you out of that mode so take the help that is given to you. So many business owners stay struggling and they don’t need to, and that would be my biggest piece of advice. It’s like take the first step to do something to get you out of the chaos and put yourself in a place where you can continue to get out of the chaos, not just take that one quick thing or some massive plan that you’re never going to be able to achieve, just take one action step and put yourself in a place where you can actually stand a chance of succeeding.
So, if it’s someone that’s really burnt out, it could possibly just be the whole decluttering your house so you don’t have all these papers all over the place and it’s something that you can just kind of set aside some time to do.
Yeah. I mean, definitely just 10 minutes every day or 15 minutes every day to start dealing with the overwhelm. If we suddenly have to have three weeks’ worth of this has got to be done ,we’re never going to start. And that’s majority of the time, we create these things to be so big that we don’t take action because of the overwhelm that we’ve created by doing it.
Finally, where do you see yourself going in the future? What is your point B?
My point B is to help 100,000 people in the next three years. That’s my goal. We launched the Hub four or five months ago. We’ll hopefully break a thousand this month so if you know people, send them in our direction, and then we’ll start to grow, do lots of live events. We really want to focus on live events too and going into different cities and communities and helping them build small businesses and growing those pieces. And, for me, I really want to be able to live a balanced life of running this business that I love and being incredibly passionate about helping business owners and really fulfilling their lives and, at the same time, spending time with my four kids and my husband and seeing the world and living the adventure and having my best life, that’s what I really want for myself.
And I believe that’s what a lot of people want, whatever their pursuits are, we all want to live our best lives and have some sort of an impact.
Yes, and you have to know what your best life looks like. And that’s really the key. For everybody, it’s different. So by defining it, it helps you to figure out how you’re going to get there.
Well, that is wonderful. Claire, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, telling us all about how we can deal with some of these overwhelm, some of the stress, some of the chaos, but also, hopefully, for everyone out there listening, giving people hope that your experience in building a business or building whatever it is that you want in life, because it doesn’t have to be a business, it could be community group or something on the side, doesn’t have to be this overwhelm, this chaos, this stress that may be turning you off, maybe making you hesitate, that there is a balanced way by being more strategic about what we’re doing and really understanding where we want to go.
Thank you for having me.
And I would also like to thank everyone out there for listening today, whether it’s your first or your 160th episode of Action’ Antidotes, and hope you can continue to be inspired by these stories and continue to just believe that something more is possible for yourself as well as so many other people around you.
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About Claire Ansell
Claire Ansell is a business transformation expert and the visionary founder of the Business Power Hub, a dynamic platform designed to help entrepreneurs scale with clarity and confidence. With years of experience turning struggling businesses into success stories, Claire has developed a proven system that equips business owners with the strategies, tools, and operational frameworks needed to grow sustainably.
As a sought-after speaker and strategist, Claire specializes in helping entrepreneurs break free from overwhelm and take control of their businesses with intention. Her signature TAP System provides a clear roadmap for sustainable growth, ensuring business owners can streamline operations, maximize productivity, and step into true leadership.