Starting and Scaling up a Business with Claire Ansell

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! --- Listen to the podcast here: 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. --- 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 X And 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. Most small business owners, they actually have everything that they need already inside themselves, they just haven't activated it yet. 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. They tend to do a lot of self-sabotaging, a lot of, “I'm not gonna get my goals, I'm gonna be stuck in these weeds,” because then I don't actually have to go after what I really want, so I didn't actually fail because I never really truly defined it. So once they define it and they kind of understand w