Keala Kanae is an American businessman that started as a worker in a coffee shop and now is the CEO and founder of a leading company that focuses on skillset and mindset as a dual approach to business growth, professional growth, self-mastery, and leadership.
At 29 years old, Keala earned a minimum wage, had a 500 credit score, and was living in his mom’s spare bedroom. He was so broke that he gave his girlfriend a used purse that his mom was dropping off at Goodwill for a friend of hers.
But his instinct to follow his dreams made him quit his job and begin his first 5-figure month as a “freelance marketer”. He hasn’t looked back since, achieving features with Forbes, Huff Post, Entrepreneur, ABC News, and winning more than 7 awards from Clickfunnels including their coveted Centurion Award for doing more than $50M in sales on their way to $100M.
With his enterprise Inspirean, he scaled to over $20M in sales in his first year by adopting a lot of concepts about business, operations, management, leadership, scaling economics, business finance, and helping his clients to become better leaders of themselves and their businesses through our two-pronged approach focusing on both skillset (marketing, sales, operations) and mindset (leadership, self-mastery).
“It’s the reason I can help our clients see fast growth while also seeing the potential pitfalls and obstacles ahead long before they’re a threat to the business and begin planning and/or adjusting accordingly”, said Keala.
Despite reaching a value of over $40M in sales in the second year, he went through a difficult partnership breakup which led to eventually buying out the partner and rebranding the company. When the partnership split, all of the problems that come along with growing a company at breakneck speed taught Keala other skills, such as leadership, team building, culture building, and how to be an effective war-time CEO and a Peace-time CEO.
This allowed Keala to strengthen its ability to control a company, anticipating several problems. An example of this was the limited impact on Inspirean after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. The company was prepared by closing its physical offices and preparing more decentralized work environments and virtual teams since 2018.
“Great leaders are those who can stay calm during the storm; remain poised, not poisoned, and convey confidence in adversity. They take none of the credit but all of the blame as they empower their teams to do what needs to be done regardless of the hours, circumstances, or workloads needed to achieve critical outcomes”, stated Keala.
For Keala, an entrepreneur must follow some recommendations to stay afloat in any condition and reap success for their companies, such as not surrendering to the struggle, the preparation for chaos, learning to see the hidden order in the apparent chaos, the learning to interpret and appreciate the data, and then identifying when to get comfortable to do nothing.