Keala Kanae, the man who Went From Being Broke to Being a Millionaire Businessman

At 29 years old, he started out working in a coffee shop for minimum wage, having a 500 credit score, and living in his mom’s spare bedroom.

“I was so broke that I gave my girlfriend of 7 years a used purse that my mom was dropping off at Goodwill for a friend of hers. In other words, I gave her someone else’s trash for her birthday”, said Keala, who 7 months later quit that job and began his first 5-figure month as a “freelance marketer”.

Since then, he started to stand out at the highest standards, where he has been featured in Forbes, Huff Post, Entrepreneur, ABC News, and won more than 7 awards from Clickfunnels including their coveted Centurion Award for doing more than $50M in sales on his way to $100M.

Keala launched Inspirean in 2016 and earned over $20M in sales in its first year, providing many consulting services to help customers 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).

As leading an only company of its kind that focuses on both skill set and mindset as a dual approach to business growth, professional growth, self-mastery, and leadership, Keala assured that the high paced, rapid growth and scale taught him to be a master in this business.

“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”, expressed Keala.

But his first bad experience as an entrepreneur left him with a more valuable lesson for running a successful business. In 2018, after two years of rapidly scaling his company to over $40M in sales, Keala went through a difficult partnership breakup which led to eventually buying out my partner and rebranding the company. 

“The partnership split and all of the problems that come along with growing a company at breakneck speed have taught me a lot of leadership, team building, culture building, and how to be both an effective war-time CEO and Peace-time CEO”, stated Keala.

In recent years, the most difficult challenge was the arrival of the pandemic, becoming in a crisis that Keala had to take on like all the world’s entrepreneurs. However, his vision of more decentralized work environments, virtual teams, and the closing of their physical offices, enabled his company to be better prepared to withstand the pandemic.

For Keala, a successful entrepreneur needs to be ready for any situation that may occur internally or externally in his business. “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”, said Keala.

On other hand, he warns that entrepreneurs’ futures “are uncertain and their livelihood is constantly threatened by economic factors, competitors, technology changes, internal power struggles, organizational changes, market conditions, and more”.

That’s why Keala give some tips for the starting entrepreneurs, such as not surrendering to the struggle because for him building a business is hard and there will be periods of self-doubt, uncertainty, fear, criticism, loneliness, disbelief, and a whole host of other things that make most people cower. “Leaders don’t have that luxury. Find peace in the struggle”, recommend Keala.

Also, Keala suggests that entrepreneurs have to be prepared for chaos, enhancing and innovating their businesses constantly. “There is no time for being comfortable. Keep your teams growing, improving their processes, increasing their efficiency, mitigating losses. Complacency is the enemy. Invest in your people. One day it will be their turn to invest in you”, explained Keala.

Other tips that these American businessman shares are the learning to see the hidden order in the apparent chaos when the challenges forge a successful entrepreneur with the character and mind required to achieve his big ambition, the learning to interpret and appreciate the data, where a good analysis of a company’s statistics derive to meaningful decisions with measurable outcomes, and the identifying when to get comfortable to do nothing because is important to stop the progress as the situation is unclear.

Above all, Keala thinks that combining a professional experience of various industries and businesses could assure a successful development in any venture.

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