Keala Kanae is the founder and CEO of Inspirean LLC. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1982. This inspiring entrepreneur created his company to fulfill his vision of helping people become better leaders of themselves and their businesses. To achieve this, Kanae uses the two-pronged approach focusing on both skillset marketing -sales, operations-, and mindset -leadership, self-mastery-.
Kanae’s beginning as an entrepreneur is an inspiring story in itself. His journey began at 29, while he was working for a minimum wage, and was not able to support himself financially. “I was so broke 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.” A couple of months after this event, he decided to quit his job and venture himself as a freelance marketer. Within a month, he had already made a 5-figure salary. For Kanae, that was the start of his success story, and he has not looked back since.
Kanae founded Inspirean LLC in 2016, and within a year it scaled to over $20M in sales. “This high-paced, rapid growth and scale taught me a lot about business, operations, management, leadership, scaling economics, business finance, and more.” With Inspirean LLC, Kanae combined his 3 years of professional experience with his charisma and his personal story.
Kanae has overcome several hurdles in his personal and professional life before becoming an award-winning marketer. Kanae has been featured in Forbes, Huff Post, Entrepreneur, ABC News, just to name a few. Moreover, he has also won than 7 awards from Clickfunnels, including their coveted Centurion Award for doing more than $50M in sales. For these reasons, he can successfully help his clients see fast growth while also seeing the potential pitfalls and obstacles ahead long before they’re a threat to the business.
After the 2016-incredible rapid growth of his company, he had another professional life-changing event. In 2018, after two years of rapid scaling his company to over $40M in sales, Kanae experienced a difficult partnership breakup which lead to a company rebranding. “The partnership split taught me a lot of Leadership, team building, culture building, and how to be both an effective war-time CEO and Peace-time CEO.”
Amongst the pieces of advice that Kanae shares with entrepreneurs, he claims that ‘preparing for war’ is a key aspect of the entrepreneurial mindset. Kanae references the Navy seals, and how they prepare in advance: “they don’t prepare for war when it’s commenced.” He also advises keeping your teams growing, improving their processes, increasing their efficiency, and mitigating losses. Kanae’s philosophy for success is all about preparing for thought times during peaceful times. This warrior mentally is what has prepared him for tough business times, for example, the 2020 pandemic. For Kanae’s company, the pandemic home-office situation was not an issue, since they have been managing their team virtually for over a year and a half by that point.
Finally, another major tip from this inspirational entrepreneur is: “invest in your people. One day it will be their turn to invest in you.”
