Most small business owners start out doing everything themselves. In the early days, that can feel necessary, even sensible. Over time, it often becomes the very thing that limits growth and wears people down.
In this episode of Go Beyond Busy, Christine Abela speaks with John Anderton, Launch Director at Clarke Point, about what he has learned from more than 25 years in business and four very different ventures. The conversation centres on a question many business owners quietly wrestle with: how do you grow without ending up exhausted or trapped inside your own business?
John’s background spans food manufacturing, software, and global team structures. He has seen businesses grow rapidly, others stall, and many fail for reasons that had little to do with demand. One of the recurring themes he shares is the tension between working in the business and stepping back to shape how the business actually operates.
There are periods, especially in startups, where owners have to be hands-on. Action matters. Work has to get done. Problems need solving. John is clear about that. The issue arises when that phase never ends. When everything continues to depend on the owner, growth becomes fragile and stressful.
The conversation then turns to how work can be structured differently. John explains how offshore teams can support small businesses, not just through basic admin tasks, but through highly skilled roles such as estimators, designers, engineers, accountants, and project managers. The key point he makes is that location matters far less than clarity.
Clear roles, documented processes, and realistic expectations allow businesses to tap into global talent without losing control. John shares examples of businesses where owners focus on the work that truly needs their attention, while the bulk of execution, follow-up, and delivery is handled by well-structured teams elsewhere.
One example discussed is a business owner working only a handful of hours each week while managing a global operation that continues to grow steadily. That outcome did not come from shortcuts or hustle, but from careful thinking about how work flows through the business.
Another important part of the discussion is readiness. Not every business is immediately prepared to bring on remote team members. John explains when it makes sense to document processes first, when it is better to hire experienced people who can help shape those processes, and when bringing in a business consultant can save time and frustration.
This episode will resonate with business owners who feel stretched, who are carrying too much themselves, or who know something needs to change but are unsure where to start. It offers a grounded look at scaling that does not rely on hype or unrealistic promises.
John can be contacted at https://ClarkePoint.com
Want to read the transcript?
Introduction to Go Beyond Busy
[00:00:00] Bernard: Welcome to Go Beyond Busy.
[00:00:02] This episode features a conversation with John Anderton from Clarke Point, based in Melbourne. John has built and scaled multiple businesses over more than two decades, across manufacturing, software, and global team structures.
[00:00:16] The discussion covers what John wishes he had understood earlier about running a business, the balance between working in the business and stepping back to build systems, and how offshore teams can support growth when roles, processes, and expectations are clear.
[00:00:34] This is a practical conversation for business owners thinking about scale, structure, and smarter use of time.
Meet John Anderton: Business Journey and Insights
[00:00:41] Christine Abela: Hi, I am Christine from Go Beyond Busy. I’m here with John Anderton, who is with a company called Clarke Point, and he’s in Melbourne, Australia. How are you today, John?
[00:00:51] John Anderton: Good morning. I’m very well, thank you.
[00:00:53] Christine Abela: Very good. So tell me, John, what have you learned about running a business that you wish you’d known earlier?
[00:00:59] John Anderton: I’ve been in business for about 25 years now. I’m on to about my fourth business. I think the biggest thing for me is that balance between working on the business and working in the business. When I was younger, I read a lot of books like The E-Myth, and it’s all about working on your business. I’ve spent a lot of time working with different startups.
[00:01:17] I’ve taken a number of startups to be quite successful, but I’ve also been around a lot of startups that have failed. And there’s times in a startup where you have to work in the business, you have to actually get out there and do stuff. And if you don’t do that action, you’re not gonna have success.
Diverse Business Ventures: From Muffins to Software
[00:01:32] Christine Abela: So tell me, you’ve said you’ve run four businesses. What kinds of businesses have you run?
[00:01:37] John Anderton: It’s quite a diverse background. My first business actually it was a food manufacturing business. We made muffins we made 5,000 a day. We grew that business 460% in three years. My business partner ended up buying me out. He still runs it today, 20 years later. He’s got a machine that can make a hundred thousand muffins in a shift now. After that I turned around another struggling business. And then through actually my BNI chapter I pivoted. At the time the internet was coming out, this is sort of 2006, the internet was hitting business ready and I’d learned how to make websites when I was studying aerospace engineering in the nineties. And so I could see that it was changing the way people were gonna do business. And I started a software engineering business in 2006 called Butterfly. I built that up. At its peak, it had 54 staff, seven and a half million turnover. That’s. Australian dollars.
Clarke Point: Revolutionizing Offshore Staffing
[00:02:25] And then my current business is high quality offshore staff. We hire people mainly in the Philippines for Australian businesses. That’s Clarke Point.
[00:02:35] Christine Abela: Tell me about Clarke Point. It’s an unusual name.
[00:02:38] John Anderton: Yeah. Thanks. The name comes from Arthur C. Clarke. In 1964, there’s footage on YouTube, you can see it, he describes that in future work will be about communication technology, and connecting with people, not commuting. And he actually said you’ll be able to run your business just as easily from Bali as from Edinburgh.
[00:02:59] We’ve passed that point now. Most businesses haven’t realized it and haven’t taken advantage of it. Some definitely have. The future of business is hyper global connected, and we’re able to find really great specialists in all kinds of areas where you can have, the required talent in a high cost jurisdiction like Australia and New Zealand. And then, whatever work you’ve got elsewise done in jurisdictions where you’ve got access to great talent at a much lower rate.
[00:03:28] Christine Abela: So you’re a global recruiting company. Is that a summary?
Success Stories and Strategic Offshore Hiring
[00:03:32] John Anderton: Effectively. That’s a good way to think about. We’re often working with business owners that have never worked with offshore talent before. So there’s the strategic part to it as well.
[00:03:41] So for example, for a construction company, they do commercial air conditioning installation. We’ve helped them think through how they can access offshore talent. Now their challenge is: how do you hire enough people who are of good quality?
[00:03:54] And so for everyone that works at a desk in their business we’ve hired someone offshore. The estimator in Australia has got an estimator offshore. The CAD technician’s got a CAD technician offshore. We’ve got mechanical engineers, we’ve got designers, we’ve got bookkeepers.
[00:04:08] And in that way the Australian business can continue to grow. And yeah, they’ll have people on the ground doing installations, but supported by a team which is hybrid. Some in Australia, some offshore.
[00:04:19] Christine Abela: Just to be clear, you are helping businesses hire people who are located offshore, not helping them to hire people to bring them into their own country to work in person.
[00:04:31] John Anderton: That’s correct. So for about 20 years I have hired people overseas and brought them into Australia. And that’s tremendously expensive. So I’m quite experienced at that. But these days really to access rapid growth, organizations are better off to actually rethink how they’re doing their work and make use of of people offshore.
[00:04:54] And the challenge is to be creative in this area. For example, there’s farmers using drones driven by people in the Philippines to herd sheep, and electronic gates to move them between paddocks. Every time there’s a step change in technology, there’s more work can be done remotely.
Practical Advice for Small Businesses
[00:05:11] Christine Abela: Can you give me an example of how a small business might use Clarke Point?
[00:05:17] John Anderton: Yeah. Excellent. So I’m gonna describe, a one person business. So one person in Australia. Now this is a real example. One person in Australia, 20 people in the Philippines. He’s got a scientific B2B sales and marketing.
[00:05:34] Now they research organizations that they are going to sell to. He’s got a very well defined target audience. Within that he’s mapped out the personas of the buyers. He knows, he’s got the database of the organization and the decision makers within each organization. They have a really great outreach program that generates appointments. He in Australia does the appointments. But his sales offer is so good that it’s too good to refuse. He does it, it’s very strategic, it’s very smart.
[00:06:04] While he does that sort of 45 minute online chat with a person, with a potential client, there’s a virtual assistant either listening in, or working with a AI note taking later will do the proposal, do the follow up when the client goes ahead.
[00:06:19] Everything’s done offshore. The actual work’s done offshore. The accounting is done offshore. The account management done offshore, the project management.
[00:06:27] And so what you end up having is, one person in Australia who’s only really working six hours a week turning over a very substantial amount of money at a very high profit margin and growing at 20, 30% per annum. One of the things he’s just done, because he has really mapped down his sales process like clockwork. And it really does work without any of his involvement up until that sort of initial video chat. He’s now pointing that sales machine at the US market. And so there’s really almost no limit to the upside in his business.
[00:07:02] That’s one person working six hours a week.
[00:07:05] Christine Abela: So I’ve got a couple of questions here. One is that your example is someone in Australia, but can that person be in America or in the UK or New Zealand or wherever?
[00:07:16] John Anderton: A hundred percent. Location doesn’t matter. It helps if you’re in a nearby time zone. But to be honest, it’s probably better if he’s not in Australia, moving to Singapore or some other lifestyle destination, maybe Bali. But these days the technology’s so good, you could be anywhere. And this is where, if you structure your business correctly, there’s no reason you can’t take your family on a holiday through Europe, and you might have to have a few meetings in the middle of the night. That’s really the downside. And the clients don’t even know.
[00:07:44] Christine Abela: The other question was, you’ve talked about structuring your business correctly, having the processes documented. Is that sort of a prerequisite? What if you’re not at all organized, is that what you call in a business consultant like me to help with that sort of thing? Or does Clarke Point help with that as well?
[00:08:01] John Anderton: Excellent question. So just to be clear, Clarke Point does not do that.
[00:08:05] So typically we find our customers fall into a couple of categories. For the medium to large businesses, they’ve already got great processes and they just need some advice around supporting. Okay, so we normally onboard in person. How do we onboard remotely?
[00:08:18] For the smaller business it depends. For the really solo one man band type per business, if they try and get all the processes documented first, what I find is they tie themselves into knots and they just never get started. So I recommend basically one of two strategies.
[00:08:34] The first strategy is effectively you hire somebody good who’s experienced, maybe you pay a bit more, and then you get them to document the processes as you onboard them, and you use that as a checkpoint, to see if they have understood it. Of course, if you can afford it, the better way to do it is to you engage a business consultant who will set it up properly, very well.
[00:08:55] And that’s, do you wanna just go to the answer quickly or do you wanna try and map it out yourself?
Specialized Talent and Clarke Point’s Unique Approach
[00:09:00] Christine Abela: is this just for people who know how to write stuff and write blog posts and do ChatGPT and stuff? Or can you actually hire somebody who’s a lot more qualified, like an architect or a designer or somebody like that?
[00:09:12] John Anderton: Great question. So we mainly hire, in the Philippines, there’s 110 million people. We’ll often get two and a half thousand applicants for roles, sometimes 9,000 applicants. There is amazing talent there that run everything. And to be honest, you can get specialties in the Philippines that you cannot get in Australia and probably New Zealand.
[00:09:31] Because companies have been offshoring for decades now, it can be quite possible to find the most obscure talent overseas that already knows local market. For example we have a client that does balustrades for high-rise buildings. We hired a CAD technician who specializes in balustrades for high-rise buildings, and they have experience designing balutrades for a company in the same market. Familiar with the building standards. They know the way of working. And that’s a CAD technician for a highrise balustrade expert.
[00:10:10] We’ve placed property accountants to manage commercial properties. It’s very specialized. The software used is called Yardi. Almost nobody’s ever heard of it. We found someone with over a decade experience managing a hundred commercial properties for a Brisbane company. Not just do they know that software. When the prior company moved to that software, they flew the person from the Philippines to Brisbane to be in the office to supervise the data transfer.
[00:10:38] Our specialty is working with companies to figure out the roles that they can take advantage of, and then go to market and find subject matter experts in whatever field. And sometimes that takes a few iterations to, to really hit the nail on the head.
[00:10:55] For example, for a printing business we found customer service representatives very easily. That’s the one we got 9,000 applicants for. We ended up hiring somebody who actually happened to have lived on the Gold Coast for 10 years working in a print shop, speaks the language perfectly well, understands how to estimate jobs or quote jobs, and do the sales component in terms of the sort of inbound selling, closing deals.
[00:11:19] Then we went to get pre-press operators. Now that’s the language used in the Australian market, pre-press operator. We only had 90 applicants. Now in the Philippines, that means there’s something wrong. So we are changing the language on that and we’re going back to market with slightly different wording. And we’ll get at least 500 applications.
[00:11:36] Christine Abela: There’s lots of VA recruiting type of places around. Why is Clarke Point different?
[00:11:43] John Anderton: There’s really two main differences. The first is we are absolutely specialists at finding subject matter experts. People who are high quality in what they do. Experts in the mandatory and nice to have experience, the right level of spoken English for the role. Great attention to detail, demonstrated longevity in roles.
[00:12:03] The second thing is, the market for offshore talent is heavily dominated by players that have been around since before the pandemic. And their model is quite different. So they’ll often keep 60 to 80% of the money for themselves. and they’ll basically keep a massive margin.
[00:12:21] Now we do it for about half that. As a result, the offshore talent gets 75% or more money in their pocket. As a result, we attract a bigger and better pool of talent and you retain them for a longer period of time.
Conclusion and Contact Information
[00:12:36] Christine Abela: Thank you very much for joining me today, John. I’ll put all John’s contact details and stuff underneath this video or wherever it is you are watching this. And if any of you are interested in having a talk with John or with me about your business, I can do a free business strategy session then get in touch.
[00:12:53] Thank you, John.
[00:12:54] John Anderton: Thanks, Christine.
[00:12:55] Bernard: If this conversation with John Anderton sparked ideas about structuring your business, building better support around you, or creating more space to focus on the work that matters, you can find John’s contact details under where you are viewing this episode.
[00:13:12] A free business Strategy Session with Christine is also available for business owners who want a clear, calm look at what comes next.
[00:13:21] Details for both can be found at GoBeyondBusy.com.
[00:13:25] Thanks for listening.
1 February 2026 · Season 3 : Season 3 · Episode 5
13 Min, 38 Sec · By Christine Abela
John Anderton shares how small businesses can scale by changing structure and support, not by working longer hours.
