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Bernadette McClelland has lived the story many of your clients are living right now. She went from corporate sales at Xerox to owning a retail business in country Victoria, Australia — and then through a health crisis, a staffing breakdown, and full bankruptcy. In this conversation, she shares the mindset tools that carried her through, and why the bookkeepers who understand those tools are better positioned than they know.
Bernadette was deep in the middle of a classic E-Myth trap — the owner as the business — when a serious injury put her in bed for most of 2009. Staff couldn't step up, and she hadn't built the systems that would have let them. One specific gap: she had an accountant but no bookkeeper, because she had taken over the bookkeeping herself as part of the business handover. "I thought I could do it," she says. It's a mistake she's long since corrected, and one she sees echoed across thousands of small businesses.
Coming out of bankruptcy with nothing, Bernadette developed a deceptively simple mental habit. "I change the word problem to the word situation. And when I change that one word, it just flips something in my brain where I can now work on it and it turns it into something objective." She likens it to the Situation Room in the White House — a space where emotion gives way to clear-headed action. For bookkeepers who sit with clients in financial distress, this single reframe is a practical tool worth passing on.
Bernadette draws on Nassim Taleb's concept of antifragility — the idea that some systems don't just survive stress, they grow stronger because of it. Resilience, she argues, is about coping; antifragility is about growth. "We need weight-bearing exercise. We need that pressure on our skeleton because if we don't, we atrophy." Her model moves through five stages — survival, stasis, success, strategy, and significance — and disruption is the mechanism that pushes people from one level to the next. For bookkeepers building a practice, knowing which stage a client (or you) is in changes the kind of advice that's actually useful.
The conversation turns to creativity — not the artistic kind, but the kind required for critical thinking, decision-making, and moving a business forward. Bernadette points to research on Alzheimer's and ADD to explain what being "always on" is doing to our brains, and draws a practical line between constant distraction and creative output. Warren Buffett's daily thinking time and Bill Gates' reading retreats aren't luxuries — they're the conditions that produce insight. "It's in those power-down moments where we get those ahas." For bookkeepers, even 30 seconds of focused breathing before a prospect call can shift the entire tone.
Bernadette was told three times she didn't have what it took to be in sales. She proved them wrong, eventually leaving Xerox as one of its senior sales executives. Her advice to bookkeepers who flinch at the word "selling": trace it back to its Old English root, sellen, which means to serve. "Don't be triggered by the word sales. Shift that whole narrative to: I can help these people because they need what I have." She reframes the close as an invitation — not pressure, but an offer to be served by someone who genuinely has what the client needs.
Bernadette McClelland is a sales coach, mentor, keynote speaker, and author based in Denver, Colorado. Originally from New Zealand and having built her career across Australia, she brings experience from corporate sales at Xerox and Kodak, small business ownership, and over a decade of sales leadership consultancy. She mentors at Harvard Business School and the University of Colorado Boulder, and speaks internationally on disruption, deliberate leadership, and the mindset behind meaningful business growth.