Personal. Independent.
In Your Corner.
Ansley Wallace was born in New York and raised in Europe, surrounded by artists, writers, fishermen and financiers.
Instead of getting a summer job before heading off to college, she started a marketing company dedicated to helping small business owners reach new markets. Armed with a degree in Art History and Business, she became a serial entrepreneur, starting and running small companies both in the U.S. and abroad, eventually partnering with British Oxygen.
Some of those companies were successful. Some were not. But every one of them taught her something about the realities of owning a business—the exhilaration of getting it right, the cost of getting it wrong, and the thousand things nobody tells you before you begin.
She went on to spend years as a management consultant, analyzing the finances and operations of small businesses throughout the United States. That gave her something entrepreneurship alone could not: the opportunity to look inside other businesses, see the patterns that separated thriving companies from struggling ones, and understand how seemingly small decisions about people, money and operations could have enormous consequences.
Along the way, Ansley has pursued a few decidedly unconventional interests. For fun, she participated in an effort to retrace Hannibal’s route across the Alps—with elephants—and worked on the recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s monumental horse, originally designed for the Sforza family in Milan. Her definition of “fun” may be somewhat unconventional.
Through it all, one lesson kept surfacing: making money and keeping money are two very different skills.
I’ve lived enough life to know that financial decisions don’t happen neatly on a spreadsheet. Careers change. Businesses struggle. Markets fall. Families change. Taxes show up where you didn’t expect them. And sometimes the plan you were told was “the right way” turns out not to be right for you at all.
That’s why I don’t begin with a product—or somebody else’s formula for retirement. I begin with your life, your circumstances, and the possibilities you may not have considered.
Ansley has an insatiable curiosity and a decidedly analytical mind. She asks questions, challenges conventional assumptions, runs the numbers, and looks at a problem from more than one direction.
Her job isn’t to sell someone the solution she walked in carrying. It’s to explore the available possibilities and help each client understand which ones make sense for their life.
Because retirement planning shouldn’t simply be about accumulating a pile of money. It should be about turning what you’ve accumulated into the life you intended to live.
And preferably keeping as much of it away from the tax collector as legally possible.
Ansley is the author of Tame the Dragons: A Field Guide to Protecting Your Profits and Your Peace of Mind.
Ansley introduces a unique framework that helps business owners and individuals recognize the hidden threats that can destroy wealth—and the guardian strategies that build a stronger future.
From 401(k) to 7702: A New Path for Retirement Security
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The Dragon Interview Project began with a simple premise: the best way to understand a business is to listen to the person who built it.
I ask about what is working, what isn’t, hopes and ambitions, successes and failures, the people helping build the business—and what each of them has at stake. We talk about the challenges everyone can see and the ones hiding beneath the surface.
Eventually, every conversation arrives at the question that matters:
What is the biggest problem standing between you and where you want to go—and how can I help?
OPEN THE DRAGON INTERVIEW PROJECT ›
Some of the most useful lessons I bring to business owners came from building businesses, backing other people’s ideas, and facing the unexpected.
Great art and great science begin in much the same place: the ability to visualize something that does not yet exist and then find a way to bring it into the world. The entrepreneur is a natural extension of that same creative impulse.
I worked with a company that had developed an innovative industrial-cleaning technology. They were excellent scientists. The technology was extraordinary. And they were barely making payroll.
We took that technology into international markets and sold it throughout Asia and Europe. I wrote the operations manual, put on a white protective suit, climbed onto industrial equipment, and demonstrated the process myself.
Somewhere along the way, people began calling me the “Ice Queen.”
It was an early lesson I have seen repeatedly since: creating something exceptional and successfully bringing it to market are two entirely different skills.
Great artists are often very good at creating art—and remarkably uncomfortable marketing it. So I started an art gallery in a Victorian townhouse in Washington, DC, with the original woodwork and fireplaces intact and the walls painted a perfect medium gray.
Within a few short years, the gallery became an established force and sold millions of dollars in work by emerging artists. We did more than display beautiful things. We found the people who would value the work, told its story, and created a connection between artist and buyer.
The gallery also taught me about hiring, loyalty, keeping good people, and learning—sometimes painfully—that not everyone deserves the trust you initially place in them.
I was a founding member of an LLC that created an online marketplace at a time when viewing text and photographs required visiting two different internet addresses.
Four partners and two employees worked from a handsome nineteenth-century adobe schoolhouse beneath enormous oak trees in rural New Mexico. We were ahead of our time. The building, unfortunately, was not: after we bought it, we discovered it contained asbestos.
We eventually sold the company before the internet became part of everyday life. I still insist Amazon stole our idea.
That experience reinforced what the scientists and artists had already taught me: seeing what is possible is powerful, but timing, communication, structure, people, and execution determine whether possibility becomes a business.
I look at what is there. I ask what is missing. And I question the assumptions that may be preventing someone from seeing a better possibility. Different does not automatically mean better—but familiar does not automatically mean right.
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