The Dragons’ Den Entrepreneur Who Says Trust Is the One Thing Leaders Cannot Fake

This exclusive interview with Claire Brumby was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.

Claire Brumby does not sell leadership theory from a safe distance.

She has built a food brand from the kitchen table, pitched on Dragons’ Den, survived a life-threatening illness, written a bestselling business book and now teaches leaders why confidence, trust and self-belief decide whether teams last or collapse under pressure.

As the founder of Scrubbys Crisps, Claire took a healthy snack idea into the brutally competitive FMCG world, learning the hard way what it takes to build a brand people believe in. After exiting the business, she became an ICF-accredited executive coach, NLP practitioner and business mentor, working with leaders and entrepreneurs who want more than another polished management model.

Her new book, Forget Normal – I Want Magic: The 5 Rules of Leadership, builds on the MAGIC Framework™: Mindset, Awakening, Gumption, Intuition and Charisma. It is her argument against stale, control-led leadership, and for a more human way of building teams, cultures and businesses that can actually survive change.

In this exclusive interview with the Inspirational Leadership Speakers Agency, Claire discusses brand belief, trust, failure, self-leadership and why modern leadership needs to leave old control systems behind.

Question 1. What turns a brand from something people recognise into something they genuinely believe in?

Claire Brumby: For me, it’s about being consistent and having conviction.

When I look back at brands I’ve built in the past, and when I’ve worked with organisations around their brand, it’s about building a belief system that people feel part of.

They feel part of something.

Question 2. What makes a team strong enough to last, especially under pressure?

Claire Brumby: The magic in teams that truly lasts is, in one word, trust.

This comes back to self-leadership. If we know and understand ourselves, we trust ourselves. If we trust ourselves, that helps people trust in us.

They trust in our decisions. They trust in our vision. They’ll come on the journey with us. They’ll buy into the vision of where we’re taking them.

But you will not buy people’s trust. You will not earn people’s trust if you don’t trust yourself and you do not convey that inner conviction with clarity, with this awakening piece, and with all of who you are.

It’s trust every day of the week.

Question 3. People often hear the phrase “getting out of your own way”. What does that actually look like in practice?

Claire Brumby: I love helping people get out of their own way.

It really boils down to what’s going on up here. What’s going on with our mindset? What’s going on with our beliefs? Are they founded? Are we catastrophising? Are we creating a false reality?

Are we standing in our own way because we’re scared of success? Are we genuinely fearful about something?

I’m a big believer that you can’t go around something, over something or underneath it. You have to face it and go through it.

When we really dial into our mindset, beliefs, values and boundaries, we’ll get out of our own way because we’re not on the run from ourselves anymore.

In one sentence, getting out of our own way looks like really getting a hold of the commentary that’s going on inside your head.

Question 4. You have spoken openly about setbacks in business. How do you separate failure from your sense of self and keep going?

Claire Brumby: I’ve had a lot of failure throughout my entrepreneurial journey.

That includes some large things, where I didn’t get the buy-in from the Dragons on Dragon’s Den, right down to some smaller things, where I didn’t get the win in a listing or I didn’t get the win in a deal.

The main thing to understand is that it’s not the person. It’s not you. It’s to detach.

When you detach your identity from the outcome, that creates space. When we create that space, we can dial down and think, right, okay, I’ll go again.

Question 5. Your new book, Forget Normal, I Want Magic, introduces the MAGIC framework. What are the key ideas you bring into your events?

Claire Brumby: I’ve got a new book launching pretty soon. It’s called Forget Normal, I Want Magic.

MAGIC is a framework that I’ve created, and this is how I share key takeaways for people throughout the keynotes. MAGIC is mindset, awakening, gumption, intuition and charisma.

Typically, people come to me when they need a certain element of something for their team or their leaders. We can dial into whichever pillar is needed.

That could be mindset, where we help teams unlock a different mindset. It could be gumption, where we’re needing more action within the team or wanting a different mindset around taking action and having courage.

This is how the keynotes work in terms of my book. It’s all about leaving behind the old hierarchical control mechanisms of leadership, which are just not fit for the modern world.

Leadership’s changing. The world’s changing. We need to forget that normal.

It’s all about magic.