Latest / The Jasmine Star Show / How a Mastermind Changed the Trajectory of My Business (and how it can do the same for you): Part 1

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How a Mastermind Changed the Trajectory of My Business (and how it can do the same for you): Part 1 · The Jasmine Star Show

• 0:13
  I know the feeling of what's next.
• 0:16
  I understand the pool of feeling thankful for what you have.
• 0:20
  And then that push for wanting more.
• 0:23
  I have experienced a desire to run towards a really big goal, but then I realize I'm uncertain of the next steps. I've been there, I've done that. I got the t-shirt.
• 0:33
  Welcome to the Jasmine Star Show where we get real.
• 0:37
  And today I am talking about eight very personal experience.
• 0:42
  But here on this podcast we like to talk about business decisions, life and everything on the in between.
• 0:49
  So I'm gonna share a personal example of an experience that I just listed, like that feeling of what's next? The feeling of being thankful, but you want for more in your uncertain of the next steps.
• 1:00
  Let's go back to 2015. I was at a pivot in my life, my business, and I needed a fresh perspective.
• 1:04
  I needed a new way of thinking and I wanted the challenge of being surrounded by people who were growing in ways bigger than I was.
• 1:15
  So I started my photography career in 2006 and I gained international notoriety in just a few years and it opened a lot of opportunities for me. Could I look back and say that that was a unique experience?
• 1:28
  Perhaps I think it has more to do with simply doing the same thing that everybody else was doing, but showcasing it on the internet in a new and different way.
• 1:38
  So as a result of that, I wanna go through a quick snapshot of what my career has looked like that has brought me to this point. In 2006, I was a photographer and they started creating content for other business owners and photographers. So much so that my business really started to shift in 2010, where I was front and forward creating content by way of photography. And then by 2012 I became a consultant.
• 2:02
  Other companies were coming to me asking me to, you know, help them build their social marketing, their branding.
• 2:08
  And then I realized that I could only take a certain amount of clients because there was limited hours in a day. And I asked myself, what could I do to serve more people in bigger ways? And in 2015, I started creating courses.
• 2:21
  I was able to teach and facilitate thousands of people who wanted more information on social marketing and branding everything that I was doing as a consultant. And then I realized that like courses were great, but I wanted something that was ongoing, a way to facilitate continuous conversations. So in 2017, I created a membership and then all of a sudden on the back of creating membership, when I'm talking about social marketing and building a personal brand online and making sure that your stuff is out on the internet, people were asking for the thing that would help them get their stuff out on the internet, which makes total sense.
• 2:53
  But I'm not a technical founder.
• 2:57
  I'm not a developer.
• 2:59
  But yet in 2020 I became the CEO of a SaaS company, a tech company called Social Curator. So Brave Recap, 2006, photographer 2010, content creator 2012, consultant 2015, course creator 2017, membership founder, 2020 SaaS sas ceo.
• 3:19
  Okay y'all.
• 3:21
  It wasn't until I actually put a pen to paper that I was able to look back at my career and see the ping pong that led me to where I am today.
• 3:30
  As a first generation Latina, as the daughter of an immigrant, as the first in my family to go to college, I never knew I could build a business.
• 3:39
  Now I know that sounds totally crazy, but it was my reality.
• 3:44
  My biggest dream was being able to go to college and wear a pencil skirt in heels and drive to downtown Los Angeles and take an elevator up to atop story in a high rise.
• 3:53
  And nothing is wrong with that, but that was just as big as I could ever think.
• 4:01
  That was as big as I could ever dream.
• 4:04
  I hadn't seen anybody in my sphere actually do that.
• 4:08
  I hadn't seen anybody in my sphere become a corporate professional.
• 4:14
  But I have seen a lot in my life where people who were housekeepers in cleaners and nannies, that's what I grew up with.
• 4:23
  So I didn't know I can build a business until I was 26 years old.
• 4:27
  And I really thought that other people could be entrepreneurs, not me.
• 4:32
  But the crazy thing was, it's not even that I was cognizant that I was even saying those things to myself. It was just a thought. It was just a fact.
• 4:38
  It was a thought that I had repeated to myself so many times on a subconscious level that I actually was no longer aware of it.
• 4:48
  And then all of a sudden I created a business as a photographer and within the first 12 months I was able to build a revenue stream that was over six figures, which is crazy to me because my father at that time and still today doesn't make that in a year.
• 5:09
  And so here I was my first venture out as a business person and I was proven that I could actually do something in a business on my own.
• 5:19
  And that was a beautiful moment except for the fact that I became so reliant on doing it on my own, why I didn't know anything else. So here I was, you know, 26 years old. Um, and then almost a decade later, like nine years later as a business owner, I realized that I had hit a plateau.
• 5:43
  So it's 2015 and I knew I needed to change my business approach, but I had no idea what to do.
• 5:47
  I had no idea where to start.
• 5:52
  And it's not like I was starting from scratch.
• 5:54
  I realized that I needed to restart.
• 5:57
  But how so randomly I am cruising the web one night and then I discovered a group of entrepreneurs who met to trade ideas and frameworks and strategies.
• 6:07
  And I was like, wait, what?
• 6:11
  This type of thing existed.
• 6:13
  Like I didn't even know what exactly it was, but I was like, oh hey, this is the thing I didn't even know I was looking for, but like I'm all in.
• 6:22
  I need this. So I had never heard of the word mastermind, but when I learned it's definition, I knew I had to be part of one.
• 6:31
  So I first heard the definition of a mastermind by a gentleman by the name of James Wedmore, and this is his quote, A mastermind is the amplification of like-minded people coming together for a similar purpose. It's the notion that the sum is greater than the parts that one plus one plus one doesn't equal three, it equals 30.
• 6:52
  This happens when you surround yourself with other smart people and begin the process of peer coaching end quote.
• 6:56
  Okay, so you know your girls in the hood, you know your girls simple. So in short, what I read as part of this is that a mastermind is an opportunity to get around in an environment that allows your dreams to foster and then get a clear plan of action to bring it to life.
• 7:15
  And so when I came across, it was a blog post that I had come across and then I started digging into what a mastermind was, who was going to them, what type of people found them interesting.
• 7:26
  And then I started digging into their websites, their blogs, their social, and I realized that this was a different caliber of a business person that by 2015 I had been met with plenty of success. It was great, but I knew there was something more what that was, I had no idea, but I knew that there was something more.
• 7:47
  So in 2015 I was a small business owner with a partner and one employee. I wasn't even sure I was ready like , I wasn't even sure I was qualified for the masterminds, but let's not even go there. Okay?
• 7:58
  So I wasn't sure that I was ready, I was qualified. And beyond that, I wasn't even sure I was ready to invest.
• 8:06
  So, and why don't you hand me your cup and your saucer because I'm about to pour some tea. I'm about to get very transparent with you.
• 8:14
  I have not mentioned this outside publicly, but here on the podcast, I feel like I can go deeper with people and be a hundred percent myself a hundred percent of the time.
• 8:26
  So I started my first business in 2006 and by the time I considered a mastermind a full nine years later, I hadn't ever not once invested in peer coaching or an online course.
• 8:39
  I had built my business entirely alone and it was lonely. And I've spoken about that before.
• 8:48
  But I really wanna hone in at where I was doing it entirely alone and not having a barometer of could I be doing this different?
• 8:57
  Could I be doing this better? So looking back, I wasted almost a decade of business growth opportunities by not investing in education by, you know, not realizing that there is a different path or a different track that I could take that actually could be giving me more than I was doing on my own.
• 9:17
  So when I applied and I was accepted to my first mastermind, I debated investing because it was far more than I was comfortable with. I mean the price tag, quite literally, it made my eyes twitch when I read the price tag initially, I turned to my husband and my business partner and I was like, oh, I think there's a typo. You see, they actually added an extra zero.
• 9:39
  This must be wrong, but it wasn't.
• 9:43
  So after debating with myself, you know, cuz like myself was the only person in this like decision making process, cause I was like, are you gonna be all in? I came to the following conclusion.
• 9:53
  If I learned one new way to grow my business, I mean let's just be real.
• 9:58
  If I weren't learned one new way to make more money in the Mastermind, it would pay back what I invested. You know, oftentimes people are like, oh, you know, there's this decision making process that I go to and I weigh the pros and cons and like how do I make this the simplest decision as possible?
• 10:15
  And I ask myself, do you think that you have the capacity to do something as part of this mastermind that would empower you to pay back the mastermind? And the answer that I thought back then was, yes. So with that, I set my mind to building a revenue stream that made $25,000.
• 10:32
  Yeah, that was the cost of the mastermind.
• 10:36
  And that number is not a big number, it's a huge number.
• 10:41
  And that was for somebody who had never invested in their business in any type of education. It was so far out of reach, it was so bigger than my mind had ever thought. I was just like, this scares me beyond all measure.
• 10:55
  And so I was like, okay, um, can I do this?
• 10:59
  So the answer became within six months, I created a new project and I launched it, but it didn't earn $25,000.
• 11:08
  It earned $255,000. Mm, yeah, $255,000.
• 11:17
  And we yielded that after six months of work.
• 11:21
  But a one week cart open, being surrounded by brilliant people in the Mastermind, it challenged my beliefs, it forced me to work in new ways. It cleared a path for me to create something new in an entirely new way.
• 11:37
  So I wanna go back and offer a little bit of insight as to where I was at this time in my career. So my husband and I, we are living in Orange County at this point in time.
• 11:48
  And money for us has always been this interesting thing in our lives.
• 11:54
  We are both children of immigrants.
• 11:57
  We hail from Mexican-American families. My husband's mom is Chinese, his father is Mexican, but his mom was raised in Mexico.
• 12:06
  My mom was Puerto Rican, my dad is Mexican. And all of our families, like they came here and they worked very, very, very hard and they did the best they could, but it is not in any way, shape or form a way that you would look back in the life and be like, wow, they had a little extras for vacation.
• 12:24
  You know, it's like family dinners.
• 12:27
  Were like, kids get in the car. We're going big tonight.
• 12:31
  We're not going to Mickey D's, we're going Carl's Jr.
• 12:34
  To which we would all be like, can we get a Western bacon burger? No.
• 12:38
  And of course, of course you can't get that. You're gonna get a cheeseburger, of course you're not gonna get the bacon. Who has money for the bacon?
• 12:45
  So for us, having a successful business was really a massive change in our lives and in our families it was, we were doing things that a lot of our families did not understand.
• 12:59
  They were in full support of, but they really didn't quite understand everything.
• 13:04
  And so when it came time for us to actually grow our business, JD and I did our best. But we were really, depending on what we can source from the internet, we were not around other people who were doing what we wanted to do in bigger, newer, different ways.
• 13:20
  So I flew to San Francisco, which is where the first mastermind had met.
• 13:27
  And we stayed in this hotel called the Cliff Hotel.
• 13:29
  At the time it was like really brand new swanky. It was right down in downtown.
• 13:33
  And I remember walking in and in the lobby they have these massive oversized chairs and tables.
• 13:37
  And when I say like oversized, I don't mean like oversized for a seven foot person.
• 13:44
  I mean it's like oversized for like a 40 foot person.
• 13:47
  And so it feels like you're walking almost into a museum and they have these really cool elevators. And I went up to my room, I didn't know anybody, and went down this bright purple hallway and I went into my room and I laid on this bed and I thought to myself, you just made the biggest mistake. Like, what are you doing?
• 14:07
  You have no idea what you're doing.
• 14:07
  Then I talked to myself, you know, out of that negative talk and went to the penthouse.
• 14:14
  And there I met 20 other entrepreneurs.
• 14:18
  And let me tell you everything I thought on that bed, Ooh, it was right , I was so out of my league.
• 14:27
  I walked into this room and I realized that they could have been speaking Japanese. I had no idea what they were saying.
• 14:36
  And this is not for a sake of like exaggeration. No. Quite literally, I had no idea. Like I understand these words are English, but the way that you're putting 'em all together, I don't know what any of this means.
• 14:47
  I don't know about forecasting, I don't know about funnels, I don't know about cost per leads or earnings per leads.
• 14:54
  I don't know about setting budgets, I don't know about funnels.
• 14:56
  What is a webinar? What is an email sequence? What's an email provider? What, what, what all of these things.
• 15:04
  And they were just talking about retargeting and their oh girl, is it too late to get a refund? I'm like, I'm not lying.
• 15:15
  I was quiet.
• 15:17
  I am pretty sure that on the first day of a two day mastermind, I didn't say a single word. I'm pretty sure people were like, I don't think that girl talks.
• 15:27
  And I've always been raised to believe that it is better to keep your mouth shut and be presumed to fool than to open your mouth and confirm it. Okay?
• 15:36
  So I was just scribbling notes like, what is e p l? What is a funnel?
• 15:43
  Figure out how to do a webinar.
• 15:43
  Like literally I knew nothing.
• 15:48
  And so half of me was like, I am in so far over my head, you gotta get out.
• 15:53
  You are wildly uncomfortable blaring alarm signals, you feel unsafe. Go back to safety.
• 16:03
  And so in the break, cuz at the end of a very long day, you take like an hour break before you go out to dinner.
• 16:10
  I went up to the hotel room and I called my husband and I told him like very much like an eight year old, uh, at summer camp, like, I wanna go home. Like, please let me go home. Like I, I'm gonna change my ticket. I, I need to go home.
• 16:23
  And very wise of jd, he said, well just finish the weekend.
• 16:28
  You're already there.
• 16:30
  So if you assume that you're not gonna get anything or learn anything or say anything, that's fine, but just finish it. So I did, but I didn't do that before, just scribbling down in my journal how I was thinking and feeling and my greatest concerns. And it was in the process of journaling that I wrote everything down. And then I went back and I said, do you think you have the capacity to figure out all the things you don't know? And the answer was yes.
• 17:00
  I didn't think it was going to be easy, but the answer was yes.
• 17:05
  And so with that, I went to dinner that night, I got to meet really brilliant people. And then the next day, instead of going into the room being like, I don't know, I don't know, this is so hard. I'm frustrated.
• 17:15
  I'm alone, I'm scared, I feel like I'm drowning in a sea of unknowingness.
• 17:21
  I simply just started writing a bunch of things that I had to figure out.
• 17:27
  And that was the, the safety net.
• 17:30
  That was the buoy that was the lifesaver was, I don't know any of this, but I think I could figure it out.
• 17:38
  And like lo and behold, Google became my best friend.
• 17:44
  So when I said that I wanted to create a revenue stream that yielded, that brought in $25,000, that was the amount that I had spent on the mastermind.
• 17:54
  And then it ended up six months later earning$255,000. That was on the back of, I don't know what I'm doing.
• 18:06
  I believe I can figure it out. And then I tried it.
• 18:11
  But here's the crazy thing. Um, when you are surrounded by people who challenge your beliefs, when you're surrounded by people who forced you to work in new ways because you're like, oh, my old ways got me here. The new ways will get me there.
• 18:24
  And then these people re really cleared a path for me to create something entirely new in my business.
• 18:31
  It opened my eyes not just to $225,000, but I launched that same project again four months later and it earned $325,000.
• 18:44
  So maybe you come from a family where that is acceptable, normal given expected, but I have to tell you that in the matter of less than a year for somebody to make that amount of money, it was life changing.
• 19:07
  I didn't even dream that big In 2015, I realized the difference in what I had a business online to what I was building an online business. Ooh.
• 19:20
  So what's the difference?
• 19:20
  Mm, so glad you asked. Okay.
• 19:23
  So I had built a personal brand and I had built a business online, but I realized that I was the one who was trading dollars for hours in the mastermind.
• 19:34
  I learned that an online business is set up so you have a system in place that work for you and they scale over time.
• 19:42
  This meant less of my time and more revenue.
• 19:46
  Now this brings us to 2023, a year of new adventures for you and me.
• 19:49
  In the last eight years, I have created multi-million dollar revenue streams building online businesses. I have done this in a multitude of ways.
• 20:04
  And then later, most recently, I have also built a tech company.
• 20:08
  I have experienced the ups and downs of scaling a business while growing my personal brand. In fact, I have been sharing my journey online for years.
• 20:17
  If you've been listening to this podcast since 2019, you can testify , but I am ready to get up close and personal.
• 20:26
  I'm hosting my very own mastermind, dun da da da, uh, yeah, I feel crazy. I feel like nervous, excited.
• 20:33
  I feel all of the emotions and I want to create a space in the same way that that space was created for me in 2015.
• 20:44
  So this is a specific mastermind for a small group of a service-based business owners looking to build a personal brand and know it's very specific, but I want to work with a small group of people that will be able to really do what is being facilitated by way of the group.
• 21:05
  And I want to work with a very specific group of people because this is what I dream. I breathe, I eat every single day. Like I, you know, build personal brands.
• 21:13
  I am building online businesses and I wanna show others how to do the same, but more so I wanna teach people how they can do it with ease, flow and joy.
• 21:22
  What has taken me eight years to learn, I wanna distill down in this mastermind.
• 21:27
  So the application process is not open yet, but we've started a wait list and if you are interested, you could check out the show notes for that link. Okay. So, um, if you are a little bit uncertain, I wanna talk about who's gonna be a perfect candidate for this mastermind. And yes, you have to apply and it is first come first serve, but you are perfect for this mastermind.
• 21:50
  If you are a service-based business owner, if you're building a personal brand, if you're making a round in that ballpark or a little bit over a hundred thousand dollars in revenue, you're more likely to find answers to your questions, then wait for the answers to find you.
• 22:07
  You're willing to take messy action knowing that the You're ready to take full accountability for your success, and you want to turn past failures, mistakes, missteps into valuable lessons and learn how you could leverage them in the future. Okay? So just to ensure that we're on this same page, let's be clear about who should not apply for this mastermind.
• 22:32
  If you're looking for personal coaching with me, please do not apply.
• 22:37
  I am hosting a peer led coaching program.
• 22:37
  I am hosting this mastermind.
• 22:41
  And a mastermind is not one-on-one coaching, it's one on a group.
• 22:47
  So ideally we're gonna be working with around 15 to 20 business owners and it is a one on 20, not a one-on-one.
• 22:57
  That is why a mastermind is greater than the sum of its parts.
• 23:02
  Now, I don't think you should apply for this.
• 23:04
  If you have a tendency to blame your circumstances for the outcome and not your effort. If you blame what's going on around you, probably not a good space for you.
• 23:14
  If you are the kind of person that likes to learn a lot, but you don't do a lot, if you're waiting for the perfect time to take action, if you come up with excuses for why you didn't take that action, mm, probably not the space. Actually, I'm not gonna say probably this is not the space for you. If you like to take more than you give, if you like to talk more than you listen, if you are not a fan of vulnerability, this is not going to be the space for you.
• 23:44
  And I want to to be very specific around who should not apply.
• 23:47
  Because what we're fostering is a magical Petri dish of big ideas. It is not for the faint of heart.
• 23:56
  It will not be easy, but it will be simplified in such a way that people will be able to create new projects and take their business to the next level. So people ask, well, how long should I be dedicating to this mastermind? Well, we have more details that are coming up. So if you sign up for the wait list, we are gonna be sending you that information.
• 24:18
  I would say that during the time of our mastermind, we're looking at about three week .
• 24:21
  We're looking at about, we can leave the almost like gonna edit that out. No, no, no.
• 24:27
  We're looking about three hours a week to dedicate it to the Mastermind.
• 24:32
  So if you are ready to join me in a small group of service-based business owners in y Forest's mastermind, uh, with Jasmine Star. I know, I know.
• 24:41
  Here we are. It's like your first mastermind with Jasmine Star.
• 24:45
  I've referred to myself as third person, which is so annoying.
• 24:48
  Like somebody just, I'm gonna get off the mic girl, your tongue is come. Listen, I want to work with you in a group of people and I wanna uplevel and I wanna use 2023 as this opportunity for me to give back what I have been given for years of years in masterminds.
• 25:04
  And I am still to this day a part of masterminds.
• 25:08
  So join the wait list to be the first to know when applications open, and they are going to be considered on a first come, first serve basis.
• 25:16
  I can't wait to see you there.