Whitney (00:00:12) - Do you ever feel like you're taking so much action but not sure what is actually working? Whitney here Content director for Jasmine Star and social Curator. In this episode, Jasmine is taking you behind the scenes while she debriefs her 2023 mastermind. And the best part, she is teaching you her Post project assessment framework, which gives you four questions to answer so that you can get better results with every launch project and action you take.

Jasmine Star (00:00:39) - Okay, I'm going to try something I have never done before, at least publicly. I do this quite often behind the scenes, but today I am sharing it with you in case you find it valuable. So do you want to know what I do? After every promotion, every launch, every product offering? Sometimes when I do something new, I need a way. When it's done, to look back and say, Hey, how was this actually, how did it actually fare? And then how do I make it even better the next time I launch? Now this is a framework that I call is the Post Project Assessment Framework.

Jasmine Star (00:01:11) - Yeah, it sounds pretty fancy, but actually it's very simple. It's four questions that are going to empower me to get better with every iteration and I want you to do the same. So let's follow through. So the first thing we're going to do is, number one, we want to assess the outcome. On a scale of 1 to 10, what do you give it? Ten is like perfect. I want to rinse and repeat. Doing this. Exactly. One is I never want to do this project again. I think it's important before you go past anything is to really give an honest assessment of where you are at the end of it. Number two, you want to assess the wins, What worked well and what do you want to keep in the future? I know it seems like it seems easier, like, okay, well that worked really well. But actually when you write down the things that were clear wins, it puts them up in the forefront of your mind to say, okay, this is what we're going to index for.

Jasmine Star (00:01:59) - We want everything within this offer, promotion, launch to match that caliber. Once you've identified it, you start seeing it again and again and how to map other things up to that caliber. Question number three is to assess the lessons. What should we change or what should we try to amend in this process? What do we want to change? What do we think was like, you know, it was good, but we can make some major tweaks and make it amazing. And then lastly, we want to assess the weight. So what slowed us down? What held us back? What are things that we should actually let go of because they aren't serving us? So those are the four questions that I encourage every business owner to take some time and go through. And actually it doesn't take very long, but the power of it is that it gives you a very powerful blueprint of what you're going to do in the future. The more times you do something similar in your business, the better and better you have to make it enhanced to increase the value, to increase its perception, to increase how many people are signing up, why you're constantly making it better.

Jasmine Star (00:02:59) - Now I walk you through this framework, but I also want to be very candid. And so I have a few notes. So if you see me like kind of like thinking or pausing, I really want to be clear and I really want to respect the privacy of a lot of people who are involved in this conversation and always they're always good things, right? All of these things are good things. But oftentimes we've been trained and I'm just going to be honest, a little candid here oftentimes is female entrepreneurs. We don't necessarily like to talk about the wins or how successful our business is. It's not it's not kosher. So I really want to make sure that I'm looking at everything holistically and I'm only sharing my perspective of how I believe this mastermind went. So a couple of weeks ago in a mastermind call, one of our members had said, It feels like I'm starting from behind. And I and she had left that in the group, right? That we were doing these deep dive assessments of what are we doing to push our personal brands forward? What are we doing to build our businesses in in tandem? Right? And so she said, I feel like I'm starting from behind.

Jasmine Star (00:03:58) - And that's where I had to stop. I got that question. And then in our live call, I started there and I said, we have to rewire the way that we look and hear things. You are not starting from behind. You're not starting from in front. You're not starting to the side. You're just starting. Anytime you do something new in your business, how you couldn't anticipate what's coming. You don't know how to make things better. You don't know what to do differently. You don't know how to enhance. You don't know how to decrease. You don't know what to modify until you actually do. So if you go into a project and you're saying, Oh, I feel behind, Oh, that's the wrong mindset, you're not behind, you're just starting. And guess what? Anybody who is starting a new project, a new venture, making a new offer, everybody is starting at the same point. So you get to choose how you show up on that starting line. And I'm saying you have been given this massive opportunity.

Jasmine Star (00:04:55) - You know, she is a powerhouse entrepreneur, but there's some things in her business that are brand new to the way that she's doing them. So she's like, I feel like compared to all of y'all, I feel like I'm behind. And I'm like, Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Don't get on the starting line feeling that way. I know it is normal, right? Let's have a normal conversation. It's normal to look back at projects or things or instances in our life or we say, Oh, I wish I could have done this differently. I wish I could have done this better. I wish this, I wish that that's normal. Like, I want to be very clear and have people understand that it is normal for us to say and wish that we did things differently. That's normal. So why don't we say, okay, The more I do something, the better off it's going to be. The more I do something I get to make these amendments, the more I show up and the more I do, the better it's going to be.

Jasmine Star (00:05:47) - So that is what I am doing now here in front of you. I'm going through this assessment of the mastermind. I am going through this exact framework. Why? Well, we're going to be launching cohort number two. Yeah, we're going to be opening the mastermind for a small group of entrepreneurs who want to scale their business. And it's not just I want to do the mastermind again. I will look back at my I will look back at 2023. You know, it's July 2023 at the time of this recording. And I will look back at July 20th, 23. I will look at the whole year. And I will say that one of my proudest moments was being able to walk and navigate with some brilliant entrepreneurs and show them what's possible and not show them what's possible. Like, it's not like I'm like Moses leading the people to the Promised Land. Not at all. I was simply along the journey with them. And I am here to prove what a business owner can actually do in six months.

Jasmine Star (00:06:41) - You know, oftentimes people are like, Oh, well, what can you do in a mastermind that six months? Well, how about in studying instead of like pontificating instead of like, well, Gander, what do you think might be I'm just going to share a view, real life, legit, legit success stories. Now, I'm not going to use anybody's name again. This is just here. I just want to take a second and say, Dang, it's not. I wonder if it is simply this is what has been done and if every single person in this mastermind is able to use this post project assessment on their own, I think their minds are going to be blown. We have one member who started in June to create a brand new from scratch. Never been done before in her business. Build an online course. She came into this mastermind saying, I am going to build an online course. There's a ton of things that I need to do before that. Okay. She needed to hire her very first team member to streamline.

Jasmine Star (00:07:37) - And this is one thing that I found very common with a lot of our members is like we came in and the focus became in order to grow, you're going to need bring people in. And depending on the size of your business or the ambitions of your business, that's the first thing you had to let go of. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go big, you got to bring people. And so she made her first hire who she's ecstatic about, and she decided, I'm going to be launching this course. So there's going to be things I need to do. I need to grow my newsletter list. So for the first three months, she dropped not one, but three new mechanisms to grow her email newsletter list with a strategy. And she's picked up hundreds and hundreds of new subscribers all coming in for the specific value that she's offering that's in alignment to her course. Now, I thought it was really interesting because she's going to build and this was it.

Jasmine Star (00:08:28) - She came in saying in this mastermind, I'm going to be building a course and then I'm going to be building funnels up into the course. Like, how are you going to streamline people into watching this course launch with her? But here's the thing. She saw something even bigger. It is not just I am going to build pathways to grow my subscriber list. And it's not just I am going to launch an online course. What she did was map an entire product suite to build her future business. So she sat and had a big goal in mind and in six months said the first big chunk is going to get done and she did it in six months. My mind is freaking blown with the amount of work and dedication that somebody can do by themselves with one, you know, part time new employee blow my mind. Now, on the total flip side, I don't want ever to come in and think like, oh, this is like, you know, grind until the grave and hustle, hustle, hustle.

Jasmine Star (00:09:18) - Not at all. Like, we want to build businesses that serve our life, not a life that serves our business. And so one other member now we're telling a different story. She had the most successful course launch of her career, and she decided to say, I'm going to go in a month long sabbatical. She lives on the East Coast, flew to the West Coast and just spent a month with her and her kids, and her husband would come out and visit. And she says, I just need some time for me. I need some time to recalibrate. I need to redefine what my success is. And there's so many people who are looking at her and being like, You just took a month off entirely and lived your best life with your children. How incredible and crazy enough. During the downtime, she actually edited framework and created what is going to be her highest ticket offering that she's going to be launching. And all of this happened in six months. Now another mastermind member. She named a CEO in her business like she had been doing everything.

Jasmine Star (00:10:15) - She'd been the CEO, the CEO. Now, oftentimes you're going to hear me flip between words like an integrator. If you have read rocket fuel, if you are part of the EOS system. Oh, you know, Gina Wickman, if you haven't read that book like Rocket Fuel, this, you'll see that Geno uses the term integrator, other people, you see. But it's basically like your right hand person. This person is going to do the operations. This person is going to be like, You tell me the plan and I'll figure out how to scale. And it leaves the CEO in the visionary role. Now, this other mastermind, a mastermind member, someone moving on to the third person, this other mastermind member, she was doing everything. And here's the thing. She has such a high capacity. She had a powerhouse business when we first met. So I do onboarding calls with everybody. I'll meet 30 minutes with every new mastermind member as they come in and like, what are your objectives? What are your goals? How are we going to measure them? And she came in and she told me what she was doing.

Jasmine Star (00:11:09) - And I'm telling you like 25 minutes in, I was like, Woman, how are you doing all of this? Like, her business is gangbusters and she's doing it entirely on her own. So in six months, she had named a CEO, somebody who is going to be doing purely operations and scale communicating to the rest of the team, which leaves her in her place of power. And during the six months, she decided to create a mastermind of her own. Incredible. She had seen the power of what she had done and said, I need to do this in my community because it hasn't been done. Incredible. So that means it's a whole new revenue source and revenue source that she didn't see at all when she started. And in our most recent call, she had said year to date she is 69% ahead of her financial goals then she was last year, so about halfway through the year. And she's already 69% more than she was at the same time last year. All of this is happening in six months.

Jasmine Star (00:12:06) - When you think of another mastermind member. I met with her in this onboarding call. Right. So we're going and we're talking and she's like, Jasmine, I used to have a team of over 20 people. It exhausted me. I felt like I had to micromanage. I just wasn't in a place of thinking. So I decided I'm going to come back to myself. I'm going to downsize. It's just going to be me. And she told me, she told me in the beginning, it's called I Just want to Build a solo business. I know what I'm about. I know what I can do. And I'm like, okay, I love this. This is your goal. And she said, yes. And I said, Yes, but what are your ambitions? And she's like, I want to do X, Y and Z and I had no doubt that she was going to do that. I think that I was a little bit shaky on the amount of people that was going to be needed for her to execute on these big goals.

Jasmine Star (00:12:44) - Well, lo and behold, two months in after our in person mastermind meeting where we had my mentor, the very first mastermind I ever joined, was with a gentleman by the name of James Wedmore. Well, surprise, surprise. In a full circle moment, James came to be the guest speaker in Newport Beach for my mastermind. And what did he focus on? Building a team like you don't need a team of 30 or 50 people, but you need a small team to really catapult you to get some big numbers on the board. And Barbara, she got shook to the core. Now, at the end of six months, Barbara hired 11 employees. But here's the difference between the employees that she hired now versus the ones before they bought into her vision. And she had clearly defined the roles for everyone. So she doesn't have to micromanage. She says this is what you clearly need to do. If it doesn't get done, guess what? That's on you. I don't have to micromanage. I only get to judge results.

Jasmine Star (00:13:36) - So she's in a place of power and she says that she's already doubled her revenue for the year. But more than anything, it's like she has a plan. She's like, I'm getting to $1 million this year. This is how I'm going to do it. And this is the team not getting 2 million. She's breaking $1 million. And so she's just like, it's upward and beyond. That was pretty dang incredible for somebody who said, I don't want to have a team. Big things shifted on the inside of six months. Now another member, Oh, this one. Like, honestly, like I don't have favorites. I just look at these people and I'm like, I'm literally blown away. So one of our members has a membership and love what she's doing. And she had come in and said, I just feel like I'm working so much in my business. I'm in my business. And so in our one on one and then in subsequent calls, I wanted to know the structure of her business.

Jasmine Star (00:14:24) - Now I get it. She was being really like strategic with her finances. She had a she has a wildly successful business and she was so strategic with her finances. And instead of having employees, she had a multitude of contractors. Now to each their own however you want to build your business is totally fine and it's workable. But where she was in her business, like with the amount of revenue and the amount of growth and the amount of like she's like the 1% of the 1% of what she was doing in her business, I was like, okay, I see that you're working with contractors now. If you had a really great experience with the contractors and they're blowing your socks off, well then rock on. But what I hear, rock on. What is this? What is this, 1987 Rock on. Yeah. Okay. Like, okay, okay. You do. You write like. So if if you really loved the relationship with your contractors. Awesome. But that was not the case. The contractors were draining the living lifeblood out of her, and she didn't really feel like she had a good understanding.

Jasmine Star (00:15:17) - There's like a lot of smoke and mirrors. And so I think I pressed a little hard on her and I said, listen, if it you know, we had this conversation on onboarding. We're having this conversation here in the in person mastermind meetup in Newport Beach. And I said, if we come back in a month and you haven't sung a different song, it's telling me that you're actually okay with how things are and or you're more afraid to change things than being afraid of where things are, so you fear less being stuck than you fear the possibility of getting better. And guess what? Girl showed up. She cleaned house the following month. She hired in house people letting go of her contractors. Now what she's focusing on is building the culture of her in-house team. On top of that, the Queen has a launch for her membership that is four times bigger, more and a half. It's like four and a half times bigger than anything she had done in a previous in a previous month launch or promotion four times.

Jasmine Star (00:16:20) - I'm not going to get into numbers, but I'm this is what you need to hear to change. Ching, ching, ching, ching, ching, ching. Like she killed it. She killed it. And I think to myself in six months, what you did is you restructured your team, you're building a culture, you're building the vision. You had your. Four and a half times bigger launch and anything. And you want what she says. She's like, Jasmine, I'm working less now in my business than before. Oh, it's like I get the chills. Like that can happen in in six months. And, like, one of my favorite one of my favorite, like, Rocky Balboa moments of the mastermind is one of the members. You know, she came in and her big goal, her big goal is like, I am here to build my personal brand. I am build, I am here to build allegiance. She has a very successful business. She has a team. But she's like, I think I'm working in the business and I'm not working on the business.

Jasmine Star (00:17:09) - She's like, Furthermore, there's two arms of my business. There's my strong personal brand, and then there's my strong business brand. She's like, I need time to focus on my personal brand. And I said, Great, Well, if you need more time, you're going to have to be replaced in your other business. And so that means if you want to be replaced, you have to hire some really capable people. And guess what she did? She loves the team that she's creating. She started working a lot on her personal brand, and she's vivacious and she's magnetic and she just attracts people to her. And on the back of six months, she decides she's going to host a conference. Like. I don't. Here's the thing. If you've ever been a part of participated in or host a conference, you know like that, it feels almost like you're asking for the impossible. Like it is such a big feat because not only do you have to sell tickets, like you actually have to think of venue and food.

Jasmine Star (00:17:59) - You have to think of vendors, you have to think of sponsors, like what does it look like? And she's done it. She has out in six months launched a conference. In addition to keeping her business growing and thriving, in addition to continuing to create her own personal content on behalf of her brand, she decided also, because of all that, to start a conference. I mean, I literally can go through every single person. We had 15 people in the first cohort of this mastermind, and I look at what all of them have done in their own ways, in their own way, everybody's own version of success looks different. But I just needed to say, okay, all of this was so incredible. Now, talking about their success stories actually doesn't come in and talk about the framework, right? When we assess the wins, when we assess the lessons, when we assess the weight, when we assess the outcome. Right. Like what are we actually working with? So a couple notes that I had written, and I want to be really candid because, I mean, if you're going to find any value you like, you need to hear it straight, right? And so I learned a lot in this mastermind.

Jasmine Star (00:19:04) - And I you know, there's a part of me like I started the conversation by saying, man, if I can go back, it's normal for us to say if I can go back, I would change things. And guess what I'm saying? The most normal thing, if I can go back and change things, these are some of the things that these are some of the things that would change. So I'm going to do three things that I'm going to change and then three things that I thought we we did a really good job in. So I'm going to start with what we learned, right? The things that we need to change. And so, number one, in the beginning, I should have explained more of what a mastermind is. I thought I had, and I thought I had done a pretty decent job. But I think around month four or month five, I think that I could have done better at reminding people what a mastermind was. Now, if I was being really fair, most of the people in the room had never been in a mastermind.

Jasmine Star (00:19:59) - And so the first time I went into a mastermind, this was back in 2016, I joined my first mastermind. I just I was soaking it all in. I didn't know anything else. And in every subsequent mastermind, there wasn't one on one coaching. It was we got together on online calls and we got together in-person events and that was it. That was what the mastermind was and a mastermind. So it's not one on one coaching, and it wasn't accountability. Like I was never getting accountability from the host or the organization of the event. If I wanted accountability, I would reach out to people in the group to say, Can you hold me accountable? But just because I say, Oh, I could have done a better job, that's not enough. Because the second time I need to make it like a monthly mantra of reminding people, especially if people haven't been in a mastermind of what it actually is, that if you want like everything you want is on the other side of asking somebody, right? Like asking your mastermind counterparts, asking me on how we might synthesize this as a group.

Jasmine Star (00:21:03) - And if you need accountability, like to find somebody in the group to be accountable or to like go into the group and saying, this is what I'm going to get done in two weeks, what are you going to get done? And so I could have done a better job at reminding people of that. That was like major lesson number one. And that's what we're definitely going to deploy in future masterminds. The second thing I should have done better and yeah, just be honest, like nobody likes to talk about the things that they wish they had done differently or better like. But I want to do this because I want to show the process of getting better because far be it from somebody to be like, I don't know how to get better or I don't know how to take feedback. Like it doesn't always feel the best, but it's true and it gives me an opportunity to get better. So the second thing I am looking forward to improving. I should have explained the purpose of a mastermind again on a in a monthly way in a mantra like that is a mastermind is to gather people from all different walks, right? Different businesses.

Jasmine Star (00:22:01) - So this mastermind is focused on service based, service based business owners with personal brands looking to scale their business. That's the thing. But we have such a wide variety of people in the mastermind that the goal was to get everybody in it, in everybody together. But the purpose, you know, is is not just one plus one equals two. It's one plus one equals 15. Right? Because when you go and ask a question to the mastermind, you're not asking of a business coach. You're asking it from 14 other really brilliant people and everybody sharing their perspective on how to get better. Now, I also believe that masterminds show you what you're capable of. So oftentimes as business owners like we don't I mean, I don't know about you. I never had a lot of like business owner friends. And so I needed to know how do other business owners think? How do they feel, how are they preparing? And so a mastermind shows you what you're capable of because everybody comes into a mastermind with at least in this mastermind, you come in with an objective.

Jasmine Star (00:22:57) - What are you here to do? In our very first call, we tell everybody this is what I'm in this mastermind to do, right? So there's that. So essentially, we're all starting on the starting line and then, you know, three. Four months in. When you see other people leapfrogging ahead, you're wondering, dang, what? What do I how do I need to act? How do I need to behave? What do I need to do that's different than what I'm currently doing? Because you get yourself in a room of other people who are like groundbreaking and then you're like, Dang, I'm either playing too small or I could learn from them by asking, How are they thinking? How are they approaching? And I think it's really important that in a mastermind what you're actually seeing is you're getting a front row seat like the inside candid look of somebody's business, because on the outside it looks very different. When you're in a mastermind, everybody's starting on the same starting point and you see other people like jamming.

Jasmine Star (00:23:46) - You get to see the outside and you get to see the inside and then you find ways to get better. I should have said that mantra again and again and again. The third thing I learned was that I need to plan for more just talking time during the live event. So as a as a former wedding professional, I was professional photographer for over 13 years and we did high end luxury events and we got to work with the best of the best. And so when you come into event, everything's orchestrated. Like if you have ever been to $1 million wedding, yes. JD and I would photograph million dollar weddings. It doesn't feel like everything's orchestrated, but everything is orchestrated to the minute. It is like a whole Broadway production. And so I think that I looked at this mastermind and I'm like, minute to minute. It is an orchestrated thing and people loved the experience. But one of the people like what people said was just like, I just wish that we had time just to like, sit and talk.

Jasmine Star (00:24:43) - And I was like, Oh, yeah, More sitting and more talking. Okay, lesson learned. So more in time, more in time. So we had planned like our first in-person event was a day and a half. And so I think we're going to extend it to being two full days, but we're going to have pockets of time just to like sit by the water and like hang out and just those small micro conversations. So those are the three things that we needed to change to get better. But I want to talk about things in really proud of as we went through this assessment. Number one, I, I never gave myself credit, but I'm very good at connecting people. Like I see things in other people. And as we curated this first group of the mastermind, there was like over 2000. There's like 20 over 200. There was over 2200 people who sign up for the waitlist or the mastermind. I mean, it was it was massive. So we needed to handpick the right alchemy of group.

Jasmine Star (00:25:36) - And so for me, I'm like, if we get the right people in the room, the success will come. And so what we did was we orchestrated a group of people who were all very different from each other, but had very complimentary things. And so, you know, immediately when it started, people were like, Oh, I can connect with her about getting my operations and I can talk to them about building systems and i could talk to her about h.R. So what we saw in the beginning was like a lot of people were sending one on one calls with each mastermind member, which was really cool. And then other people were setting up just like their own in-person meetups depending on where in the country they were. So I was like, Hey, I want to make sure that I'm leveraging that. I'm flexing that muscle, like to be confident in the muscle of me being good at connecting people. Number two, I'm good at seeing patterns. So this is the first time that I've ever done a mastermind.

Jasmine Star (00:26:17) - And then working with the same group of 15 people over six months, I flexed a new muscle that I didn't know I had. I was like, Dang it. Like, this person's going through X and this person is going through x x and that person is going through two x. All the X's are similar. Can I find a way that connects everybody to find the core of the lesson, Give action steps and then like, let's hit the ground running? And I never had realized that. I'm really good at that. I'm good at seeing patterns. I'm good at creating like a problem solution statement and then creating accountability within the group for that. So I want to make sure that I continue doing that. And then the last thing that I that I never probably really noticed or maybe wouldn't give myself grace to acknowledge was that I'm good at taking feedback. Like that's not one that I'm actually like all that excited for. But I do think it's worth saying we sent out surveys, we send out a survey every 6 or 7 weeks and they were candid surveys and so people were giving us candid feedback about where they were, what they wanted to see change, what they wish there was more of.

Jasmine Star (00:27:17) - And then based on that feedback, we would make changes. And I love that. But I talked to my mentor and she had said, Why did you have candid surveys? And I said, Well, I wanted people to be honest. Like I didn't want them to. I didn't want them to care about my feelings. Like I want I really just wanted the feedback. And she says that that is good for a first start. But what a good and true leader does is that they set an environment where good and candid feedback is not a bad thing, that if you say something to somebody that they need, they need to be able to receive that candid feedback without you pulling any punches. And they need to be able to give you candid feedback. No punches, hell. And I thought to myself, Man, that's the biggest takeaway. So what are things that I'm really proud of is being able to take? Candid, anonymous feedback. And what a more excited about is to take candid feedback with some of these name and face attached because they know if I come for them, it is with love and respect and if they come for me, it is with love and respect.

Jasmine Star (00:28:24) - So, Oh, okay. That was like a that was like a whole distillation. And so for us, going into launching the Mastermind a second time, it's just an experiment process. It is us putting out a timeline in which we feel comfortable. It is us putting together deliverables and we feel comfortable and it's for us and honest to cultivate and create a team, a cohort of brilliant minds working together to push each other forward. If you would like to, you know, apply for the mastermind, you can go to Jasmine Starcom, forward slash mastermind there. You will get all of our call dates or in-person dates, get all the information, the criteria and when you apply, you'll then be asked to go on to an in-person interview if you move to the other round. And then we will be able to make a decision. The deadline to apply for the second cohort is July 31st, 2023. It would be an honor and a privilege to see you as part of the mastermind and meet you in person here in Newport Beach.

Jasmine Star (00:29:28) - And I always believe that if it's not now, it's in the future. So I wish you all the best. I hope you have a beautiful day.

Whitney (00:29:37) - Isn't it incredible to see how much your business can transform in just six months? Jasmine's mastermind application is linked in the show notes below. And if you're ready to uplevel, you owe it to yourself to apply. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Jasmine Star Show.