Why Scrappy Entrepreneurs Always Win

Today’s episode is for the scrappy, heart-on-fire entrepreneur who knows there’s treasure hidden in places no one else dares to look. You see, I grew up learning to spot potential where most saw "junk." From yard sales with my dad to watching my mom transform discarded plants into a blooming garden, I learned that value isn’t about what something looks like—it’s what you make of it.

And guess what? That’s the SAME mindset I use to build my business.

In this solo episode, I take you on a trip down memory lane—back to Kmart garden centers, tiny motorhomes, and our thousand-square-foot family home—to share the unexpected ways my childhood shaped how I show up as a CEO. I talk about what it means to “sift through the dirt” and why being willing to do what others won’t is the ultimate business edge.

We cover:

• The unexpected connection between thrifting and scaling
• Why you need to embrace imperfect, slow growth
• My 3-part content plan that gets me results (and it's NOT glamorous!)
• How to treat your “weeds” like potential blooms

This episode isn’t just about nostalgia—it’s about real business strategy rooted in grit, consistency, and seeing what others overlook. So whether you're bootstrapping or bossing up, know this: the gold is in the dirt... you just have to be willing to dig.

Click play to hear all of this and:

[00:00] Why You Must See Opportunity Where Others Don’t

[02:52] The Dirt Kmart Tried to Throw Away

[05:39] The Business Lesson in Cultivating What Others Discard

[08:12] Why Posting Daily is ‘Digging in the Dirt’

[10:47] The Secret to Standing Out? Doing What Others Won’t

📧 Join my Newsletter for a weekly cocktail of insider business strategy, personal reflections, and the journey of being a thought leader: https://jasminestar.com/newsletter 📧

For full show notes, visit jasminestar.com/podcast/episode572

Transcript

Jasmine Star 00:00:00  We have to have a vision when nobody else does. We have to have careful and meticulous planning. We have to understand that we're going to make mistakes. We have to understand that progress takes time and we have to accept the terms of the time. Have you ever heard of the phrase one man's junk is another man's treasure? Well, today I want to talk to you about how you can find business, treasure, and places that other people might see as junk. Welcome to the Jasmine Star Show, where I empower seven figure business owners to scale to eight. And we're going to be doing it oftentimes in unconventional ways. That is how we do here. Okay. So let's back up and create parallels of my life of why I find this theory. We can find treasure and junk so close and near to dear to my heart. So as a child, every weekend I am talking. Every Saturday my dad would take myself and my four siblings and we would go to yard sales. But people would call them yard sales or estate sales.

Jasmine Star 00:00:56  But let me tell you, people were just pulling out their junk. Like it was like whatever they had is in the garage. They got him, put it out in the front line. And these are things that people would charge like a few dollars, 10 to $20 for. And they were just like, happy to get this junk off their hands and into the hands of other people like my parents. My parents furnished my child at home entirely with other people's junk, but our house was actually beautiful. Our house is tiny as it was. Would have people pause and say, what a lovely home this is because my mom had style, or what we might say like a little flavor that was entirely her own. And my dad really appreciated what she was able to do. And together the two of them were able to make some magic. So I am wanting you to imagine a tiny living room. So when you would walk into my child home, you are walking into a tiny living room so you would see a couch, you would see a vanity.

Jasmine Star 00:01:57  You would see telephone. You would see frames. You would see a radio set up. Okay, so people would walk into our home and they would have no idea that all of these pieces would be junk from other people's houses because it felt so distinctly welcoming. But it didn't just end with the indoors version of my parent's home. So there's a place called Kmart. I don't think it went bankrupt, but Kmart existed, and it's basically like the early versions of Walmart. And so my mom, it was Easter and my mom was able to buy her kids two new outfits a year from Kmart. Now everything else we bought was from thrift stores or clothes that was given to us. So when we were going to Kmart, it was like, y'all be prepared. It was like we were walking into Bloomingdale's. We were walking to Saks Fifth Avenue, so we felt really good. Now I want you to picture my mom and her five kids in a car called a Chinook. No, a Chinook is essentially a tiny motorhome.

Jasmine Star 00:02:52  It was basically like a truck that had a cab in the back, but it was like a higher cab on the end of it. And we didn't have safety belts, and we would all sit on like this end like a bench, we would sit on a bench that lined the side of the like, truck style RV. So all of us are in there. We pull up to Kmart, we're getting ready to buy our Easter outfits. But Kmart had a garden center attached to the side of it. Now, my mom always dreamt of going into the garden center and buying flowers, but money was so tight that that never permitted. But this one time we parked the Chinook outside of the garden center, and we walked in through the garden center to get to the Kmart, and my mom saw a pile of pallets like, you know, those plastic tins that flowers normally sit in. It was just a bunch of pallets with plastic six packs of dirt and weeds. My mom walked by. She went back.

Jasmine Star 00:03:47  She's like, can I speak to the manager? And she asked the manager, what are you doing with all of this junk? And the manager said, well, we're just waiting because we're gonna throw it all away. My mom asked, do you think that I could have it? And he says, you want this dirt in in six packs that we're going to throw away. My mom said yes. The guys like, sure, my mom got that Chinook, turned it backwards, brought it right up to the garden center, and her and her five kids, myself leading the charge, loaded up the back of the Chinook with just pellets of dirt, and we're like, why are we taking dirt home? My mom had other ideas, so the thing that she saw that nobody else saw was that there were roots that were still good to these quote unquote, weeds. So my mom brought all of these plastic pellets. We laid them on our front lawn, and she began pulling them out, cultivating them, trimming and pruning them down and planted them.

Jasmine Star 00:04:42  Now, the front of our house, I think the total size of our house was about 900 or 1000ft². So it's a three bedroom house, around 1000ft² for a family of seven. And the area leading up to our our front door was this tiny little curving path. I mean, I'm talking about tiny, but on the side of it there was like a brick edifice that had a light on top, and there was a tree on the other side of the path. So if you think of it as like an S-curve path to the front door, and there's a light on one side and a tree on the other, and it was just dirt along the sides of the pathway. My mom had us and all of her kids put out these weeds we thought were weeds. And a few months later, after tending to her garden, that garden was full bloom. She had literally taken what other people had thrown away and put it in front of her. So how has experiences like this? And there were plenty shaped my business and my perspective of what we can build.

Jasmine Star 00:05:39  That is what I want to talk to you about today. Between my dad's hunting for junk to furnish the indoors of our home to my dad's, hunting and using junk to really beautify the outside of our home. Number one that this taught me about building my business in unexpected ways is I will do the work of sifting through the dirt. So I will be posting every day on social media. I will be personally writing a newsletter every week that turned into a blog post. I will be posting YouTube videos at least once a week, documenting my journey by way of the podcast or vlogs or interviews. I will be updating my podcast every single week and I have to tell you, friends, these are the slowest ways to grow, but I am willing to sift through the dirt of the slow work to get the results that I want. I am willing to do the pruning. I am willing to do the dirt. I am willing to do the finite sifting through the junk of somebody else's stuff to make sure that I find a treasure.

Jasmine Star 00:06:41  And that is where most people quit. And I am making this podcast to normalize what it feels like to sift through dirt. And this is your reminder that it is the people who see the dirt planted, cultivate it, and do the slow work of tending to a garden where you get to actually see it full bloom. Number two, the thing that has helped me see my business from a different perspective so I could see treasure other people see junk is I can fix what other people think is broken. Okay, so imagine this. My dad found a vintage radio. It was avocado green. It had two circular dials on each side, and it had a large center circular area that you can actually use your finger to spin a dial and pick up an Am station. And it was really cool looking, but it was broken like the handle on top was broken. They said you couldn't pick up any Am and god forbid FM stations. It just wasn't going to work. Well, my dad had a collection.

Jasmine Star 00:07:37  See, this is this is those crazy things about my dad. My dad had his garage, and he would just find these random, like, widgets or pieces of tech. And he was not necessarily, like, handy. He was handy ish. So he buys this radio. And of course, my dad has that one random piece to this one random radio that he fixes, cleans off, repairs the handle, and my mom puts it in the house not only as decor, but as a really cool vintage functioning piece. Now, my dad was prepared to fix that radio because he had collected pieces. And I am telling you, friends, I've learned how to collect experiences, indiscriminate random experiences that I'm collecting that are preparing me so that when I find the opportunity to fix a radio that sounds like it's unfixable, you've collected something that makes you have an unfair advantage. So I collect experiences that I can apply to, for example, consulting. So here is an example of consulting that I have used.

Jasmine Star 00:08:38  So I have experienced in-person events that were so over the top, really freaking cool and amazing. And this was back when I was a wedding photographer. And we would fly to Italy. We would fly to all over the United States and Canada and London to go to these really expensive, beautiful, amazing, over-the-top, curated events. Now, these were for wedding professionals who targeted a luxury market, and it was a really great way for other vendors to show their expertise. So these events were just absolutely amazing. I experienced world class events so that when I had the opportunity to consult with a medical SaaS company and they said, we want to bring our physicians and we want to wow them. Normally they just sit in like a ballroom and they'd have speakers and they'd have like a catered lunch. It's like for me to use an uncollected piece in a different area and say, we can create an experience that leaves people with their jaws open and think that not only did they just learn, they came and had a curated experience.

Jasmine Star 00:09:35  That makes them so excited to come back to this experience, which increases the LTV of them staying on the platform. That was just a totally different perspective of seeing the way that education in a medical capacity works. I was consulting with another business and I was talking about storytelling in a marketing event. So I was consulting and I was talking about how I'd given this presentation around storytelling, and that's how good messaging is actually heard and is palpable and permeates. And I used the same principles that I use when I'm giving a marketing presentation through storytelling about how I'm able to do that in a leadership capacity with my team. And he had presented that he was at a crossroads with his team, and he didn't know how to convey, like the odds were stacked against them. And what I simply did is I used a framework that I had learned in something else with storytelling and with marketing, and we were able to contextualize how he's positioning his business to his own team internally. Like the David and Goliath story, it is absolutely possible to beat the big guys.

Jasmine Star 00:10:43  It's possible to beat the giant, but you first have to have the wherewithal and the capacity to pick up a slingshot and to pick up a stone. And so we were able to framework different pieces of information that I collected so that he could step into leadership in an entirely new way. Before I get into the last and final piece of finding treasure where other people might see junk, if you found this at all. Helpful. Inspiring. Engaging. Share it with a friend! I have just noticed that the way that this podcast grows, but the way that we're actually creating synergy and connections with each other is when we pass it to other people, and we grow our businesses collectively. If you would like to pass it along, that would mean the world to me. The last and final step. So number one was I have the willingness to sift through the dirt. Number two, I can fix what other people find broken because I have been collecting experiences along the way. And number three, maximize what you do have.

Jasmine Star 00:11:35  So my mom couldn't plant endless fields of flowers using Kmart throwaways forever. That was a one time experience for the rest of our time going to Kmart. We never, not once, went through the garden area and saw that things were just left there. It was a one time thing. So how is she going to maximize that opportunity? My dad couldn't fix every broken radio because he didn't have every single piece. So if we know that these instances are a once in a kind of ish lifetime. What are we going to do to maximize it? They couldn't fix every radio. They can furnish every garden, but they could maximize what they had. In business, we have endless ways to get what we want. We just have to find ways to use and find more of what we do have. Find more money, find more leads. So we need to maximize what we have. And how do we do that? We can expand our LTV, the lifetime value. It might be hard for you to say, oh, I'm Jasmine, I'm not getting those leads.

Jasmine Star 00:12:35  I'm not getting new clients. No problem. But for the people you do have, are there offers? Are there extensions? Are there places of value that we can go deeper with somebody that we don't have to acquire to go deeper with somebody you already have? How do we have more opportunities to expand what we have? By having our current clients and customers give recommendations. Can we incentivize our current clients and customers to give those recommendations in ways that we probably weren't thinking of? Those are people we already have in our sphere. We can also maximize what we have by asking clients what they wish they could invest more in our business. There's probably a whole line, a whole service, a whole product opportunity for you to furnish in ways that you just didn't even actually think of. So how do we maximize what we have? When we extend LTV, we ask for recommendations. We ask for what people wish they had and then ask ourselves, can we find a way to build that? So how have these experiences shaped my business? As a brief recap, before we get to the last and final point.

Jasmine Star 00:13:39  I will do the work of sifting through the dirt. I will fix what other people think is broken. I will maximize what we have. And that leads us to finally number four. I'm going to release timeline expectations. I will tell you that my mom wanted a fully decorated living room when she moved in, and that didn't happen. We were at the mercy of people putting out their items in yard sales until we found the right thing. We weren't looking for any couch. We were looking for the couch with potential. We weren't looking for any vanity. We were looking for the vanity with potential. We weren't looking for any set of records because many times those came with scratches. We were going and doing the work of picking out every single. Elle Green or Earth, Wind and Fire record that we could find. For my dad, that didn't have any scratches and that takes time. I believe that they had to make what they had, and then have the willingness and patience to work until they found the right solution.

Jasmine Star 00:14:46  I have an unnaturally weird, absurd, maybe a little bit crazy belief that things will happen as long as I let go of when I think they should happen. I think that what I've seen a lot of times with not just the entrepreneurs I consult with, but just in conversations with friends, is that we tie ourselves to an outcome in a timeline when we have absolutely no idea, on average, how long an average takes to build an eight figure business to build to a nine figure business, we have no idea how long it will take. We have no idea if some sort of technology will come in and make it faster than we anticipate. We have no idea if there's going to be an economic downturn that's going to take it longer than we anticipate. We have no idea if somebody in our C-suite or a business partner does this dirty that sits us back a couple of years, we have no idea. And yet we say this is the time that it should make it happen. And I just realize that for us to get where we want to go, we release the timeline.

Jasmine Star 00:15:39  When my dad found the couch that he was ready to read a poster, he saw what he wanted and he knew my mom was going to like it. But before he actually did the work, he had to have a vision for that couch when nobody else did. You need to have a vision for your business before anybody else will. He had to pick every detail of that couch and sofa in advance. There was no such thing as I'm going to, you know, reupholster this couch and figure it out as I go. No. He knew. Oh my gosh. I mean, this is going to sound tacky, but y'all, it was really pretty. I promise you. It was like early 90s. Okay. It was like a dusty rose velvet. You had to pick this material with my mom. He had to know what color he was going to stain, the wood of the arms and the legs of the sofa. He had to know that he was going to line the sofa with a certain brocade, and he had to pick that out in advance.

Jasmine Star 00:16:35  This required so much planning. He had to understand that he was going to make mistakes, because he had never upholstered a couch before. He had to accept that the progress was going to take time. I think the same things for our business. We have to have a vision when nobody else does. We have to have careful and meticulous planning. We have to understand that we're going to make mistakes. We have to understand that progress takes time and we have to accept the terms of the time. I apply this to my business daily. I have to have a clear vision. I have to be released from the timeline. I have to do meticulous planning. To the best of my ability and then remain unattached to. If it doesn't happen when I want it to happen how I want it to happen. My goal for this podcast is that you find treasure where other people have denoted their drunk. They have the patience to sift through dirt. That you have the willingness to do things that other people will not do.

Jasmine Star 00:17:30  That you have the willingness to prune and cut back and plant dirt within dirt, because you know that the seeds are existing and you're going to do the work when you actually don't see the fruit of your labor until one day you're walking up a pathway to your front door by plants that you have built when nobody else could see the future that you saw. I hope that you take what other people say as a liability, and you turn it into an asset. That is where you're going to find true prosperity, true fulfillment, true purpose, and true growth. I want to say thank you for watching and listening to The Jasmine Star Show. Here's to us the treasure finders amongst the junk.