From Burnout to Breakthrough: The Power of the Pivot

Have you ever hit a point in your business where everything should feel amazing… but instead you’re thinking: “Is this really what I want forever?”

That was Robin Ballard. At the time, she had a dream business—thriving event planning company, skilled team, systems in place. But deep down, she knew something else was calling.

She didn’t have all the answers, but she had the courage to ask better questions.

In today’s episode, I’m sharing a full-circle moment: Robin stepped away from what was working and launched Curate, a luxury networking experience for wedding professionals—and invited me to speak at her event.

You’ll hear a clip from that keynote, where I talk about reinvention, starting messy, and building a business beyond your first success.

If you’ve ever wondered how to pivot, what comes after success, or whether it’s “too late” to start again—this episode is for you.

You’re not behind. You’re right on time.

Click play to hear all of this and:

[00:01] Why successful business owners sometimes feel stuck (even when things are “working”)

[00:55] Gaining clarity after months of experimentation and uncertainty

[02:10] How a luxury membership for wedding professionals came to life

[02:58] A full-circle moment: from mastermind student to event host

[03:52] Proof that unqualified people can do impossible things

[06:44] The behind-the-scenes story of launching digital products with zero experience

[07:41] How low-ticket content created massive impact—and built a new legacy

Listen to Related Episodes:

• From Etsy to Empire: Dylan Jahraus’ 7-Figure Pivot
• 5 Steps to Pivot with Purpose (Not Panic)

Connect With Robin Ballard:

Robin Ballard is a luxury event planner turned founder of Curate, a regional membership community for wedding professionals that brings together elevated networking, stunning events, and guest experts. With a successful background in event design and coordination, Robin launched Curate to create a space for connection and creativity in the industry. She’s a former mastermind member and a real-life example of what it looks like to pivot powerfully.

📧 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/episode598

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Transcript

Jasmine Star 00:00:00  If you are the person who has to trade your hours for dollars, then guess what? The business owns you. You don't own the business. Has there ever been a point in your life where you say you want to do something, and you're not quite sure how to get it done right? So there's a chasm of where you are and where you want to be. And you're like, I don't know how I'm going to find my way across. I want to introduce you to a woman by the name of Robin Ballard. She was in my mastermind, and she came in and she had a wildly successful event planning business, and she was there and she said, Jasmine, I have systematized and operationalized this business. I have a team of designers and coordinators, and my time has come. But she's like, the business is so successful and I don't know how to pivot. I don't know what to do next. So in our eight months together, she was trying a multitude of things, and towards the end of our eight months, it was like everything fell into place.

Jasmine Star 00:00:55  And she said, I have a clear direction of what I want to build now. I want to, like, pause here and say, she didn't say I've built it and it's successful. She simply said, over the course of eight months I know what I want to build. So then Robin stepped away, did the deep work, prepared for what she wanted to build, and she told me a few months later, much to her delight, the offer has taken off. She created a program called curate and what it is. It is a luxury membership for event designers, people in the wedding industry to get together on a regional basis and network with each other, and then they bring in guest speakers and it is just a lovely event. It is beautiful. Every single event is decorated. It's a vibe. So think about this event serving wedding professionals the way and in the manner when they go and create these gorgeous, over-the-top luxury weddings, they now get to go and network at events that look and feel the same way, but for their professional development.

Jasmine Star 00:02:00  Robin launches it and she launches it in Newport Beach, and it has since expanded into other cities around the United States. So I've been following up with her and she says, Jasmine, this is so incredible. I'm absolutely in love with it. This is the thing I've been called to do. It's an extension of the work and relationships I've already built. And I said, I'm so excited for you. Well, this has been going on well over a year. So when she reached out to me and she said, Jasmine, this is a full circle moment for me. We started curate in Your mastermind and it's taken off. And number one, I want to be very clear, I take zero credit for this idea. I take zero credit. It's everything about Robin. However, when she invited me to speak at the curated event, I was totally humbled because I was able to watch in real time a wildly successful entrepreneur, take a skill set and pivot it. So if you are here and you would like to say, listen, I can operationalize or systematize a business and they feel like I'm being called to do something else.

Jasmine Star 00:02:58  What does it look like? A real life story of a pivot. What needs to be true? What needs to be taking place? It is with much gratitude and humility that Robin is allowing me to share a video from that event. I'm going to share it right now to put you in the seat of people in the room, and then we'll loop back and tie it up with a nice big bow. Good evening. How are you? I feel like I'm with my people. I appreciate this very, very, very much. This is an honor, and it's a privilege, but it mostly feels full circle. Here's why. A moment of truth. I started off as a wedding photographer, and I said I wanted to become a photographer, and I didn't own a camera. I just decided that's the thing I wanted to do. So for all intents and purposes, I set out and I started with a blog and I just took pictures and I posted them on a blog, and I thought, there's nobody in the world who will hire me.

Jasmine Star 00:03:52  And about 12 months later we had brought in over six figures of revenue. So what did this mean? It meant two things that unqualified people can do. Impossible things. And it also meant that content began to change the game. Much to the chagrin of many people who said, she's not that good. To which I replied, yes, but I'm making money and I can get better. And so I'm here to let you know I am an advocate for unqualified people doing impossible things. That's thank you for the one person who's like, I get that because what you're going to quickly see. And yes, I hope that the air comes on as much as anybody else. But guess what? You know, it's just like it's hot in here. And so. Oh, I think that's a good song. I feel like we're going to be vibing out with this song. So this is what we're going to do is just have a quick conversation. That's a narration. And if we have time to do Q&A at the end, that would be the best because nobody really wants to hear me pontificate things.

Jasmine Star 00:04:55  What I want to do is I just want to share a little bit of my history to show how a highly unqualified person can do highly qualified things, and then just continue to refute the point that whatever we put ourselves to, we can accomplish. And so my whole point here was Robin said, Jasmine, can you come in and talk about the pivot? And I said, yes, I can do that. But here again, I don't show up saying I did it the right way. In fact, I will say the opposite. I did it so wrong that please learn from my lessons so you can do it in half the amount of time and make twice the amount of money here. Again, that's okay. Okay. It's like I'm leaving you guys right to it. I should also say that my dad is a pastor in East Los Angeles, California. And so we have this talk back nomenclature and Latino culture. My dad is a first generation. He's an immigrant. I'm the first generation Latina, first in my family to go to college, first in my family to start a business with hip hop.

Jasmine Star 00:05:47  Okay. So we see these things, right? Because I'm literally just laying things out. I don't think I have it together, so please take my mistakes and run with them. So I started off my career as a photographer in about 2007. I shot for 16 years all around the world. My camera became my passport and I began to build a name and a brand. What does a brand mean? A brand is just what somebody says about you when you're not in the room. And my brand became somebody who worked hard and followed through. And I stayed in business. And over the years I kept in raising my prices and began shooting for magazines. And photographers were looking at me saying, you're not qualified. How are you getting those results? So I started creating digital products and I was selling them online. And in around 2009, 2010, I just started putting out $19 PDFs online. Did I know how to create an online store? No, not at all. Did I know how to create a PDF? No, not at all.

Jasmine Star 00:06:44  Did I know how to create a separate URL? No, not at all. And there was this thing called Google and you literally just figure it out. So I started creating these PDFs and lo and behold, around this time my husband and I, he, I said, hey, leave your startup and come with this startup. And he agreed. Crazy. Let me just tell you, my negotiation skills are like on par. Let me just tell you, this guy was like, let's go all in. And so what happens is we're building this business and we're shooting on the weekends, we're editing, we're doing all the things, and I'm creating digital products. In less than 12 months, we created another six figure revenue stream. So it's about 2009, 2010, and we're doing about 400 or $500,000, with the vast majority coming from a digital resource. What is the digital resource about things I knew? And guess what? Everybody here knows something. No, you'll say what I know. Everybody knows.

Jasmine Star 00:07:41  And let me tell you, this entire presentation will simply say, I just shared what I knew and people paid me for it. Started off $19 and then, you know, as one does, being savvy entrepreneur. I charged less over time. Why? I got in my head. Who's going to be paying for this? What does this actually look like? So I started creating these videos that were about two minutes, y'all. I was creating reels before reels were a thing, and I was charging $2.99 per download, and then I just created content and people were paying me $2.99 and $19, and I would wake up and I was like, oh, well, we made $800 last night. That began something. And an understanding that we all have a finite time in the world. And so what we do with that finite time can have powerful impacts on legacies. I can now tell you that my family is forever changed. Not just my daughter, but my parents and my siblings. And I am here to tell you that we all can share something and we could think differently about our businesses.

Jasmine Star 00:08:51  Here's why I started off as a photographer. Then I began creating digital products, creating a separate revenue stream. We got to such a point that I thought to myself, I am shooting around the world 36 weddings a year alongside my husband. And I thought to myself, is there a way for me to work myself out of the business and only do the thing that I was the most qualified to do? I was most qualified to shoot and then hired somebody to do my editing, hired someone to do my albums, told me to ship my albums, hired somebody to do my press hire. I abdicated the responsibilities of the business so that I can be the main rainmaker. I will shoot everything behind the business is optimized, and then opened up time for me to think about new ways of creating money. So it's about this time that I create an online course for the first time. And I was like, I don't know if I can do this thing. I've never created a course before. So $197.

Jasmine Star 00:09:46  And we opened it for five days. And I was like, man, if we just sell. Oh, and in five days we made $255,000 off a $197 course. And then we launched it again. And then we launched it again. And in 12 months, made over $1 million off $197 course. Then my minds open up and I'm like, okay, still shooting, still creating content, still doing the digital stuff. I do not recommend those types of hours, but let me tell you, it was setting a foundation to be like, there is money and then there's wealth. The first time I stepped into money, I became so afraid I was going to lose it all that I was like, I'll work 100 hour weeks because there's like, there's paying and then there's getting paid. And I was like, I don't know how long this is gonna last. So the brain starts mapping to things that we think we can control. So then I launch another course for $2,000. I'm going to save everybody here some time.

Jasmine Star 00:10:45  We kept on creating courses. Then we launched a membership and I said, if we can just get 500 people in this membership, my life would change. We launch it again in five days. 2444 people joined this membership. So we have multiple seven figure revenue streams coming in. And I'm still shooting weddings. Why? I optimize the business so that my time rendered in the business was the time of the wedding and that was it. That's the whole point of this conversation. What can you do in your business that's called operationalize. When you operationalize your business, it means I have a business. I spent my years building the business, and now there are things in the business that I don't necessarily need to do. So that is how I met Robin. Robin joined I, who's a mastermind for seven figure female founders. This means that only 4% of all business owners, 4% of all business owners in America, will ever cross seven figures. Of that 4%, point 7% are women. So if I aggregate a group of seven figure founders who want to scale to eight figures, I'm literally in a room with unicorns.

Jasmine Star 00:11:53  And I think to myself, what magic can we create in these rooms? That's how I met Robin at the end of our mastermind. Together, Robins like Jasmine. I sense a pivot in me, and she hammered away for months and months and months at what that pivot would be. And ladies and gentlemen, we are standing in the manifestation of the pivot. That's right. That's right, that's right, that's right, that's right. I am not advocating for pivots. If you love what you do, continue doing more of what you do. But we all have the same 24 hours in a day. What is it going to look like for you to start thinking differently about creating a separate revenue stream? All I want to do here is quite a little bit of a fire. So what would be the best way for us to navigate this quick conversation? Well, I often have questions about the pivot because people say in a matter of a decade, what have you done and how have you done it? So I went to my audience very much like this audience here to ask questions.

Jasmine Star 00:12:47  Four main questions that are going to guide this conversation. Question number one, what's the best piece of advice you have been given when it comes to pivoting? Earn the pivot. How many of us have seen somebody in the wedding industry say, oh, you know, it's like I'm going to pivot. And then all of a sudden they fall off like the proverbial cliff. You didn't pivot, you just stopped, or you tried pivoting and there wasn't anything else there to pivot into. We have to earn the pivot. So this leads us to how you earn the right to pivot by way of consistency. I don't care if you want to be a photographer and then add an album line. If you want to be a wedding vendor and then do holidays, whatever it is, you have to be consistent on one thing focusing what happens in the creative world. Everything is beautiful, sparkly and amazing and we're like that thing and that thing. And now TikTok. I'm going to be a YouTuber. And what I need, I need a podcast.

Jasmine Star 00:13:40  I'm in the wedding visual world. I need a podcast. And all of a sudden everybody is just distracted with all the things. If you want to pivot, you must be consistent with your focus so that you're putting in the reps. Let me tell you, let me just beat everybody here. If you do not have the humility to get your face smashed in publicly again and again, the pivot is not for you. Everybody can just get up, walk right out the door. If this is not it, this is not it. The cost of your success is directly proportional to the humility. You have to show up and do it wrong again and again and again. Let me just paint the picture for you. It ain't easy and it's not for the weak hearted. However, every time you stumble, you do not fail. You only fail if you quit. Because if you quit, you don't get another chance. But if you quote unquote fail, which I just call a lesson, now you know what not to do.

Jasmine Star 00:14:35  I am in the game of figuring out what not to do again and again and again. And then I'm in the game of sharing what not to do with you, so I save you some time. That's how we all. That's the glow of. That's the come up. I always said that if I ever had the opportunity to create a business, any business. This was before I was a photographer. I flung myself, my husband was at a startup and we're not having any money whatsoever. They paid him, like occasionally, like in a bag of oranges and pesos. And I was like, how are we going to live? And I was working part time at my dad's church, and I flung myself in the bed, and I was just like, if somebody would just take a chance on me, I could prove that I could be a photographer. And guess what? Nobody came. So then you teach yourself and say, I won't quit until I get where I want to go, and then I'm just embarrassed.

Jasmine Star 00:15:19  But I take those lessons and I figure out what action to take, and then I get a result. The only thing that will guide you is not a print to save you in a castle. It is the results that you get from the lessons you learn here to the end. And then you say, I have earned the right to pivot when there's nothing left in the business to fix that, you have worked yourself out of a job. I had successfully worked myself out of lead acquisition for getting brides to book me. I have successfully worked myself out of the position of creating content for that arm of the business. I had successfully worked myself out of album design, album shipping, fulfillment, talking with the vendors and posting afterwards on social media. I had one job and that was to show up on a Saturday, shoot the wedding and the business was off to the races. So this is the word I was trying to get y'all. I was practicing my keynote operationalize operationalizing the Business before you're over the business, how many of us have gone to events? And we're like, oh, there's Sarah.

Robin Ballard 00:16:22  Another Saturday at a wedding. And you're like, I hope I'm not Sarah.

Jasmine Star 00:16:28  You'd stop and avoid becoming Sarah when you operationalize the business and you're good at what you love, and you abdicate the rest because that's Gary. Is there a Sarah here? Did I? I got the room out real quiet. I was like, is there a Sarah I don't know about? It's a fictitious name, y'all. Fictitious name. A pivot is a strategic shift based on stuff you already know. I had pivoted part of my services into digital offerings and digital offerings into slightly different digital offerings and then consulting. And then now I sit as a board of advisors where my husband and I have an equity stake in businesses. Why? It was all tiny little pivots leveraging the thing we had learned before. And so if we always stay in a state of stasis, my central nervous system is calm because I'm booking my 12.25 weddings a year. It's just enough to get by, and I'm just active on social and I can afford tours and everything is okay.

Jasmine Star 00:17:21  Go on, go on. But if you sense that there's something more at first, it's going to come as a knock. and then it's going to come as a nudge. It's going to push you and you feel it in your gut. And if you decide to ignore it, it will come as a rhinoceros. If you know something's in you, face it. Try it. Lesson learn and innovate. So the biggest thing that we can say is earn the pivot. But how do you do that? By working yourself out of it. Second question is how do you prepare yourself for the pivot? What are things that we can start doing immediately today is to systematize. Now let me tell you, I am invited to curate and nobody wants to hear this conversation. What we want to do is what people I'm most known for is Johnson's all about content and marketing. And I am. But let me tell you, content and marketing will make you popular. It will make you profitable. And I am here to say I don't care about the followers.

Jasmine Star 00:18:18  What I want is legacy. And what I want to turn is my riches into wealth. And the way that you do that is by systematizing what it is that you do. Because if we're going to sit here and we're going to work our way into 84 years old in the industry. We have to ask ourselves, what have we done to set the business up? Systematize. So what does this mean? It is like an owner's manual. Like, let me tell you, if I brought you in, I was like, you got to take over my company. What's your name? Jay. You got to take over my company. And you're like, where do I start? I was like, here is our SOP standard operating procedures. You would open it up and be like, I don't know what you does, but step one, turn on the computer. Step two. Set up a zoom meeting. Everything in the business has a manual. If you are the person who has to trade your hours for dollars, then guess what? The business owns you.

Jasmine Star 00:19:07  You don't own the business. Oh.

Robin Ballard 00:19:11  Don't worry. You went to church right there. Thank you, thank you.

Jasmine Star 00:19:17  So the next thing we need to do is the leadership who's replacing you. And I really need this. Like, your VA is going to be replacing you in your inbox, and that's cool. Your social content assistant is going to help you with social media. Who's replacing you? The minute we've identified here is my manual of how to run my business. And you're really great. You're going to do this. Awesome. That leads us to step number three. What's the growth plan? How is your business growing without you? That's going to be the part where you ask yourself, how could it be? And then you ask yourself, am I willing to do the work? If you don't know how your business is going to grow without you, I promise you, you spend one day tomorrow asking yourself that question five times. You're going to come up with an answer and you're not going to like it because it's going to require you to do things we don't want to do.

Jasmine Star 00:20:07  And guess what? The winners will continue to win because they eat. I think it was Hemingway who said, if you have to eat a frog every day, eat it at the beginning, get it over with. And many of us pretend we don't have to eat the frog. We don't have to eat the frog. And yet the person who eats the frog, AKA I'm going to post on social media when I really don't feel like it and other people will say, well, it's turning into a portfolio. If people aren't finding me right, it's going to get harder. Ladies and gentlemen, it's going to get harder. So let's ask ourselves, listen, if it's like ten x hard and then next month or year it's going to be 20 x hard. Let's eat the ten x toad. This is the cost of us doing business. You have to prepare your pivot by removing yourself from the business. Here's the thing I don't expect anybody to say like, okay, Jasmine, I'm out of my business.

Jasmine Star 00:20:56  But imagine just imagine right now you're working about 52 hours a week, and you were to bring in the VA, and you're bringing somebody in to help you with content, and they saved you seven hours a week. What are you doing with your seven hours? Some people might be like, oh my God, I can go to my kid's game or I can go to bed at a regular time. Awesome. I freaking love that. And I bet your life. But if in those seven hours you decide to do something else that leverages your skill set to do something, then now you have the tools to do it. Question number three. Ashley. Ashley's. What's the number one thing you're most proud of? Now, this is where I want to pause here. This is not a humble fest. This is. Let me tell you what. All the things I did wrong. So we had built a membership. And at the time, I was like, well, we need special things as part of this membership.

Jasmine Star 00:21:38  So against all advice, I said, you know, I'm not a tech founder, but, it's 2021. Let's just build a tech company. So hired out a CTO, hired out a tech stack, and we became a SaaS software as a service. And we integrated with every social platform out on the internet. Not too bad for a brown girl. Thank you. I was I actually sounded like I let up for the woo, I didn't, I just wanted to take a moment and like literally say it was the hardest freaking thing I had ever done. There is the Hall of Shame. I am right up there with all the things you shouldn't be doing. Let's talk about things I wish I would have done differently and I'm telling you, they will apply you to your business, whatever your business is. Number one, I'd wish I had built out a tech team sooner. And your land? It could be. I wish I just hired a VA somebody to help me get out of the mire.

Jasmine Star 00:22:35  You and all of your glorious business should not be answering. You should not be doing tasks in your business that a person who's getting paid $20 should do. If you're doing the $20 tasks. Oh Lord, baby Jesus in a manger. Hire somebody. Everybody get together. Everybody get together. Three people and say, you know what? I could use somebody for 12 hours and I could use somebody for 12 hours. I could use somebody for 12 hours. Y'all bring in one person for 32 hours. You say you work for the three of us. You streamline those synergies. And guess what? You get back that time, and you're spending a couple hundred dollars to live an entirely different life. Can I get an amen? Okay, I focused on data and analytics, friends. Data and analytics is where the millions are made. This is why Zuckerberg has a bunker and more money than he knows what to do with. It is all on data and analytics. So often what I see specifically in the creative world is we don't look at numbers are not fun.

Jasmine Star 00:23:30  You just open any of your social apps. They the apps are telling you, look what's working. We want you more here. They're giving you a roadmap of what you should be posting. Oh, we don't like looking at that because my engagement has been going down. Okay, so if they're giving you a map on what went well and you don't look at it, why, the data will tell you what you should be posting more of. So if you're like my engagements going down, well, how about you pick the one thing in the last month that actually did the best of everything, even if it's not as good as it used to be, and then repeat it. That's what the data wants you to do. Repeat what is working. Lastly, created content with a marketing team. What I think that we all do is the tendency to say, like, I can do it because it's my way, which I'm the Queen like transgressor of that bring people in to help see things differently because they could speak to people in different ways.

Jasmine Star 00:24:22  I mean this for every industry at any given point in time. Was there a pivotal moment when you stopped playing small and said, I'm all in? Oh, Christie. yes. Ish. Because, I texted my husband. We live here in Newport, and he's with our daughter. And I texted him and I was like, bro, I am so nervous for this thing. I can't like what in the world? To which he says, you've spoken on stages of tens of thousands of people, but this group matters the most to you because this group is you. And so I want to say, is there a moment that I stopped playing small? Like I want to say yes, because it sounds really cool and the answer is every single day I have to believe that something is destined for me more than what I have been put on this earth to do. My greatest fear is to die and realize that the pearly gates. Somebody said you didn't leave it all in the field. You had so much more talent to give and you stopped yourself.

Jasmine Star 00:25:21  So this is where I get a little bit woo! So just deal with me, okay? Like deal with me. Southern California, born and raised. Okay. I'm a granola hippie through and through. When, like, when somebody is just like, do you get a word of the year? I was like, I download a word, okay? The word comes to me. I'm not going to get into how. It's just a word that slaps me across my face every single year. Let me talk to you about the year that is 2023. After a year of 2022, when it felt like I got socked in the face every single morning, and I woke up the next morning, I said, thank you, sir. I'll have another question every single day so that I wake up in 2023 and I'm like, never have we been more successful and never have I felt so bad about myself. Something has to change in 2022. My word of the year was trust. Let me just tell you, if any of y'all get that word, just stop this.

Jasmine Star 00:26:13  Just take your last breath. You don't want to go through the year of trust. You just don't. And so 2023 happens. And it's a year and it's a rebirth. And I think to myself, oh foolishly 12 months new me here I go. And so I think to myself, I'm going to list every lesson that I had learned. And then I'm going to take action. And what I realized is, as I'm talking here about lessening owner dependency, like, hey, guys, work less in your business. When I started the tech company, all I did was eat it, breathe it, dream it, sleep it. I couldn't get out of it. I became consumed, I became obsessed with the thing I knew nothing about. I paid $30,000 for an eight month program to learn how to build a tech company, and then paid it again eight months later because I was like, I still don't know what I'm doing. I said, what did you learn, woman. Now go and change it.

Jasmine Star 00:27:12  I lessened owner dependency. I said, I'm going to replace myself in the business around things. I actually have no clue what I'm doing. I handed operations to the team, I need manuals. This is what I do on this day. This is what I do on this day. This is what I do on this day. Do you do this? I'm going to pay you to do it now because you're better at it. And it's draining the living blood out of me. In 2024, the word I got. And let me tell you, by the end of 2023, I was not a new person. I felt just as miserable. But I had more time, and I really loved the team that we had built and I was working. I can't even tell you how many hours I was working every week. And I came back and I thought to myself, what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life? Because you're good at business and you like it, how do you get out? The word that came to me was independence, and I was afraid because I have a twin sister I've only ever known coupling.

Jasmine Star 00:28:06  I met my husband in high school. Like I am down for that brother. I was like, listen, when I die, I'm going to haunt you. Don't even worry about it. So, like, let's just stay here. So independence meant like, oh my gosh, am I going to do things on my own? And what it meant was do it your own way. Whatever you think, you know, you got it wrong, girl. Do it your own way. So what happens? I started expanding my network and saying, okay, if we have a social curator that did eight figures of business, we have somebody running it. It's doing seven figures of business. What are you going to do now? And the answer was, I don't freaking know, because the world that had existed in the digital space is so totally different. So I had time to start thinking, what do I see the future of education being? And do I have the capacity to fill in the gap in entrepreneurship? And the answer was, I sure named Hope so.

Jasmine Star 00:28:57  And so we go through a whole nother freaking year of building in collaboration. So I started asking myself, okay, the industry changes, what am I actually doing? We have people in our holding company, which means that we have equity in their company, so if they ever sell, we get paid for it. So I sit on their boards and I give them advice on their strategy and overall. So I started thinking to myself, can I create an offer that's leveraging the companies in our holding company so that, like, we win, they win, and then we all win. Started thinking about this. I wouldn't have had this space to actually think about how big things could be if I didn't radically cut back on the things that was keeping me behind. But what does this have to do with playing small in 2025? The word that came to me was flow, not go with the flow. I don't know if you guys probably know me like five minutes. I am not a go with the flow kind of girl.

Jasmine Star 00:29:42  I'm like, fight the flow. I like look at the water and it turned the other way. Flow. This was choose flow. Can what you build be so radically easy because not of the failures, but of the lessons that you had learned. That was the big question. Can it be easy? So we have this mastermind for seven figure female founders. We have a course called Your Biggest Lunch Ever. We have a tech company. And we also created a slightly different offer. So we have all of these people in the businesses and we're building businesses and putting operators in. How then does this work? I said, I've got to get out of being like, Seabiscuit, go on, Seabiscuit, win that race. So I got to get on social, do all the things and teach all the ways. And I was like, get out of it. Build a sales team, build a coaching team, build a directorship. All of these things were coming. Why? Because I just had space to think about how does it become different? So we debuted a new offer, which is still to this day, behind the scenes and already doing multiple six figures.

Jasmine Star 00:30:39  It's not even public facing yet. I wouldn't have been able to think about the future if I was still tied up in the present. So what does this mean about playing small? I stopped playing small and built the systems for big after all of the lessons. After getting my teeth knocked out, I looked at this business. I was like, okay, don't do anything Jasmine. Build the systems and put people in it. Could we do it differently? Hot dang. The answer is yes. Now you might be sitting here like, what does that have to do with me? How do you work yourself out of the stuff that you absolutely hate? Because right now, there's a chance that some of us I'm not looking at anybody, might be struggling a little bit with burnout. Nobody. Nobody's like, I have no idea. It's like mid-summer. We're just coming off some of the best time. Absolutely. I'm all about it. I don't know about you, but the quickest path to burnout for me was doing things that were so out of alignment that I always felt like I was losing.

Jasmine Star 00:31:32  Oh, there's another thing. Oh, here's another thing. So there are four zones of genius. There are four zones of leadership. And when you're like, I don't really want to define myself as a leader. If you're making your own money and you sign your own check, you're a leader here at the end. If you have people paying you to show up on the most important day of their lives, you're a leader. If they hire you again to come back to the second most important day of their life with their new spouse, about 7.25 years later, you're a leader. Okay, so four zones of leadership. I just want you to sit here and I want you to do some basic math with me. Incapable. There's four zones. Zone number one is I'm incapable. I don't know how to do it, and I hate it. If you're doing stuff in your business that you don't know how to do and you hate it, it leaves you feeling exhausted, incapable. Second zone of leadership.

Jasmine Star 00:32:25  I'm capable. I know how to do this, but I hate it. That will leave you exhausted. Okay. Third zone of leadership. And this is the tricky one. Your zone of excellence. I'm good at it. I just don't really like it. Wow. It's like moody lighting. It's like. So like, man, it's like. Really like they're such a downer. Your zone of excellence. I'm good at it. I don't like it. What does it make you feel like? It feels like I'm feeling tired. This feels so heavy. Last zone of leadership is your zone of genius. I'm the best at this. This is the stuff where you like. Pick your head up from your computer, or you put your camera down at the end of the night, or you get out of a design session from an event and you're like, how did you just spend six hours doing that? That was freaking incredible. That's your zone of genius. I want you to ask yourself right now, how much time are you spending in your zone of genius? Excellence? I'm good at it.

Jasmine Star 00:33:26  I just don't like it. I'm capable. I'm fricking exhausted. I'm incapable. I'm dumb and exhausted. Nobody's dumb. Nobody's dumb. I felt when I. When I'm incapable, I feel dumb. I am not dumb. I'm just doing something I've never done before. So let me tell you about the punch in the face. You're called 2022. I was doing 25% of things. I was incapable. I have no idea what I'm freaking doing. I'm literally, like, on a roller coaster sitting in the front seat and there's no track in front of me. I was like, yeah, every single freaking day. Imagine for hours a day being petrified and like, they're asking me a question. I have no freaking clue. And oh guess what? Here's another bill. Holy mother of God, that was my life. 20% of capable. I guess I can do this because I'm just going to pick up the slack because like, oh my God, they're going to be expecting me to know these answers.

Jasmine Star 00:34:15  So let me go and watch for lessons on how to answer this one question in slack excellence. I'm doing things I'm actually really freaking good at and I don't like him. You want to know a little surprising fact I freaking hate social media. Hey, I have millions of followers across platforms, I hate it, I'm excellent at it, I hate it. Zone of genius. Nothing. Nothing. It's like 10% being generous. Let's talk about the study. And for you to be your best and have everything come to you. Optimal leadership zone distribution. You are doing zero that you're incapable of. Like, duh, Right. Why was I doing things? Zero of what you're capable of. 20% of what you're excellent at, and 80% of your zone of freaking genius. Ladies and gentlemen, if you just take one thing on the way home, please index on the genius. Things come faster to you. They show up in your orbit easier. People look at you like you're a shining beacon in the room.

Jasmine Star 00:35:25  And they're like, what is glowing about that person? You're just doing the thing you were put on this earth to do. That's it. I wasn't burnt out. I just wasn't in my zone of genius. I needed to pivot. The rhino hit me upside of my head. Do you want to know the story? Was that in 2022, I told myself if I'm not in, this business is going nowhere. Do you guys believe I wrote a letter to the business saying I love you for everything you taught me? Goodbye. Have a great live day. Okay. This is what a therapist told me to do, okay? It was like a business coach. Like, just grieve the loss of the thing not working. And I was just like, okay, but we're doing like millions grieve the loss. It's going to go away grieving the loss. And it didn't go away and the team took it over. And it's great. We tell ourselves stories to make ourselves feel more important. And the reality is, is if you build a business, it runs without you.

Jasmine Star 00:36:16  It was embarrassing. I sat for so long thinking that I was the center of that universe was wrong, and I wasted so much of my time and I wasted so much of my daughter's time with that. So 2022 birthed the year of 2023, which is rebirth. And in 2023, everything changed, brought in a team. I have more time to think. I live my life. I love what I freaking do. Opportunities just come my way. I'm now creating for nobody but me. I am creating for the stuff I wish I knew. I am creating for people to do their homework. I am creating to put things out and say don't do this because it was the wrong way. I put things out to save you time. I put things out to be like, make some freaking money. Have your business. Let me tell you that money is not to be rich. Money is for optionality. Money is for you to say, I have saved, I have invested, and I get to shoot weddings.

Jasmine Star 00:37:11  I don't have to. I get to do makeup. I get to design. I get to do that. You only earn the right to get to do something when you let go of everything that's holding you back. So, ladies and gentlemen, earn your pivot by doing the things we don't want to do. Set up systems, hire an interview VA, and you'll probably have to go through 2 or 3 before you find your one. then you tell yourself your stories and you're going to stay consistent and you're like, rah rah, rah. I'm hosting three times this week, and then you go nothing for six weeks and you're like, why did the leads coming in? Nobody's paying attention. Okay, we have to do the things. So we learned the lesson so we get the results. I want you to get the results that other people don't have, because you're doing the work that they're not doing. The game is just showing up, Literally, you show up and the game entirely changes. We have just a few minutes.

Jasmine Star 00:38:01  Are there any questions just to tie up? Let's take about five questions. So thank you. Thank you. Any questions at all. It's always the first person. Thank you so much.

Multiple Speakers 00:38:10  I'm wondering with your description of VA, are they still responding as you or are they as their own person.

Jasmine Star 00:38:18  No, they're responding as themselves.

Multiple Speakers 00:38:20  Okay. So then you're just like incorporating them into your team and they're getting kind.

Jasmine Star 00:38:25  Of what do.

Multiple Speakers 00:38:26  You do. System florals.

Jasmine Star 00:38:27  Great. Oh my god. Even better, you probably get the same eight emails, but every bride thinks they're a special snowflake. And like, she's the only one who's ever wanted pink peonies.

Multiple Speakers 00:38:37  Yeah, ever.

Multiple Speakers 00:38:39  Okay, so yeah, you can really, like, nail it on a personalized response. But like, if you just kind of send a generic response via honeybee or some auto, I.

Jasmine Star 00:38:47  Think the top 8 to 10 questions that I'm often asked, I write the responses, I go to my VA and I'm like, hey, all you have to do is change the name the date.

Jasmine Star 00:38:55  Read over two details. I'm like, I need you to find two data deals. Before you respond. Go back and respond to those two details. Like all you're just doing is like the first four emails of any inquiry are just like, how much are you? Bet we want to know. Like, are you crazy? We could get a V8 to do that. And then the final thing is before, like, do we decide to meet? I will probably intercept that. So take the time, write the 8 to 10 emails. Everybody's asking you the same questions. What kind of piano do you bring it? Do you need to plug in flowers? What time do you arrive? It's all the same stuff taking the time to build it. Remember the SOP, the standard operating procedure? You turn that over and anytime somebody has a question like, oh, but what do I do about that? Come to me, we'll figure it out. We add it to your SOP, and the next thing you know, I'm not in my inbox at all.

Multiple Speakers 00:39:36  All right, who's next?

Multiple Speakers 00:39:38  Hi, Allison. With Five Crowns restaurant.

Jasmine Star 00:39:40  My husband is there so often.

Multiple Speakers 00:39:43  Oh, well, come ask for me, I mean, oh, he's gonna. I'll keep an eye on him. Thank you. No, no, no. Are you kidding me?

Jasmine Star 00:39:49  I keep an eye on him all the time.

Multiple Speakers 00:39:50  Don't eat me. Will you come in and join me for a drink while he's on the other side? Yes. Say less. Do you offer personal coaching services? No, I don't.

Jasmine Star 00:39:58  I don't. Here's why. Mom, when you look at the spectrum of what you can do. I was doing consulting and I realized I loved it. And I was getting paid $2,500 an hour, but it was $25 an hour. And building out somebody else's business that had a disproportionate return on the time that I had spent. I loved it, but I realized I don't need to be $2,500 richer. I want to be $2.5 million richer. So I start asking myself bigger questions.

Jasmine Star 00:40:25  And the bigger question then became, how do I make the most out of my time? Which is why I created the mastermind. So the mastermind to me, in my mind is getting a group of people. And yes, I meet one on one with the people in there, but the value. Like Robin said, she's still talking to people from there. That to me is like the greatest legacy. It should never be about the Jasmin show. I'm really not that interesting. The aggregate of 20 powerful seven figure women or men in a room is mind blowing. You learn more from the group than you would meet. I just navigate it. Then if I am sitting with founders, I'm having equity in the company. So now this leads me to ask you a question. Have you ever pivoted, or are you in the moment of having a desire to pivot? I am sharing this content because I have pivoted my career a few times, and every single time I did, I took what I learned in the past to set me up for a wildly successful future.

Jasmine Star 00:41:16  And that's exactly what I want you to do. But I want you to do it by learning lessons not just for me, but watching Robin do it and do it so well. I want to say thank you to Robin Ballard and create events. I want to say thank you to you for being here and watching and being on this journey. And if you have found this powerful, impactful, helpful in any way, shape or form, please feel free to send it to a friend. The more we learn together, the more we grow together. And that is the entire intentionality of this podcast. Thank you for watching and listening to The Jasmine Star Show.