The Jasmine Star Show

Quarter One Review: Inside My Podcast Monetization Strategy + Course Launch Wins

• Jasmine Star

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In this raw and real “Laying Bricks” episode, I pull back the curtain on Q1 of 2025—from launching the second round of Your Biggest Launch Ever to experimenting with podcast monetization.

You’ll hear why we hired alumni entrepreneurs as our sales team, how we ditched commissions and brought in pro trainers to level them up, and what that taught me about leadership and selling with heart.

Plus, I share the big shifts I’m feeling in the business, the risks I’m taking, and what it looks like to play a bigger game this year.

Here's an honest look at how I’m building the next version of my business—one brick at a time.

Click >>PLAY<< to hear all of this and:

[00:00] Why staying “above the forest” is key to starting the year strong

[02:00] The real reason I started the “Laying Bricks” series—and why I’m documenting this journey

[03:45] Inside the course launch: why we added alumni entrepreneurs to our sales team

[04:36] How I decided to compensate the sales team—and what changed when we removed commission incentives

[06:20] The unexpected bonus our alumni sales team got (hint: it’s not just the pay!)

[07:20] How this nine-day sales experience turned into a mastermind-level think tank

[08:30] The honest truth behind why I started taking podcast monetization calls in January

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Other links mentioned:

  • Join the waitlist for my mastermind so you’re first to know when we start accepting applications for the next cohort: JasmineStar.com/mastermind
  • Scaling to hit 7-figures? Apply for my brand new program, First Million Framework, to help you reach the next level in your business: Jasminestar.com/million

Join me for my free (no pitch!) 3-part live class series Scaling Accelerator for 7-Figure Business Owners - I’ll break down the exact systems, marketing frameworks, and time management processes to grow your business, get in front of your ideal client, and ensure you are operating at the highest level. Sign up for free at JasmineStar.com/scaling — and learn how to scale to 8-figures.

You know that feeling when you find a platform that just works—and you never have to worry about switching? That’s been me and Showit for the past 10+ years.

I built my website with Showit because it gives me total design freedom.

If you’re ready to build a website that works FOR you—and not against you—head to JasmineStar.com/showit for a 14-day free trial + first month free when you subscribe!

Jasmine Star 00:00:00  There is an importance of being in the trees and above the forest. When I'm in the trees, I'm doing the work. My ear is on the ground. I'm listening to what's going on. I'm talking to people. I'm doing the work. But if you're always doing the work, you actually lose sight of what is the big vision. And so this is our reminder on my very first laying bricks of 2025. Stay above the forest. Welcome back to the Jasmine Star Show. For those of you who are new here or would like a quick refresher. I am a law school dropout. I am a first generation Latina, a first generation business owner, and a first generation podcast host. This show is a documenting of the process. I said I wanted to become a photographer back in 2006, and I didn't have a camera, and that led to a long and crazy career of becoming a creator of content, having other companies pay me to create content on their behalf, having other companies hire me to consult on building a brand and helping their marketing teams, which led me to want to help business owners, Period.

Jasmine Star 00:01:01  So I started creating courses around 2015 and 2016, and then around 2017, I created a membership and then in 2021, debuted my own tech stack for a tech company called Social Curator. I have since gone on to build a holding company where I invest in other companies. I sit as an advisor, and I am a mom and I'm a wife and I am a daughter and I hope a really good friend. Welcome to the show, because I want to be your really good friend. And so the kindest thing that I think friends do is they spit the truth, they tell it as it is, and they also share what it is they know that is what is happening today. Today we are doing another installment of Laying Bricks. So what is Laying Bricks? As a quick reminder, these are my quarterly reviews. This is no frameworks I am not teaching. I am showing up wholly as myself, even though I feel like it's a bunch of disparate pieces. So back in 2024, I started 2024 by creating a series called Laying Bricks, and I said, I want to show the foundation of the skyscraper I am building.

Jasmine Star 00:02:00  Oftentimes in the business world, it's easy to talk about all the things that we've done or the business that we built. But this is the nitty gritty. This is the brick by brick. And so sometimes I make decisions that might not make sense. Sometimes I pursue things that might not make sense. Sometimes I make mistakes, and then sometimes I place a really great bet. Laying bricks breaks it all down so that in the future, should anything good come from a bet I might have placed, or a decision that I might have made, or maybe a failure that I've openly documented, and then I can go back and say that wasn't a failure. It was a lesson that led to something much bigger than you could have anticipated. So that's what laying bricks is. I take them quarter by quarter. Welcome to the episode that is January 2025 to March 2025. All I am doing is laying out the meetings I'm taking, where I'm going, who I'm speaking to, things that are happening in my life that changed my perspective.

Jasmine Star 00:02:50  I will be sure to link to the Laying Bricks episodes in the show notes. If you want to go back and hear, quite honestly, how some of the things I'm doing now was called back a year ago, and how some of the things I'm doing today will hopefully yield really great results in the next. I mean, if I'm being real, I mean, I hope that this yields results next week doesn't really work like that. So here's to hoping they yield results in a year or two or whenever the right time happens. Let's go back to January 2025. We started the year very fast. We began training a sales team for the first time. I launched a course called Your Biggest Launch Ever, and at that point in time, we had one sales mechanism, which basically means we sell this in one way. We have a promotion, I teach live classes, I get people very excited. And one thing we wanted to add in as another sales component was the ability for people who were interested to take a sales call, but not with a classically trained salesperson.

Jasmine Star 00:03:45  We actually got a group of alumni. So this is the second cohort that I've taught this live course experience your biggest launch ever. And people went through it last year, and there was a group of really successful entrepreneurs who swear by the program, and they were kind of staying up to date with me. And I said, do you think that you can commit to us for a nine day period to be on our alumni sales team? And so one of the first things that we had done is we hired a professional team of trainers to come in and train business owners in sales, specifically short form sales, in that we were going to be closing the door and we were not offering your biggest launch ever for the rest of 2025. So how might we put sales in a container over a nine day period? Now, I learned so much through these trainings. We hired these training teams and I actually wanted to know what it is they were teaching. So I was either showing up to the live trainings or I was watching the recording.

Jasmine Star 00:04:36  Now I was watching it from two different perspectives. I'm watching it as the founder and CEO of the business that is promoting it, but I'm also watching it from the trainees perspectives. Now, these are business owners who are getting sales training. Now, we went back and forth on the team to debate and how we compensate the sales team. A very classic sales structure with a sales team is that you are paying them a commission for what they close. Now, when these sales trainers came to us, they said, we have a suggestion and we think that you should pay per call if they close or they don't. And at first I was like, nope. I love a good competition. I love keeping things going. And they had said, can you be open to the idea that it changes the energy? If somebody is incentivized for the sale, it might change the energy. And I said, no, you don't know these people. These are entrepreneurs and they're really great people and they're very smart.

Jasmine Star 00:05:27  They're going to sell it because they like it. And they said, true, but it's a very powerful thing to have your sales team say, I am not incentivized if you buy or not. I am simply here to guide you through what is the best decision for you? So I did something that was against the grain. I listened to professionals and then I watched. Now some people specifically, one of the things I noticed is when our team was taking those sales calls, people who joined the sales call, they were always super skeptical. Well, why are you doing this if you're such a successful business owner. Why are you taking the sales call? Now, I understand that skepticism exists, but one of the things that I thought many people we did make this offer to more people, and some said no and some said yes. And I understand that if you're a busy business owner, you're not trying to get on somebody else's sales team, even if it is just for nine days. But I thought these business owners, they got the game on a different level.

Jasmine Star 00:06:20  They said, I'm going to get paid for the sales call that I'm taking. I'm going to be receiving sales training from a professionally trained sales team that's going to help me in my sales for my business, and they don't have to pay for it. And somebody else, aka us, is paying for their training, and they get a front row seat to a behind the scenes of how we launch a product. They said this training and those nine days is going to be a masterclass, is going to be like a university class in watching how another business works from the inside. And so they were changing the energy of how the sales unfolded, and they were really excited to apply what they learned in their own business. In fact, at the time of this recording, just two days ago, I received a direct message from a small group of people on the sales team, and they're still meeting together as accountability partners. They meet together twice a month, and just by meeting on the sales team, applying their businesses, going through the sales mechanism, they're going with each other and they're saying, okay, where are you getting stuck in your sales? How can we help each other? They created a small group and think tank on the back of that.

Jasmine Star 00:07:20  That was a win win win in my book. January 17th. Okay, so we did something a little bit different here on the podcast. You probably have noticed. On January 17th, I decided to start taking podcast monetization calls. Now the reason why is that I absolutely love this podcast. And in 2024, we made the decision to be video forward on the podcast, which means I am working with a professional video team, which means I have a podcast producer, I have a podcast booker, and I have a podcast PM. I am also writing all of my own content, and I think, and I'm very proud to say that the level of the podcast has improved, but that all comes at a cost. And I know that when we looked back at 2024, it cost the business more than six figures to produce the podcast. Now this is including when I am podcasting in different cities and different towns. This is accounting for the cost of my time and applied for it. But all of that is a serious cost to the business.

Jasmine Star 00:08:20  Now, I did not want podcast sponsors. I didn't want to run ads. I didn't want to read. Nothing against Tostitos or what is it like a tummy gummy? Like, I see all these influencers on TikTok doing these really cool things. I'm like, that's great. It's just not for me. I wanted partners. I wanted to highlight businesses I already use and love. And then I wanted to say, how can we become co collaborators in empowering business owners to do something pretty magical in their business? And so I made a list of all the companies I use and I love. Then I ask myself, do I have personal connections to those companies? Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn't. So I started off with the companies that I had personal relationships with. And then I put together a proposal. The team and I laid out, why would a partnership with the podcast be valuable to them? Obviously, it's going to be valuable to me because we can use the funds that we're getting from this to continue to produce the podcast at this level, but what's in it for them? How did we create a proposal that was valuable for them? And so we ended up doing is tailor making a proposal for each of their businesses, and explained how we might be able to create synergistic relationships between the both of us.

Jasmine Star 00:09:25  So for two weeks straight, like I just blocked significant hours in my schedule and I took these meetings and, you know, the wide range of the businesses that I spoke to, some business owners that I was speaking to, didn't know that I was going to be pitching them. And then I was in the call, and I would realize that there was like a flicker of recognition, and they were like, oh, she's pitching us. And so I'm learning. What did I do to not prepare them for the call? I am learning how to best communicate what's the intention of the call? And all of this is literally fly by night. This is like I am flying blind and I am just like I am creating this proposal that is valuable to them. But I probably could have learned a lot more on how to prepare them to know that I was planning on pitching. So we went from the range of. And here's the thing I approached every business the same way. Some people were just like, I'm getting pitched.

Jasmine Star 00:10:14  And then other people on the call said, we're all in. Send us a contract. So, you know, I don't know. Did my preparation work? Did it not work? I am not sure. However, I'm really proud to say that people were really excited and the people who were in was just the people. I didn't want to sell them into this idea. I wanted them to know and see the value from the podcast. And so I am continuing to make this show on the back of many amazing partnerships that we've lined up. You're going to hear more about the companies that I'm using and loving every day. This is all organic. These are all personal reach outs for me, and I'm going to continue to travel to meet incredible entrepreneurs and podcast on the road video forward. And I just want to turn to you and I want to say thank you. Thank you for being on the journey of this podcast. It has been a learning lesson, I have done a billion things wrong, and I'm just really proud that you've been on that journey with me.

Jasmine Star 00:11:02  So thank you. January 22nd. This is a side note. It has nothing to do professionally, but I have to say, our daughter turned five years old and I probably wouldn't bring it up except for the fact that we were in the wible your biggest launch ever promotion. And so we were in this promotional period and I asked myself, how can I live a life that I love while building a business that I love? And she told us she wanted to go to Disneyland for her birthday. So on January 22nd, we're in the middle of promotion. I'm like, baby girl, we're going to go see Mickey. So we went to Disneyland and I absolutely had the best stinking day, just turned my day off from work and was fully present. And then on the 25th of January, I hosted a party. Now, listen, I do at my parties. Just don't judge me. Just. This baby girl wanted a cat tastic party. So we went all in with a Gabby Dollhouse theme. We brought in balloons.

Jasmine Star 00:11:52  We brought in cat plushies, brought in cat ears, brought a cat cake. It was cat tastic and it was wonderful. And it felt really good to say I am building a business and a life in the intersection of the two. Now we are in January 27th, and this is when we are officially opening the la carte. And all I knew is that I wanted flow. How can I be in a massive promotional period with a massive revenue generator? And my word and focus was flow? How do I set up flow? So I practised my masterclass, the class that I was teaching. I practice it well over 30 times. This masterclass was about 53 minutes, so I spent a lot of time practicing and understanding what works, what doesn't, and how to stand confidently during the pitch. I envisioned how I wanted to feel. I know visualization sounds so Olympic champion, doesn't it? I wanted to know how do I want to feel after each masterclass? How do I want to feel in the middle of this launch, and how do I want to feel at the end? And having the idea and already telling my brain I was priming my brain for what I wanted to feel and experience, and it literally set me up for those very things.

Jasmine Star 00:12:56  And I wanted this launch to serve my life. I did not want to sacrifice my life for this launch. And so I taught three live classes. And then I responded to DMs. And then I watched responses and based on responses, that's the type of content that I was creating to kind of pivot and make sure that we were answering in the way that people wanted answers. So my job during the promotion was to do one of two things I am teaching or I am engaging. I am carefully listening to what the market is saying, which empowered me to let the sales team do the sales team. They absolutely crushed it. Okay, the sales team had a 65% close rate, a 65% close rate. When I saw how well that sales team was closing, the entire messaging went from, hey, send me a DM to book a call book, a call book a call. They were absolutely killing it. And it is proof that you can have a sales team without having compensation close attached to them.

Jasmine Star 00:13:53  closing. It wasn't. They got paid for the call that they took. And then it just became like, I want to serve these people and I want to get these people off the fence, because why is going to change their life on January 31st? We are in the middle of a promotion, like a few days later, we leave to Las Vegas and we left to Las Vegas and I left the business to the team and I said, we have the sales team going, we have our ads running. I am not teaching any more live classes. So we took off on a Friday and we went and spent the weekend in Las Vegas. Now we closed launch on February 4th. And I have to tell you that that experience of us being in Las Vegas was peaceful. It was good. We went to the Mandalay Bay aquarium. We went to it twice because my daughter was obsessed. We went and saw a show. We went and hung out by a pool. Why? Because we left on the 31st.

Jasmine Star 00:14:44  But February 2nd is a day on our calendar that will forever be blocked to our daughter. February 2nd is the day we call it Miracle Day. It is the day that we became a family we adopted our daughter on February 2nd, 2020, and it's the best day of our lives period. And we want to make sure that she understands how deeply she is loved and how important that day is. And we will celebrate her birthday. We will celebrate her first mom and her first dad, and then February 2nd is the day that we are celebrating becoming a family. So we want to mark these traditions. And when we saw the promotional calendar for the year and we said, oh, we have a business initiative that is very big and very serious to us. How do we celebrate? How do we keep our traditions and how do we keep flow? Now what we wanted to do is we told ourselves that we are creating ceremonies in our family that become sacred, and we do not mess with the ceremonies. So February 2nd in my been a business launch and I'm like, no, the priority is absolutely her.

Jasmine Star 00:15:39  I want my daughter to know that our family's priority will always be her. It will never be the business. However, I also want to show my daughter what it means to show up and build a life and a business that you love. I want to show my daughter a strong businesswoman. I want to show my daughter how to balance symphony orchestra like a synergy can exist. So it is February 5th. By this time we close. On the fourth. We are in Las Vegas. I'm feeling really, really, really great. And on the fifth we're planning on headed home. So JD and Luna Drive home and I fly home, so they're on their way out. I have a mastermind call on February 5th. Now, what I wanted to highlight here, and the reason why I'm talking about this is in January, we had a mastermind call and we called it the Massive Action Workshop. And what we wanted to do is we wanted to join our networks together to see how might we be able to leverage introductions.

Jasmine Star 00:16:38  So we call this massive action action into connecting our group to other people. So what we wanted to do is say we're you're going to come in and you're going to ask for something specific, and then you're going to ask for people who can move you there. You don't need to know the people. You're just going to come in and say, I need this in my business and I'm looking for this type of person specifically, and then the rest of the people in the call, there's 20 people in this mastermind were saying, I think I know a person who can make an introduction. I think I know a person who does the booking for that podcast. So these were the things that we did that was in January, so that by February 5th, a month later, they came in and they were like, thank you so much for that connection. I've already booked this, I've done this. They have a contract in my way. And the key is get in the right rooms, get into rooms with people who will make those connections with strategy for you.

Jasmine Star 00:17:20  If you are feeling stuck, I want you to get into a new right room. If you are feeling tired and overwhelmed, I need you to change your environment by doing that. It opens up so much for you. So I during these massive action calls, there is a woman by the name of Nikki and she is in the mastermind. And it was by way of this connection. So Nikki was talking about a program that she had launched that was profitable, but it's no longer in alignment for her business. And Valerie is on that call. Valerie has a SAS company for dietitians and nutritionists to do meal planning for their clients. Those don't seem like they would have synergistic capabilities, however. Nikki says, I have a program that I want to sell. This is a course with all the deliverables, all the resources, all the ads. But she says it's taking me and my team away from the thing that we're building. So Valerie makes an introduction to a friend who buys the course from Nikki. So Nikki comes in and says, I want to sell my course.

Jasmine Star 00:18:15  Valerie makes her an introduction to somebody else. Nikki sells the course on terms that she is elated with. Valerie is ecstatic, and Valerie's friend is saying, thank you so much for bringing that deal flow my way. This is just like one of the massive things that had happened. Now, Heidi, Heidi creates a membership on how you can host paint parties and make money. So that's super niche. She hosts paint parties and then she teaches people how to host paint parties and make money. Now she used our lead gen and our ad strategy so she can have her biggest launch. She came in and said, how do I look at this differently? And she's going to be coming on the podcast to be talking about how she more than three xed her results based on what she had been learning. And what we're also talking about in this call amongst this massive action workshop is how are we recruiting? Who are we looking for? How do we optimize our interest, our inbound? How are we looking at people who could possibly be teammates? All of this was happening in February.

Jasmine Star 00:19:13  This all matters. Let me get to that in a second. Now we are excited for our live event that is going to be happening in quarter two. That's going to be happening in April, by April. Our goal is to go back to what we did in January and say what happened, what deployed, what connections happened so that we can say, look around the room. Everything you want is one. Ask away from the person that you are seated next to. So if you are a seven figure entrepreneur and you would like to get more information, you can join the mastermind waitlist. It is not open right now. Jasmine star.com/mastermind. It will send you all of the details and you can get that information now February 24th. This is like a few weeks later. We behind the scenes. We do not make a big deal about it, because we are hand selecting a group of people that were on an interest list. So I want to get a little bit here and talk about the importance of what we have been learning on segmenting our newsletter list.

Jasmine Star 00:20:02  What I'm trying to do is people we have hundreds of thousands of people who subscribe to the newsletter, but I want to know more about who is there, why? I want to create things, resources, classes, free bonuses, and offers that pertain to exactly where they are in their journey. So we started sending out small surveys and questionnaires. Where do you live? What kind of business do you have? How much money do you make? And so what happened was we were able to segment our list to a group of people who are making more than $500,000, and they were trying to scale to a million. We created First million framework, and this was an opportunity for us to take our wherewithal, our knowledge, and take the very system that we applied to other businesses. So on a side note, I have a holding company. I also sit as an advisor. I sit as a consultant. The team and I have also created a resource called an audit. When we are commissioned to sit on as a consultant in a business, well, before you go on, you're not like, oh, cool, I'm a consultant.

Jasmine Star 00:20:59  Let's talk about what's happening here. No, no, no, you've got to do a deep dive on the business to understand everything. So our audits are so comprehensive, we act as if we're going to buy that business. So if we're going to buy this business, we want to know all types of data. We want to go really deep. It is after we do this audit with our consulting clients that we can come back and say, okay, here are there's four levers that we're going to pull to really grow and change this business. What are we going to focus on first? And every business is different depending on what systems they have in place. So we decided to create the first million framework for entrepreneurs who want to set up their businesses to scale. Now we are only taking a handful of people. We are currently not taking people right about now. However, we also have a wait list for that. You can go to Jasmine Starcom for million. We won't be talking too much about it because we keep it behind closed doors.

Jasmine Star 00:21:48  February 26th. This is two days later, I instated a deep work day. Back in January, I released a podcast called how I Plan My Year. Now, as I started 2025, I made sure that there were three big changes to my calendar in my schedule. Change number one was that I was going to have something called a deep work day. This means once a month I have no meetings. I have no expectations. I have no task. This is do not disturb mode. And on these deep work days are when I focus on the vision of the company, not what we're doing in quarter one, not what we're doing for the year. It is the big vision, what is getting in the way of us moving towards the big vision. That is a deep work day. The second big initiative that I had launched is what I call a dark day. I know in Spanish da da means to give. And what I started realizing there's a group of people who are like, hey, can I get 20 minutes of your time? Or hey, can you speak into this charity or can you do this? And I started realizing I was saying no to things because I was very overwhelmed.

Jasmine Star 00:22:45  So I have a da de da. I call it a da de for people who don't speak Spanish on my Da day means that I'm going to be taking calls that otherwise I wouldn't be taking, because I want to give some of my business acumen to people who otherwise couldn't afford it or pay attention to it. No, I am not broadcasting this. This is made possible by way of personal connections or charities that I am personally involved with. Okay, the third big sweeping change that I made to 2025 calendar is that once a quarter, once a quarter, I am taking four business days off and the weekend once a quarter I am taking six days a quarter all in one block so that JD and I can go in and focus on the business. This is us stepping away and looking at the business from a different perspective. Okay, well, February 26th was the first deep work day that I did of 2025. So what did I do on that day? I focused on I went on a walk at 5 a.m. in the morning, and I went in it with my sister.

Jasmine Star 00:23:41  I always find that when I walk in, I move. And she had explained to me that there's a form of therapy called eMDR. And what you do is eMDR focuses on movement and talking, movement and talking. And as you're walking and you're talking with somebody else, if you're expressing your dreams, your greatest fears, your desires, your excitement, that becomes a form of therapy. So you're walking and talking and it's like a form of eMDR. So to me, it was like a great place to get started. I also went to a 90 minute meditation. After my walk, I spent 90 minutes in complete silence and I just went deep and I focused on clearing my mind. I wanted to unplug. I wanted to declutter. I wanted to get in a state of deep thinking. And after my meditation, I booked a co-working spot so I did not want to come back home to my home office. I wanted to change my environment. So for four hours, I booked a chair at a co-working spot here in Newport Beach.

Jasmine Star 00:24:35  And I wanted to understand how are we pacing for the year? Not what are we doing, but how are we pacing? I wanted to step away from things that could be done by others and say, focus on the role of CEO. And then I used some of that time to reach out to people who I want to connect with. I just opened my eyes, literally opened my phone. I went to my contacts and I just started scrolling. Oh, I haven't sent this person a message in a while. I haven't done this post. So what I'm doing is just I'm spending time to reconnect with people and send them a personal message to say how much I appreciate them, how they've impacted my life or what they've done for my business. I wanted to maintain those deep relationships, and then for one hour, I made a list of two sets of people on my paper. I just wrote a line down the middle and I wrote on the left side, who can I serve? And then on the other side is who can help me? And I have to say, just where I'm at right now.

Jasmine Star 00:25:26  I feel like I can serve a lot more people than I know what to ask for. So I just started saying, reach out to this person and send this and do this person with this and help this person send this resource, connect with this person. And then who I needed to ask help for. I reached out to a couple people who are all podcast hosts and I'm like, hey, can you make an introduction to this person? Or I'm looking to book a call with this investment firm to explain what a partner looks like. there's just things I don't know. And I think that there's people who can help me connect with. So the goal was to recalibrate to our big company vision. And that is all what happened on February 26th. It's the first time I did it. So I wanted to make sure that I'm sharing this to talk about does it stay the same or does it change in the future? Now we are in March, March 8th and ninth. I spoke at a keynote for an event called Create and Cultivate.

Jasmine Star 00:26:10  I flew to Austin, Texas, and this was during South by Southwest. Now I have to pause here. When you're at South by Southwest, all the cool kids will say South by and your girl's not cool. I actually said, oh, I'm sitting on the plane. I'm like, oh, I'm going to se S.W. and then he turned to me like South by southwest, South by. And I was like, oh yeah, I'm going to south by. I don't care, I don't care. I was on my way there. There was an event called Create and Cultivate, and I spent the eighth and the ninth. I was speaking on the ninth and I was coming home. So I flew by myself on the eighth, and I wanted to do a deep day of just me thinking about the event, but also thinking about business as a mom. As a wife. As a daughter and as a friend. Sometimes there's a lot of noise. So to go somewhere completely by myself, I was like, oh my God, this is going to be amazing.

Jasmine Star 00:26:59  So I sped up. I set up a spa day. I did some time on my own, I did some journaling, and then what I decided to do was I decided to set up a dinner with people who were going to be speaking at the event. So I went and I reached out to the list of speakers, and I just started sending them DMs. I knew they had some really big names speaking. I knew that they were not going to have dinner with me, but I was like, well, you miss every shot you don't take. I just started DMing the people who were there and lucky for me, two of the speakers, two phenomenal speakers decided to join me for dinner and I invited my friend Geraldine. She's also been on the podcast here. I'll be sure to link to Geraldine's podcast episode. The last time I was in Austin, we filmed it together. It was really powerful around licensing your intellectual content, even if it's digital. And so we had an incredible time. So what was the biggest win from the ninth? I spoke on the ninth on the morning of the ninth.

Jasmine Star 00:27:49  The energy was incredible. It was truly palpable. And just to be in this room and see the way that things were done differently, it was like they had create and cultivate, had their own thumbprint. That really affected things in South by Southwest. The biggest takeaway was to deeply understand, to make time to connect with people. So before my keynote session, I went into the audience and I just started talking to people. I wanted to hear from them. I wanted to know their greatest struggles. How can I serve them? What's missing? Just having that opportunity connect was always a grounding moment of saying, know your people. I will not be for everybody in the room, but for the people who want to talk to me. I will absolutely show up. And my, my, my favorite memory would be simply sitting at a table. I stayed at a hotel and we ate dinner there at the hotel, and it was crowded. And it was this beautiful, like Moroccan food. And just to be able to sit across other business owners who deeply understand what it is to create content on behalf of their business, I just feels like I'm with my people, and I'm building relationships here that are going to carry me into the future.

Jasmine Star 00:28:46  So shout out to Geraldine, Maya French and Teagan Gerard of Half Baked Harvest. Okay, March 14th to the 17th. I was in Santa Barbara, Montecito specifically, and this was an opportunity, I gather, with a group of six entrepreneurs. So it's myself and six other entrepreneurs, and we get together and we mastermind. And so I have to give a shout out to Jamie Kern Lima, who opened up her home and generously hosted us. It was absolutely mind blowing. I told my team it felt like my face just melted off with all of the ideas, all of the synergy, all the things that we want to do. Amy Porterfield, Jen Gottlieb, Lori Harter, Gabrielle Lyon, and Lindsey Schwartz. Now, what were my three biggest takeaways and things that I'm watching now. Like, what am I taking away from the event that I need to use in my business in the future? I'm going to be sharing that with you is number one. All of us had a podcast and very, very successful podcast, and it's crazy that we all were facing the same thing.

Jasmine Star 00:29:40  We had to focus on who we were speaking to. About four of the seven of us speak directly to entrepreneurs, but we are speaking to very different entrepreneurs. We have to know who we are speaking to and we needed to know how do we show up differently. This goes back to something that I've been banging a drum about. Who is your ideal client? I have to ask myself, who are you on this podcast? This is a very clear ask, a very clear ask. Please leave a comment on YouTube. Send me an Instagram DM. Please tell me who you are. Tell me what you like. Tell me what you want more of. We make this show absolutely for you. The second thing that we had to focus on that my biggest takeaway is there is a difference as an entrepreneur of doing and being. I will say, just for me, I'm not gonna speak for anybody else when I do a lot. I feel really great about myself. Oh, I'm busy. I'm doing all the things.

Jasmine Star 00:30:31  I'm moving in all the ways. And the hard part for me is to be to be very grounded, to stick to the vision even when it doesn't make sense. And so my biggest takeaway is doing more doesn't always help. Being more always will help. My third biggest takeaway from this mastermind is how to hire differently. What we're seeing is in the advent of AI, what we're seeing is a contraction of teams, every single person. Well, I would say 90% of us have contracted our team because of how much we're leveraging AI. That's crazy. That's the future. And if you're being very forward thinking, you're asking yourself, how do I leverage AI even more? And so when we know that AI is literally replacing jobs and people are really pushing up our profitability and really creating a cultivation of asking how we'll figure it out with AI, we can figure it out. Well, how then do we hire differently in light of AI and how it impacts our roles? Those are my three biggest takeaways. Okay, so now we are at March 19th and 20th and I had two days of video content production.

Jasmine Star 00:31:44  On the 19th I connected with right hand co collaborator, president of Social curator. She is the right hand in everything that I do in regards to content creation, community building and ideation. And we got together and we recorded, I think, 43 pieces of content for something that we are going to be dropping in quarter two. So this is us in March recording what we're going to be dropping. I can't say what date, but it'll definitely in quarter two. And we also interviewed really incredible guests who are sharing their stories. And you will see a shift in a lot of the guests that are bringing on is I want real entrepreneurs talking about the real success stories. Yes, I know a lot of the people that I bring on, they're like, oh, I sold my business for $1 billion, which is very interesting, but I want to make sure that there's a balance, like who's actually in the dirt with us as builders. And so we'll be profiling a lot of those. And so I hope that you really enjoy.

Jasmine Star 00:32:37  And for those of you who share this podcast, I just have to say thank you. It's like on those long days of the 19th and 20th, on those days that I'm like on coffee cup number four, on those days that I'm literally passing out energy drinks to the content team. On those days when you share this with a friend, when it impacts you, you're like, hey, this one little thing, I'm going to pass it to my cousin, my sister, my coworker, my business peer. Thank you. That all matters. Lastly, at the end of March, guess what appears here? Remember how I talked about at the beginning of the year? How we decided to take one quarterly break, four business days and a weekend? Once a quarter we take six days of block time. I'm in Austin, remember a couple of weeks ago for Create and Cultivate at South By. I am there and I meet a incredible woman. Her name is Sarah. Sarah and I meet backstage and she's talking about what roles I play as an advisor.

Jasmine Star 00:33:35  Where am I investing the structure of capital and women in business. And the more she's talking, the more I'm just ultimately fascinated with her. And I said, you need to share this message around female founders and how to get funding and when to take funding and when to do things. And I was like, I need you on my podcast. I know we just met, but if you're ever in Newport Beach, please know you have a space on my podcast. And she looks at me and she says, what are you doing on March 27th? And then I got chills down my right arm because what was scheduled for March 27th, my quarterly break, I had nothing. I had nothing scheduled. And I said, I can be somewhere on March 27th. And she says, I'm hosting an event for my capital company, my investments with Gloria Steinem at her home in New York City. She's like, do you know Gloria? And I'm like, well, I don't know Gloria Steinem, but I know Gloria Steinem.

Jasmine Star 00:34:26  And she's like, I'd love to have you as my plus one. I'm hosting it, and we're going to be talking about capital. We're going to talk about female entrepreneurship, and we're gonna be talking about philanthropy. Can you be in New York? And I said, absolutely. On my flight home from Austin, I booked tickets for J.D. And I to go to New York when I was there, I went to this amazing event. I'm not going to get into the details, because when I was in New York, I set up a podcast interview with Sarah. So you're going to be hearing all about that experience in great detail. But this goes back to reminding myself that the decisions I made at the beginning of the year, it didn't make sense to have blank space on my calendar when I'm so pressed for time. And yet it does. This is a reminder to myself, and I hope to you that when you create blank space, you are creating space for the right opportunities to find you.

Jasmine Star 00:35:15  I will get into great detail about what that event meant for me in New York, how it changed my life, how I met incredible people. All of that is coming soon, but what I want to do more than anything is making sure that you and I have time to create, as founders and CEOs, our attention is pulled in so many different directions. And if I'm just being real with you, it's easy to feel very lost in the forest. What I have realized that planning this year versus what I did in 2024 is I started my laying bricks episodes in 2024, and then I said, okay, I'm still going to be doing the Laying Bricks episodes, but something has to change so that I'm creating space so that I stay above. There is an importance of being in the trees and above the forest. When I'm in the trees, I'm doing the work. My ear is on the ground. I'm listening to what's going on, I'm talking to people. I'm doing the work. But if you're always doing the work, you actually lose sight of what is the big vision.

Jasmine Star 00:36:12  And so this is our reminder on my very first laying bricks of 2025. Stay above the forest, be in the forest, love the forest and stay above the forest. Create the time for that. Thank you for watching and listening to the Jasmine Star Show. These laying brick episodes are only done when I hear from you. If this is at all valuable, please let me know. Please share it with a friend. I only create based on what I hear from you. So I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart, I appreciate you.