I Spent $100k on Masterminds, Here's What I Learned

$100,000 on masterminds, what I learned, what I liked, what I didn't like. I get asked a lot, Bridger, I'm looking at joining a mastermind group, or I want to be involved, or I want to get access to those types of deals. Is it worth the money to join mastermind groups? We can go to the whiteboard now. Mastermind groups. And by the way, we're live mixing this. Check this out. It's a live call. So we'll see how this goes. Let me know in the chat if you guys like this live, uh, this live feed. So 100%. $100K Masterminds. And again, this includes, yes, masterminds, but also courses, online education, events, the whole gamut. I'm going to talk through kind of my thing as well, all on here. Speaking of events, okay, we actually, some of you guys know, we are throwing the largest fund manager event in the world. Fund Launch Live is happening. Today we are announcing a new speaker. So currently we've announced Um, 3 speakers so far. I have about 15 speakers. We're announcing them every couple days. Funnel Launch Live though is happening April 28th through the 30th in Las Vegas. Can you see this okay? Oh, no more there. All right, we're trying to fix it on the back end. So we're doing Funnel Launch Live April 28th through the 30th. So if you guys want to get tickets, the link below, grab a ticket. We are, uh, I think we're actually sold out of VIP, so you can check. I think VIPs are sold out. Today though, so as far as speakers, we have Jeff Sackinger coming to speak. He runs a $60 million crypto fund. Aaron Wagner with $100 million in his real estate fund coming to speak. We have Vu Tran, the expert of pitch decks. We have an economist coming. Today we are announcing a new speaker. I, you know what? Maybe we'll announce it live right now. You guys ready? Give me a little drum roll. There we go. You're in. A little drum roll, please, in the chat. We have coming, I'm going to post on all of our channels in just a second. GK from Non Bond Investments coming to speak. So GK is actually a member of Black Card on our community. 2 years ago, had no clue how to set up a fund or whatever. Joined our group. He launched his fund. In 2 years, has gone from $0 to $2.5 billion under management. Absolutely insane. And actually, that's a dated number. It might be more now. I got a message in this morning to get the exact number. Absolutely insane. They run a hedge fund model. They've also now branched into real estate and venture capital because they have so much capital being thrown at them. Insane. I believe they've raised over $700 million of equity raised in their funds. He's going to be speaking live at Funnel Launch Live, April 28th and the 30th. So we're getting another camera back here for the whiteboard. So that's what we're doing there. So again, back to the topic. Spent $100,000 on masterminds and courses and communities and coaching and events. Why do I do it? What have I got? What's the good, the bad, and the ugly? Should you do the same? So I'll take you back a little bit. So I was 20, 21 years old in college. I had a lot of ambition. Some of you guys know my story. I started a bunch of little businesses. So I got into college. I served. I went to high school. I did a 2-year LDS mission. I went to Taiwan. I spoke Mandarin Chinese. So I came back first year as a freshman. At 21 years old in college. And I got to school and I was like, shoot, I got to make some money. So I decided to start a Chinese tutoring business where I would tutor kids in Chinese. So we had 7 or 10 tutors, something like that. We'd go out to all these kids. We were making money. It was kind of fun. I then said, I don't love the margins. Tutoring, whenever somebody else tutored for me, I made like $4 an hour or something because I paid them a lot to tutor. And I just said, the margins are, for me to make $1 million, I got to have like 1,000 tutors tutoring full-time. I just said, I don't want the overhead. Let's move on to something else. So I started to build websites for people. I did some internships. I wholesaled 2 houses. We did stuff with forex trading. I mean I tried every little business that you see on YouTube. I tried them all. And during this process, I was introduced to my very first program. It was actually a girl. I'll tell you who it was. It was Catherine Jones. She actually ended up being a neighbor of mine at school. And she launched a course. Is this working, by the way? Is it working now? So she launched a course on, it was like website design and building. And so I said, screw it. I'm going to do this. I don't have a lot of money. I'm going to spend some money. I spent $1,000 on this first course. And the course was, again, dedicated to website building. And I said, shoot, I think I can get some clients. And this, actually, I went a little fast. Before this time, I had I had a little bit of experience building websites and funnels on ClickFunnels and other platforms, Wix and other things because of just launching my businesses by the nature of it. I had to learn how to build a website. And I thought, you know what? Maybe we could, and she introduced me to this idea, you could offer your services and sell this to other people. And I said, shoot, let's give it a shot. I spent $1,000 on this course, which I very much gulped. I told my mom that I bought this course and she, I remember it was a, I walked into her house like a Sunday dinner or whatever. Hey, what's new with you? I said, well, you know, I ended up buying a course. Really? A course on what? On website building. Really? How much was that? And I said, well, it was $997. It was $1,000. And she kind of, she didn't say anything. She said, you spent $1,000 on a course? And I said, well, yeah, no, it's pretty great. And she's like, huh, okay. And you could just, my parents are that way. You just see the disappointment behind her eyes. And it was kind of hard. I had to gulp to do it. Long story short, from this course, I learned how to build websites. I landed a client the next month that paid me $3,000 to build a website for them. I then landed another client that paid me $2,500 to build a website and some ads for them. We had another client that ended up paying us $8,000. This is over the next 6 months. We had a little business and I was building websites for people. I was like, this is awesome. Right? And all started from a course. So Yes, Bridger, I am a big believer in courses. I have made money on courses time and time again. Now this led up. So I was introduced to the course world. I got my feet wet. I then, and actually this is the story of how we launched Investment Fund Secrets. You guys want to know the story? This is how we actually launched it. So I was with my business partner, Mason, and you guys have seen him behind the scenes. We were building websites for people. And we went to this event, this guy named Steve Larsen, and he gets on stage, a really great speaker. He's talking all about funnels and offers and all this kind of stuff. And we were very intrigued. We're like, man, we could maybe do this. And the current plan was the agency model. So we would have an agency that would go make funnels for people. And by the way, just so you guys are aware of the timeline, this is before I launched my first fund. Okay? So we had this idea for an agency model. His offer was $15,000 to join his coaching group. And that was a big ticket. And we didn't know what to do. And I kind of go, Mason really wanted to do it. He's like, let's just put it up. We've made all this because we had made a little bit of money. We'd made about, you know, $8,000 from our other agency. He's like, dude, let's put it on a credit card. We can put $8,000 down. We can put the rest on a credit card and we can make payments as long as we make money as we keep going. And I was like, man, I don't want to throw away all the money we've already made into a course. And it feels like this this cycle that's never going to end. And so he convinced me and I said, screw it. So we put, I think we put like $5,000 down and we had a payment plan to pay the other $10,000 over 10 months. So it was $1,000 a month. We put our money in and it was like, just, I was like, I'm an idiot. I come home again. And this time I had learned. My mom asked me, how was your event? You went up to this event in Idaho. I'm like, oh, it was good. Like nothing, you know, Nothing crazy. Like it was fine. Nothing crazy happened. She goes, no, like what happened? And one way or the other, she found out that I had spent 15 grand on another coaching course. And this time though, she had learned from the first time. She said, well, you better make it work. And I said, yeah, I better. And what's interesting about this is it puts your back against the wall when you pay a high-ticket amount like $15,000 to join something. It puts your back against the wall. And what happened for me and Mason was we were like, shoot, every month we have a bill of $1,000 because that's the payment plan we did. It was a 10-pay. Like crap, we've got to make $1,000 a month. We're both in college. I'm like 21 and a half at this point. How are we going to do this? And so we started to launch funnels and grab clients and bring them in. And we were now committed to each other, me and Mason, because we couldn't just back away from this now. We had a bill to pay. And what's funny, if you hear about any entrepreneur journey, it's always the moment when they were backed against the wall that they made things happen. That same thing happened for us. So we started to launch things. We actually did decently well throughout this time. About 6 months later, we actually had made this money back. We were doing well. I then decided to launch my first fund. And that's, you guys know that story. I had this idea. We went and met with my dad, put it all together. I launched my fund while still running this agency with Mason. So he was, and he would run a lot of it. And I was like, yo, Mason, like I'm gonna do the fund. I'll help you sell because I'm a decent salesman. I'll help you grab clients and do client negotiation. But once we sign a client, like fulfillment, you got to go build the funnels and do the ads. He said, cool. Sounds good. I'm gonna launch this fund. So I launched my fund. You guys know that story. And fast forward about 2 years later, 18 months later, I can't remember the exact timeframe. We're still running this agency and it would kind of, we had made our money back. We'd done okay. But I would say we made probably $5,000 or $6,000 on this. Wasn't crazy. And we had the struggles, me and Mason, of launching this agency model. And I was running my fund, making money there. And I said, you know what? It's fine. We don't need to do this anymore. And so Mason was still in school. I'm in school while running my fund. And Mason comes to me. He's like, Bridger, I've got the greatest idea. What if we ran a course or an online something that taught people about funds? I was like, well, that's a good idea. I mean, I run a fund. I have a dad who's in the fund world. My brother's a securities attorney. Like it's actually not a terrible idea. And we had learned this through our agency model of how to put together this. By the way, you guys following along? Is this making sense? Okay. So this is, we're putting this together. We're like, man, we could do this thing. We went actually on YouTube, did research There's a great app called TubeBuddy. I will recommend it to anybody. TubeBuddy. You can, it's a Chrome extension. You add it to your Chrome thing and you can see what keywords are searched the most, how much volume and how much content is created for that keyword. So we started to look on there and say, how to start a real estate fund? We'd type in that keyword and see how much volume was there. How to start a hedge fund? How to start a venture capital fund? And we started to target those keywords. And we put this whole targeting strategy together and we started to walk through and we started to get some traction. We said, you know what? Let's start with— and if you guys are in any of my groups, I challenge everyone to start a podcast. I think everyone should start a podcast. Very simple to start. We started to target these keywords and get content created for the podcast. We built a little bit of a following, but again, I was just testing out my voice. I was testing out to see if we had traction. We then decided, you know what? Screw it. And I think one of the best entrepreneurial advices I could ever give to anybody, I received this from an incredible mentor, $100 million guy. He said, any venture you have, you need to have 2 things to make it, to help you. He said, you need to have a timeline and a budget. And he said, right now you're in college. Any business idea you have, you can vet in 3 weeks and $500. That's your timeline. That's your budget. And we said, okay, let's do it. We had this idea for Investment Fund Secrets. Let's do a timeline and budget. So we literally, we set a budget and a timeline. We said, and the budget was $500. We said, we're going to spend that on ads. So we set up some Facebook ads. I filmed on my iPhone. I think it was like 7 or 8 ads, whatever it was. We built out 2 funnels, landing pages, and we ran these ads, $500. And what we did, we wanted to test out if people would click on an ad that said, hey, do you want to learn about investment funds? Do you want to learn how they're structured, how they're put together, how to raise capital, the whole thing? And we wanted to see if people would click on it and how they would do. We then put up a second page if they clicked through. to a sales page. And on this sales page, we mapped out— some of you guys are a part of this— we mapped out what we called our mini vault. The mini vault was a program that we mentally built out and framed out. It was $47. And we said, let's see if people will join this. And so we put this together and we sold it on our page for $47. We had not built the product yet. We were just testing. This was over the first weekend. If someone bought We sent them an email right away that said, hey, it's not built. If you want your money back, we'll send you a refund right now. We just were trying to test if this thing works. But if you want to wait, you know, 3 or 4 weeks, we're planning to build this mini vault thing out. And we started to run these ads. The first weekend, $500, I think it turned into about $1,800 over the first weekend. And we were like, shoot. We got some traction here. And the second piece that I give every entrepreneur, if you set a time and a budget and get momentum as quickly as possible. Because everyone can burn on adrenaline for a little bit. But once you go over 2 months or 6 months or a year, a lot of the momentum of you and your partners fades away and people end up doing other stuff. So I said, we got to get dollars in the door. We got dollars in the door. We were excited. I went over. I had a friend, a family member that had an incredible studio. We filmed this entire mini vault over a weekend. Wow. We put it together, packaged it, and we put it out to all these people that had bought. And it was incredible. This is over like the first weekend. Again, we still had 3 weeks left. We then started to pump up ads. Over the next month, we spent $80,000 roughly in ads and we made back, I think it was about $79,500. We had a perfect breakeven funnel. It was crazy. And you might say that's a loss. You guys lost $500. Yes, we lost $500, but we had over 1,000 buyers. Let's put it up here, 1,000 buyers. And we built a list of, I think, 7,000 people, something like that. We now had an audience. This is how we launched our business with zero— $500, not zero money, but $500. And we then from there, we had this little audience. We then said, hey, we're going to launch this thing called the mastermind program. really going to bring in mentors and people all over the world to help coach. And so we brought in 7 or 8 coaches that would coach on funds. We brought them all together and we launched this thing called a mastermind. And then from there, that thing blew up. Some of you guys know we sell that for $2,000. It's our mastermind program. It's one of the top 1% of courses on the planet. We have over, I think around 1,800 buyers of the mastermind. And we've had incredible results, people launching huge funds. And then from there, we launched our Black Card group where people wanted coaching on top of that. And during this time, I was running funds. We had other mentors come in and all that kind of stuff. So back to the original topic. I spent a lot of money on masterminds. You can see I am a direct result of masterminds and coaching groups. Funds and Investment Fund Secrets is all because I joined groups. I paid to play. I think, yes, there's a lot of free stuff. Start there. Start with YouTube. Start with books. But once you get past the free stuff, and you can pay to play. Pay-to-play networking I thought was such a hoax. I said, this is the dumbest thing ever. Why do people spend $30,000 to network? Sounds ridiculous. That's been one of the biggest needle movers for me in the last 2 years for my funds, for my businesses, for my tax strategies. Because when you join a group that's 30 grand, Guess what? Everyone else there has also paid $30,000 to be there. You're hanging out with high-level people that are running businesses, that are in the game, that aren't tire kickers, people that have what it takes to get there and are wanting to do deals and make things happen. I'm a huge believer. Now, is every group perfect? No. Is every course perfect? No. You're going to have some that miss. You're going to have some that were like, ah, it was okay. Right? I didn't learn a ton. I've bought— I spent $10,000 on a Facebook group course, how to run Facebook groups. I spent $10,000 on that. We spent another, I think it was $12,000 on a YouTube course on how to do YouTube content. And that one was, you know, it was okay. This one was okay. Those are ones that I just, they didn't really do that great. We spent another like $5,000 on an ads course to do online ads. Yeah, it was okay. You know, I didn't, that's, you know, but all these, I did learn a few nuggets that I plugged into my business that You know, it's hard to track everything, but have as an overall effort absolutely changed my life. I actively look for mastermind groups and programs to join because I want to keep sharpening the axe. Too many people are in business for 20 years, but they've actually been in business 1 year 20 times. They keep reliving the same year of business. They don't improve. They don't progress. They don't go to the next level. They plateau. The way you break through that glass ceiling, the way you break through that plateau is by doing things you haven't done before. One of those is this. Being around other entrepreneurs that have done it, been there before, and have been in the process of this entire thing. That's why I'm such a big believer in mastermind groups and networking and coaching and live events. It's absolutely changed my life. I actively go to them. I attend. I like to see how they're run. I like to see how these entrepreneurs are making money. I like to be exposed to a lot of information. We live in a time right now. Money is moving pockets at a faster rate than it ever has been before. This is an incredible time to be in business, to be involved, all that kind of stuff. If you guys like this video, hit the like button for me. It'll help it push it out on YouTube apparently. But that's what I got for you guys today. If you want to join us live, Fund Launch Live is happening. It's the number one fund manager conference in the world. We just announced a new speaker live earlier on this video. If you missed it, go back. We've got An incredible person coming to speak inside of our group, runs a $2.5 billion fund, primarily a hedge fund. GK, one of our Black Card members, coming to speak at Funnel Launch Live. We have another guy that runs a $60 million crypto fund, another guy runs a $100 million fund, another guy that runs a $10+ billion fund coming to speak at our event. We'll see you guys there. Funnel Launch Live, grab the tickets below. Hit the like button if you guys like this video. Love you guys. I got to hop on another call right now. See you guys later. Bye.