Behind the scenes of Sam Ovens’ mastermind - $6M/year in PROFIT 🤯

This next session is with Sam Ovens of Skool and also consulting.com. So he is great with masterminds. He is great with his new SaaS products coming out. He really understands courses. It's a great session. Let me know what you think about it. This is coming from the Leveling Up Founders private event that I did in Los Angeles in August. Hope you enjoy.

These info businesses make a lot of money and you, you save up quite a lot of money very quickly. And then you notice there's not many opportunities to reinvest that money in the business. And then you're like, should I get into real estate? Should I get into, you know—

It caps out.

Yeah. And there's not so much asset value, right? Or, and that's the total opposite with a platform or software. However, they're very hungry on cash, like very expensive, and they don't make anywhere near the same amount of money like initially, right? So I've been balancing the two, like, but I needed capital and I needed my time to build school. And consulting.com provided a lot of cash flow, but it also took up a lot of my time when it was making $36 million a year. It was just the only thing I could do. So, I've been dismantling it and like mostly just tweaking it and optimizing it to be, how can it make as much profit as possible with as little of my time as possible? And I've found like an optimal configuration for it, which is like there's only 3 people on the team and it's a mastermind and there's 100 people in there paying like $36 grand a year and it can be run with 3 people and it's, you know, it can on $3.6 mil rev, it'll make like $3.2 profit. And I only needed, the total time commitment is about 1 week a year.

Wow.

Like, so—

like prepping for it or actually doing the event?

That's the event time and the Q&A times, like added up. Yeah. And so I've like— it used to be $36 million a year with multiple products and about 55 people. Now there's just like one product, 3 people, and like $4 million a year. So I've— I'm making way less money now. But it's been to just get my time freed up so that I can build skill.

But it's worth it, right?

Because what I tell people sometimes, it's like, okay, I used to poo-poo on the agency business because it's a service business and then like coaching or info. But at the end of the day, it's like it's actually a funding mechanism every year for you to do what you're doing now. And like that time commitment is the strategic thinking that you have now, that time that you have. is actually, it's worth more than whatever the profit that you would have made from the 30 long-term, right?

I guess we'll find out.

Well, I hope it does work out.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's true, but I mean, I can't say definitively until it's happened, right? So the main thing that like differentiates a platform from a tool is that the users provide most of the value. You're not just using it to like do a job, like send emails to people, like a MailChimp, right? Tool. A platform would be something like, I don't know, Facebook or Instagram, where you go there to interact with other people and their content that they're creating, that provides the value. Do you know what I mean?

Yep, totally.

So with Skool, it's basically a social network where course creators can put their groups on there and their courses there too, and all their students can interact. And so the course creators are providing the content, they're doing the moderation, and they're guiding the They're groups, right? But the more people that are on Skool, the more valuable Skool gets because there's more people there, which means it's more engaging. So we noticed these interesting things where like the more groups we get on Skool, the more engaged the users become and the more valuable the product becomes. I had a $2,000 course called Consulting Accelerator. And that one taught people how to start. It was like a business opportunity, right? And it taught them how to start a consulting business from scratch. That's what made us the big numbers for a while. But then I was doing the higher ticket stuff where I was working with existing course sellers and helping them run their business better. In hindsight, that, it's kind of misleading. Like if you look at pure revenue, the biz op low ticket thing looks the most impressive. But if you analyze it through a profit lens, The high ticket working with existing business owners is way better. Plus there's just way less drama. When we were trying to like optimize consulting.com to require not much of my time but make a lot of profit, it was just so obvious to us to just stop doing the biz op stuff and to only do high ticket.

How much is that mastermind and what are the qualifications for that?

Yeah, so it's $36,000 a year. And there's a cap of 100 members and you have to be making at least $30,000 a month and have an info business, which means you're selling information of some sorts, like a course, coaching, mastermind, whatever. That's the criteria we're looking for, yeah.

And what are they getting for that 36 grand a year?

We do 4 events a year, every quarter. 2 are virtual, 2 are in person. They go for 3 days. We also have a weekly Q&A call on Zoom that goes for 2 hours. We record the events and upload the recordings, and then we record the Q&A calls and upload those. So if people can't attend, they can catch the recordings. That forms the content of the experience. And then there's a community on— and all of this is housed in Skool, which is this platform thing that I built. So that's the structure that the interactions take place in and the What I've learned with masterminds is alignment is important, like high alignment. They're all kind of doing the same thing. They all are trying to achieve the same thing and they're all kind of at a certain level. And then you bring those people into a room together and then you're like, what are you guys struggling with? What do you want to achieve? Let's make the agenda live in the room. Like I do no preparation.

Oh, you're literally Q&Aing the whole time?

It's just like you're working with your team. You know, like I start every event by going around the room and everyone stands up and says, my name is, I have this business, we're currently making this, we want to get to this. These things are blocking me from doing this and I want to get these things out of the event. And when everyone's going around and doing that, I'm like taking notes and I notice the patterns. There's recurring themes, right?

Mm-hmm.

I get the list of things and I'm like, okay, so these are the things that you guys want and are struggling with. What order should we cover these in? And they're like, do that one first, do that one. So they give me the sequencing. And then I'm like, okay, so would you be happy if we spent the next 3 days doing this? And they're like, yeah, but actually maybe if you could also talk about this other thing. And I add that in. I'm like, okay, would this be good use of time? And everyone's like, yes. Then I just circle the first thing. Let's say it's like YouTube. Then I'm like, what do you guys want to know about YouTube? What are the problems? Literally 3 days. And they tell me and they— I write it down and then I'm like, okay, let's cover this. And I'm like, all right, here's what I'm doing to do YouTube, right? And then there might be some other people in the mastermind that are very good at YouTube. So I'm like, Kwasi's one guy. I'm like, you come up here, share us your strategy for YouTube, and he shares it. So I'm like, it's a— you know what I'm saying? Yeah.

You're passing the ball around too. So like you're letting some experts come in and speak.

Yeah, it's very collaborative. And that's what I like. It's painful for me to like sit down and to make content actually. Like I like to do it and get good at doing it. and then talk to people about doing it. And it's very pure. And that's why I like the Mastermind because, you know, the best person at doing it will just share how they do it and they don't need to prepare to tell you how they're doing it because they're doing it. I tell my Mastermind members this. I'm like, an info business is the best cash flow machine I've ever seen. It makes— I've never seen anything else that makes this kind of cash flow with such little capital expenditure or anything, right? Like, You can sell words and make millions. Like, it's— and people get real-world results as well. So it's like, it's amazing, honestly. And what I recommend to all of my mastermind members is like, just understand that it's that and then just make it very profitable and make as much profit as you can with it and run it as a solid business and then invest that cash flow into Something else. Maybe you get into real estate. Maybe you get into, I don't know, maybe you're into crypto or something, right? But like that's more of your asset stuff and you can use, you can create these good synergies with cash flow and assets. And I think we've seen a few patterns of this. Like Grant Cardone has been using info for cash flow and then real estate for like asset building. I'm not into real estate though. It just bores me. So, you know, platforms, ecosystems, software, that, that's what I'm doing. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you have a couple people in here that have the holdco model where it's just like, I was saying earlier to Alex, it's just like the best investment is actually in your own business, right? Because you have full control over it. And no matter what you compare it to over the last 10, 20 years or whatever, beats real estate, beats stocks, beats crypto. It's just focusing on that. What are some key things you learned Info versus becoming focused on, you know, SaaS?

One is very long-term focused, right? Like, you're making decisions. With software, I think the main difference is that you're building on top of the decisions that you made yesterday and you never escape them, right? So like, whereas with info, you throw stuff away all the time, you start over again, you do that all the time. And you can, you're always, that's what I didn't like so much about it is that You're never really building on top of stuff. You have the throwaway, the amount of throwing away is high. And it's like, there's a lot of quantity involved.

And your churn on info is like 15%, right? It's kind of crazy, or above.

Yeah, but also people just get tired of a product. They want something new. So like you've got to just make a new product and a new product. Whereas with a platform, you don't escape what you built like year 1, right? Those decisions will come back and haunt you.

You're gonna attack that, yeah.

Yeah, so there's a lot of thinking, like deep thinking and it's a lot of long-term thinking. A lot of the time the feedback loop, you don't even know if you're doing the right thing for a few years. Whereas in info you can do a split test and you know the answer like very quickly. The talent, like, oh my God.

So much better, huh?

But also so much more expensive and so much harder to find, right? So like, You spend a lot of your time just trying to find the right people and most of your expense is your people. You're making very— you're thinking in very long horizons and then the cash flow of it, like it burns a lot of money before it makes much. So like you've got to get comfortable with that and you've got to be able to survive that. It's honestly like it could— it couldn't be more different. It's basically the opposite.

I mean, the beauty is you don't really have any investors. You don't have a board right now. It's you being accountable to yourself because you've proven that you know how to build a business and you just have this cash flow machine that funds your SaaS, right?

All right, so that's it for this session. Hope you enjoyed it. If you are interested in learning more about the Leveling Up Founders private event, it's basically an annual thing where we gather the top founders and also the top speakers and ultimately just help each other grow our businesses faster. Last event was rated a 9.8 out of 10, and everyone said it was more so about the people. The speakers were amazing, but the people are even more amazing. So you can go to live.levelingup.com to learn more if you are interested, and we will, we'll catch you later.