What I Learned From Doing A $25K Mastermind Group

Today we're going to talk about what we learned from throwing the Growth Accelerator Mastermind. That's the group that I do with Neil Patel. Um, and before we do, don't forget, don't forget to rate, review. No, that's wrong. See, allergies, allergies kind of screws you up. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell button, whatever channel you're coming from. Um, bell button's more for the YouTube channel if you want to grow faster, both personally and professionally. The Growth Accelerator Mastermind, I hate using the word mastermind, Because it's kind of like, you know, there's like masterminds where it's like they're all about making money. Ours is more so around centered around kind of growth both personally and professionally, right? You know, this group, people paid a high ticket to attend. It was $25,000 for a ticket. We did the first one in Beverly Hills, next one's in San Francisco, and we're keeping the group very small, very exclusive, very intimate, right? You can learn more by the way if you go to marketingschool.io/live, that's L-I-V-E, to check it out. There's an application there, no fee to fill it out. You know, I wanted to talk about a couple of things that we learned from it. We had really good speakers, so we had Sam Ovens, who took his business consulting.com from $0 to $36 million. And think about it, it's, it's, it's an online education business, took it from $0 to $36 million. So he, he does better than all the internet marketers out there that do courses. Like he is actually a very, uh, he's a very deep thinker and the way he does it, like he thinks about, you know, taking elements from, um, you know, digital marketing itself and also taking elements from, you know, um, top startups, uh, around the world. We also had the, Uh, co-founder of Activision Blizzard. Uh, his name is Howard Marks. He spoke and we had Drew Sanokhi who actually helped save a company called Karmaloop. He actually runs a company called Auto Anything now. And also the people were amazing too. So I'll talk about some of the elements I learned from the speakers and also, um, you know, from the group too. The first thing is, uh, Sam Ovens. What I really like is that he's classified. He has this Excel sheet where you have different columns. So imagine one column says negative $100. And then you could go all the way down the column to, you know, $0 and then, you know, $100,000. And these are all per hour. So negative $100 an hour, $0 per hour, $100,000 per hour. So these are— this is the amount of money you can make per hour, right? He basically broke it down and said, you know, look, if you are drinking alcohol, if you are eating unhealthy food or like, you know, doing stupid things, um, you're probably making negative $100 an hour, right? And you know, some people are definitely going to challenge that. No, I love drinking alcohol. I love doing this stuff, right? Totally fine. Like that's, that's your life. But at least in his sheet, you know, that was negative $100 an hour. $0 an hour might be like watching Netflix or something. And then $100,000 an hour might be negotiating a potential acquisition deal. He really compartmentalizes his life. And what I really liked too is that he talked about the concept of, um, you know, just making your life easier when it comes to making decisions around food. Just making sure, look, you know what, he orders from a company called Thistle. Thistle. Thistle.co, and I think they're in the Los Angeles area, maybe some other spots too, but they just deliver food to him every day. And it's so good that he delivers food to his entire office, makes his entire company more productive. They make less decisions on that. And honestly, if you get food in the office, you're probably gonna eat really fast and you're probably just gonna go back to work a lot faster. That's kind of the secret that a lot of people don't really talk about when they're running companies. Why does Google offer food, right? For dinner and for lunch. Think about it. Like if you eat in like 5, 10 minutes, you go straight back to work. You probably gain that 15 minutes back, right? So you get really good food there. That's another element, not having to make decisions. You know, he doesn't spend a lot of time on networking. And in fact, like that was the only conference he came to in the last 12 months or so. Um, and you know, Neil and I are very grateful that he, he, he did, he did that for us. And so, you know, the other thing he said, which I, Neil and I kind of laughed about, was the thing that really took him from $1 million a year to $18 million a year was stopping alcohol. We think it was more than that. You know, he's a very methodical, person. So, you know, he honestly said like, you know, alcohol really screwed him over. But, um, you know, now he feels a lot better and then, you know, he looks a lot thinner now. He looks, you know, he, he looks a lot healthier and happier. So I'll put it that way. So Sam Ovens, you know, took consulting.com from zero to $36 million a year. Now Howard Marks from, uh, he runs a company called StartEngine now. His whole goal is to democratize capital. And what I learned from him is that you can crowdfund your business like a Kickstarter, thing, and you can raise up to $1 million a year using Regulation CF, which is where you can have anybody, you can have your mom, you know, put in a credit card transaction for $50 and you can get like, you know, thousands of investors, right? And you can kind of, you know, use these investors to be kind of your martyrs. They can kind of be there to support you. If you could also use Regulation A+, which is where you can raise, you know, a lot more than $1 million a year, and you can use Regulation D, which is what we use for ClickFlow. Uh, to raise, you know, over $300,000. Uh, Regulation D is working with accredited investors. So if you're interested in kind of funding, um, that's an alternative way of funding your business. Drew Sanoki, who runs Auto Anything, I really liked his, um, cause he worked in private equity, right? He, the whole concept, like a lot of people, a lot of marketers don't understand that. To me it's, it's very much a marketing hack to be able to evaluate businesses, identify, evaluate businesses and acquire them, right? That is a business skill, but that's still helping you grow. So to me, that's still kind of centered around marketing too, right? You could say marketing, business, whatever. He kind of opened people's eyes up to like, hey, like, look, private equity mergers and acquisitions, that's still very much a way to grow your business. Because if you stack up a bunch of companies and you sell it and you bundle them together, you can sell them for a higher valuation, right? You're playing, you're kind of arbitraging it that way. I also really enjoyed Neil's talk. So he kind of gave a really rapid-fire talk around Um, 21 tactics and I can't share all of them obviously, but, um, you know, within this quick podcast, but you know, he talked about the idea of, you know, there's a lot of companies that have product tours when you sign in, like a SaaS company. When you sign into a software, they have all these tours that guide you around how to use the product. But why don't you have product tours on your checkout page? You guide people to the next step, you get them to try to, you know, take an action, right? Um, that's helped lift conversion rates by about, by about 13% or so. What we discovered too, putting this, this group together was that, We didn't want to make it a glorified conference. So, you know, we had the people in the group, like we went, we went out and we did activities, right? We went out and, you know, we bonded and we did, you know, activities where we paired up as teams and that was just really fun. It was a nice changeup from just sitting in a room all day, right? Because again, like you don't pay all that money to go to a glorified conference. You go to build, you go to build that community. Um, and that's what you really come back to, uh, time and time again. You know, that, that part's powerful as well. Um, and I would say the dinners, like the way we did dinners was the first night was all the attendees, the people that actually paid, they came. And then the second night what we did was we took it to, um, we took it to the next level and we said, you know, we're going to invite a bunch of people in the Los Angeles area that we know. So I think the first night we had like maybe 15 or 20 people. And then, um, the second night we, I think we had like 35 people or so. And you know, there's just, it was a nice mix up where people got to know other people. And so the change up there was, um, people actually really enjoy that based on the feedback that we saw. The final thing I'll say is around chat and this was, this during my talk. Um, chat is just getting bigger and bigger. Um, we think about, you know, texting, chat and texting, ManyChat, Intercom, all these companies, their valuations are getting bigger and bigger. Um, ManyChat, just their, their, their metrics. When I spoke to the founder a couple of years ago, they're only getting 1 million messages a day going throughout their ecosystem, right? Which is still a lot. Now they're at 266 million messages per day going out through their ecosystem. So you can see the transitions, like that is really fast growth just in a couple of years. And this is, again, this is why Twilio is getting, you know, doing so well because chat is very much, I mean texting, chat, all that kind of stuff. They're interacting with people, right? Um, so I think those 2 channels, um, you know, those are, I'm really excited about those for, you know, 2020 and beyond. Yeah, those are just a couple of things that we learned from doing the Growth Accelerator Mastermind. If you want to learn more about it, typically the businesses that come in here, They're doing over $1 million a year and the application process, you fill it out, Neil or myself will call you and then we'll, we want to make sure you're a good fit. If you're a good fit for it, you have a solid business, you're a good person, you want to grow, you're not just there to make money, you're not a douchebag, then you know, that's, that's grounds for, yeah, you know, joining the Growth Accelerator Mastermind. But we try to keep the group small and very intimate. We don't want it to be hundreds of people. So go to marketingschool.io/live. That's L-I-V-E. You can go there to fill out, fill out an application. And yeah, don't forget, by the way, leave a comment. Let me know what you think about the Growth Accelerator Mastermind, what you'd like to see, which speakers you'd like to see us have in the future. Um, and maybe I can talk about this in another review, um, in the future. And, um, if you're coming from YouTube, don't forget to check out the next video over there and don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. Helps us grow and we'll see you tomorrow.