#17: Masterminds Success with Entrepreneur & Finance Expert Brad Hart

Welcome to The Creator's Adventure where we interview creators from around the world, hearing their stories about growing a business.

Today we are talking with Brad Hart about his journey from Wall St. to entrepreneurship, how to run a successful mastermind, and help more people to make impact, earn more, and gain fulfillment in their businesses.

Learn more about Brad Hart: https://makemoremarbles.com/

8 Minute Mastermind: https://8minutemastermind.com/get-your-free-resources-and-claim-your-copy-of-the-8-minute-mastermind

Transcript

Bryan McAnulty: Welcome to the Creator's Adventure, where we interview Creator's from around the world, hearing their stories about growing a business. My name is Bryan McAnulty. I'm the founder of Heights Platform. And today I'm talking with Brad Hart about his journey from wall street to entrepreneurship. How to run a successful mastermind and how to help people make more impact, earn more and gain fulfillment in their business.

Hey everyone. We're here today with Brad Hart and with 20 years of experience, as an entrepreneur and 16 years managing wealth under his belt, Brad is committed to helping entrepreneurs and investors reach their full potential so they can focus on solving the grand challenges of our time. His company make more marbles is focused on helping people generate grow and give wealth based on their core values.

And with his books and trainings, he helps leaders heal the world with masterminds and learn time tested principles for managing wealth. Brad is the author of the eight minute mastermind and the eight minute money manager. Brad, welcome to the show.

Brad Hart: Thank you so much for having me Bryan. It's a wonderful pleasure to be here.

Thank you everybody for listening. I hope you get something really wonderful outta this interview that helps.

Bryan McAnulty: Cool. So I wanna start off where you went from working with hedge funds to starting your own company, make more marbles. Can you tell us a little bit about your story and how you got there?

Brad Hart: Sure.

So the, the condensed version is, you know, money was always an issue growing up. So I always wanted to make a lot of money and I felt like the best way to do that was as an entrepreneur. And I didn't really know how to spell entrepreneur until is like 20 something. Right. You read the book rich dad, poor dad.

You kind of get this idea in your head of what, what it could be. So my first foray was you know, I was working at wall street at the time I got my license. To, to sell real estate. And I did that in New York for a while, and that was my first like entrepreneurial job. I had a really great group of people that taught me a lot of wonderful things.

Give a shout out to bond, New York. They're still running strong there, top 10 real estate firm in New York. And within two years I had gotten like six promotions and I had a bunch of people working under me. It was really great. So that was the first time I'd ever learned to market to, to spend my own advertising dollars to generate leads, to work deals, to negotiate with big landlords.

And that was a real turning point for me, realizing like, I can be responsible for more than just one segment of a business or not just be a cog in a wheel, but actually think about myself as a business. So when that came into an end around the time my dad passed away, I realized that I wanted to do something that was more entrepreneurial.

I took a little bit of time to learn how to trade stocks and options, and eventually had a hedge fund that, that did pretty well is my first, I would say, you know, big success startup company. That had a really great year. We over doubled the money for our investors, a little less net of fees. And ended up shutting that down in 2014, just decided it wasn't for me, lifestyle wise, but I had, you know, achieved what I had set out to achieve, which is make a lot of money in a short amount of time.

And it gave me the two realizations. One realization was that money wasn't gonna solve all my problems. And second realization that money, you know, success tied to nothing. You know, for, in and of itself is kind of irrelevant, right? Like, why are you being successful? Who are you trying to help? What are you trying to, to serve?

And that's a different answer for everybody. You know, Tony Robbins talks about the, the science of achievement versus the art of fulfillment. I believe everybody's, answer's a little bit different, but I wasn't fulfilled doing what I was doing. So I had to switch gears. So make more marbles came out of this desire where I had been.

And wall street, and I'd been all these different businesses that were all part of the wealth cycle, but they were the part where like, things are divvied up and decided and competitive. And, you know, it was like hungry, hungry hips, Graham for all the marbles. I'm like, what if we just made more marbles?

I was like, oh, that's kind of a catchy name. I'm gonna call my company that. And then for the last, you know, Almost 10 years of having to explain to everybody what it is. So if, if I was to name a company again, I might not go for the inside joke, but it's to catch people's attention and, and stick in their minds.

So yeah, like, like you said, we've become, you know, pretty big marketers you know, top affiliate for Tony. He's had a huge impact in my life. I've been a 15 events. We came in number eight, his big affiliate promotion a couple years back which is great. And we've helped, you know, thousands of people at this point through our books courses, masterminds, etcetera, to get more leverage in their business so they can help more people earn more money, invest that money and then give it away as well.

Bryan McAnulty: So I wanna actually go into a little bit more about if you could explain about the name and the metaphor. So we saw on your website, you have this promotional video where you talk about the metaphor of flow and capacity. So can you explain a little bit more of that analogy and how that connects with the name?

Make more Mars?

Brad Hart: That's actually great. You guys dug deep. I haven't looked at that video in probably years but the idea of that is as we grow. Right. There's this is, again, going back to, to what Tony teaches, there's really six human needs, right? And they're based on the ones you focus on the most is how your life is gonna go.

The vast majority of people in society are focused on certainty and security, right. Certainty. And let's say significance are like the top two. And the problem with that is that they're opposed to getting variety in your life, right? So you're always feeling like you're lacking variety and they're opposed to love and connection, right?

The more significant you feel, the less loved and connected you feel as well. The only way to break outta that, just long story short without diving into the whole teaching, which could take hours, is to focus on the needs of the spirit, which he calls growth and contribution. So if you're always growing, you're always giving the side effect of that is that your certainty will be taken care of.

You'll get variety in your life. You'll feel significant and you'll be connected to people and you'll have love in your life. So when I think about flow and capacity, I think about it's this idea of getting into flow about pushing past your, you know, I'm kind of mixing a few different books here. So this is like power versus force.

So it's like pushing past what you know, you can do, but not so far past. To where you break down and not so far below it, where you're where you're bored or you're just not growing and, and you kind of fall out of, out of flow. Right? So flow is like that one to 4% mark above where your current level of capability is, and that in turn increases your capacity.

Right over time. It allows you to achieve more and be able to do more. So on a percentage scale, you might only be going one to 4% above your current capacity, but that and of itself is actually compounding and growing because your capacity's growing over time. So, you know, if you were in the stock market and you got, you know, 1% gain per day, That would be an insane return, right?

That would be like 3778%. That'd be 38 times in a year, over a decade. It's multiple millions of percentages. And you know, most people don't realize you can't really do that with investments necessarily, but you can do that by investing in your skills. You can do that by growing yourself. You can do that by you know, having the the anticipated effect of like bringing people around you that are also striving for.

Being the top at something, for example. So if you yourself are working on yourself and you're surrounding yourself by people who are working on yourselves and you're aligning your interests and your incentives in the same direction, now things become exponentially more incredible. Right? This is why you can now have multi-billion dollar companies coming outta nowhere in a couple years, because between leverage of technology, people, and systems, you can go really far, really fast.

Bryan McAnulty: Awesome. Yeah. So I like that. I like to hear that transition of how you started in something like finance. To now what you're working on with his coaching, the masterminds, everything like that, because it's so different. It's such a different world that from,

Brad Hart: and it never stopped being my love. I'll be honest.

Like we're going back that direction again. Cause I get so many people coming outta the word work, asking me about crypto. I've been in crypto for 10 years now or whatever it is. And you know, I was looking at Bitcoins when they're 5 cents and I was buying 'em under a hundred bucks and I was buying Ethereum at $8.

And most of the time I just held, you know, and I, I would kinda weigh in when people would ask me questions. Cause I had the traditional finance background. But generally speaking, like I wasn't giving advice. I wasn't trying to specifically give anybody recommendations. I was trying to help them understand, and that just came, you know, kind of organically so overwhelming that I had to build systems in my life to be able to do that.

So like I gave out this free cheat sheet for people about early blockchain technology that got downloaded tens of thousands of times. And then that became a crypto course and a couple other things. And now recently with the big rise in NFTs, defi gaming, all that kind of. We're seeing a lot more interest in these things.

So I'm actually I'm launching a fund and maybe a registered investment advisory just to help people with crypto because it's gotten to that point. they're all asking me. And most of these knuckleheads out here, aren't, you know, really giving people the understanding that they need and they're not licensed or, or paying attention to the laws.

So we're gonna try to do it right. Even if it costs a little bit more money, it takes a little bit more time. So like I have my series 65 test on Friday. That's gonna allow me to register as investment advisor and And do that. So yeah, I think it's all important. Right. And, and to continue to grow, believe in, you know, moving back to my old thing and, and just part of these, you know, the masterminds, which we'll get to in a minute is this idea, like what can I do for others that increases my capacity to serve and increases my fulfillment in doing so, because if I just sit around and, you know, count my shackles, you know, not that there's anything wrong with that, you know, I've worked very hard to get where I am.

But that's, that's a very meaningless life, right. To be on top of the mountain and have nobody to share. So I wanna share it with my clients. I wanna share it with my readers. I wanna share it with the people who, you know, troll my Facebook pages and groups. I wanna, I wanna share it with many people as I possibly can, knowing that whether I become the next Joe Rogan or not is irrelevant, but if I can help one person avoid stupid mistakes and prepare better for their future, then I've, I've done a mitzvah so to speak.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah. I think that's a good takeaway for somebody who's really just starting out as an entrepreneur to think about. Instead of most people think, well, how am I gonna make money? And then it's easy to fall into a trap of doing something that makes money in some way. And then only to realize hopefully eventually realize in your life that you're doing something that's maybe not as fulfilling as it could be.

So, if you're trying to think of what you want to do now, and you feel clueless about that, I think it's really important to think about what can you enjoy? What can you feel that you're providing value to the world with, and also make money with really, you can make money doing anything if you're good at it, anything.

Brad Hart: Yeah, that's true. If you're the best in the world is something it's very difficult not to make money at it. Right. Money tends to be a byproduct of being incredible at. Yeah, exactly. We're talking about the icky guy. It's a Japanese idea. It's four things. I can't remember all of them, but you, you essentially hit on three of them.

It's like, what are you passionate about? What does the world need? What can you make money at? And there's one other, which is escaping me at the moment. But if you look up icky guy, it's, I K a I G I, I believe Okay. Yep. Something like that. You can really get a good sense of this and this is like a moving target, right?

you're never gonna nail it all. Like maybe you hit certain parts of your life, where you got 'em all firing at once. And then you have to balance and harmonize with, you know, other parts of your life, like family relationships, health, and all that. But if you can continually be focusing on and moving towards a goal and setting, you know, higher and higher standards for yourself, you can create a really beautiful life, cuz we were meant to grow and we were meant to give that's how we are most happy.

The vast majority of society gets into Twitter wars or whatnot because they're just, they're not happy and they're not happy cause they're not contributing in a way that's meaningful to them and they're not making, you know, whatever impact that they were here to make. And if everybody just. Increase their level of impact by 10%, the world would change drastically exponentially overnight.

It would be insane, but that's not the, the general mindset. So what we can do aside from that is just kind of remind people like, Hey, all of these interim distractions are irrelevant. All this technology is not making us any happier. And in fact, the more we can focus on the relationships and the, the things that we care about our values and, and serving those, the better things are gonna be.

And there's like, there's the values you have now. And there's aspirational values. Like I'd really love to aspire to be somebody who is extremely philanthropic to the point of like giving away billions of dollars one day. But I have to grow into that person. It just doesn't happen overnight. It's not an accident.

Bryan McAnulty: That's a great point. So I wanna get into talking about masterminds a little bit. You're an expert on masterminds. You've been part of many masterminds as well. So I think there are a lot of Creator's out there. Maybe they have an online course. Maybe they have a coaching program membership. Maybe they're thinking about building something like this.

And they've heard about a mastermind. Can you explain a little bit about. What is a mastermind, first of all, and then why is it so powerful?

Brad Hart: Yeah. So I'll kind of break it down. I'll talk about masterminds in and of themselves, but I'll talk them, talk about them in relation to other things like, so if you're a coach consultant, you you're in the information business.

Right. And all entrepreneurs are content Creator's to some extent they have to communicate with the marketplace. So they have to create content and you have a couple choices, right? The big choices are like books, courses, coaching and consulting one on one and like events. Let's just say there's those four.

Things books are great, you know, they're low price. They're great for getting your, you know, Your your buyer intent, so to speak, like people willing to buy something low ticket, maybe will be willing to buy something higher ticket. They're great for indoctrinating and introducing people to your concepts.

You know, they're amazing for visibility, branding and expertise and having written three books. Now, two of which are of note best sellers you know, they take a long time to write. They can take a year to write or more. They don't really make a lot of money in and of themselves. You know, they're more of a lead in than an actual profit center.

They're expensive and difficult to market. You know, it's very saturated. There's a lot of books out there. So books can have challenges, right. Courses, highly leveragable. You can produce it again and again, it's on the pro side. You can sell it again and again, theoretically the price point doesn't require a phone call, which is nice.

You know, you can sell a course on a webinar or another fashion, like on a sales page. You know, it doesn't have to necessarily be a one to one. But the cons are, you know, there's a low completion rate on courses. It's not the most perfect way to get information across people. Don't technically consume more than, you know, 10% of a course on average, there's a high refund rate, five to 15%.

Sometimes it takes a lot of work to get off the ground. You got marketing, copy funnels, team affiliates, depending on how you're launching, et cetera. So it's expensive and also difficult to market, very saturated. And there's different people in systems that can make this easier, but it's generally a, it's not an easy thing.

Overall, you know, I've marketed a lot of courses over the years and it's been a challenge. One-on-one coaching consulting, highly customizable. You can kind of do offers for each specific person. You can do high ticket, high value low refund rate. You know, although refunds can be pretty devastating, especially when you're talking about a lot of money.

The cons are, you know, you have concentration risk. If you lose clients, it's a big part of your income. They take up a lot of your time. You know, you have to sell on a call typically and, and potentially customize each package, which can be a lot of work and difficult to keep track of. And you might end up offering things that you don't ultimately wanna fulfill on, or it's not scalable to fulfill on.

And then you're on that dreaded income rollercoaster, right? You sell a bunch of. And you have to fulfill a bunch of business and then you have to go back and sell again. And you're kind of all over the place. As far as income goes. Events. I mean, all I have to say is COVID right. If you're running events for the last three years and that's, you know, been your bread and butter, it's gonna be really challenging during a pandemic time, but they're super high, scalable you know, high touch, high scale.

You can go to thousands of people, great environments, a pitch, you have a captive audience. They're super sticky and you have like transformative environments, but the cons are, they're kind of susceptible to pandemics, right. You know, tons of overhead, risk and liability. If somebody gets hurt, there's a massive undertake with many moving parts and they're extremely capital intensive.

So let's talk masterminds. So why do we like masterminds versus all these things? Cause masterminds are kind of like you. I believe the role's Royce of this industry, because they don't really require a lot of inventory. They don't have any overhead or expertise necessarily required. You can bring in experts to help you.

They're high ticket, high touch and low time commitment. So they have a lot of benefits that, you know, others don't have they're extremely leveraged and scalable. You can have a lot of masterminds going. They'll require a ton of your time, like five, 10 hours a month for a typical master. And they don't require a lot of risks either.

Right? You don't have the concentration risk. You can have a lot of clients. You don't have a lot of liability, especially if you're virtual and, and whatnot. And there's little to no cons compared to these other models. So that's why I really love masterminds. And I've been doing them for so long. They kind of call me the mastermind guy, right.

So I've been a part of like 35 of these things. I'm joining them all the time. I've traveled all the world doing 'em 25 countries, 43 states. I wrote the book. I wrote another book on it, you know, it's like, it's a whole thing, you know? And we've helped hundreds of people launch these on a one-to-one basis, you know, really helping 'em out individually that have generated at least six figures for them or more in their business, which is really fun.

That's a lot of profit that revenue typically is 50% more or more in profit, which is great. So I hope that answers the question why I like masterminds and what they, yeah.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah, it does so well. What would you suggest then to someone who's a new entre. Or maybe they're an online coach and they wanna start a mastermind.

What's what's the first step for them.

Brad Hart: Yeah. The first step is really just identifying what you could be doing for your clients. If you had unlimited resources at your disposal, most people think about what they can do from a constraint perspective. Like this is the amount of money I have, the amount of time I have, etc.

It's easier and better to design the perfect experience and then work within the bounds of what's possible because then it expands your thinking to say, okay, well what could I create or who could I bring in? Or what could I, you know, offer? And it doesn't have to be right away, maybe in phases, right?

Phase one, let's do this phase two. Let's do that. And you build it into the thing you want. And I kind of lay out all these different strategies. I'd say there's at least 30 really solid strategies in my book. It's called the eight minute mastermind. You can check it out. We have a free plus shipping offer.

And we also give you a bunch of bonus stuff. So it's like, even if you don't get the. Cool free stuff is 101 questions to ask it your next mastermind, cuz we want you to just get in the game and see what it's like. It's 50 hot seat recording. So you can listen to me, actually give these hot seats. And that's, I believe like of the, one of the three things that are most important in mastermind is hot seats, networking and content.

And then third thing would be a cheat sheet to get you up and off the ground. So if you just wanna start a mastermind, we'll give that all to you. Cause I could go on and on and give you a ton of content right now, but this is a short form interview. So I would say go to eight minute mastermind.com.

Grab those resource. Consider grabbing the book as well, which expands on all this. It's a great read. I've gotten a lot of great feedback on it. And then if you really need a lot of help or you're just the kind of person like me, who just wants to kick things in a high gear and say, Hey, you know, let's, let's pay to go fast.

Then we have options for that as well.

Bryan McAnulty: Cool. Yeah. I think you touched on a great point though, too, when you start to plan it out to think of the ideal situation, rather than just what you feel that you have capacity for right away. Because not only, so not only does that help you build it to that ideal situation later, but you may also realize that some of the things you may have not considered early on when you really think about it, maybe you can do some of those things earlier as well.

So it's good to think of what's what's the whole ideal thing that you would create and work backwards.

Brad Hart: Yeah. It's such a, it's such a powerful frame too, because in order to expand and to grow, which is kind of in the theme of, we've been talking about, you have to. Standards for you yourself that are higher than what they currently are, you know, aspirational standards.

No, I'm not that person yet that can have these things, but if I was, how would I start to work towards it? How would I become that person? And then you start to create your own reality in the sense of like, you envision it and then you work backwards to find the pieces and you just take bold leaps until you get there.

And one day you wake up and you're like, holy crap. I'm actually that person, it doesn't have to be years from now. It could be six months from now or three months from now, but people way overestimate what they can do in a day or a week or a month. And they way underestimate what they could do in a year or a decade.

Bryan McAnulty: Yep. Definit. So you've been part of these masterminds and been holding these masterminds all around the world. So from co-leading a mastermind of 52 people in China and Hong Kong to running local weekly mastermind group in San Diego with over 500 members. Do you feel that like there's an optimal, optimal member amount for a mastermind?

Brad Hart: Yeah, I, I always tell people to start between eight and 15 people. That's a manageable group and it doesn't require multiple facilitators. You could get through those people, hot seats and just do it yourself. Even if you have to break 'em over a day or two. When you start getting into the 50 to a hundred range, you're gonna wanna have multiple facilitators, breakout sessions, et cetera, different content.

You're gonna probably wanna rent a space for that, not your house, you know or an Airbnb or something like that. So it's really just comes down to the size that matters for you. And I wanna put a little asterisks next to the 500 members that, that wasn't every single time. That was the people who were in the mastermind generally that would come to meetings, you know, at least once.

So, so, you know, when you hear big numbers like that don't get discouraged. Like I started off with one person and then two people and then five people and then 20, you know what I mean? Like I worked towards it and I've had the benefit and the blessing of just finding this niche, this little, you know, thing in the world, that's not new.

I didn't create it. You know, they've been talking about these for a hundred plus years. I mean, even Henry Ford had a mastermind with like Westinghouse and the people of his. It's really just people coming together and helping each other get clear on and solve their problems. And that's a really big part of what I teach is like, how can we simplify the art of overcoming challenges to the place where anybody can do it and get a ton of leverage on anything that they're trying to accomplish.

You know, whether that be connections, resources, opportunities, people systems, however you're gonna move forward faster in your business life is, is gonna continue to help because like I've met people. Day one, they're crying because they, they hate their business. And two years later they're selling that business and they're, they're thrilled.

Right? And they, they, they couldn't even talk about it at first. Like they were, they would break into tears. I've met people that, you know, started out being like broke, working $12 an hour job, you know, and living in their mom's basement to, you know, having a million dollar month in business, less than a year later with a team that supported them and, and really finding their own skills.

I've had people. You know, they created very niche masterminds. Like we have one guy that's got a manufacturing. I don't know what you wanna call it. It's like a membership group almost. And he decided to build a mastermind for it. So we can define that too, before I go further. Memberships are more low ticket and high touch, or I'm sorry, more low ticket, low touch, consistent content over time, you know, lower dollars and have a broader reach.

So they typically make sense when you have an audience of 50,000 plus, but masterminds are smaller, so you can start high ticket, high touch, and you can go right away without having a big audience. The biggest mistake people make that I see out in the marketplace, they try to start a membership, but they don't have an.

That's the hardest thing to do because you're going out and trying to get a few hundred bucks here and you're gonna fail before you get to any profitability. If you're charging a thousand dollars a month or more with a mastermind, you can be really good shape, really fast, making good living six figures, plus within your first 10 to 15 to 20 clients, depending that's piece.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah, I think, Like, I mean, it's really like a lifestyle choice in a way. But it also depends on the kind of content you wanna teach. Some things may naturally fit well for a mastermind. The way that you want to interact with your clients may naturally fit well for a mastermind, or it might fit better for an online course or a membership.

So it doesn't have to be totally one of those things. But definitely it depends on what you're after. And I, I would say, I don't know, I don't know if you have a different opinion, but. For me, I wouldn't say go after what you feel is gonna make you the most money, but what you feel is gonna serve your audience the best and create their lifestyle.

You want the best.

Brad Hart: Yeah. And, and that's a good point about content is specific to the medium. The type of content that people wanna learn, but that's part of the magic, right? Is we teach you how to do market research so that you can understand what's the best way to present this for these people. Or maybe you have multiple offerings, maybe there's a course component, maybe there's mastermind component and people can kind of work their way up to it.

Like I have a book, I have a course, I have a mastermind. I have all these things. They all have a useful part of my business, but if I was gonna start somewhere, I'd start with the mastermind and work through the other ones. I wouldn't try to start with the book, take a year and all that stuff. I would just go straight for the mastermind, which I can get that up in a couple weeks or a month.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah, well, I think a, a good way to use a mastermind I guess, is, is what you're hinting at here is that you can get a small group of people and then use that to validate your idea. Mm-hmm and use that to understand their problems and challenges. So if you do wanna create a book or create a course, yeah.

Now you have the content for that. You have the roadmap for that.

Brad Hart: Yeah. You shouldn't really write a book here's like for all the authors or spying authors out here having read three books and working on my fourth. Don't write a book until it's bursting outta you. That's the best advice I ever received from Ryan holiday, who writes probably a book a year at this point.

Mm-hmm , it's just, it's gotta be like in your head and ready to go on the page. And then what I do is I brain dump for like two weeks. I'll just sit in a room. I won't talk to anybody and I'll just write and I have an editor to go and like, make it into a book. Like it's, it's a painful process, no matter how you slice it, but if you can get leverage on it, it becomes a lot easier.

And the easiest thing is just to wait until you have so much content that you can just put it all in the book. It's like not a lot of figuring stuff out as you go. So by the time you go to write, you should just. You shouldn't be thinking about all the different things you're gonna say. Yeah. Yeah.

Bryan McAnulty: It's, it's a hard thing to do.

So why not make it easier for yourself? Yeah. And be ready to be at that point. So with masterminds though, again, I think something that feels important is to vet your members. So what kind of vetting process would you have or do you have one for vetting members who wanna join your mastermind?

Brad Hart: Yeah.

So in the beginning, it's another mistake people make is they assume that masterminds have to be exclusive and they can only be for people who are at a certain level. But the problem is that they're not at that level yet. So they're gonna have a really hard time attracting people at a higher level.

Right? They're gonna end up with a lot of people who are just starting out just like them. And there's nothing wrong with that. But when you start to present yourself with something, you're not, it creates all kinds of challenges. So the better strategy, in my opinion, Is not to get too hard up in the, in the beginning about, you know, who is at what level and, oh, this gotta be such a great thing.

Like obviously have general rules. Like you can't be a jerk. You can't bully people. You can't docs people, you gotta stay private confidentiality. Like that's all important, but it shouldn't matter if somebody's really successful or not. In the beginning. As time goes on, maybe you have higher end masterminds and you decide, okay, well, I really want to create an elite group.

That's cool. I, I have no problem with that, but generally speaking, most people in the right mindset. With the right amount of experience, regardless of their financial success, have some value to add, especially in a format which you control, right? It's not about them giving value to each other as much as it is about you providing a format by which everybody gets value.

So it's less important. Who's in the room and more important that you follow the structure. Does that make sense?

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah, that's great. Because I think people would be apprehensive to feel that maybe they can't start a mastermind yet because they have to have this elite group.

Brad Hart: Yeah, no, if you're doing it right, you're not the guru, the expert or anything.

You're just the facilitator. You're, you're playing the playbook. You're making sure everybody gets what they need and you're taking personal responsibility for the outcomes of the mastermind. You're not trying to make sure it's full of amazing people necessarily, or like super high, you know, level entrepreneurs or rock stars, whatever.

Yeah. It doesn't need to be Warren buffet for everybody to have a good time. Cool.

Bryan McAnulty: So we saw recently a post on LinkedIn that you made, where you started, you mentioned that you started a dozen masterminds on topics that you knew almost nothing about. Can you tell us a little bit about how you would do such a thing like that?

Brad Hart: Yeah. So this is part of the reason that I believe masterminds are so powerful for my personal development and growth is, I don't know everything. I don't believe everybody does know everything, but I don't need to know everything if I know everybody. So as a function of that belief, I always try to get people in the room who have different varying knowledge, skill sets.

And I, I kind of organize people around what they're interested. So perfect example is I met a guy named Michael at an event with Jay Fette, who it was another mastermind. We were at the VIP table and, you know, locked eyes over the, over the mashed potatoes or whatever you do at those events. So we started talking and, you know, I just realized like, oh, this guy's really interesting.

I asked somebody was up to, he says, oh, you know, I got this Amazon business, it's turning like a hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue. like, I'm like, cool, man, how long did it take you to build that? He's like, oh, you know, I did it with my family over like six. I'm like, that's amazing. And he is like, yeah.

And here's the best part is I work about five hours a week. I'm like five hours a week to make a million dollars a year. That's pretty great. Teach me your ways. Right? He's like, okay, cool. I don't really coach people. I don't know what to, to say, but like, if you want me to coach you, like, it's not something I really do, but I'll, I'll charge you 30 grand we'll we'll start.

And I'm like, okay, 30 grand. I could do it, but did I want to? And I said to him, listen, are there other people that wanna learn this from you? He's like, yeah, tons. I get, you know, interest all the time. Everybody. I talk to, wants to learn this from you. This is going back maybe five years ago. and I'm like, well, have you ever considered building a mastermind?

He's like, no, I'm like, great. Well, does everybody in your network who wants coaching have 30,000? He's like, no, I'm like, great. Well, wouldn't it be better to get, you know, 50 or a hundred thousand and help a lot of people and do it in one shot, as opposed to like spreading it out over a lot of one-on-one conversations over maybe the course of years, it doesn't even seem like you wanna coach people.

He is like, yeah, you're actually right. I'm like, well, let me bring my genius to the table. I've built a system to build mastermind. Let me make a mastermind around you. I'll go sell the seats. I'll, I'll split the money with you. And we'll like do something that you're already doing, like going to China and Hong Kong and looking at these product fairs and whatnot and helping people source products.

We'll just do that. So we won't play travel agent, you know, we'll just have everybody. Figure out their own flights and accommodations. We'll put out the schedule here, be here at this time and you know, all that, and we'll do some parties and fun stuff as well. And we'll make it into a mastermind and we'll train people leading up to it cuz you know how travel is.

It's really difficult to sometimes focus and learn when you just flew halfway around the world. So we'll, we'll train people leading up to it. So by the time they hit the ground. They're like ready to go. And it's just, we're after questions that they have along the way, but they'll like be sourcing their own products, starting their own Amazon businesses.

So that's basically what we did. So we, we filled the group, I think I've sold 35 spots in two weeks. By the time we left, it was like 52 people came with us. You know, we, we generated a bunch of revenue. Ended up splitting that he didn't care about the money he spent is on a boat party. But I paid for my trip.

You know, I ended up meeting a lot of really great people, but they asked better questions than I would've asked, you know, and from different perspectives, they took better notes than I would've took. I introduced myself to a lot of really wonderful folks. We ended up partnering on a couple deals and out of that mastermind.

I probably would've got value from the coaching, but outta that mastermind, we created like a hundred million worth of value when you yeah. More value for everyone launched out of it. Right. So, so that by kind of moving, moving, removing myself from what I wanted and creating an opportunity for everybody.

I not only made money, but I also expanded my capacity. So coming off the back of that, the two partners and I, we launched a company that went from zero to 75 K a month in six months and recurring revenue as an Amazon marketing agency, we decided not to launch our own products, but to then go market for other people and to learn the game from that perspective, cuz it's a little less risk now.

I ended up share selling my share in that and getting back to what I really love, which is helping people build mastermind. It was a really powerful lesson for anybody to be like, oh, I understand how masterminds could be an educational tool and a leverage tool versus just a, you know, a thing to sell.

Bryan McAnulty: Awesome. Well, I think that's a great explanation. I think you inspire me to want to get more involved in masterminds with hearing all this. So that's a really helpful one more question I want to ask is we like to have each of our guests come up with a question of something they wanna know from our.

If you could ask our audience anything, what would that be?

Brad Hart: Yeah, absolutely. Why haven't you built a mastermind yet? That would be my question. You know, if you've had some misconception or maybe you never heard of mastermind, you don't understand what it is. Maybe you have thought about it, but you're like, oh, I can't do that for X, Y, or Z reason.

Trust me. I've heard everything and I've covered most of it in my book. You could check that out. Eight minute mastermind.com. I just, I recommend you go for it. Right? What do you have to lose? You know, if. If you start a new part of your business or a new business that generates six figures plus in revenue with mostly profit, you know, in five to 10 hours a month, you know?

Sure. And certainly be a little more work to you off the ground in the beginning. But once you get going, it's really not that much maintenance that could really change your, your game, right. That could give you the leverage and the scale to help people that you never anticipated before. Or you could just use it to learn a new skill that you didn't have before and then go make money with that.

Yeah.

Bryan McAnulty: Well, awesome. That was all my questions for today. But Brad, you mentioned they can find you at eightminutemastermind.com. Is there anywhere else that sure. You'd like the audience to be able to find you online?

Brad Hart: Yes. That's a great place to start. Again, free hundred one questions for your masterminds.

Free 50. Hot seat recordings and free cheat sheet. So just for taking a look at the page, grab that. And then if you want to grab the book, it's just a free plus shipping offer. So you pay for the shipping. We should send you the book all guaranteed. If you don't love it, I'll refund it. No big deal. If you want to do the same thing for investments, I have a book called the eight minute money manager.

If that's where you're more interested at this moment you could go to eight minute money manager.com, same deal. I got a bunch of goodies. And then you can grab the book as well. And then finally, if you're just interested in, in crypto generally, and you wanna get more into that world, a lot of people ask me about it.

So I created a group with a ton of free content. There's like 30 hours of beginner video to get you up on, up to speed on NFTs gaming, defy, all that great stuff. You can go over to NFT, crypto, community.com and that's a free.

Bryan McAnulty: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show, Brad,

Brad Hart: my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me Bryan.

Thank you everybody listening at home again. I hope you got real value outta this, but don't just listen and, you know, go on the rest of your life. Like take something that you want to take action on, write it down and grab a resource. I have a lot of resources or just reach out and like take an action step towards it.

You know, it's it doesn't take much to change your life. You just gotta start. Awesome.

Bryan McAnulty: Great point. Thanks Brad. If you enjoyed this interview and won the chance to ask questions to our guests live tune in on Tuesdays when new episodes premier on the Heights Platform, Facebook page, to learn more about the show and get notified when new episodes release, check out the Creator's Adventure dot com until then keep learning and I'll see you in the next episode.

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About the Host

Bryan McAnulty is the founder of Heights Platform: all-in-one online course creation software that allows creators to monetize their knowledge.

His entrepreneurial journey began in 2009, when he founded Velora, a digital product design studio, developing products and websites used by millions worldwide. Stemming from an early obsession with Legos and graphic design programs, Bryan is a designer, developer, musician, and truly a creator at heart. With a passion for discovery, Bryan has traveled to more than 30 countries and 100+ cities meeting creators along the way.

As the founder of Heights Platform, Bryan is in constant contact with creators from all over the world and has learned to recognize their unique needs and goals.

Creating a business from scratch as a solopreneur is not an easy task, and it can feel quite lonely without appropriate support and mentorship.

The show The Creator’s Adventure was born to address this need: to build an online community of creative minds and assist new entrepreneurs with strategies to create a successful online business from their passions.

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