From Burnout to Breakthrough: The Power of the Pivot

0:0010 years ago, I made the decision to build my personal brand that was elevated, yet approachable, and reflected who I was, not just what I did. I created my website with ShowIt because it's true drag and drop freedom so you can easily build and update your site. Plus, their real human support team, game changer. Want to try it for yourself? Head to jasminestar.com forward slash show it for a 14-day free trial and first month free when you subscribe. If you are the person who has to trade your hours for dollars, then guess what? The business owns you. You don't own the business. Has there ever been a point in your life where you say you want to do something and you're not quite sure how to get it done, right?

0:38So there's a chasm of where you are and where you want to be. And you're like, I don't know how I'm going to find my way across. I want to introduce you to a woman by the name of Robin Ballard. She was in my mastermind and she came in and she had a wildly successful events planning business. And she was there and she said, Jasmine, I have systematized and operationalized this business. I have a team of designers and coordinators and my time has come. But she's like, the business is so successful and I don't know how to pivot. I don't know what to do next. So in our eight months together, she was trying a multitude of things and towards the end of our eight months, it was like everything fell into place.

1:20And she said, I have a clear direction of what I want to build. Now I want to like pause here and say, she didn't say I've built it and it's successful. She simply said over the course of eight months, I know what I want to build. So then Robin stepped away, did the deep work, prepared for what she wanted to build. And she told me a few months later, much to her delight, the offer has taken off. She created a program called Curate. And what it is, it is a luxury membership for event designers, people in the wedding industry to get together on a regional basis and network with each other. and then they bring in guest speakers and it is just a lovely event.

2:05It is beautiful. Every single event is decorated. It's a vibe. So think about this event serving wedding professionals the way and in the manner when they go and create these gorgeous over-the-top luxury weddings, they now get to go and network at events that look and feel the same way, but for their professional development. Robin launches it and she launches it in Newport Beach and it has since expanded into other cities around the United States. So I've been following up with her and she says, Jasmine, this is so incredible. I'm absolutely in love with it. This is the thing I've been called to do.

2:39It's an extension of the work and relationships I've already built. And I said, I'm so excited for you. Well, this has been going on well over a year. So when she reached out to me and she said, Jasmine, this is a full circle moment for me. We started Curate in your mastermind and it's taken off. And number one, I wanna be very clear. I take zero credit for this idea. I take zero credit. It's everything about Robin. However, when she invited me to speak at the Curate event, I was totally humbled because I was able to watch in real time a wildly successful entrepreneur take a skillset and pivot it.

3:14So if you are here and you would like to say, listen, I can operationalize or systematize a business and I feel like I'm being called to do something else, what does it look like, a real life story of a pivot? What needs to be true? What needs to be taken place? It is with much gratitude and humility that Robin is allowing me to share a video from that event. I'm going to share it right now to put you in the seat of people in the room, and then we'll loop back and tie it up with a nice big bow. Good evening. How are you? I feel like I'm with my people. I appreciate this very, very, very much. This is an honor and it's a privilege, but it mostly feels full circle.

3:54Here's why. A moment of truth. I started off as a wedding photographer and I said I wanted to become a photographer and I didn't own a camera. I just decided that's the thing I wanted to do. So for all intents and purposes, I set out and I started with a blog and I just took pictures and I posted them on a blog and I thought there's nobody in the world who will hire me. And about 12 months later, we had brought in over six figures of revenue. So what did this mean? It meant two things, that unqualified people can do impossible things. And it also meant that content began to change the game. Much to the chagrin of many people who said she's not that good, to which I replied, yes, but I'm making money and I can get better.

4:46And so I'm here to let you know, I am an advocate for unqualified people doing impossible things. That's, thank you for the one person who's like, I get that because what you're going to quickly see, and yes, I hope that the air comes on as much as anybody else, but guess what? You know, it's just like, it's hot in here. And so, oh, I think that's like a song. I feel like we're going to be vibing out with the song. So this is what we're going to do is just have a quick conversation that's a narration. And if we have time to do Q &A at the end, that would be the best because nobody really wants to hear me pontificate things.

5:20What I want to do is I just want to share a little bit of my history to show how a highly unqualified person can do highly qualified things and then just continue to refute the point that whatever we put ourselves to, we can accomplish. And so my whole point here was Robin said, Jasmine, can you come in and talk about the pivot? And I said, yes, I can do that. But here again, I don't show up saying I did it the right way. In fact, I will say the opposite. I did it so wrong that please learn from my lessons so you can do it in half the amount of time and make twice the amount of money. Here again, that's okay.

5:54Okay. It's like I'm leading you guys right to it. I should also say that my dad is a pastor in East Los Angeles, California. And so we have this talk back nomenclature in Latino culture. My dad is a first, he's an immigrant. I'm a first generation Latina, first in my family to go to college, first in my family to start a business. Okay. So we say these things, right? Because I'm literally just laying things out. I don't think I have it together. So please take my mistakes and run with them. So I started off my career as a photographer in about 2007. I shot for 16 years all around the world. My camera became my passport and I began to build a name and a brand.

6:35What does a brand mean? A brand is just what somebody says about you when you're not in the room. And my brand became somebody who worked hard and followed through. And I stayed in business. And over the years, I kept on raising my prices and began shooting for magazines. And photographers were looking at me saying, you're not qualified. How are you getting those results? So I started creating digital products and I was selling them online. And in around 2009, 2010, I just started putting out$19 PDFs online. Did I know how to create an online store? No, not at all. Did I know how to create a PDF?

7:08No, not at all. Did I know how to create a separate URL? No, not at all. And there was this thing called Google and you literally just figure it out. So I started creating these PDFs and lo and behold, around this time, my husband and I, I said, hey, leave your startup and come with this startup? And he agreed. Crazy. Let me just tell you, my negotiation skills are like on par. Let me just tell you, this guy was like, let's go all in. And so what happens is we're building this business and we're shooting on the weekends, we're editing, we're doing all the things and I'm creating digital products.

7:43In less than 12 months, we created another six-figure revenue stream. So it's about 2009, 2010, and we're doing about 400 or$500 ,000 with the vast majority coming from a digital resource. What is the digital resource about? Things I knew. And guess what? Everybody here knows something. Now you'll say what I know everybody knows. And let me tell you, this entire presentation will simply say, I just shared what I knew and people paid me for it. Started off$19. And then, you know, as one does being savvy entrepreneur, I charged less over time. Why? I got in my head, who's going to be paying for this?

8:29What does this actually look like? So I started creating these videos that were about two minutes. Y 'all, I was creating reels before reels were a thing. And I was charging$2.99 per download. And then I just created content and people were paying me$2.99 and$19. And I would wake up and I was like, oh, Well, we made$800 last night. That began something and an understanding that we all have a finite time in the world. And so what we do with that finite time can have powerful impacts on legacies. I can now tell you that my family is forever changed, not just my daughter, but my parents and my siblings.

9:09And I am here to tell you that we all can share something and we can think differently about our businesses. Here's why. I started off as a photographer. Then I began creating digital products, creating a separate revenue stream. We got to such a point that I thought to myself, I am shooting around the world 36 weddings a year alongside my husband. And I thought to myself, is there a way for me to work myself out of the business and only do the thing that I was the most qualified to do? I was most qualified to shoot. And then hired somebody to do my editing, hired somebody to do my albums, hired somebody to ship my albums, hired somebody to do my press, I abdicated the responsibilities of the business so that I can be the main rainmaker.

9:51I will shoot. Everything behind the business is optimized. And then opened up time for me to think about new ways of creating money. So it's about this time that I create an online course for the first time. And I was like, I don't know if I can do this thing. I've never created a course before. So$197 and we opened it for five days. And I was like, man, If we just sell, oh, and in five days, we made$255 ,000 off a$197 course. And then we launched it again. And then we launched it again. And in 12 months, we made over a million dollars off a$197 course. Then my minds open up and I'm like, okay, still shooting, still creating content, still doing the digital stuff.

10:39I do not recommend those types of hours, but let me tell you, it was setting a foundation to be like, there is money and then there's wealth. The first time I stepped into money, I became so afraid I was going to lose it all. And I was like, I'll work 100 hour weeks because there's like, there's paying and then there's getting paid. And I was like, I don't know how long this is going to last. So the brain starts mapping to things that we think we can control. So then I launched another course for$2 ,000. I'm going to save everybody here some time. We kept on creating courses. Then we launched a membership.

11:13And I said, if we can just get 500 people in this membership, my life would change. We launched it again in five days, 2 ,444 people joined this membership. So we have multiple seven figure revenue streams coming in and I'm still shooting weddings. Why? I'd optimize the business so that my time rendered in the business was the time of the wedding. and that was it. That's the whole point of this conversation. What can you do in your business? That's called operationalize. When you operationalize your business, it means I have a business. I spent my years building the business and now there's things in the business that I don't necessarily need to do.

11:52So that is how I met Robin. Robin joined, I host a mastermind for seven figure female founders. This means that only 4 % of all business owners, 4 % of all all business owners in America will ever cross seven figures. Of that 4%, 0.7 % are women. So if I aggregate a group of seven-figure founders who want to scale to eight figures, I'm literally in a room with unicorns. And I think to myself, what magic can we create in these rooms? That's how I met Robin. At the end of our mastermind together, Robin's like, Jasmine, I sense a pivot in me. And she hammered away for months and months and months.

12:32and what that pivot would be. And ladies and gentlemen, we are standing in the manifestation of the pivot. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. I am not advocating for pivots. If you love what you do, continue doing more of what you do. But we all have the same 24 hours in a day. What is it going to look like for you to start thinking differently about creating a separate revenue stream? All I want to do here is light a little bit of a fire. So what would be the best way for us to navigate this quick conversation? Well, I often have questions about the pivot because people say in a matter of a decade, what have you done and how have you done it?

13:08So I went to my audience very much like this audience here to ask questions. Four main questions that are going to guide this conversation. Question number one, what's the best piece of advice you have been given when it comes to pivoting? Earn the pivot. How many of us have seen somebody in the wedding industry say, oh, you know, it's like, I'm going to pivot. And then all of a sudden they fall off like the pervert real cliff. You didn't pivot. You just stopped. or you tried pivoting and there wasn't anything else there to pivot into. We have to earn the pivot. So this leads us to how you earn the right to pivot by way of consistency.

13:44I don't care if you want to be a photographer and then add an album line. If you want to be a wedding vendor and then do holidays, whatever it is, you have to be consistent on one thing, focusing. What happens in the creative world, everything is beautiful, sparkly, and amazing. and we're like that thing and that thing. And now TikTok, I'm going to be a YouTuber. And what I need, I need a podcast. I'm in the wedding visual world, I need a podcast. And all of a sudden, everybody's just distracted with all the things. If you want to pivot, you must be consistent with your focus so that you're putting in the reps.

14:16Let me tell you, let me just beat everybody here. If you do not have the humility to get your face smashed in publicly again and again, the pivot's not for you. Everybody can just get up, walk right out the door. It's this is not it, this is not it. The cost of your success is directly proportional to the humility you have to show up and do it wrong. Again and again and again. Let me just paint the picture for you. It ain't easy. And it's not for the weak-hearted. However, every time you stumble, you do not fail. You only fail if you quit. Because if you quit, you don't get another chance. But if you quote unquote fail, which I just call a lesson, now you know what not to do.

15:00I am in the game of figuring out what not to do again and again and again. And then I'm in the game of sharing what not to do with you. So I save you some time. That's how we all, that's the glow up. That's the come up. I always said that if I ever had the opportunity to create a business, any business, this was before I was a photographer, I flung myself. My husband was at this startup and we were not having any money whatsoever. They paid him like occasionally, like in a bag of oranges and pesos. And I was like, how are we going to live? and I was working part-time at my dad's church and I flung myself in the bed and I was just like, if somebody would just take a chance on me, I can prove that I could be a photographer.

15:33And guess what? Nobody came. So then you teach yourself and say, I won't quit until I get where I want to go. And then I'm just embarrassed. But I take those lessons and I figure out what action to take. And then I get a result. The only thing that will guide you is not a prince to save you in a castle. It is the results that you get from the lessons you learn, period, the end. And then you say, I have earned the right to pivot when there's nothing left in the business to fix, that you have worked yourself out of a job. I had successfully worked myself out of lead acquisition for getting brides to book me.

16:11I have successfully worked myself out of the position of creating content for that arm of the business. I had successfully worked myself out of album design, album shipping, fulfillment, talking with the vendors and posting afterwards on social media. I had one job and that was to show up on each Saturday, shoot the wedding, and the business was off to the races. So this is the word I was trying to get, y 'all. I was practicing my keynote. Operationalize. Operationalizing the business before you're over the business. How many of us have gone to events and we're like, ooh, there's Sarah. Another Saturday at a wedding.

16:49And you're like, I hope I'm not Sarah. You stop and avoid becoming Sarah when you operationalize the business and you're good at what you love and you abdicate the rest. Was that scary? Is there a Sarah here? Did I, I got the room out real quiet. I was like, is there a Sarah I don't know about? It's a fictitious name, y 'all. Fictitious name. A pivot is a strategic shift based on stuff you already know. I had pivoted part of my services into digital offerings and digital offerings into slightly different digital offerings and then consulting. And then now I sit as a board of advisors where my husband and I have an equity stake in businesses.

17:28Why? It was all tiny little pivots leveraging the thing we had learned before. And so if we always stay in a state of stasis, my central nervous system is calm because I'm booking my 12.25 weddings a year. It's just enough to get by. And I'm just active on social and I can afford curate and everything's okay. Go on, go on. But if you sense that there's something more, At first, it's going to come as a knock. And then it's going to come as a nudge. It's going to push you and you feel it in your gut. And if you decide to ignore it, it will come as a rhinoceros. If you know something's in you, face it, try it, lesson, learn, and innovate.

18:13So the biggest thing that we can say is earn the pivot. But how do you do that? By working yourself out of it. Second question is how do you prepare yourself for the pivot? What are things that we can start doing immediately today is to systematize. Now, let me tell you, I am invited to curate and nobody wants to hear this conversation. What we want to do is what people I'm most known for is, Jasmine's all about content and marketing. And I am. But let me tell you, content and marketing will make you popular. It will make you profitable. And I am here to say, I don't care about the followers. What I want is legacy.

18:45And what I want to turn is my riches into wealth. And the way that you do that is by systematizing what it is that you do. Because if we're going to sit here and we're going to work our way into 84 years old in the industry, we have to ask ourselves, what have we done to set the business up? Systematize. So what does this mean? It is like an owner's manual. Like, let me tell you, if I brought you in, I was like, you've got to take over my company. What's your name? Jay, you've got to take over my company. And you're like, where do I start? I was like, here is our SOP, standard operating procedures.

19:16You would open it up and be like, I don't know what she does, but step one, turn on the computer. Step two, set up a Zoom meeting. Everything in the business has a manual. If you are the person who has to trade your hours for dollars, then guess what? The business owns you. You don't own the business. Ooh. Stumbling went to church right there. Thank you. Thank you. So the next thing we need to do is the leadership. Who's replacing you? And I really mean this, like your VA is gonna be replacing you in your inbox. And that's cool. Your social content assistant is gonna help you with social media.

19:53Who's replacing you? The minute we've identified, here is my manual of how to run my business. And you're really great. You're gonna do this. Awesome. That leads us to step number three. What's the growth plan? How is your business growing without you? That's gonna be the part where you ask yourself, how could it be? And then you ask yourself, am I willing to do the work? If you don't know how your business is going to grow without you, I promise you, you spend one day tomorrow asking yourself that question five times, you're going to come up with an answer and you're not going to like it. Because it's going to require you to do things we don't want to do.

20:32And guess what? The winners will continue to win because they eat. I think it was Hemingway who said, if you have to eat a frog every day, eat it at the beginning, get it over with. And many of us pretend we don't have to eat the frog. We don't have to eat the frog. And yet the person who eats the frog, AKA I'm going to post on social media when I really don't feel like it. And other people will say, well, it's turning into a portfolio. Not if people aren't finding me, right. It's going to get harder, ladies and gentlemen. It's going to get harder. So let's ask ourselves, listen, if it's like 10 X hard and then next month or year, it's going to be 20X hard.

21:10Let's eat the 10X toad. This is the cost of us doing business. You have to prepare your pivot by removing yourself from the business. Here's the thing. I don't expect anybody to say like, okay, Jasmine, I'm out of my business. But imagine, just imagine right now, you're working about 52 hours a week and you were to bring in a VA and you were to bring somebody in to help you with content and they saved you seven hours a week. What are you doing with your seven hours? Some people might be like, oh my God, I can go to my kids game. Or I can go to bed at a regular time. Awesome. Cool. I freaking love that.

21:39Buy back your life. But if in those seven hours, you decide to do something else that leverages your skillset to do something, then now you have the tools to do it. Question number three, Ashley's, what's the number one thing you're most proud of? Now, this is where I want to pause here. This is not a humble fest. This is, let me tell you what all the things I did wrong. So we had built a membership. And at the time I was like, well, we need special things as part of this membership. So against all advice, I said, you know, I'm not a tech founder, but it's 2021. Let's just build a tech company.

22:14So hired out a CTO, hired out a tech stack, and we became a SaaS, software as a service. And we integrated with every social platform out on the internet. Not too bad for a brown girl. Thank you. I actually sounded like I let up for the whoop. I didn't. I just wanted to take a moment and literally say it was the hardest freaking thing I had ever done. There is the hall of shame. I am right up there with all the things you shouldn't be doing. Let's talk about things I wish I would have done differently. And I'm telling you, they will apply to your business, whatever your business is. Number one, I wish I had built out a tech team sooner.

22:54In your land, it could be, I wish I just hired a VA. Somebody to help me get out of the mire. You and all of your glorious business should not be answering. You should not be doing tasks in your business that a person who's getting paid$20 should do. If you're doing the$20 tasks, oh Lord, baby Jesus in a manger, hire somebody. Everybody get together. Everybody get together. Three people and say, you know what? I could use somebody for 12 hours and I can use somebody for 12 hours and I can use in one person for 32 hours. You say, you work for the three of us. You streamline those synergies. And guess what?

23:29You get back that time and you're spending a couple hundred dollars to live an entirely different life. Can I get an amen? Okay. I focused on data and analytics. Friends, data and analytics is where the millions are made. This is why Zuckerberg has a bunker and more money than he knows what to do with. It is all on data and analytics. So often what I see specifically in the creative world is we don't look at that. Numbers are not fun. You just open any of your social apps. The apps are telling you, look what's working. We want you more here. They're giving you a roadmap of what you should be posting.

24:05Oh, we don't like looking at that because my engagement has been going down. Okay. So if they're giving you a map on what went well, and you don't look at it, why? The data will tell you what you should be posting more of. So if you're like, my engagement's going down, well, how about you pick the one thing in the last month that actually did the best of everything, even if it's not as good as it used to be, and then repeat it. That's what the data wants you to do. Repeat what is working. Lastly, created content with a marketing team. What I think that we all do, it's a tendency to say like, I can do it because it's my way, which I'm the queen transgressor of that.

24:42Bring people in to help see things differently because they can speak to people in different ways. I mean, it's for every industry at any given point in time. Was there a pivotal moment when you stopped playing small and said, I'm all in? Oh, Christy. Yes-ish. Because I texted my husband. We live here in Newport and he's with our daughter. And I texted him and I was like, bro, I am so nervous for this thing. I can't like, what in the world? To which he says, you've spoken on stages of tens of thousands of people, but this group matters the most to you because this group is you. And so I want to say, is there a moment that I stopped playing small?