Laying the Bricks for Your 2026: Lessons from Quarter 4

0:00You can control what you can control, and you cannot control what you can't control. I can control the effort. I can't control the outcome. So if I couldn't control the outcome, what did I need to do to become a different person? And that is the energy that I brought into 2026. One of my favorite quotes is by Bill Gates. And he says, we have a tendency to overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in a decade. That's why I have made the dedication to share my quarterly reviews. At first, it just started off with this random idea. Like, I'll just share what I did over a quarter.

0:33And then I started realizing that the greatest gift that I can give myself and bring you in on the journey is to document the journey, to show you the ins and outs. Because at some point in the future, I can't help but wonder that maybe, just maybe, something in quarter four at the end of 2025, you could look back and say, you did something without knowing the outcome, and it yielded something pretty dang incredible. So with that, welcome to the Jasmine Starr Show. My name is Jasmine Starr and I empower business owners to scale businesses to six, seven, and eight figures. This show is all about documenting the process and finding ways that you can do the exact same thing that I'm doing in your business.

1:12Big themes that came up in quarter four is saying yes, having conversations, and taking a break. Okay, how does this all work together? So I just want to start off by saying that the small things you're doing now can turn into big things. This was just a note that I have in my notebook to make sure that I'm understanding what I'm doing, who I'm doing it for, and the why behind it. When I look back at the end of 2025, that was October, November, and December, I had a mantra. That quarterly mantra was how you do one thing is how you do everything. So one of our core values here at Jasmine Star Brands is extraordinary is our baseline.

1:52that if somebody doesn't walk away from an event or a mastermind or a course and say, that was extraordinary, then we didn't do our job. So how do we pursue extraordinary? Well, we focus on excellence. So how do you do one thing? That's how you do everything. So every meeting, every project that I wanted to take on, I asked myself, how can you be excellent at this? My version of excellent. So I kind of want to take that into our theme. So the question that I had was, how are you fostering excellence so that you end excellence? with 2025 and start 2026 on a new chapter. So let's begin with October.

2:26So there was a mix of business and personal. I'm going to start off with the personal because for some reason, when I shared this random thing on social media, it got a lot of questions. So my daughter is in kindergarten and every week, every day, there's a parent who volunteers in kindergarten. Well, I aligned my work schedule to be one of her volunteers. And some people don't know, I was homeschooled my whole life. I never went to kindergarten. So as I walked my daughter into her kindergarten. It was my first day of kindergarten too. I don't know why I was nervous. I told my husband when we were driving and I'm like, what am I doing?

2:59I'm around five year olds and I'm feeling so intimidated. It was a really cool experience. Now, first things first, anybody who works with children in the elementary school system, God bless you. My daughter goes to a co-op. So it's like half homeschool, half school. And so she was there for three hours. I left that class three hours in and I was like, I need a vacation. I need to drink maybe a martini or 10. I need a nap. I need Kelgon, take me away, take a nap. I was every three hours. I do not know how kindergarten teachers do it. So God bless all y 'all that do it. I wanted to also take a step back and distinctly say that it's a gift to be able to build a business that serves my life first.

3:43And this is where people have questions. so I'm just going to answer them all here. I know that I have built an atypical life, and I know that I have an atypical standard relationship when it comes to gender. My husband and I are co-founders and business partners. However, he is her 100 % primary caretaker. We had an open conversation around what our business looked like when we became parents, and I made the decision, and he made the decision, and then we made it together and said, this is the decision we're making, so it's a little bit atypical. I can't volunteer as much as I would like, but when I do, I keep it a priority and I know that it is a luxury.

4:19And I've said this before on the podcast and it rubs people the wrong way, but I'm going to keep on saying it because I think that somebody out there possibly needs to hear it. I am an entrepreneur who's a mom. I'm not a mom who's an entrepreneur. During the workday, I act and function like an eight-figure CEO. I happen to work at home. I have the luxury most days of doing breakfast, lunch, and dinner with my daughter. I get to wake up with her. I get to put her down at bed. I get to do bath time. We get to read books. That is a gift, but make no mistake. During the work day, I treat it like I am building an empire because that is what my husband and co-founder have done and decided.

4:56I also realize it's not for everybody. And I also realize I don't have an opinion about your opinion about how we roll. I have chosen to live an atypical life. So I make atypical decisions. Hey, okay. That's going to be the, probably the only personal thing we're to get into. Let's get into the work. October 11th through the 14th, I went to an executive retreat called Hampton. We flew to Austin, Texas. I recorded a whole podcast with a deep dive on what this did and how it transformed my business. I will be sure to link it in the show notes. But as a brief recap, there was a change, a change around, I thought I was going just for a business perspective.

5:31And what I came to find out was a lot of mindset. Let me tell you, I would say 95 % of this event were men. And there I am with guys who are crying and they're doing breath work, like holotropic breath work, and they're finding their purpose and their why. And it was a really cool experience to step out of what is like my normal day to day and be around other people who think really, really big thoughts. Now, I didn't know then only when I look back is I went to this event because I wanted to have expansion from an executive perspective, but I was laying bricks. So what happened at that event is that I landed two podcast interviews with totally new audiences.

6:08I hired an executive coach. I'm in the process of hiring an executive coach for our COO from that event. And I landed an interview with Inc Magazine as a result of being at that event. So this is just another way that it's me documenting so that when somebody at some point in the future is like, oh, Jasmine's in Inc. must be lucky. Well, it is an element of luck, but it's also putting yourself in the right rooms. It's also making investments and bets on yourself to be in places that are a little bit uncomfortable. I had a lot of growth opportunities there, which is why I get into different rooms to meet other people.

6:43Because if we just stay in the same spot, we will always be getting the same results. But the best thing I walked away with, which is what I documented on that podcast, was a lot of internal growth. There was a lot of opportunities for me to let people in, to accept help from other people, and to have conversations that would not have happened otherwise. I might have mentioned in the podcast before that our goal, my husband and I, our goal was every time I'm traveling for business, 99 % of the time we're going to be traveling together. So my daughter and husband were with me in Austin and I was able to walk away from the event, kind of like digest, go through some notes, ideation, him like kind of strategize and then he would take her out to dinner, go to the library and then I was back at the event.

7:19So here again, blending of an atypical life with atypical decisions. October 17th, this was a podcast recording day. Now I batch my podcast content. As 2026 takes off, we're looking new ways of creating this because the podcast is yes, a bit for me, but it's mostly how can I share and help people along in the journey. So on that podcasting day, I'm taking particular note because I interviewed a woman by the name of Dylan Jarhouse. She talked about how she's built an eight figure Etsy empire. She teaches people how to build their Etsy stores. And it was during one of the breaks that we began to talk about content.

7:54And she told me, hey, I have this friend, you should check him out. So randomly, I just followed him based on her advice, and I didn't look any more into it. Here again was another brick I had laid without knowing. I'm going to talk to you about what had happened just a couple of weeks later in a second. We're going chronologically through the quarter. October 20th, I taught a class called the three money beliefs that made me millions. It was a free, no pitch class. Okay. So I love teaching these classes. We called them inside of the business, we called them brand classes. So what is a brand? A brand is what you make somebody feel.

8:27Now we also have masterclasses where we teach somebody a topic and And then we have like a directive, what we call a CTA, a call to action. What do we want somebody to do when they watch those educational classes? Okay. This was a brand class, which meant I didn't need anything from anybody. I just wanted to come in and share things that has wildly helped my business. I have this big mindset shift in my business going from making$10 ,000 a month. That was the biggest thing for me in my business. The minute I was able to make$10 ,000 in my business, I felt like game over. This is the start of something.

8:56And then I was like, well, can I make six figures a month? Can we do seven figures a year? Can we do seven figures in one year? Can we do seven figures in a month? All of these things started happening over time. And this past summer, I went away and I kind of just had the download of there were decisions you had to make in order to get to where you want to go. What was the mindset shifts that you had to make to make those millions? So it was literally on a flight home that I'm like, the whole class came to me. I was like, heck yes, let's go. I'm going to teach this. I don't want to ask anybody for anything.

9:23I was ready to go. I felt like, oh, quarter four, I'm going to do this thing because brand is how you make somebody feel. So if I can get online and make somebody feel something to take an action towards building a million dollar lifestyle, then heck yes, let's go. Okay. I was fired up. Clearly I was. And then the day of the class comes around and AWS has an outage. Like unprecedented. I mean, when does Amazon fail? Hardly ever. Doesn't happen. On this day it did. So the thousands and thousands of people who registered for this class, we couldn't send text messages. We couldn't get emails. We couldn't send emails.

9:56We wouldn't assume Zoom was going to work. So we had thousands of people who signed up and literally minutes before the class happens, I realized there was about 20 people here. That was awesome. That was really great. I was so excited. I was just like, oh, isn't this the irony? It's like my millionaire mindset beliefs. They got super challenged right there. Like what was the mindset I was going to be taking in there? So we decided to go through the class. About a hundred people were there live. and I told myself, okay, this was meant to happen. You can choose to fight, you can choose to be upset, or you could just choose to say, was the class teaching about the class or was the class simply raising your hand saying that you were gonna do something different and in a different way?

10:39What did I learn? Who did I impact? And how did I need to get better? Okay, that was the mindset shift that I had on that day. But I was like, I did all this work. No, heck no, we're gonna do this again. Okay, so then the following week, just for the people who signed up, and I'm like, we're gonna do this again. We'd love to see you online. And I think that the class was highly attended and the class got a really great piece of feedback. And it was me stepping into becoming the person I needed to be to end 2025. So that starting 2026, it was another tool in my tool belt. Because you can control what you can control and you cannot control what you can't control.

11:13I can control the effort. I can't control the outcome. So if I couldn't control the outcome, what did I need to do to become a different person? And that is the energy that I brought into 2026. Okay, so I believe that everything was happening for me, but as a business and a business perspective, the people who signed up for the class and they didn't get any reminders, they couldn't access the class, I didn't want there to be like a breaking of trust. They said, I'm gonna give you my time and then you're gonna ghost me. So from a business perspective, it was one thing for me to have a mindset shift, everything's happening for me.

11:42But another thing is I had to clearly communicate from a business perspective what happened, how we're making it right and how we can fix it and how people can join on that journey. Okay, so now we're towards the later of the month. It's October 21st to the 26th. I went to Santa Barbara for a personal event. A friend had a baby shower and I just needed a break. I was like, JD, we just need to get away. We've just been hitting it a little too hard. And I like to have just long weekends. So we went to Santa Barbara. We had a great time. Why am I talking about a baby shower and a laying bricks? Here's the theme.

12:11I'm going to tell you like a good independent movie maker. What they'll do is they often start the movie with like the end at the beginning and they immediately hand over to the start of the scene so that the viewer is a little bit like, wait, what's going on here? And so then you have to reverse engineer everything that's happening and why the movie ended that way. So this is the end of the movie. The end of the movie is if you don't talk about your business, nobody else will. Even if it makes you awkward, even if it makes you feel icky, you must be talking about your business, especially until the audiences are talking about your business.

12:39Okay, flash forward. This is Montecito, California. This is just lush oak trees and eucalyptus. This is driving up through horses in stables and riders and sun dappling light through the trees. This is fresh bottles of Veuve Coucou opening and this gorgeous little like China. It's like, I'm not even fancy. Tea? Tea cups? China tea cups? I think that's what they're called. I'm so not fancy. I don't even know that the proper thing of them, they have these little tiny gold spoons and these like little sugar cubes. And this is like, oh, this classy. This is classy. For a girl from East LA, I showed up.

13:14I was like, girl, just being here, you made it. I'm not even thinking about business. I'm just sitting here thinking about finger stuff. Okay. There's this one part. It's not even in my notes. They have food out on a food station and I don't see the cutlery. I don't see the rolled like forks, spoons, and knives. So everything, there's finger sandwiches, there's crudités, there's all this other stuff. And I'm just like, okay, I guess we're just going to just eat with our fingers. So I put it on a plate. I sit down and I don't know anybody at this baby shower. I know the woman who's having the baby shower.

13:41I don't know any of her friends. I don't know if they're in her family, but I show up because I'm a ride or die. I'm gonna be there for her. So I sit down by myself and I'm eating with my fingers and then other people join the table and they unroll their independently cloth rolled cutlery. And there I am with a soybean or a green bean, whatever it was and hummus and I'm chomping away and I'm like, Oh my God, are you going to wipe your hands on your pant leg right now? Because what other option do you have? So how do you play it off? Like, Oh yeah, I just see, I don't like forks. I just stopped eating.

14:12And I was like, okay, no more lunch for you. As I'm sitting there, people started talking and like, I don't know anybody. They start asking me what I do. And then I start speaking to a therapist. If they're the therapist, she's built this wildly successful practice in, I'll just say Southern California. She works with a lot of Google executives. I mean, the girl has it going on. Wildly educated, so well-spoken. Just like, you want to know, it's just, I'm at a point in my life and my career where I wish that I could do things in scale. Right now I'm trading very well. I'm getting compensated for a one-on-one therapy session with an executive.

14:42I wish I can do this better. I wish I can do this online. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, are you saying you would like to teach a concept to a group of people who pay you so that your hourly rate meeting with five to 10 people at a time is more than meeting with one person at a time? And she was like, yes, exactly. I was like, girl, you have no idea who just unsaid. Next to, I do this for a living. Like the digital world is my space. So we start talking and I want to bring in a little bit of a framework because as I walk people through the consistent 10K, one of our program offerings, a lot of times people are very nervous about talking about what it is they sell.

15:20And I have to go back and like reverse engineer. Jasmine, when you first started off and you became a photographer, you had a very hard time saying to people that you were a photographer because you kind of sort of didn't believe it yourself. You had a camera, you had passion, you had a way to make it work. But did you actually believe that? And so I always joke that when I became a photographer, I was a photographer, like it was like a remix. I was like, I was rapping. I'm a question mark. I'm not sure. And with every iteration of my career, that's the same thing that always happened. So I look at her and I know that she wants to say something that she really wants to do.

15:51And I have the opportunity to not repeat the same mistake. I'm not going to say, well, I'm an educator. No, I'm like, I have a holding company and inside of this holding company, we have different divisions of businesses that we help elevate and amplify somebody's trajectory. And she was like, well, how would that look for me? So now let's go through a framework. When somebody is talking to you about what it is you do, I want you to look at this as a brick. You are laying a brick. So let's go down. When people ask my best tips and advice for somebody, when they're asking you what it is you sell or what it is you do, when it's done right, when you have this engaging conversation, people are going to say, well, who is it for?

16:28What do you sell? How do you do it? Great. When that is happening, number one, you always want to answer who it's for. When I was speaking to her, I said, well, the consistent 10K is for business owners who'd like to create an offer online that generates consistent 10K months. Great. Number two, always answer what your process is because people immediately want to start aligning. Does that work with me? Does that vibe with me. So Consistent 10K is a 90-day program and every step is listed out detailed and you are working with a coach and live leaky coaching. Now here's where most people get stuck.

17:06They start explaining the process in great detail that would make somebody say, oh no, no, no, that's not for me. So when they ask about the how, my kind advice and framework would say, you know what, it's very detailed and we want to make sure that it's in alignment with you. What I would love to do is set up a separate time to talk. Now, I sent her, I invited her, hey, book a call with one of our sales team. And she did. You might have a sales team, but you can be doing this. Let's set up a Zoom call. Let's set up a phone call. Let's go on DMs so that you could follow through a very specific sales process.

17:37So reminder, you are uniquely positioned to help people. If somebody asks, say your name, say it out loud, and say it again. Talk about the what the program is and who it's for. But when you talk about the how, get them in byline to a way that you could follow a sales process. And talk about your offer in a way that's about them. Not I do this. It's people get this result. That changes everything about the alchemy of that conversation. Okay, so now we are in November. A bit ago on the show, I had explained that I take once a month, I take a full day off and I call it a deep work day. No meetings, no tasks.

18:15I go deep and I ask myself, are we working towards getting the things that we need to get the results we want? This is kind of like a recalibration time for me to cut out the noise and say, are you tracking on what you should be doing? So I went on this one day in November because I wanted to think about our big next hire. It was a pretty big role for us. It was an executive role. And I will tell you that in November, I realized I had done it wrong. So what I did wrong? Well, I created a role within the business that was very broad. Now, my thinking, okay, this is my thinking. Well, somebody already does that role now.

18:53So we can hire somebody to replace her, except for the fact that the person who's doing it now, she's kind of a gangster. Like she's just a unicorn. Like everybody knows that her capacity is next level. Like she has atypical capacity. She has atypical skillset. And also she's been working in the business for over five years. She understands all arms of the business. So to bring somebody in to that role, it was just too broad. I was expecting too much from somebody on the outside. So I worked with a consultant and we were working with a recruiter and that consultant had said, listen, your job description is way too broad.

19:27You're not going to attract somebody. So on my deep work day, and I'm sharing this as a brick because sometimes we're in motion and the kindest thing that we could do for ourselves is just to stop and say, okay, this isn't working. How do I attempt to fix it? I might not get it right, but what's my attempt? So when I looked at the role, I immediately said, okay, I need to divide this role into two distinct and separate roles. So on that deep work day, I divided it out. And then I said, this role is for this and this role is for that. So what I decided to do is then set my focus on a sales manager with experience.

19:58And I wanted a sales manager with experience building an eight figure business in a specific amount of time. There was a lot of other details that we can get into at a later point in time. So I got very specific around the role and who specifically I wanted to run the sales operations. There were three things that I dove in specifically. Qualities, value, map. I wanted to make sure that this person shared qualities as a human that we share on this team. Is she proactive? Is she communicative? Is she clear? Is she kind? Is she driven? Is she self-motivating? All of these things that just created a bubble map.

20:33This is like the thing that I need to have this person do. I needed to clearly outline how I saw this role in the future and how I saw it expanding. Because yes, I could hire her for now with where we were in the business, but I wanted her to set her visions big on where we were going to go. And I needed that to come from her, not from me or her or him. I'm kind of giving away the plot right about now. And who was this person? Was she embodiment of our culture? Could this person come in and land and just feel like, oh, I got this and I'm going to run. That was going to be very important for me because we're moving fast and I don't want to hire somebody who's good without them being in alignment for who we are as a culture.

21:08Okay, so when I got very crystal clear on who I wanted this person to be, I said, Jasmine, these are your standards. If this person does not align on every single one of those standards, even if this person's great, it's not a hire. So I'm going to come back to this in just a second about how that lens became what I looked through entirely. On November 6th, so just a couple of days later, I invested$5 ,000 for a two-hour consult. And I say this because when I laid down that brick, it was an expensive brick, period, the end. Paid somebody five grand for two hours because this person had years and years and years of consolidated time and experience around a very specific question I had.

21:52And at the end of those two hours, I probably would have paid more. He didn't give me information. He collapsed time. He collapsed mistakes. I'm telling you straight out, I probably, probably, likely would have made a mistake that cost$5 ,000, not because I'm dumb, just I didn't know. So that alone, I was ROI positive the minute I clucked off my computer. So he sat down and he was creating a future vision for myself based on all of his experience because I can't tell you, I can't shake it and the team's gonna hate it when they hear this. I feel in my bones a live event. I just do. I don't, I just do.

22:31I'm not gonna get into the details and no, it's not gonna be Tony Robbins, large scale, okay? You're not gonna see me in the arena, at least not yet. We'll save that for 2027. But what I am saying is I definitely feel with AI, I definitely feel like people want high touch. I definitely feel like, honest to God, sometimes we need to be in a room so that our butt gets kicked, period, the end. Sometimes you need to shake up your life so you come to and be like, what is the thing I want? I see live events. But if I'm going to go to my team, if I'm going to go to our CFO, if I'm going to go to our account and say, we need to put up this money for these funds, I need to lay out a case.