The 3 Financial Mistakes Ambitious Founders Make

17:44Jasmine Star:That level of context, nearly every entrepreneur is missing that context. I mean, that's what we provide.

17:52Kaitlyn Carlson:100%, which is why I felt like this is why I wanted this conversation, because you get the luxury of speaking to 0.7 % of any woman in business will build a business over seven figures. We're not talking about profit. We're just talking about overall revenue. So you're talking, your total addressable market is 0.7 % of all entrepreneurs. This podcast serves a lot more than that. So even if people are not there, how can you answer the same questions that Caitlin Lynn is asking those of people with larger businesses, because we can all duplicate this model in different ways. Now, first mistake is not knowing how much they make per month.

18:27Kaitlyn Carlson:The second mistake is not understanding or knowing what has to be in place in order for it to be work optional. And the third mistake, common mistakes we see.

18:34Jasmine Star:Another common mistake I would say is a lot of people think that a bookkeeper and a CFO is the same thing, and it's not. Oh, we talked about this. Okay, say more about this. This is good. So if people are not quite ready for theory, I say hire a good CFO because a CFO is responsible for overseeing the financial health and growth of the company. You need that position first. Well, it's a little bit of chicken and egg because on the personal side, you need to know what the business needs to do for you. So I'll use myself as an example. I started theory, I'm making$0, but I went, you know, you could just go to nerdwallet.com and just type in, I want to be financially independent or retire by age 60, spending$30 ,000 a month.

19:20Jasmine Star:For me, I ran that calculation and it told me I was going to have to save$13 ,000 a month, save and invest$13 ,000 a month. So I was very clear from day one of running theory, this business needs to give me$13 ,000 a month to save and invest.

19:35Kaitlyn Carlson:Like beyond your living expenses.

19:37Jasmine Star:Beyond my living expenses. But what does that inform? My pricing structure, the number of clients I take on, what I do and what I don't do, because I have that number in the back of my mind. That is my North Star. Doesn't mean I'm going to hit it tomorrow, but it is a North Star that informs so many of my other decisions. So when I hired my CFO, I said, I need to cover my living expenses and I need$13 ,000 a month to be going into my investment portfolio.

20:07Kaitlyn Carlson:Now, theory has taken many iterations since I started it.

20:11Jasmine Star:When I started it, I just had this little dream that I was going to be a solopreneur and just have 40 clients. Now we have a team of nine people. So obviously that has changed. But what has not changed? Being financially independent at age 60, spending$30 ,000 a month. So I go to Matt and I say, okay, I'm not a solopreneur anymore. And now I'm running a company with a team of nine people. But that North Star is the same. and he helps me translate what does the business need to do to achieve that North Star. Okay.

20:43Kaitlyn Carlson:So I want to go back and it's understanding how much we are spending every month to live and be very real with that. Understanding the number we would have to be able to meet in order to be work optional by a certain age or within a certain timeframe. Yes. And then number three, making sure that you have a team, not just a bookkeeper, but a CFO. So I had no idea when we really started scaling the business, getting into the digital space. So when I was a solopreneur, photographer, we'd run multiple seven figure, but it was just my husband and myself. Like we were fine with a bookkeeper. We were fine with somebody filing our taxes.

21:19Kaitlyn Carlson:Then we get into the online space and things just grew really fast. We met with the CFO. He came on board and we did not know how good we had it. I just thought, well, this is what everybody does. And then he sold his book of business. And as he sold his book of business, I realized that the company that had bought his business were bookkeepers, very good at what they did, bookkeepers. They were not CFOs. And so we went through a whole year and a half of waiting to be like, well, once they understand our business, then we're going to go back to what we used to get. Okay. Once we pay more, then we'll go back to what we used to get.

21:51Kaitlyn Carlson:And we just had this like wake up. We're never going to get that because they're two entirely separate things. And so for us moving into 2026 and getting a CFO, going back to, we have a bookkeeper, we have a CFO, we're talking to a tax strategist. And for those of you guys who are interested, had a great conversation with Carlton Dennis, be sure to check that out. We'll link it in the show notes. Now we're here at this conversation, and this is a conversation that JD and I have. I know that it sounds awful and I don't want to actually say it because I think that people are going to have an opinion online.

22:20Kaitlyn Carlson:And then I just realized, well, I don't care about their opinion. It's my life. And I'm sitting here with a brilliant person who could speak directly to it. So we bought this house. It was a complete fixer-upper and we poured money into it. And I love it, Caitlin. The day I walked into this house and I walked through it, I cried and it was beautiful and it felt like a deep breath of air. And that same day I told my husband, I see us listing the house. And he was shocked. And he's like, are you not happy? What happened? I was like, no, it's everything. It's everything we wanted. And I can't tell you, I know we're listing the house.

22:57Kaitlyn Carlson:Like it's in me. I already know. I am so happy. I have no ambitions to move right now, but there's a knowing in me. I know it. I feel it. And he said, okay, when I hear you talk after our conversation, the first thing that came up was like, well, how do I figure out my work optional number? How do I figure out what we're going to need? Because I could tell you if all things stayed equal and we saved, if Luna wants to go to college, if Luna would, if we want to travel twice a year, if we want to do all these things and we come up with that number and then we change a house, that's a big change, a very big change.

23:27Kaitlyn Carlson:And I know how much we would need liquid because I love, I know it's disgusting. I love a little chaos. I love building, I love tearing it down. I love designing. It's like, if it's not chaotic, I don't know what I'm doing with my life. So it's like, I want a new project. I already envisioned what the house looks like. I can see it. And my husband's like, do you know how much liquid we need for building that? I was like, I know, but we'll just find another fixer upper. So all of that to say, I know our number's changing. What do we do in the meantime?

23:51Jasmine Star:Right. So that's a good example of you have your peaks of the mountains, right? There's multiple. And I always say like between your personal life and the business and legislation, it's always fluid. It's always changing. And that's why we are like your Sherpa on this journey. So what you're telling us is, okay, a peak has changed. And so we're going to change our path. And our job is to provide the context and be a sounding board to help you do that in the smartest, most effective way possible. Can I tell you what comes up for me? What?

24:23Kaitlyn Carlson:Is I'm so happy that I would have somebody as a sounding board. And then there's a part of me that feels like that's like a little bit of a constraint because you would be forcing me to make a decision. You're like, Jasmine, you sell the house. And what this means is you either work another four years or you find a way to increase revenue so that your owner's pull every year turns into be a different number. And then I'd be like, oh, that's too much stress in the business. Do I want to work another four years? Like, I don't like to make decisions. I'm just like to, like, let it be. And I think that what I've needed in my life are those constraints with the trade-offs.

24:53Kaitlyn Carlson:Is are you willing to work more or radically change your income to get the outcome that you desire? And sometimes I don't know if I really want to say I want to work more or I want to live on less.

25:04Jasmine Star:Right. Or introduce more time. So in terms of, like, a goal. Oh, got it. When we're talking about like work optional, for example, so you can push out the time frame, right? Or you can decrease lifestyle or you can save more. So there's, you have choices. That's why we call it modeling. We're going to model different things so you can see how you feel in different scenarios. That's all we're doing is we're contextualizing for you. but ultimately yes previously you haven't been presented with those trade-offs so you don't really know how you feel you know how when you ask someone a question and you already know the answer and then they give you the other answer and you're like that just affirmed that I want this answer yes we're kind of doing that for you yeah you know right but when you knowledge is power so when you have the information you can make an informed decision so I have like a just like

26:01Kaitlyn Carlson:flash fire questions. I was going to do, sometimes I do, like I start with a game and it's like under 60 seconds, answer these six questions. And I just felt like with your whole vibe and energy, I'm like, we're not playing the game. Like that is out of alignment. I could just feel it. So I was like, okay, we're going to can the game. Don't need to do that. But I actually want to answer these questions because I feel like it would drill down for somebody who's listening to contextualize it for them. I don't want somebody listening to be like, well, that's a nice to have. I'm nowhere near that.

26:26Kaitlyn Carlson:Well, right. But many of us were always in that position until we were there. How do we best prepare even if we're not at the precipice of being able to work with somebody like Therese? So true or false? If your business is profitable, you're automatically building personal wealth.

26:39Jasmine Star:False. Okay. Explain. You need to give dollars a job because it's human nature that if you don't give dollars a job, they will be spent. So when you say give dollars a job, explain it to me like I'm five. So let's say that you're, it's great that you're profitable. Like a lot of, I did notice when I first got into the space, kind of like the vanity metrics, right? It's like people talk about revenue, but revenue really does not matter. Profitability matters. So what are we doing with that profitability? How is it helping us reach our goals? How is it helping us further our mission? Again, it's kind of this balance between the CFO and us.

27:19Jasmine Star:If there's a game plan and a roadmap, we're very clear on, okay, the business made$500 ,000 of profitability this year, and it's going here, here, and here. That's because there was a plan in place before the$500 ,000 was made. Give the dollars a job. Yes. Those dollars are going to be going towards things. That's actually what I see people miss the most is just the execution, right? So we, and it's funny because we see this with clients, the clients that are on a monthly savings cadence are building wealth faster and smoother than the people who say, well, let me see how the year goes and then I'll dump money into my portfolio.

28:01Kaitlyn Carlson:What's a general rule of thumb? Like for somebody who's listening and maybe they're not at the seven or eight figure mark, general rule of thumb percentage wise, how much does somebody be saving so that they have a pathway to wealth?

28:09Jasmine Star:I mean, automating is certainly like, that's one of the best things that you can do. Like is there a general rule of thumb for percentage wise?

28:16Kaitlyn Carlson:Like 2 % every month, 10 % every month. And I know it's different for everybody because most people are living paycheck to paycheck. But if there's like a way for you to say, can you live a little bit less and be able to put 3 % every single month automated? Have you seen like a general rule of thumb or just be like whatever you can, however you can?

28:32Jasmine Star:it's it's a little bit of like whatever you can however you can yeah I mean if you could do like five percent that could be meaningful over time like when I so I just paid off my student loans

28:43Kaitlyn Carlson:last month I paid them off 13 years early congrats thank you and I took a three-pronged approach

28:48Jasmine Star:so even though I had two hundred thousand dollars of student debt I was still I was an employee at the time so I did a 401k I contributed five percent of my salary to my 401k because there was a 5 % match with the company. I put 5 % into my savings account, and then I paid down my student loans. I did that for eight years, basically like 22 to 30. By the time I was, I was actually 29, but by the time I was 29, that's when COVID hit. I had$70 ,000 in my 401k. I had$30 ,000 in my savings account, and my husband had built$100 ,000 in his 401k. So because we had been doing the slow and steady three-pronged approach, we had built up assets by the time COVID rolled around.

29:34Jasmine Star:Well, COVID comes, they roll out the CARES Act. They say you can access your 401k without taking the 10 % penalty. You can take up to$100 ,000 loan against your 401k. So that's what we did. So rather than paying Navient 8 % on$180 ,000, I liquidated my retirement account. Part of the reason why I did that is because it was the only time I was going to avoid the 10 % penalty. And I was shifting from being an employee to being a business owner. This is crazy. I didn't know this part of your story. It's freaking brilliant. So I knew being a business owner was going to open me up to massive wealth creation vehicles in terms of like retirement savings, like solo 401ks or defined benefit plans or like cash balance plans.

30:19Jasmine Star:So I was like, it's fine. I'll take the hit now. I'll avoid the 10 % penalty. So I took the$70 ,000 out of my 401k, liquidated most of our savings, paid off$80 ,000. And then my husband took a loan against his 401k and paid off the other$100 ,000. So we paid off$180 ,000 to Navient, which we were paying 8%. And with a 401k loan, you pay yourself the interest. So rather than paying Navient 8 % interest, we were paying ourselves 4.25%. On$100 ,000. Oh my gosh. So we did the boring thing, right, for eight years. Just like save and invest, save and invest, pay down the debt. But then COVID comes, that's a wealth building opportunity.

31:05Kaitlyn Carlson:And you couldn't forecast it, but you just, somebody had told me just yesterday, the quote I heard is you're not responsible for the abundance, but you're responsible for the preparation. And so you just prepared for the moments you had the option to do something that you wouldn't have if you had not making those small steps. blind, those small blinds, like it's going to happen. It's going to, that's amazing. Yeah. I hope that people hear that and they listen and they say, okay, that's the thing I'm going to do before I get to these big, massive things. Those are going to be things. Okay. So yeah.

31:34Kaitlyn Carlson:How much money should an entrepreneur have before considering to work with financial planner?

31:38Jasmine Star:That's a tricky one. I mean, for theory, we have people come to us who, did you say how much should they have saved?

31:45Kaitlyn Carlson:How much should they, should an entrepreneur have before considering working with the financial planner?

31:50Jasmine Star:For us, it's zero dollars. That's a huge thing that makes us different is we charge the flat monthly retainer. So it doesn't matter, but the traditional model... But would

31:58Kaitlyn Carlson:you... Okay, but like you have a flat monthly retainer and let's just say, I'm not going to give like a number, but let's just say for math's sake, it's$5 ,000 a month. Let's just say it's $5 ,000 a month. Somebody has a 5 ,000, but they, you know, on a quarterly basis have 5 ,000. So they have 20 ,000 at the end of the year. Are you still taking them as a client? Does it really make sense?

32:18Jasmine Star:For theory, RFI is$1 ,500 a month. So I would say to feel good about that energetic exchange, we like to see people able to put at least$30 ,000 to$50 ,000 a year towards their financial goals. That would be a good fit for theory.

32:32Kaitlyn Carlson:That's great. And so for people who are listening, this is really just, all I wanted to do was to go back and say, at what point in your journey, if you had heard something that you would be able to say, okay, that's the bullseye. I didn't even know what I was like saving for or aiming for. So had I heard this a decade ago, I would have, I think my life would have been really, really, really different because I think that the way that the model is built is built for somebody like me at that time. And so it made a lot of circulous patterns until I've came and found you and your perspective. Okay.

33:04Kaitlyn Carlson:So should your business be your biggest retirement plan?

33:07Jasmine Star:Absolutely not. Okay. Explain that. Okay. So the cornerstone of wealth preservation is diversification. So money is created through concentration. It's preserved through diversification. For entrepreneurs, they start off concentrated in their business. And that's great because concentration leads to the outsized return, right? Like high risk, high reward. That is good for a certain period of time. And that's where you can get that outsized return. But over time, we need to start to diversify away from the business. Because it's okay to be living and dying by business performance for the first five, even 10 years.

33:50Jasmine Star:It's not okay to be living and dying by business performance 30, 40 years into

33:56Kaitlyn Carlson:business ownership. I wish that 10 years ago, somebody would have said that. I think that alone is so profound because, I mean, here again, don't have a history with money, have never started a business. You come into money, you think that it's going to be good and up and down, and then you just continue doing it until you don't. And then I thought to myself, well, that's not going to work. That's not going to work. So part of the reason why I wanted to have this conversation was people are watching and listening and they want to know how they turn their money into wealth. What are the small things that they could start doing?

34:27Kaitlyn Carlson:And obviously you have built a model that's built for specific ambitious women who have a successful business. Okay, we're moving that direction. But I want to go back and talk a little bit about the why and then the business of your business. So this podcast is literally, I just loved, I could talk about business all day, every day and twice on Sunday. So let's talk about the structure of your business and then we'll go back and talk about, but why, why was it created this way? Because I felt like that was super fascinating. So the structure of your business, you'd said you have nine people. So you sit at the top and then you have planners with their own book of clients.

35:01Jasmine Star:So they don't necessarily have their own book of clients because we all share the clients. Okay. But one concept that was, I feel like I intuited, but then it was just affirmed by a friend of mine, Sarah Tacey Tangretti. She's a nervous system regulation coach or guide. she talked about the tanskretti model where it was scientifically proven that if a baby had parents who were supported by two layers of support the baby's nervous system would be regulated and i not only want to positively impact female entrepreneurs but i also want to create a culture where women can thrive whether they want to be mothers or not and so theory works in this model where we deliver white glove service.

35:47Jasmine Star:Our advisors work with only 40 families, which is very rare. That's like a very private wealth model. Most advisors work with like 150 to 300 clients. So each advisor is the primary on 40 households. So they're the lead. And then they have a co-lead who is also familiar with their 40 households. And then that co-lead is a lead on 40 and then they have a co-lead for their 40. So it's this model where like you can truly go on vacation. You can truly go on maternity leave. We have an advisor on maternity leave right now. I have two other advisors stepping in to support her households so she can truly feel like she can step away and rest and rejuvenate.

36:32Jasmine Star:That was the culture that I wanted to build is like when you're away, you're truly away. You're not checking your phone every two seconds.

36:40Kaitlyn Carlson:And so your clients come in and your business scales when you have your advisors. And so you know that when you're going to go into like a growth season or there's like a big wave that you have your advisors built, set up, that there is a web of support with each other.

36:53Jasmine Star:And

36:54Kaitlyn Carlson:so you've built this and you've stepped into that. But why did you leave UBS?

36:59Jasmine Star:What happened?

37:01Kaitlyn Carlson:And then why did you decide to make a decision when all systems go point you you're on a very successful track. Like what happens for you to say, this is where I stop and a new part of me begins?

37:11Jasmine Star:Well, the candid answer is I had this conscious thought that if I wanted to be successful in private wealth, I was going to have to sacrifice my safety. And I mean, I was sexually harassed starting my first week in private wealth. I was asked to take my clothes off in front of a 68 year old advisor. So that was my first week in private wealth. And it didn't get better after that. I ended up, fortunately, he was my boyfriend at the time. He encouraged me to come forward with a claim and I did. And fortunately, UBS ended up firing that advisor. But it was pretty relentless to be, you know, I was in my mid-twenties and I'm surrounded by men and I'm prospecting men because who has private wealth?

38:02Jasmine Star:Men. Men have private wealth. And I ended up submitting six claims in three years. The first one, that was the most jarring because it was so unexpected, but about a year after, and I went through that experience and they fired the advisor and I just difficult to work with. And I mean, you know this about me, but I was an ice hockey player. So like I grew up in a boys locker room. I grew up with boys like spitting where I sat. So it wasn't that I was not used to being around men or being tough, but this was different. It was like exploitative and explicit and so demeaning. So I went through that experience and then I didn't say anything for a year because I didn't want to get a refutation for being difficult to work with.

38:49Jasmine Star:But then a year later, an assistant came to my office on a Friday afternoon and she closed the door to my office and she said, hey, I heard you were the advisor that filed the complaint that got that advisor fired. And she said, I'll never be able to thank you enough because he tortured me for years. And after she said that to me, I realized like this isn't just about me. This is about all women, protecting all women, because there are younger women coming in after me. And that assistant was 20 years older than me. So I ended up filing the rest of the complaints. And then I became a private wealth advisor, and I had a business partner who knew everything I had been through.

39:34Jasmine Star:And he still physically assaulted me on three different business trips. and after the third business trip I came home to my husband and I was like I just can't do this anymore so that's when we were living in New Orleans and we ended up moving back up to Boston and UBS was pretty good about it like I went to them and I said you're gonna pay for us to move home you're gonna pay for me to get on a new private wealth team you're gonna give me a raise but like honestly I was just a shell of myself after all those experiences and what I had been through. And I did end up joining a private wealth team in the Boston office, but it felt like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound, to be honest.

40:19And fortunately, that team actually

40:23Jasmine Star:ended up leaving UBS like three months after I joined them and they went independent, but they opened an office on the other side of Boston. And that was like an impossible commute for me, but it got me out of UBS which I really needed like I was like really suffering there but when we made that transition it caused me to take a step back and like really take a hard look at the industry and be like is this what I really want to do because all the passion had just been stripped out of it for me and I truly did not feel safe I did not feel like I could I felt like I was going to have to sacrifice my safety to be successful in that environment and my husband was like well do you think if you changed who you did this for that your passion would come back and I said maybe and he was like well I've noticed that you love following female entrepreneurs like do you think there's something that you could do with that and then I started listing out like here's all the things that's wrong with the model and how it works today and he was like well do you think you could create a solution to that and so i did okay

41:36Kaitlyn Carlson:to me it's like i just want this like and so brene brown calls it gold plated grit years later you could look back at that and say that was a very difficult thing and we look and none of us will have an understanding of the pain that you had gone through and the fear that you dwelled in and then the voice the courage to use your voice to speak up for other people who didn't have that and to be the quote unquote very successful but very difficult one to work with. We will never understand any of that. And then we hear this big, bold, courageous decision. You made it to God on your own to serve a market and you knew it was wrong and you said, I can fill that gap.

42:15Kaitlyn Carlson:And we hear this and we're like, hell yes, she can. Let's go. But like, now let's get to the real, real. You say, I think I can. Here's how the model's broken. And then you're like, I'm in business. How do you start getting clients? Like, what does that journey look like? Because making a declaration and then making it successful are two very different things.

42:33Jasmine Star:Yeah. I mean, this is kind of crazy to say, but I didn't even know if I could, if this business was viable because I didn't even know if there were female entrepreneurs out there. I mean, like you said, 0.7%. The only female entrepreneurs I knew were Sarah Blakely and Jessica Elba. If you're in private wealth, those are pretty much the only two that you know. So I had to spend the first 18 months of theory just looking for successful non-journers. So what are you doing? Let's get like nitty gritty.

43:01Kaitlyn Carlson:What are you, I mean, were you on LinkedIn, Instagram? Are you searching?

43:04Jasmine Star:I've always been highly relational. And I knew I had this like wealth of expertise and I wanted to - Was that pun intended? No. I love it though. Okay, go on. Sorry. And I knew I could educate. I knew I had my knowledge, right? Like my knowledge was my big thing. So I actually started with podcasts. I took a leap of faith and I hired a podcast booking agency. And that was great because it gave me a lot of practice telling the story and explaining these concepts. The also thing that was a huge disconnect for me was like how little the layperson knew.

43:42Kaitlyn Carlson:Yes.

43:43Jasmine Star:It took me a long time to understand how much the general population does not know about wealth building. And so podcasts, our industry is so nebulous and so intimidating. And so podcasts gave me great practice explaining concepts in a digestible way. So I started with the podcasts and then I actually used my intuition. I did join an online mastermind. And in that mastermind, I identified my ideal client avatar, like literally a person. I was like, this is my girl. And she is still a client today. And we've helped her build multiple seven figures net worth. She got a multi seven figure offer on her company this year, which she turned down because her company is so well run that she can get distributions off of it without really requiring much of her time at all.

44:40Jasmine Star:But she knew exactly what she needed to get for an offer because she has her financial plan. Oh, that's amazing.

44:48Kaitlyn Carlson:So you get on podcast, you hire. So I'm looking at this just as like from a marketing perspective, you have an idea, you build the business, you know, the offer, but you're not exactly quite sure who that is because you don't know how big the market is. And you don't actually know how to tap into this market because it's really hard to find. And like absolutely, it absolutely is hard to find. So then you get on podcast networks and then you join a mastermind where their seven figure founders are. You meet somebody who you say, I can build my model after this person. You secure her as a client.

45:18Kaitlyn Carlson:You now have since helped her get like eight figures for a sale that she chose. I don't really need because the business is printing me money and I don't have to do much. And then from there, how did it expand? In same ways of you just going out and networking and meeting people?

45:31Jasmine Star:Pretty much. Yeah. So theory, I mean, I've never posted on Instagram. I don't have a podcast. I don't have an email list. All I have focused on is relationship building and educating. Wow, this is like Fight Club. Like, oh my gosh. But that feels aligned for me. So I'm a 1-3 projector for human design. So I love intimacy. Like I love one-on-one conversations. I love presenting to a small group of entrepreneurs. I love getting live feedback. So I built theory in a way that aligns with my blueprint.

46:06Kaitlyn Carlson:And on the back of that, knowing who you are and the type of business you want to build, you can still have intimacy with your advisors, and then your business continues to grow as a result of that.

46:16Jasmine Star:And one thing that's really important is right now, so we have a little over 60 clients. My goal right now is to grow to 120 clients with my existing team. I do not have to grow beyond that if I don't want to. And I'm so clear on that because of my financial plan. And the amount of discernment that gives me in terms of what I say yes to, what I say no to, and where I spend my time, it's invaluable. And who you say yes to.

46:46Kaitlyn Carlson:Yes. You get to handpick your clients. Yes. That is a place of power. Yes. And so now that you've built the business, you started and you're like, okay, if I could just get these many, if I could just have 20 clients, and now you've expanded far beyond that and your team, does that change anything about what you see your future to be? or has the future always been the future and now you get to do it with like a small group of people at your side by your teammates I mean

47:09Jasmine Star:I definitely think Tracy Litt has a great quote she says expansion happens at the speed of safety and I totally get that because especially as I was like healing from everything I went through in private wealth I kept my vision really small and then I started to grow and then I was like well maybe I could have a team right now I want to be realistic about the fact that I'm very like goal oriented. So I want to focus on this goal of getting to 120 clients and then seeing how it feels. One thing that feels very natural for me is I do feel that I am here to mentor. And so my focus right now is transferring how I think to the team, not what to do, but how I think, because I want them to advise the way that I advise, right?

48:00Jasmine Star:I'm moving into that leadership era, which is super exciting for me. And that feels very natural for me. But that took a while because a lot of my ego was wrapped up in, oh, my value is in my skill set and what I do. So I had to go through a lot of mental work to, oh no, it's actually my leadership and the systems and the framework that I've built. Like that's the value. The value is not me. The value is the framework and the results that it's getting for clients.

48:31Kaitlyn Carlson:Can we go back to how we started the conversation? And you had said the three most important questions that we have to ask ourselves as six, seven, and eight-figure founders is, where are we now? Where do we go? And how do we get there? So you had said, where are we now? 60 clients. Where do we want to go? 120. So my question to you as we close is, how are you going to get there? I want you to point to the stands like Babe Ruth. Be like, this is it. This is how I see it. Are you there yet? Are you okay sharing that?

48:58Jasmine Star:Yeah. So, I mean, I have my 2026 calendar built out already. So I'm a part of three groups, three networking groups, and two of those groups have two events this year and another group has one. And then there's like another dinner that I'm doing in Atlanta. So that's five or six events that I'm going to go to. An eight or 10 client. Mm-hmm.

49:26Kaitlyn Carlson:Not a girl.

49:26Jasmine Star:Mm-hmm. So simple.

49:29Kaitlyn Carlson:That's so great.

49:29Jasmine Star:Gives me the time to work out, spend time with my kids, just enjoy life. And maybe this podcast. Eight or 10.

49:37Kaitlyn Carlson:Eight or 10. Eight or 10. Caitlin, I want people, like one of the things I was really impressed is, I was like, okay, so talk to me about all of your avenues, what you want people to do. Like Jasmine, I have a one-page website. If people want to chat and figure out if they're a fit, You just go and book a call. Where do they go? How do they book a call? Give us the details.

49:55Jasmine Star:Yeah, so that is correct. It's a one-page website. It's theoryplanning.com. There's a link at the bottom to book a call with me, and I'm happy to chat to give you a gut check on where you're at in your journey and see whether it's a good fit for theory now. I mean, I love to leave people with something, right? So if you book a call with me, I will tell you what the next best step is. I absolutely love that.

50:22Kaitlyn Carlson:And in full candor, I don't have a vested interest in how her business grows. If her business grows, it's like high-fiving all the way around because when Caitlin wins, the clients win. And if you become a client, the ultimate goal is how do we all collectively move upwards together? How do we create momentum? And so I brought Caitlin here because I wish that I I had this conversation with Caitlin a decade ago. And because I can't, the best thing I can do is to put somebody else who's a decade prior to where I am now to build out. And so the lessons have always been for me. I made a promise to God.

50:52Kaitlyn Carlson:Whatever I learn, I'm going to share it. And so this is me taking those lessons, putting them out there. And so I hope that in the future we can look back at this day and be like, wow, Jasmine, you were dreaming a little too small. You were dreaming a little too small. So thank you for just being an expander, an opener, and giving people hope, but then concrete steps. These are simple things we could start doing. so you had mentioned nerd wallet you would also mention monarch and you would also mention

51:16Jasmine Star:theoryplanning.com thank you thank you thank you so much i appreciate you thank you for listening

51:21Kaitlyn Carlson:ladies and gentlemen thank you for watching and listening to the jasmine star show kaitlyn carlson you're the best thanks jasmine