Wall of Love

Video transcript: What would you say to anybody considering joining the Mastermind that feels they don't have the time for it? If you don't have time, it's probably the exact reason why you should join. It forces you to improve in yourself and it's definitely a net positive. If you don't have an hour to do this a week, you need this. And then you will have an hour a week to do that, and then you'll have another 10 hours a week to do other things. The return on investment is not immediate. It doesn't come in week one, two, three, but it does come. Look, most people are probably working 12 hours a day, eight hours a day and doing 40 hour week. You're saying it's one hour out of it, two and a half percent of your time. The impact from that two and a half percent, the ROI is going to be better than the other 97.5% of your week. You look forward to those calls, you see the value in those calls and you see that every single week you can learn something and understand something that can be applied to help you. Because seeing success come from others is massively valuable. The Mastermind is the absolute place you have to be. Because if you're bombarded with work and you can't spare an hour, this hour a week will give huge relief from that and bounce ideas off. You can't say to colleagues or even friends and family. There'll be times when you'll be in the day and you'll think, thank God I've got the Mastermind to come up because I need to offload. I need to bounce an idea off with the Mastermind. I feel as though something really helpful will come out of it every single week. My God, it's been worth all of the time, all of the early mornings here at Stateside, all of the financial investment, it's all been worth it, no question. You've probably made me millions. Probably. The best way to describe it.

Video transcript: I had no intention of joining Mastermind. I thought, it's yet another fluffy thing and what am I going to get out of it? Probably nothing. It came about super random. It was undergoing a massive restructure. So trying to juggle between the restructure, the ongoing business, the plans. So I thought, am I the only one under this immense pressure? And that's when I thought of Mastermind. For sure. I'm not. I texted you on Monday, we had a call on Tuesday and on Wednesday I was already in. It is a business therapy. It's just a bit different. Getting that feedback from outside is really helpful. Peers who actually understand the matter, who have been in this situation and can speak from experience, it allows you then to breathe and unfold your mind. Only after becoming part of it, I understood the value that it brings. One decision has been sitting with me for six months, if not longer. It was my decision and nothing else besides me was stopping me. Take the decision. The group actually helped me and I just did it within a week. A lot of people think that they need to do everything by themselves, but it's not the case. You don't need to do it alone.

Video transcript: You've probably made me millions. Probably the best way to describe it. I became the bottleneck. A lot of the stuff was coming through me. I was like air traffic control. The quality of the work went down. I realized, well, actually, you know, I'm in a very good position. I've got some options here. I was marking off everything that could either be delegated to somebody on the team or a highly competent EA could handle. And I was doing that for a week. And it was so much. It was some crazy like 20 hours a week or something more. 30 hours a week. There was one day where by pure chance, I had no meetings or calls before lunch and I got a shitload of stuff done. Why don't I just fill those two seats and there's job ads going up now to fill those T sh ambition levels are sky high. Build a great team. Like we're doing some amazing hiring and stuff right now. Just absolute killers. I love building businesses, I love competing, I love winning. It was just such a no brainer decision. Sky's the limit, mate. I'm so excited.

Video transcript: If you're the smartest person in the room, then you're in the wrong room. There's only so far you can go on your own. When you sit at the top of a company there isn't anyone there chasing you. Surrounding yourself with like minded people who want to better themselves and become better in business. I saw the name of the people who are involved and like I want a slice of that pie. I just feel now I'm in a better place. I've got really good guys that work for me and I know I can step away for four days. I delegate a lot more stuff out now and stuff that only I would have done in the past. I want to go big. I'm super excited to get back and kind of crack back on with work. You don't get that on your own and especially when you're, you're a business owner or you, you're very high up in the company, you don't always have people that you can kind of bounce these ideas off. It kind of supercharges you really.

Video transcript: The shit that I had going on 12 months ago is the same shit that I've got going on now. You handle it differently. You've given yourself capacity to actually handle it. I had seen an opportunity, but by getting the CMO role and sitting with people on the management team, if I'm entirely honest, I didn't know how to fully grasp it. And it was like this. This can't go. This is not a sustainable path. I said, logically, I know that everything is fine. The back of my mind, I have this fear that it's all going to come crumbling down. And somebody said, it's how I feel every day. Instantly, you don't feel like an idiot and you realize this is. This is a driver for other people as well. Powerful. This CMO role was one ambition. And then you see further. Your ambitions expand. Your horizons expand. A small inkling. Believe I could do this. You're looking over them all and thinking, ah, that could be me. Having spent nine months into the course now, actually, the biggest question is, why don't we do this before something bad happens?

Video transcript: New job in eight weeks. It worked, man. It worked. It did. You're doing something right. I had reached a certain level where that executive training and performance coaching, all that stuff, that's up to me at that point, right? Like there's nobody at that level who's going to provide that to you like you do when you're coming up. I needed help and when you're so caught up in the day to day, you don't know that you need the help. I had no ability to reframe anything. You're going to spin your wheels forever if you're stuck in this limbo like I was, where I'm sending 45 page presentation documents to my boss when he wants a spreadsheet. At the end of the day, that's what he cares about. It was a simple fix. Understanding how I interpret the world, understanding how I communicate, understanding what my burden of proof is for myself, the recent job move, that's all a result of understanding, reframing, moving into a role very similar to what I was doing previously, but at a much bigger scale. I feel optimistic. For the first time in a long time, I can see the future again. Now. It's whatever I want it to be. If you apply yourself in the program and you are committed to making it work, it's going to work.

Video transcript: All of this self help of Zeleda crap. I'd just taken over the business and it was quite a jump. I was struggling with being the main person in the business, delivering on things and not taking the time to work out what's important. I've got a friend who runs a business selling milkshakes and friends high up in banking, but if they're not in the industry, you can talk about some stuff, but it's still not really the same. I appreciated the fact you never tried to sell this to me. I came to you and said, look, I clearly need help in certain areas. The IGB Live in London was a session we did and got a workbook. I filled in the first page for the six week of what I was going to do and then just showed you the workbook. We were meeting up in Lisbon in September and nothing had happened apart from the first page. What surprised me is how open people are. You can trust people aren't going to say anything. It's actually quite intimate. I was giving my advice on the problem and I suddenly thought, hang on, why aren't I doing that? I knew the answer all along, I just didn't know. I KN the answer. There's knowing what to do and there's actually doing it. But that's a me problem. Let's say you're doing 40 hour week. It's one hour out of it. Two and a half percent the ROI is going to be better than the other 97 and a half percent of your week.

Video transcript: I thought I had some clarity, but it was just a big mess in my head. I had so many different directions I could go down that stalled me, stopped me really going down any of those routes. Moving into first cycle of peer to peer, I was matched with a variety of people. B2B, affiliates, investors, CEOs. It just completely opened the network to so much more insight. 20, 25 minute session. The value in that could probably relate to six months of me doing it by myself. No one's out to get anyone. No one's there to sell. Everyone is just there to contribute and help people succeed. If you want to see change, you need to make that change. Yeah, he is a solid return investment.

Video transcript: When you get to the top, you don't have people to talk to about your challenges. Equally, you don't have people to talk to about the things that you want to do next. That list of things that I wanted to achieve, it would just sit there because it would be all an important thing came up this week. It was literally months and months of going, I'm going to do the things. Maybe, maybe it's me, maybe I'm the problem. A lot of those moments have come when I've had an idea in the back of my head, good or bad, and then a group of people start having a conversation and you go, it's not really that big a problem, actually. You've got an objective group of peers who are also big enough and ugly enough and confident enough to go, shut up. As well as, that's really good. It'll have saved me untold hours of thinking, of debating, of prioritising, of deciding what to do, and then untold hours of doing stuff that maybe I shouldn't be doing. If you don't have an hour a week, you need this. And then you'll have another 10 hours a week to do other things. Every single one of us could do an ROI on what we've paid on this, and it would be positive.

Video transcript: No one's got it all worked out, especially in this industry where things change so quickly all the time and the workload never stops coming. I do want a way of working that is structured rather than I'm going to try and just fix this myself and see what I can do. You don't want to live with platitudes and it's all fine and let's carry on. If something's not working and you're not addressing it, someone's going to call you out on it. Since we started with the sprints and the smaller inner circle groups, that's what I've noticed where I'm getting a lot of benefit. The first stage for it was to get myself clear diagnosis of what I thought the problems were. Rather than being like okay, I fixed X, Y and Z. I've identified the problems are X, Y and Z. The stacking effect that you can get from addressing one problem can also help fixing the other ones as well. You start looking more at the long term. Where do I want to be in six months and two years and 10 years rather than what can I do today? Knowing that life is always going to be busy but got the tools and self awareness to know that I need to address things. Knowing that you do not have to do this by yourself.

Video transcript: I should not have been at sbc, Lisbon. I'd had spinal surgery four weeks before. I shouldn't have been there at all. I was in a hotel room at 6:00 in the morning, eyes wide open. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't relax. I was wired. I was absolutely wired. And it was like this. This can't go. This is not a sustainable part. On the face of it, everything was awesome. IGP was growing. My internal and external reputation was growing. Home was good. I could walk after the surgery, but it wasn't balanced. I sat on one of the group calls. Logically, I know that everything is fine. I said at the back of my mind, I have this fear that it's all going to come crumbling down. And somebody said, it's how I feel every day. Instantly. You don't feel like an idiot. You realize this is a driver for other people as well. The shit that I had going on 12 months ago is the same shit that I've got going on now. You handle it differently, or you've given yourself capacity to actually handle it. Your horizons expand. But it's not just that. It's also, dare I say, a small inkling belief I could do this. Not only you just looking over the wall thinking, oh, it looks good over there. You're looking over the wall and thinking, ah, that could be me.

Video transcript: With Alex Pratt's interview with you, I saw and it had earned people who had been doing this as long as me, who were in bigger business than I was, but with similar experience, they're opening up. And I've said this since day one of joining the mastermind that there's just not enough of that going on. The projection of successful people in this industry is very much what you see across social media, what you hear at conferences, and it's just success after success, success after success, and it sets unrealistic expectation for oneself. You should be as good as always successful, not fail. I don't have the ability to express vulnerability in my business. I don't have a equal counterpart as a bootstrap business that don't have shareholders or advisors to lean on. Living in imbalance for so long that you just kind of accept it. You accept that you're not going to be as available to your wife and family, and when you are more available, then what gives? So it's been incredibly good sharing those vulnerabilities and working with each other through them, through shared experience or everyone learning the same way. The support I've found has been invaluable and humbling. So can't recommend joining enough.

Video transcript: When you're so caught up in the day to day, you don't know that you need that. I had reached a certain level where executive training and performance coaching, that's up to me. There's nobody at that level who's going to provide that to you, like when you're coming up. I thought I had exhausted all my options to resolve that particular challenge. Turned out I hadn't. There were like three other things that people recommended and it fixed itself. Right. And it's because I didn't know. And so joining the Mastermind, it's sped up the process. It gives you instant access to people that know way more than you. Right. It widened my view to where the future is possible, whatever that looks like, it's absolutely doable. So it works.

Video transcript: It sounds a bit corny, but as Leo says, you feel a bit isolated at the top. Got some great people in business, but there's always other people you can get advice from and talk through problems together. That really I can't do with my team. When you see people on ice, they ask you what the weather was like back home. Most of it's a lot of fluff. But the conversations here are all about development. It is very different from a trade show for you get to focus on the things that you have in common, some of the struggles, some of the successes, and you're rooting for each other, supporting each other on a weekly basis. It's been exceptionally beneficial. If you're too busy for this, that's actually one of the problems why people here is because they're too busy. It's changed my mindset from feeling like I have to do something to feeling like I want to do something. It's okay to have these type of problems. It's very grounding. If you want to go on the long term and be more sustainable, Programs like this are exactly what you need. We hesitate in doing things for sales, but never for business. So my advice is don't hesitate and get something for yourself. Don't hesitate. As soon as you start that first meeting, that first group, you really understand that everyone's here to help. Give it a go, because the benefits far outweigh any cost of time or money.

Video transcript: I've always struggled to switch off when I get home, I think about work 24 7. I work on holiday. One of the biggest problems for me is I love what I do. This, to me, is not work. I think there's only so far you can go on your own. When you sit at the top of a company, there isn't anyone there chasing you. And there's things that I need to do that the guys don't know that I do. And it doesn't affect them as such because they don't know that it needs to be done. Having these calls and these meetings, I actually realize now that I do procrastinate a lot. I realize that I look at my emails too often. I realized that maybe I do doom scroll on my phone. I realize that when I do get home, I need to be more present with my family. I delegate a lot more stuff out now and stuff that only I would have done in the past. Set you free. Because that sounds really cheesy, but you do feel kind of certain weights lifted off your shoulder. Okay, I know I don't have to do this. I know there's someone on my team that I can go, can you do this? And they'll do it and they'll do a good job of it. And I said to my wife, when we go away in December, I'm not going to take my laptop. And she looked at me and I thought she was going to have a heart attack. She's like, you mean you're not going to work for four days? Like, nope. Not going to do anything. You might not think it's possible to get to a point where you can have a break, but I'm kind of like living proof that stepping back, sometimes you're able to look at the bigger picture.

Video transcript: When you're in a senior position, it can feel lonely at times, and the higher you go, the less peers you have within your organization. Someone that I trusted told me, look, don't open up about your problems. If you showed weakness, you were somehow unfit to lead. Having people around you that you can open up with in a confidential and supportive environment, you're not raising challenges just to have them on you. You're raising up concerns and then speaking about how you can actually fix things. Having peers that understand the industry, understand the pressures and people that you can learn from and hold you to account, that, for me, is the game changer.

Video transcript: I was getting to the point where I was just. Burnt out's a big word. But I was, I was doing a lot. Working long days, working the weekends. I'm really good at suffering. I can grind it out. But I knew it wasn't sustainable. The two week breakover, Christmas, just put the laptop away, do nothing, recharge. I just left for two weeks, which is ridiculous, right? I'm meant to be like semi retired, like I'm doing this completely wrong. Something needs to change. You were somebody I knew I could work with. So for me it was basically checking your availability, understanding what working together would look like. It was just such a no brainer decision. It was more just, oh my God, I hope he's got space. You've probably made me millions. It's probably the best way to describe it. The reframing and the resetting of how I'm approaching business and how I'm approaching using my time. The knock on compound effect is whole moss. Been able to free up 30 hours a week. You end up with a huge number. The freeing up the mornings, just opening my eyes. You've got that within your control. The compound of that is ultimately colossal. So, jokes aside, genuinely millions. The sky's the limit, mate. I'm so excited.