Next Level Pros - #44: Inside the Founder's Mastermind: Three Days of Transformation

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

Get ready to unlock the secrets of entrepreneurial success! Today we revisit my exclusive Founder Mastermind Event. I invited the world's finest entrepreneurs to my home, to learn all about the fundamental pillars of successful entrepreneurship. From building a culture of trust and teamwork to the role of mindfulness and fitness in fostering success, this episode is packed with insights and experiences to inspire and guide you in your entrepreneurial journey. To top it all off, we'll share the exhilarating experiences of cold plunges, IVs, and even tactical shooting! So, gear up for an episode loaded with lessons, fun, and tools to supercharge your entrepreneurial journey. HIGHLIGHTS "The number one dysfunction of a team is lack of trust, when trust is just not there." "A lot of us, as entrepreneurs, as founders, we don't feel worthy of what we're accomplishing and we just feel like we're an imposter." "This is imperative. You need to help management see that it is imperative, that communication exists across all channels, but decision making and accountability only exists in the accountability chart. TIMESTAMPS 00:00: Introduction 02:11: Building Trust  03:56: The Power Of Meditation 06:21: Importance Of Fitness 08:34: DISC Assessment 12:37: Accountability and Communication  16:59: Building an Effective Accountability Chart 21:54: Affordable Membership  🚀 Join my community - Founder Acceleration https://www.founderacceleration.com 🤯 Apply for our next Mastermind https://www.thefoundermastermind.com ⛳️ Golf with Chris https://www.golfwithchris.com 🎤 Watch my latest Podcast Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-founder-podcast/id1687030281 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1e0cL2vI1JAtQrojSOA7D2?si=dc252f8540ee4b05 YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@thefounderspodcast

Hey guys, I just wanted to welcome you to an incredible episode in which I'm going to be talking about our mastermind, giving you some awesome things. One thing I want you to do is watch or listen to this thing till the end. I have an incredible special message the last few minutes that you won't want to miss. Let's jump in. Let's go. Yo, yo, yo, yo, welcome to another episode of the Founder Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Lee.

Today, we are doing another solo podcast, a recap of what we had going on at the Mastermind. So you guys know I did a Mastermind here at my house, here at the shop where we built SoulGen Power, so the company that I exited for nine figures. Here, we had up to 53 employees located. In fact, I'm sitting in the shop right now. This is the old conference room. It's absolutely phenomenal. But I hosted 10 incredible entrepreneurs here at my home. We limited it to 10 seats. It's been absolutely amazing three days, October 17th, 18th, and 19th. I charged people $20,000 to come, socialize with my team, and really get into masterminds. For those that don't know what a mastermind is, you probably heard the term.

You probably heard different things going on. A mastermind isn't just an event. It's not just where somebody gets up and speaks at you and you take notes and it's just tactics and everything. But a mastermind is getting together with an intimate group of people in which you are doing a group share and group think around problems, scenarios, difficulties, positive, negative things that are going on in your business, your life, your fitness, your spirituality, any of those different things, we're addressing them. We're taking on. And one thing I wanted

to do is just kind of give you guys a quick recap of what we did over the three days. So it was pretty awesome. I had people that flew in from all over the country. In fact, I had a couple of people that came in internationally from Canada. It was absolutely just a phenomenal experience connecting these entrepreneurs. Day number one was a huge focus on getting to know different people and building trust. So for any of you guys have listened to my previous episode where I talk about five dysfunctions of a team, any atmosphere that you're creating, you're trying to establish a team. And the number one dysfunction of a team is lack of trust when trust is just not there.

And so what we try to do with a mastermind is establish a team atmosphere day one by establishing trust in which we get vulnerable. And we talk about our feelings. We talk about the way we grew up. We talk about difficulties that we've been through in our life, both spiritually, emotionally, with relationships in our business, failures, successes. We went through what we call a boss list in which we brag about 10 things that we're absolutely phenomenal on without being having that imposter syndrome, right? A lot of us as entrepreneurs, as founders, as people that are just establishing our life, we don't feel worthy of what we're accomplishing. And we just feel like we're an imposter, right? Like, I don't know why I've been able to have this success.

Maybe it's just been luck. Maybe it's just been different things going on in my life, all the stars aligned. And so a lot of times as entrepreneurs, we just don't feel worthy. And this goes for anybody, entrepreneur or not, we don't feel worthy of the blessings that we're receiving. And so to overcome that, we talked about just why we are so awesome without any apologies, without any regards, without any but. You know, I struggle with this, this and this. So that was a big focus. And then we go through and we talk about what humanizes us. And anyways, there was a big focus on meditation.

For those of you guys that aren't involved in meditation, it's one of the best practices that I could encourage anybody to be involved in it. It gets you thinking in your core. It gets outside of the rigmarole of the day to day. It gets you actually present, understanding your feelings, how it's all connected. It gets you visualizing, you know, anybody that's done anything great. They first visualized it. Meditation is, is absolutely a part of that. Some of my favorite meditations to do. If you go on YouTube, Tony Robbins has a phenomenal 10 minute meditation priming. It's a great way to start your day. And he talks about all the things that you're, you're thankful for. He has you go back and remember experiences and actually put yourself

back in that situation. And it's, it's just remarkable the feeling that you get when you actually go back to a situation that you were so grateful for. And you actually see through your eyes in that moment, all of a sudden you just get that nice tingling spiritual feeling throughout your body of remembrance, of just gratitude, of so many incredible things. So I would highly encourage this is a this is a practice that we did each and every day. The second day, we did some heavier breath work in which we got even deeper into the meditation. You know, one of the key principles that I believe is how you do anything is how you do everything. And so it's impossible to disconnect the economic from the physique, from the relationships, associations, and from your spirituality. All of them are interconnected. And the way you do

anything overflows into those other areas. And most people, when they are struggling in business, they're struggling fitness, right? It's because they have a whole human struggle. When we get ourselves right, when we put things in place, when we start exercising and working on relationships and eating right and doing things to meditate, to connect spiritually with our God. And we are disciplined in work. They all work combined and intertangled. And I would just encourage you to start with meditation. There was also a big focus on fitness. We did cold plunges. We did fast IVs. If any of you guys have never done a fast IV or a vitamin drip, they're phenomenal.

You get a big rush of like vitamin B12 and different things like that. It really helps you overcome sickness and kind of flush out the body. The fast IVs are like crazy because the way that those work is you'll actually taste like Flintstone vitamins in your mouth. Like as soon as they start pumping in, it's crazy. And you kind of have like this burning feeling that goes through your body as it rushes and feels full of these vitamins. It's a, it's a, it's a fun experience.

We also just had a great time. You know, we went out, we did some tactical shooting, handgun shooting. Uncle Phil, shout out to my guy, Uncle Phil. He's my wife's uncle. One of my heroes, one of the coolest 63-year-old on the planet. Literally, this guy can out bench press me. He can outwork me. He is just like an energy. I admire his passion. He helped set up the course. We timed it. The fastest time ended up being 10 seconds.

You had to go through running, hitting. It was like 12 different shots. You had to be body shots, two shots, or one to the head. It was fun. It was a lot of fun. For those that have never had that opportunity, those are some of the things that we do at our mastermind. On top of that, we did Tannerite.

For anybody that followed my stories, if you're not following my stories, at Chris Lee QB quarterback on Instagram, Facebook, you can follow the stories. But yeah, we blew up some. I had one of my neighbors. So I live on a 23 acre hobby farm. My next door neighbor, he came over here.

We were shooting guns. And most places when a neighbor comes over when you're shooting guns, they're there to like complain or whatever else. He was there to contribute. The guy brought out a bunch of pumpkins. He's like, hey, I was going to take these to the dump. Figured you might want to shoot them. So we lined these pumpkins up.

We had Tannerite. We were shooting it. Explosion, pumpkin flying everywhere. It was just a heck of a good time. So along with that, some of the topics that we covered is we talked about the DISC assessment. Those that aren't familiar with the DISC assessment, it's an analyzation of personality. D stands for dominant, I stands for influence, S stands for steadiness, and C stands for conscientious. And each of us have dominating characteristic traits of those four. And so, for example, I'm a high D and a high I.

That means I'm high dominant and high influence. And so my S and my C, my steadiness and conscientious don't even show up on my grade. I score a little bit on there, but it means like, I am not very good at like thinking about the tiny details or consistently stay sticking with the tiny details. It's the reason why I have to hire assistants or people that are really good at being conscientious or really good at being steady so that they can help me gather all my crazy thoughts, all my crazy feelings, actions, things I'm trying to do and put them together in a good manner. And so, you know, a few of the few of the things that we talked about there is like how we've used the disc assessment to hire people as part of our as part of our interview and hiring process, we have each of our people

take the DISC assessment. And from there, we're able to analyze, are they a good fit for this particular situation? For example, I'll give you just a little carrot here. When hiring salespeople, you want to make sure that they have at least a low D of a score. A low D is somebody that scores 40 or higher. A high D is 60 or higher for the dominant trait. A dominant trait is necessary as a salesperson because it allows people to push through no's. It allows people to push through the negative, the discouragement of sales, to control the sale, to get a decision from people, to really heed the number one principle of any sales, get a decision, yes, no, no maybes whatsoever. It's the dominant characteristic that allows people to be successful at sales. And so if you run a sales organization, I would highly recommend that you have everybody

that's applying for your sales to take a disc assessment. There's a lot of different disc assessments out there. I would highly encourage that they do it and that you really try to stick to only hiring people with that dominant personality trait because it's going to help you be ultra successful. earn out cliffs clawbacks like all the different things how you handle certain certain situations and we talked about how we did over over the period of launching soulgen up until we exited like how we structured how we incentivized in fact some of you guys have heard me talk about like when we had the transaction happen not only was it me and daryl, who were the co-founders along with Robbie, the three of us, there were nine other people that were made multimillionaires on the day of that transaction because we properly incentivized, we properly structured partnerships and we brought

them in to give them a piece of the pie. And so we talked about that. We talked about employee pools, how you can do that. We talked, we did goal setting, accountability charts, building out. We dug into individual people, like the struggles that they were having. So for those that haven't been to a mastermind, one of my favorite aspects is what we call the give and get. And essentially where each person gets up in front of the room. They're the only one that has the spotlight. Everybody else is sitting around and helping that person. And so that person is going to initially give something to the crowd. Hey, this is something that I am best in class at, that I am absolutely phenomenal and can really kick butt. And I think this would really help your personal life. This would help your relationships, help your family, help your spirituality, help your business, whatever it is. Right.

So they, they create that and they, they put that together. And then on top of that, they ask for a get right. Like I need to get something from this. These are the things that I'm struggling with. And, and most people did like two or three things that they're struggling with. And we walked them through, you know, we had one guy who was doing about $90 million a year, uh, that, uh, he was really struggling in like his, what he called his org chart. And we helped him understand, like, you don't just need an org chart. You actually need an accountability chart because org charts create silos where people only work within this silo and they only communicate within this silo. And there's no cross communications between departments, between business units or whatever it may be. And so we helped them understand like

what, what people need, like, even if you as the founder want to go and influence sales or whatnot, you, you are not holding accountability. If that's not your position, if you're not the sales manager, you, they are not accountable to you. They're accountable to their sales manager with two to three KPIs, who is in turn accountable to their divisional with two to three KPIs, who's in turn accountable to their VP with two or three KPIs, accountable to their C-level with two or three KPIs. And so then it creates a level of accountability, but it doesn't prohibit communication across the organization. This is one imperative thing for anybody that's trying to build an organization. Whether you work in an organization or you own an organization, this is imperative. You need to help management see that it is imperative that communication exists across all channels. But decision-making and accountability only exists in the accountability chart. So this was something

that was difficult for me to understand and learn as a CEO, what we call an end run, where essentially people want to come talk to me. I'm the founder. I'm the CEO. I've been involved. Maybe they've, maybe they were a part of the thing for four years. And so I was at one point over them and holding them accountability. And so they feel comfortable and they want to come talk to me and they want to say like, Hey, I'm just struggling with this or this or this. What should I do? Right. And so what you have to do in that situation, if they're not directly accountable to you, as you say, Hey, look, you know, I can give you my recommendation. This is, these are my thoughts on it. These are my feelings. Let's talk about this. But at the end

of the day, we need to get your manager involved and they need to be aware of any decision that's coming from this and they need to be on board with it. This is not my decision. This is not my level of accountability. I can't tell you to work on this project. I can't tell you this. I can help enhance. I can help train. I can help develop, but I am not going to hold you accountable because I am not managing you on a day-to-day basis. This is something that is so, so, so important for business owners, organizations, families to truly understand that there has to be accountability across the board. This is something that we help develop. And when you're developing this accountability chart, right, as a small business owner, it is best that you start early and don't wait until later because then it just becomes a mess. And so when you start early, you want to create a five-year accountability chart. What does my

business look like five years from now? And how much do I want to be generating revenue, all these different things. Then what you can do is reverse engineer what that accountability chart looks like. For example, if you know that the average salesperson does $1 million in sales a year, let's just call it that and we'll make it easy. And you want to do $100 million in sales five years from now, what you have to do is reverse engineer that and say, okay, if one person does 1 million, your average person, that means I need a hundred salespeople. And then we know the law of management. The most anybody can manage in a technician space is eight people. I recommend five to eight people on the lowest part of the accountability chart. Those are where your technical workers are working, your salespeople, your installers,

whatever, your operators, your programmers, whatever it may be. And you're going to say, okay, so if I need one manager for every eight and I need a hundred of them, we're going to go in and we're going to back out. Okay. I need 12 to 13 managers in order to really make this possible. So I need 12 to 13 sales managers. And then your next level, you want to manage about three to four. So I need, you know, three, three to four of those guys in order to manage 12 to 13. And then, and then you have one above that and so on and so forth all the way up. And this goes for all production, all sales, all marketing, all operations. And you reverse engineer this great accountability chart. And then day one, you go back and you're like, okay,

it's me and you partner. What hats are we wearing? And you fill those hats all the way down. And then that provides a roadmap for you to be able to go and grow. But the key thing when developing out an accountability chart of any type is that you do it without regard to your current people. You think about this is the role, this is the responsibility that I need filled. And then you go back to your people and see if you have the right people that fit in those. You don't try to fit a round, a square peg into a round hole. And so a lot of times we just make people fit into these different aspects or the organizations, or we create roles and responsibilities around people rather than vice versa. We need to create role and responsibility and make sure we have the right people. If we

don't have the right people, we need to go either train or develop or hire in order to fill out those particular positions. This is one of the most important things because people build their accountability chart around people and it just destroys organizations. You don't have the right ability. So do it without without regard to people then come in and plug in the people and then analyze once you have roles and responsibilities within that accountability chart now it's time to go and build out standard operating procedures sops in the way that that role actually functions on it did it man i got all kinds of energy today caffeine free too by the way if you guys didn know, I gave up caffeine 18 days ago, and I'm feeling great.

It took about 10 days to actually just like, oh, it was terrible. 10 days of like absolute craziness, headaches, all this different stuff. I've given it up. Now I feel more energetic than ever before. I've done a lot of natural different things like ice baths and whatnot to really hone into the energy, the real energy, not the fake energy of caffeine. All caffeine does is drain your adrenal glands of energy that already exists in your body. You got to figure out how to access real energy, real passion, real desire. So anyways, going back to accountability chart,

like you've got, you've got to be able to develop that out and do it without regard to people, thus creating the perfect plan to be able to go and build your organization. So those are just some of the things that we covered during the mastermind. It was absolutely insane. Like everybody afterward was like, dude, how do I just be a part of this? Like, this is, this is phenomenal. You guys have a real experience, real world. This isn't some like faking mastermind, like, Hey, come look at our nice cars, look at our nice house. And, uh, let's, let's just like, you know, massage each other for the next couple of days. No, it's, we're talking about real things, but like really addressing the foundational issues of business, of families, of whatnot, which is you, you developing out,

you getting a clear head, getting a decisive head, getting clear about your purpose, your desires, what drives you, what your goals are. This is the most important thing in running a successful organization because when you're clear, it allows you to portray a clear vision. When a vision is clear, people get on board and they can help you build. So anyways, that was the mastermind. People were super stoked. We got another couple of masterminds coming up. We've got the second week of January. We're going to be hosting a mastermind. We're still finalizing locations. So stay tuned. If you want to apply to be a part of that, uh, just shoot me a DM. Uh, we're, we're going to be rolling out a new application page. We also, the second week of March, we're going to be doing the additional mastermind. Um, most of these big guys have like already signed

up. The only reason why they didn't sign up, uh, for like, for example, my, my guy from Canada didn't sign up in January because he's heading to a Harvard executive education, already had something planned. On top of that, I am so excited to announce, you guys have heard me talk about on my podcast, November 1st, we are launching, we are launching, are you ready for this? I don't think you're ready for this. Oh my gosh, Founder Acceleration. So Founder Acceleration is this. If you go to founderacceleration.com,

it allows you to sign up. So just so you know, it's super cheap, 497 bucks. You get access to me, my team, my guest speakers. We are going to be hosting calls three times a month. It's going to be first, second, and third week of every single month, hour-long calls. You're going to be the first, second, and third week of every single month, hour-long calls. You're going to be able to get on a Zoom call. If you're not able to attend, that call is going to be recorded. You have access to that library. You can be able to get

real live teaching, stuff that I don't even talk about on the podcast that is going to change your life, change the way that you do business, change the way that you really go and accelerate. And that's the reason why it's called Founder Acceleration. So if you go to founderacceleration.com, you can sign up right now. There's a form, $497 a month, the best money you could ever, ever spend. In fact, like I used to charge, this was before SoulGen, like when I was first launching SoulGen, I had a lot of successes in my life. I was charging $50,000 for one-on-one coaching in which you got one call a week for six months. This is literally only 500 bucks a month to be able to get full access to me, my team, to be our crazy solutions, strategies.

You're going to see what's going on, access to the day-to-day. You get peek behind the curtains, like how we have built our empire, how we are currently building our empire. We're talking real estate investing, advice on the newest deals. You're going to have guest speakers from people that have been on my podcast, other high influential souls from all around the world. So this is not just limited to the United States. And you guys will notice, I haven't tried to sell you guys anything. In fact, I don't even think this is a sell. This is like the absolute biggest no brainer for anybody that follows my podcast. Like, just think of it as a Netflix subscription that you get like a phenomenal ROI on because, you know, the guarantee I have is like, man, if you come and be a part of this thing and you're not at least replacing the 500 bucks with the advice that you're getting, dude, we will, we'll pay it back. We will offer a, a full, a full refund for, for a month of the service. If you feel like you didn't get the value, but like everybody that came to the mastermind automatically signed up like that was like a no brainer. So I would highly recommend it. It's a, it's a fun community. So, um, so you guys

understand like what we're establishing here. So we have what's called the founder project. It's the overarching. Our project is to develop out founders. And what do I mean by founders? These aren't just business founders. Everybody is establishing a foundation, which is the root word of the word founder, right? The foundation in their life, whether that's better relationships, better fitness, better spirituality, better economically. You are all the controllers of your own destiny, the own CEOs of your foundation, right? So you are creating that foundation. You are the founder.

So regardless, if you own a business, want to start a business, work for somebody else, you are a founder and this group will change your life, will put you on a different projection. It'll have you doing crazy things like giving up sugar for 118 days, which I've done right now. I'm no sugar, white flour, fried foods. It's going to have you changing the way that you look at your relationships, your spirituality, how disciplined you are in your life. And so if you truly believe that you are a controller of your own destiny and that you want something greater, you are a founder. We are creating, like I said, the founder project. Our project is to improve your life. The founder podcast is part of that. Founder acceleration is part of that. Founder Acceleration is part of that.

Founder Mastermind. We're going to have me rolling out a founder book here soon. So stay tuned. It's going to be phenomenal. Oh man, gets me pumped up, baby. Let's go. Oh my goodness. So we got so many incredible things. I hope that you guys stay tuned for what we got going on. I'm going to be rolling out some amazing podcasts here coming up October 31st. For those who didn't follow me on my story, I interviewed a ghost hunter as part of my Halloween episode. It's going to be phenomenal. So continue to like, subscribe, write me a review. If you love this podcast, if you love the energy, if you want more of this, I'm not charging you to be a part of this. Please go and share it with your friends,

family, share it with the world. Love you. Until next time.