SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Hollis Carter: How To Charge $3k For Mastermind
30 Oct 2015
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of Hollis Carter's entrepreneurial journey?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. All right, guys, Halloween is coming up. I hope you're getting your costumes ready, but this interview is not gonna scare you. That's because you heard from Zvi Band yesterday, and he walked through how Contactually raised over a million bucks with thousands of paying customers. All right, Top Tribe, good morning, good morning, good morning.
I hope you've started your jog or you're driving to work, and you are going to love our guest today. His name is Hollis Carter, and let me tell you, this guy was born with the entrepreneurial bug. He started his first business before he could drive. And listen, his formal education was compromised of a bachelor's degree in professional sales
and marketing, accompanied by a three-month course spent in the wilderness mastering the pillars of leadership. Now he spends most of his time growing the club community, working on his baby bathwater event series, and just helping curate top minds and getting them together. So, Hollis, are you ready to take us to the top?
Absolutely. Pumped to be here.
Let's do it, brother. So listen, people are always asking me, Nathan, I want to either be in a mastermind or I want to start my own. And, you know, masterminds, usually they're really bad. I mean, they're just really, really bad. You and Michael Lovitch, I think, have done a great job with Baby Bathwater event. Walk me through the one thing that you'd credit the success of your masterminds to.
Absolutely. It comes up every single time we find ourselves getting that kind of entrepreneurial distraction with this thing as it grows and everyone wants to put input on what could be better. It comes back to the people are the product. That's not just really the speaker piece of it. That is every single person matching common threads.
When we come back, there's just this way you know that people have similar foundation and we have been very clear that there's a lot of different types of successful people out there.
They have different ways of approaching it from your bootstrap guy to your fully funded and backed person to everything in between and making sure that they're all holding a common thread so they can have very efficient conversations no matter who you sit next to at dinner or what conversation you're into, it really is as simple as the people are the product.
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Chapter 2: How did Hollis Carter and Michael Lovitch create a successful mastermind event?
So did you negotiate early on with Elliot and said, listen, if I'm going to put down a million bucks for one of these pieces of land on this undeveloped mountain, I want to be able to use the facilities at a great rate two times a year.
Yeah, yeah. So it wasn't with Elliot. It was very similar to that, though. And that's something that I envision as this town grows and all these things grow, our event can grow simultaneously with it. And it's a very big win-win. That whole thing is being built by a constant flow of events and people coming out. but it's going to be the events in the crowd that is attracted by that group.
What's going to really add value to the town as it grows is having multiple different folks like ourselves, putting different groups together and bringing them and exposing them to what we're actually building there.
So walk me through on a $300,000 again, minimum event. What, what, you know, your biggest expense obviously was powder mountain lodging on that. What did you and love it? What are you able to clear on a $330,000 event? What's profit?
Well, to be perfectly honest, it's almost all reinvested. We pay ourselves to give ourselves the focus of that, but everything actually stays back.
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Chapter 3: What strategies contribute to the success of their mastermind events?
Luckily, we are in a very nice position where we have other cash flow and other businesses going, but it's going back into it. This next time we're upgrading quite a few things and it's going back. So the word profit in this startup phase, it doesn't really even exist. It's how much can we reinvest? And we're dedicated to doing that for two years.
And then we'd like to see it be something that can provide a nice lifestyle and see that community build some back ends. But honestly, right now it's, it's purely forward facing.
So help me understand one of the things, and we chatted privately about this when we talked about the event, you know, some people, you know, you meet them online, you think they're great for, for the event, they come and they're a total flop. They just like, it's clear they don't fit in. How do you tell people no, especially if they've already gone to one event?
Right. Yeah. So, I mean, honestly, that's where Michael has some of the best skills I've ever seen at just being so direct and on point with someone and saying, hey, I see you just sitting here on your laptop the whole time. And, you know, you paid to be here. And this is people giving you need to you need to jump in the game. And generally there's a warning, you know, kind of a first warning.
And then if they've already been and they want to come back. We just kind of believe in transparency. And the easiest thing that's happening for us now that we have a waiting list larger than the amount of people we want to take is that we're going to always have half new people.
How big is the waiting? How many people are on the waiting list?
There's about 200 people on the waiting list, but those are 200 people who've all been exposed in person at least once.
Oh, got it.
So the shift that we've made since this last one is we're actually going to take it down from 110 to 100 to keep it really intimate. But we always want to have half returning people and half new people. So that makes it a very logical thing that it's not just on personality. It's not because we don't like this person.
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Chapter 4: How does Hollis ensure a strong community at his events?
So that was the second official event. We did one other one, which was kind of the cause of a lot of this happening. There was an event that happened here in Boulder. It was a very large event, and we helped the organizer of that bring some people in, and then the event kind of took a turn for not what we wanted it to be.
And to kind of build our relationship and show our gratitude for the people who came, we ended up renting a small hotel restaurant in this little mining town outside of Boulder and dumped everybody on a van and took them out of the event and hosted them for the weekend. And that was sort of the birth of the whole thing.
They're like, wow, you guys picked the right people, the food, everything was right, and we want to do more of this. And that was sort of the birth of it all.
action takers gotta tell you I've never eaten so much paleo food in one week I almost got addicted I loved it the food was incredible the people were great okay top tribe I want to give you more brain juice this month totally free if you're loving this episode text the word Nathan
n-a-t-h-a-n to 33444 for your chance to win a prize on an upcoming show the next prize is a pack of 14 business books valued at 250 bucks if you bought them on amazon and these books are the ones that mark zuckerberg thinks every entrepreneur must read so hollis my heart is beating we are getting to my favorite part of the show do you know what's next Hit me. Dude, time for the famous five.
Are you ready? All right. All right. Number one, brother. What is your favorite business book?
Favorite business book is probably going to be The Narrow Road by Felix Dennis.
Okay. Number two, which CEO are you following or studying right now?
CEO am I following or studying right now? I'd say I'm collectively sort of watching things that I'm actually have intimate involvement in for how they carry themselves as a person. And that's going to be actually the summit core team as you're handling these massive new projects. things that are coming every day and how to navigate it.
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