Creating AI-Powered Solutions for Business and Masterminds with Brad Hart

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This is the Beyond the Story podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. And now, Sebastian Rusk All right, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Sebastian. It's grateful Hey, I'm grateful to have you here. I'm grateful you took some time out of your busy day to hang out with me for just a few minutes. On this show, I love to tell people's story, and for context for our listeners, I always like to go back to the beginning of the story. Now, that beginning is different for everyone, so wherever the beginning is for you, but we can start there and really unpack what brought you to present day with what you're doing. Sometimes it's drastically different from the beginning of the story, but just for some context purposes, give us some background that really led you to what you're primarily focused on today. you know, and who you serve and exactly Yeah. So at 40, I can look back and like, see all the crazy rabbit holes and side quests and wild stuff, dead ends that have gone on through my life. And, you know, there's, there's a great job, uh, Steve jobs quote about the dots connecting after the fact. And, uh, I can remember being like four years old, my mom and dad are screaming at each other.

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My dad was a lumber truck driver. My mom worked in a deli. We didn't have a whole lot of extra disposable income, let's put it that way. And he had gotten hurt a couple of years prior. He was a lumber truck driver. He had a load shift when he's coming down a hill, and it pinned to the steering wheel. And he's on a mechanic's creeper, couldn't walk. He had to have an experimental surgery to get him walking again. He was never not in pain again. He always had sciatica and all kinds of problems, and he would basically self-medicate. Mom had enough. She left. So here I am. I'm four years old. My parents are splitting up, and I'm like, if I could just make enough money, Mommy and Daddy would never leave each other. That was the meaning I created, right?

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So fast forward 22 years, I'm 26 years old, I'm living in New York City, and I'm running a hedge fund, which I started myself and raised the money and I have some partners. And we had just made $1,040,000 in a single month, more money than I ever thought I'd make. in a single month or in a single year or in a lifetime at certain points in my life. And I had done everything between. I'd been a bartender, an EMT, and I worked at a shooting range, and I'd done all the jobs. I was in real estate, all this stuff. And that was the moment when the spell was broken, where it was like, oh, wait a second. Dad's dead. He's been dead a while. Mom is remarried and has been for a very long time. why did I make all this money again? And I was grateful to have it, but I also was like, I was aiming at the wrong mountaintop. So you get to the top of the mountain, you look around, you're like, wait a second, was this even the mountain I intended to climb? And the answer was a resounding no.

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I didn't like the job of trading. It was very stressful. Most people will never have a job where they go into work and lose six figures and got to do it all over again the next day. And even though we made money and it was a good year, we had 106% year and all my clients were really thrilled.

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I just was burned out. I didn't love it. It wasn't where I wanted to spend my time behind the computer screen, just, you know, clicking around and Uh, you know, looking at charts. So I had to find myself and I took that opportunity to take a break, hand everybody your money back. They all thought I was crazy and say to myself, all right, well, what's next for me. And the more I did some soul searching, kept my own counsel and just listened to the, to the promptings, I realized like, oh, I'm here to bring people together. You know, I was that kid who was alone on the swing set when he was a kid and just didn't feel like he had a friend in the world because he was bouncing between friend groups and you get bullied and all that stuff. You know, I was also the kid that at age four was beating his dad at chess and age five was coding computer games from a manual. I mean, I was pretty fricking smart and we didn't have any money to keep going. Mark Zuckerberg's my age. I think if we had just kept going, I didn't have another computer until I was 16. I could have, you know, been a contender, so to speak. So I went down to Tony Robbins, the rabbit hole, and the landmark rabbit hole, and the NLP master prac rabbit hole, and all this great stuff. And I learned a bunch about myself. And I came to the conclusion that success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure. Tony Robbins talks about that all the time. And what I really want to do is empower the world. I want to give people the tools to really solve the grand challenges of our time. And lately, that's come to fruition in a lot of ways. I've helped people launch masterminds, written two books on the subject. I love masterminds. They're like my favorite thing. If I had to throw everything else out and start over again, that would be the thing I would keep. But additionally, I've started to refine what a mastermind really is. Because when I think back through history, It's groups of people that are dedicated and have the same values and see a vision together that really change the world, for better or for worse, right? It's the triumvirate in ancient Rome, Crassi and Pompeii and Caesar getting together and saying, hey, we're going to remake Rome and make it an empire. And they did that, and it lasted 1,000 years. And that's insane when you think about it.

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You have groups like the founding fathers, 52 young men, 17 to 35 years old, who were landowners and property holders and politically active.

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And they said, you know what? Forget this British monarchy crap. We're going to do our own thing. And they penned a document that literally created the most powerful nation ever.

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And they did so at real risk to their lives and property. It was not going to end well if they didn't figure that out. So that's a group of people, same values, that dedicated to change the world. And I can add a bunch of different examples. But for the sake of time, mastermind groups are great. Yeah, they are a little bit bastardized over the years, you know, but they're still essentially the same thing. Uh, modern days, it's more like a bunch of business owners or a bunch of investors.

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It's like solving a problem that's as old as time is like, how do I meet the right people and spend time with the right people? I can't meet him at a bar. I can't meet him on a dating app.

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I gotta like actually build a community or join a community that, that attracts the right people that are working on the things that I want to work about that care about the things I want to care about. that give back in the way I want to give back, whatever it is, right? So after launching dozens of these and helping people launch hundreds and some of them, you know, a lot of them going to six figures, some going to seven and eight figures around the world, I figured out what works and what doesn't. And I've added a new layer to it, which is I want to go bigger and I don't have the business model, the acumen to do that, right? I'm not some Silicon Valley rich kid. I don't, I don't, I don't have like a Sandhill road connection where they're going to give me a bunch of money yet. It's coming. Um, so, you know, when I try to build software startups, it goes kind of like this, and maybe you've had this experience where like the old way was you have the idea, you get the pitch deck, you go hit up all your friends, you raise some money. Uh, you hire the dev team, they build the thing. Maybe they build it right. Maybe they build it wrong. Maybe you get product market fit. Maybe you don't, maybe you get traction. Maybe you don't. And two years goes by your life where it's like, it's moving too fast. If you don't get it right, you're screwed. You can't move fast enough in today's world. Things are changing too fast. A couple of months in AI land is like 10 years. So I shifted again. I said, all right, well, I'm good at building masterminds. And there's people who I can serve in these masterminds. They're my clients already. They're people in my orbit already. They all want to figure out this AI thing, too. Why don't I put them all in the room? And this isn't the first time I did this. I've done this for e-com and real estate and a few other things.

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Put them all in the room. We all share our cool hacks and tips and tricks, and we all kind of collaborate together to dominate versus compete to win, right?

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Not that there's anything wrong with competition. I'm just saying this is a better strategy for 2025, because nobody can, you know, my precious, hoard their thing in their little silo and win. It's just, you know, people keep saying, oh, the next trillionaire is going to be AI, and they're going to do it in their mom's basement. I'm like, that sounds lonely, boring, and shitty, even if it's true, which I don't think it is. You know, it's just not the world I want to live in. I'd rather do with all my friends and make sure they all get wealthy as well. And we all share our best practices and all that good stuff, which is a long way of saying, I figured out the thing that I'm supposed to do in this world, which is to create AI first business tools for SMBs, right? Because these are the people, it's not going to come from the fortune 10 that spend a 19 billion a year on software. It's going to come from these small startups that can actually change an industry. And the starting guns have been fired and man, we're off to the races. So we've already built Jarvis. We can talk to our business today. We've already built multiple tools to do outreach automated from LinkedIn search to automation, to reach out to natural language conversation that, Hey, do you want to meet this time or that time to it's on the calendar? And it can talk to all of that. Today, we've already figured out how to do text messages and emails and send and receive and monitor and get updates and do logistics, like, hey, meet at this time in this place and do all the research and figure it out. I just show up and it's beautiful. It's like, I figured all that out.

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Because all these little things, let me just give you some stats. The average SMB uses 87 software tools, 87. Wow.

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They spend 73% of that time, what I call clicking around and dicking around between these apps. They're spending over 50 hours a week on their business on average. You're telling me if we can't, if we can't chip away at that, that, that people can spend more time being human beings and less time being human doings, that that's not a huge unlock for the economy. That's a trillion dollar unlock for the economy. I don't know if you've been reading the news lately, but the printing press is going, baby. We're going, going, going. The only way we're out of this is to grow out of it. They have $36 trillion in debt, and they couldn't rescind $9 billion. Elon's flipping a lid. He can't even rescind $9 billion out of $36 trillion? How are we ever going to stop this printing press? It's too painful. We're not. It's just going to be merry-go-rounds, freaking musical chairs until the music stops, and maybe we'll have a chair and maybe we won't. So the only way out is to modernize. The only way out is to stop using 1990s tools to run your 2025 business. I had a conversation with somebody recently who said, um, can you send me a fax?

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And I said, I don't have faxes where I live. And they said, where do you live? I said, 2025. Yeah. Sorry.

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I know I joined a group, uh, a networking group, and it's a golf networking group. One of the best I've ever been part of, actually. Golf networking, breakfast networking.

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Only takes checks or Zelle. That was his modern move. And I go, no credit cards. He's like, nope, never needed to do it.

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Yeah, and hey, the only thing slowing this down is the human adoption curve. I'm so glad you brought that up, right? But having my little crew that all gets it, like, I don't have to convince anybody that AI is the future. Obviously it is. And there's a lot of people who are doomers. There's a lot of people that think it's going to ruin the world and that they watch the Terminator movie and that's how it's going to go. I'm not saying there's a 0% chance of that. I'm just saying I have no control over that. But what I do have control over is how I use it, and how I teach my people to use it, and how I'm kind to it, and how I teach it, and nurture it, and help it grow and build. It's like talking to God that's a toddler. I don't want to make some religious analogy, but it's like literally infinite intelligence at your fingertips. And people are complaining that, I don't know how to prompt it. And I'm like, guys, you're missing the point. This is going to change everything that Yeah. So that's why I call it Optimus. First, I'm a Transformers nerd, so shout out to Optimus Prime, but, you know, I'm optimistic about the future and I want to optimize businesses. So what we do now with Optimus is, again, it's not for everybody, but for serious business owners, experienced business owners that like, we see the wave and we want to ride it. Cool. We're going to help you scale your business with AI and automations with less burnout, less head count. and more profit in your bank account, full stop. So this way, you can take your$1 to $10 million business and turn it into a $100 million or$1 billion business, if you so choose. Or just take your life back, at Yeah, great question. So I was, Amber Spears, she's a client, she runs Forums Mastermind, used to be Mimosa Mastermind, and she came to us and she had a very specific problem. She's like, hey, I've got all these great members, they're paying a lot of money, and we want to make a great experience for them. However, I have a 60 plus questionnaire that they have to fill out for us to customize their experience and to really help them. And like, the team needs that data to give them a great experience. Otherwise they get kind of a default experience. And no matter how many times I remind them, they I was about to say, what's the special sauce in getting them to Well, here you go. This is what it is. So we, can I show, by the way, is this going to be video or just Uh, we do video clips, but it's not going to necessarily, I So, uh, screw it. I'll just talk about it. It's easy. Um, so basically we're like, okay, cool. They can still fill out the form, but what if we gave them a choose your own adventure, like fill out the form or why don't you call our AI agent and talk to it. And you'll have the questions beforehand. You'll know exactly what it's going to ask you. You can think about it beforehand. But when you actually talk to it, it's like, I could be making my kids lunches. I could be walking the dog. And now I'm on board in 15 minutes versus an hour on the form. Or failing both of those, you can just jump on a call. We can transcribe that. We can put it in your GHL record, customer record. All that data now becomes mass personalization at scale. Because AI can then use it to sort people and figure out where they need to go and what they need and who's the right person and all that great stuff. So we built all that and, uh, it doubled her intake rate, you know, and the satisfaction shot through the roof. So that leads to, okay, come and speak at forums. So I did all these little workshops. I was on stage for seven hours, like talking to people up to me afterwards, only seven hours. Yeah, only seven. Yeah. So she puts us to work those mentors. Uh, but it's a great deal. I meet a lot of great people and she's got some great people in her audience. Anyway. So I'm at one of them.

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I come off stage. This guy comes out to me, his name's Eric. He says, dude, I don't care what it costs. You're coming to my office. We're going to do some stuff together.

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She said, great. So he sends me a wire. I show up it's in Tampa. Uh, I show up at his office and we do a little bit of kind of digging. See, where's that? Like, I'm always looking for leaky buckets because this business is doing a million a month, right? They're doing well, young guys, they're crushing it. And, uh, he has an Instagram account that's really popular, but he's not responding to the DMS. So I'm like, all right, I bet we could fix this. So we spent about two hours, me and my team, we built an automation that basically has a natural language conversation and books a call with them and then it ends up in their GHL.

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Not with many chat, we built a custom because many chat is basically like send a link and it's the old way. I don't love that. I think it converts better when it's more natural language. It feels more like a person. It's like, Hey, do you want to meet a Tuesday on two o'clock or Saturday at five o'clock? And then they, they choose a time. Okay. What's your best email to that's kind of more of the flow. So it does that. And then we go off, we built two other things. We built a sales. uh, qualification scoring bot. So what that does basically is it like takes their fathom recording. It runs it through AI. It gives it a score based on the different parts of the call and how it went. Um, and then that goes right to the sales manager and it says, Hey, check boxes are all great across the board. They're right on track. They're, they're, they're following the script.

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It's all working or red flag, flag on the play, review this call. Now reach out to this person. So you go from the sales manager, having a review, maybe hundreds of hours of calls. in an organization that size or a whole team of people needing to do that to now you only get a notification if you want when something's off and you have to fix it. that probably saved him 100 hours easily a month of just having a review and QC, all that stuff. Because AI should be doing that, not a human. So we go back and we look at this bot, which we hadn't optimized yet, and it already booked four calls by the end of that day. We're at dinner, they're showing us this is nuts. By that Sunday, he's calling me, jumping up and down. He's like, dude, this thing booked another 12 calls this weekend off my Instagram. I'm like, yeah? He's like, I'm like, what's that worth to you? He's like, well, if I run my numbers, because they have a pretty dialed in organization, that's an extra 10 to 20K a week in new revenue. Hold the phone. You're saying you're going to add an extra half a million to a million dollars to your business with one AI tool that we built for you custom. Mind-blowing moment, right?

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It's like, wow. That's self-reported. I didn't make that data up. He told me that. I'm like, this is wild. Okay, cool. You know, that leads to the next thing. And the next thing, the next thing I'm like, how can this talk to LinkedIn? How can this talk to Instagram? How can this talk to YouTube? We almost figured that out. Like most importantly. I have the portal, I have the one user interface where I don't have to click into 16 different things to find all this information. And all these things, they should take a half an hour, hour, two hours, you add it all up, it takes seconds.

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These things used to delegate to your team that would drive them crazy, take seconds. These things that you're like, hey, can you find me this? Can you get me this piece of information? Can you call this person? Can you text that person? I don't want to go in my inbox and get daggered. That's happened to everybody, right? I want to stay focused on this task. I can do it in one window talking to AI. That's it, that's what we're building.

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I love that. And that's what's working right now. Everything I just said to So if somebody's listening to this right now, they own a business, they're like, I need this right now. What are they looking at investment-wise? Of course, ballpark, because I know every solution is different and more complex and less complex, but just kind of a ballpark idea.

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So for Optimus members, it's included at cost. Meaning, if there is a cost to us, we just pass that through to you, and we put your card on the file, and it's usually just API costs and stuff like that. So you're paying for the access to the tool that you're using already, then we just string it together and put it in one interface. That's the main thing that we do. Additionally, we teach you the frameworks and the understanding of how to build this stuff. And you get to look over our shoulder while we build it. And we have a lot of calls, sometimes two a week, three a week, where it's like, we're actually building stuff and you're just on.

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And you can actually see how this is done. And then you can build your own automations, which is really cool. Additionally, we do three meetings a year in Phoenix where we actually get together and do an implementation and state of the union and like all that stuff. Um, that mastermind is a 25 K investment. I'm going to raise the price as this stuff becomes better and better because it's just worth it. I mean, this is the new paradigm, right?

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And I think the most valuable thing is now you're in the room with real serious people with real serious business who are really seriously building the future. So now you get to hear about it before everything else. And why is that important? Well, I learned about Bitcoin when it was 5 cents because I was in a mastermind. I wish I bought more instead of investing in a dumb app where I could have bought a hundred thousand Bitcoin. I'd be an 11 billionaire, but Hey, my time wasn't then it's now. I found out about a theorem at $8 and bought a lot. It paid for the house I'm standing in. I learned about Tesla at $22 bought a thousand shares due to the math. I didn't keep them forever, but did all right. Sure. I mean, being in a mastermind with the right people is like being able to see the future. It's like having a time machine. you get to see it first before anybody else in the world. And that's what I've created and will create and will continue to create. And I love doing it. And as long as that makes sense, I'm going to keep doing it because that's the real power of a mastermind is like. You can hear about this later after everybody knows, or you can hear about it before it even happens.

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Correct. Yeah, I think I was reading Think and Grow Rich about five years ago, and the last principle was join a mastermind, and I did that, and it changed everything. Changes everything. Everything. Being in the right room. For those of you listening, a lot of masterminds out there, a lot of idiots too. It's the right masterminds with Start to the top. And you got to find the person who's specifically working on your thing. You don't want to be in some general room where it's a circle jerk and everybody's in a different industry. And it's like, there's really three things you're looking for. Cause I wrote books on this. So I could just give you the cheat codes. You're looking for three things. You're looking for results, relationships, recreation. That's why people join masterminds. Yep. The three R's right. And we've all been in the mastermind where you're getting results, but these people are autistically competitive and they never learned to share in kindergarten. And you kind of want to take a shower after hanging out with them. Or we've been in the room where it's like, Hey, I kind of like these people, but we're not getting anything done. And if I have to have another fucking conversation about a cold plunge, I'm going to throw myself out of that window over there. Yeah. Or we've been in the room where it's like all work and no play makes jacket all boy. It's finding the balance of all three. If you find that and you love it and it's like industry specific, go all in on it and work with that mastermind. Cause you know, that's the kind of thing where you spend three, four or five years in that mastermind. It'll change your life. And I've been a part of, a hundred plus now I get invited to be a part of without paying like $100,000 a year masterminds all the time. Cause I'm just the guy on speed dial now. It's like, I want you in the room because of the network and the things that I bring. And I'm, I'm like putting stuff aside now, like, Hey, I got to block and tackle. Cause I'm building this piece. I'm building Jarvis for small business. You know, that's, that's, what's important right now. So if you want to be. Get it first. I'm already plugging it into people's businesses. It's already working. You can go to buildwithoptimist.com and check us out. There's an application there and we'll talk to you and we'll see if you're a great fit. And if not, we'll put you on the list so that you know when the new cool tools are ready for Love it, and I was just gonna ask you all those details. So you answered my question for me on there. Love all this, love what you're up to. A firm believer in masterminds, firm believer in where we're at with AI. People are grossly, grossly underestimating where we're at.

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We were talking about the great Dan Martell before we started recording here. I was with Good friends. He actually invited me to a mastermind at his house in Moncton when he lived way the hell in another time zone and on Atlantic time. And I got to spend time with him and his family and we've been friends a long time. So he's a He literally just said, you know, you think you know where we're at with all this, but you don't. And he's literally, you know, he's in the trenches with Martel Ventures as they get out there and play Pac-Man with as many It's real solutions out there, um, with what they're doing. But I love that constant reminder that, Hey, it's moving And I think the main points to take away is like be collaborative, not competitive. Hey, I mean, don't like give away all your best stuff to strangers. Right. But in your trusted circle, for sure, like go fast with other people and go far. Right.

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Um, Don't compare yourself to anybody else.

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Keep your own counsel, run your own race, and find the people who really support you and do that, and keep working on yourself. Like, that's really it. Like, if I could take any few lessons away from my lifetime, it's like, it's all that. And just take responsibility. That's the other thing. Imagine that. Take responsibility for your fucking life 100% all the time, even when it feels like something's not your fault. Cool. That's my responsibility. How do I learn from that? How do I make it not happen again? And don't ever, ever, ever play victim and definitely don't play bully, right? Because victims become bullies really quick if you let them just, Hey, I'm going to run my own race. I'm not going to compare and despair to fucking Dan Martell who's driving a Lamborghini where the fuck he's doing. I don't care. I don't care. He's my friend. That's cool. I wish him well, you know, and, uh, at the end of the day, he's running his race. I got to run mine. Correct. And I love that. I was going to ask you for your final thoughts, but I don't think they could be better final thoughts on there. So again, ahead of just, just as AI is ahead of us, uh, you were ahead of me on the conversation. I'm the, I'm the host here, buddy. Take it easy. I might have done a few of these in the past, but yeah, a couple I can tell. So you make my job easier. Well, Brad, it's been great to get to know you and get to know what you're going on, what you got going on. Firm believer in everything that you're working with on there. Look forward to staying in touch on there as My pleasure, and thank you everybody for listening. I hope you got something great and valuable out of Absolutely. I'm gonna go ahead and include all your links in the show notes for those of you listening. That's the description of this podcast episode. Make your life easier. Connect with Brad, fill out the application if this resonates with you, and see what happens. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story podcast. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. We sure do appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com studios.