Bart Merrell: The Money Already Sitting in Your Own Backyard
EPISODE OVERVIEW
Duration: Approximately 38 minutes
Best For: Trapped entrepreneurs who wait for permission, a qualification, or the "right time" before acting on what they already know how to do
Key Outcome: You will start seeing the skills, stories, and setbacks already inside your business as income and freedom, instead of waiting for something you do not have yet
You have been sitting on the thing that sets you free, and you sold it for scrap.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Bart Merrell has never had a job in the way you would recognise one. He took the first commercial bungee jump to Japan, helped launch thrill rides, got disqualified from the FBI, and when he lost his lower left leg in 2024, he turned even that into a way to help other people. Running through all of it is one habit. Whatever crosses his path, good, bad or ugly, he asks how he can monetise it. That matters to you because you already carry more value than you charge for. You built this thing from nothing, and somewhere along the way you started treating the things you are best at as ordinary. Bart's story of his father, a pig farmer who sold the farm and died still searching for his next big thing while the new owner found a fortune buried in the ground, is a mirror. The freedom you are chasing is often already sitting in your own backyard. You just stopped looking at it.
WHY THIS EPISODE MATTERS TO YOU
You keep telling yourself you need a qualification, a certificate, or someone's blessing before you act. That belief is one of the quiet reasons you feel stuck. Bart became a bungee jump master in Japan and imported vehicles he had never imported before, all by saying yes and learning as he went.
If you are the bottleneck because everything runs through your head, the fix is not always more delegation. Sometimes it is recognising that what feels effortless to you is exactly what other people would pay for. That reframe is what opens up new income without adding more hours.
The things you do because you have to, the hard experiences, the setbacks, often carry the most value. Bart turned his amputation into a business helping others through limb loss. What you have lived through is something AI can never take from you.
The cost of ignoring this is quiet and expensive. You keep grinding on the low value work while the real opportunity sits untouched, the way pig poop worth a dollar a pound sat under a farm for years.
KEY INSIGHTS YOU CAN IMPLEMENT TODAY
Say yes, then figure it out. Roy sent out a CV with his brother's name typed over, walked into interviews for jobs he barely knew, and phoned for help from client bathrooms for two and a half months. He bought that company in 2017. Confidence to learn beats waiting to feel ready.
Sell it before you build it. Roy's client David got asked if he could do a Barry Manilow tribute act. He said yes, made a leaflet, and turned it into around £400,000 in bookings across theatres, Vegas, and cruise ships within a year. He committed first, then delivered.
Knowledge used to be the bottleneck. It is not anymore. Bart rebuilt his own website for £25 in credits rather than paying £1,500. The gap now is not knowing, it is being willing to do. That said, you have to put the work in. The seven prompts that replace a team are noise.
Value what feels ordinary to you. Roy's partner reads astrology for free at parties and calls herself unqualified, while people with less knowledge charge happily online. You are probably doing the same thing with something in your own business right now.
Look at the light, not the shadow. So much fear surrounds AI. The better question is which parts of your week drain you, and how you free yourself and your team to do more of the work that feels human.
GOLDEN QUOTES WORTH REMEMBERING
"You do not need the qualifications, you just need to know a little bit more than the next person in the room." - Roy Castleman
"When someone comes to you with a good opportunity and you don't know how to do it, say yes and figure it out." - Bart Merrell, quoting Richard Branson
"Knowledge used to be the bottleneck. Now it's not. You just got to be willing to learn it and do it." - Bart Merrell
"We're paying way more attention to the shadow that's being cast than the light that's being created." - Bart Merrell
"Don't be like my dad and overlook the things that are right there within your reach, right in your own backyard. They might even look like a pile of pig poop." - Bart Merrell
QUICK NAVIGATION FOR BUSY LEADERS
00:00 - Introduction: Why every idea dies if you cannot answer one question, how will you monetise it
03:15 - The bungee jump in Japan: what a little brilliant and a little crazy teaches you about running a business
08:30 - You do not need the qualification: Roy's story of walking into jobs he had never done and learning on the phone
14:00 - Say yes then figure it out: David's Barry Manilow act and £400,000 in a year
19:20 - Knowledge is now £20 a month: rebuilding a website for £25 and why doing beats knowing
25:10 - Monetise Your Mindset: turning what you like, what you need to do, and even an amputation into income
31:40 - Valuing yourself: why you devalue the things you are best at, and how to stop
35:00 - Conclusion: Acres of pig poop and the fortune buried in your own backyard
GUEST SPOTLIGHT
Name: Bart Merrell
Bio: Bart Merrell has never had a job in the ordinary sense and does not believe you need one either. He teaches people to build financial security by monetising what they already know and do, an approach he calls the Monetised Mindset. From a pig farm in New Mexico to launching thrill rides in Japan, and turning the loss of his lower left leg in 2024 into a business helping others, Bart shows trapped entrepreneurs how to find income and purpose in what is already right in front of them.
Connect with Bart:
Website: TheSideHustleSamurai.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bart-merrell-2440148/
YOUR NEXT ACTIONS
This Week: Write down three things you do for free or barely think about, the skills people always ask you for. Pick one and put a price next to it. That is the value you have been giving away.
This Month: Take one idea you have been sitting on because you do not feel qualified, and say yes to a first small version of it. Sell it before you build it, then learn your way through, the way Roy did on the phone.
This Quarter: Look at your week honestly. Find the low value work that drains you and start moving it off your plate, using AI or your team, so you free up hours for the work only you can do.
EPISODE RESOURCES
Monetize Your Mindset by Bart Merrell, a how to think book about turning what you like, need, and already do into income
Identify Your Ideal Side Hustle, Bart's signature workshop
Who Not How, the book Roy references on valuing yourself and your time
Acres of Diamonds, the classic story Bart retells at the close
Lovable, the tool Bart used to rebuild his website
Suno, ElevenLabs, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, the AI tools discussed for creating music, voice, and content
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READY TO ESCAPE THE TRAP?
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Book a Free Strategy Session: https://www.allthepower.co.uk/contact
Let's discuss how to build a business that works WITHOUT you.
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CONNECT WITH YOUR HOST, ROY CASTLEMAN
Roy is the founder of All The Power Limited and creator of The Owner's Thrive Method, a business coaching system for entrepreneurs ready to grow without burnout. As a certified Wim Hof Method Instructor and the UK's first certified BOS UP coach, Roy combines AI as a thinking methodology, wellness practices, and business operating systems to help trapped entrepreneurs reclaim their freedom.
Website: www.allthepower.co.uk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roycastleman/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@allthepowerltd
Transcript
Roy Castleman: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world, and interesting conversation. Now I'm here with Bart, and Bart is going to talk about monetizing things. One of the things that whenever I'm working with somebody, the first question is always, how are you going to monetize it? Business owners, entrepreneurs, they have all these amazing ideas, and the reality is, if you can't put the money where the product is, you can't go anywhere. So welcome to the podcast.
Bart Merrell: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Roy Castleman: So you've had a bit of an interesting life.
Bart Merrell: Yeah, I have, yes. I.
Roy Castleman: What a blessing that is. What a blessing that is.
Bart Merrell: It sure beats a boring life, that's for sure. Right? Yeah.
Roy Castleman: Yeah. You're a fellow adrenaline junkie. Or you. You were, I think. I think you are. Or you aren't. Right?
Bart Merrell: I still am. I just do safer things nowadays. So.
Roy Castleman: So what, What? Tell us what you've done in the past. What is the. You mentioned bungee jumping. Tell us a little bit about that.
Bart Merrell: So I took the first commercial bungee jump to Japan. I am a bungee jump master, at least in Japan, and that gave me the authority and the permission to push little Japanese people off the top of an eight story bungee tower and assist them off the tower. And so I. I took that first commercial bungee jump over there. One of my. One of my stupid claims to fame is I jumped off the top of the tower, just hanging on with my hands to the bungee cord.
Roy Castleman: That doesn't seem like a very good idea.
Bart Merrell: It. I call it the. When I tell that. That story, and I call it brilliant or crazy. So brilliant is your finger moving forward. Crazy. And so at the bottom of my tower, we had a stuntman airbag. And in theory, one could jump from the top of the tower without a bungee cord, hit the mat and be okay. And I walked to the edge without my cord, getting ready to jump. And I looked down and I said, I ain't that crazy. But my. My brilliant mind said, okay, we can attach a bungee cord. You jump with the bungee cord. When the bouncing stops, then all you got to do is unhook it and you can fall from six stories up instead of eight. And in my mind, I could do that. I jumped with the bungee cord, but I couldn't get it unhooked. And so my brilliant mind continues to think. And it says, okay, we can take the connector, which is a little strap. It's a nylon strap about a foot long and has a carabiner on the end and I could wrap it on itself and hook it to itself. Put two of those at the bottom of the bungee cord. And I have two handles and I could jump, just hanging on, wait for the bouncing to stop and then all I have to do is let go. And so I got my handles and I went to the edge and I was like, okay, I can do this. I jumped, I waited for the bouncing to stop. And then sometimes your brilliant mind doesn't go all the way to the, to the end of the thinking because I am hanging from a giant rubber band. What's gonna happen when I let go? That rubber band shot to the top of the tower with this loud bang. I fell to the mat with a loud slap. It echoed throughout the park and everybody came running to see who just died. Anyway, if you're in business, if you're an entrepreneur, you got to have a little bit of crazy. Brilliant and a little bit of crazy.
rning and learning. Yeah. And:Bart Merrell: Yeah. And, you know, Richard Branson has that famous quotation, if someone comes to you with a good opportunity and you don't know how to do it, say yes and figure it out.
Roy Castleman: Yep.
Bart Merrell: And before we hopped on here, I told you about when I was in Japan doing the bungee jump thing. I would go to the gym, and for the first couple of weeks, nobody talked to me because I'm this big gaijin, this big gringo in Japan, and they're afraid of me and don't know if I speak Japanese. And finally this one guy comes up and he says, hello. And I said, hello. And he. Then I started speaking Japanese to him and he's like, I'm glad you speak Japanese. But he wanted to. He was a big rig driver in Japan and wanted to stop driving and start importing camping trailers, Ford and Dodge diesel pickups into Japan from America. And he asked me If I would help. I didn't know how to do it, but I thought he did. I said yes. I thought we would. He would teach me how. He didn't know how to do it, so we learned together. We still do that to this day. That was back in 97. And it's a very good side business of mine. I mean, I don't have a main business. I just, you know, I'm the side hustle samurai. I side hustle whatever crosses my path, good, bad or ugly. And it started because I said yes, just like you were saying. I didn't know how to do it, but we did it. I didn't have one of my clients
Roy Castleman: to continue the story thread. One of my clients, David, he's an amazing musician. He was a teacher for many years and decided he wanted to get out and start his own company. And he came and worked for me for a while. And one of the things I always tell people is, sell it before you build it. And this stuck with him. And he's a producer, he puts acts together, he does all that kind of stuff. And he teaches youngsters how to get into the music industry. And he had this opportunity come across his desk to do a Barry Manilow tribute act. So they sent this thing out and said, do you know anyone that can do this? So. So he jumped onto Chatty Pitti, made a leaflet, sent it back and said, yes, I can do it. This year so far, he launched. This was just over a year ago. This year so far, he's launched. I think he's done something like £400,000 turnover already. He's booked in theaters all around the world. They've asked him to perform in Vegas, they've asked him to perform on cruise ships. But it's just from having enough confidence in yourself and your skills and what you've learned to know that you can take that step. And I think that's something that entrepreneurs are the only breed of people that can go and do that, right?
Bart Merrell: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like you said, with your brother as kind of a mentor, he was there to help you through things in the bathroom with you and your. And your phone. But when. When you start something that you don't know how to do, it's nice to have someone there to hold your hand, because you're going to have lots of people telling you the reasons why you can't do it, and a lot of them are going to be the closest to your friends, your family. Oh, you can't do that. And you. It's nice to have someone there to. To hold your hand to. Hey, you can do this and help you through it because you're going to have the naysayers and, you know, like yours, your brother for you just having that and then you. For your client. Having someone to, to guide you along the path definitely helps and helps give you the confidence.
Roy Castleman: Yeah. And now we go into a different world. We're in an entirely different world now, Ron. We're in a world where beforehand knowledge was expensive. Yeah. Now knowledge is 20 bucks a month.
Bart Merrell: Yep.
Roy Castleman: Yeah. Your imagination is the only thing that stops you. Right. And what do you make of this new. This new AI world we're in?
Bart Merrell: I love it.
Roy Castleman: That's great.
use I didn't want to pay him $:Roy Castleman: Yep.
Bart Merrell: Knowledge used to be the. The bottleneck. Now it's not. It's. It's there, it's out there. You just got to be willing to. To learn it and do it.
Roy Castleman: Yeah. And I think. Yeah. As we go into this new space, that gap between people doing and people knowing what's possible is getting bigger and bigger. Right. Yeah. We. We think about what ChatGPT can do, what Codex can do, what Claude Code can do. If you look at anything on social media, suddenly your whole feed gets flooded with these people saying, oh, say, replaced a marketing team with these seven prompts. Nothing irritates me more than that. Right. Yeah. Because there's a reality in the work that you have to put the work in. With all of this, you have to put the work in. Right. I spent three years now deep in AI. Right. And I know. Yeah. How badly wrong it can go. But I also know. Yeah. If you, if you're the architect, how well it can go.
. I took a picture of me from:Roy Castleman: The same chap I was talking about, David, after I'd introduced him to ChatGPT, he had this idea and, yeah, being the producer, he sings, he plays multiple instruments and he had this idea to ask ChatGPT if AI was going to take over the world, how would it do it? So he got really kind of engrossed in this and he started working on this project. And six months later, he calls me up and says, roy, can you come to a private screening that I've got for people, because you were instrumental in this. And I wasn't in the country at the stage. And he wouldn't tell me what it was because he hadn't told anybody. So what he had done is he'd gone to Chatipeti, he had worked out the script, then he went on to Suno, he went on to the various things. And, you know, the War of the Worlds, they've made the album for it, right? Yeah. Not the original, but the next one.
Bart Merrell: Yeah.
Roy Castleman: And he had made a. AI Apocalypse with this. He had sent to his family members, you know, a request that they could go and record on 11's labs. Yeah, this. The small chunk of text. Yeah. So they recorded this two minutes or three minutes onto eleven's labs and he built this entire. It's on Spotify now. It's amazing. It's so good. AI Apocalypse. Look it up. And he literally went through this whole process and released this on Spotify. Yeah. And this was the same guy that a year ago said, nah, AI is not going to go into music. It just can't get there. And the imagination is now the only thing that holds us back. And there's so much fear around it and there's so much concern about it. I really love the idea to think about our freedoms. Right. And think about the things we don't want to do. You know, what are the things we do that make us human? Right. Yeah. If you wake up in the day and you've got, I don't know, 70% of the things you're doing aren't the things that you love, how can you automate those things to give you time to be more human? Right. And, yeah, if you've got 10 people that work for you. And you're not thinking about, oh, but if I get AI, I have to let them go. You're thinking about if I enable them to do what they love, can I do 10 times more or a hundred times more? And I think that's the reality that we step into if we want to.
Bart Merrell: Yeah. Yeah. So back to what you can create. I have two alter egos. One's name is Mason Cain, the other one's name is Dana Call. And they both have albums out on Spotify that deal with my. My thoughts, my feelings that I turned into a song using Claude and me and Claude having a discussion and then putting it in Suno. And it's just, you can. It's amazing the things that you can do.
Roy Castleman: Yeah.
Bart Merrell: Just like, like your, your client was talking about. But as back to people and how. How AI is going to affect everything. So you familiar with Glenn Beck? So he is a talk show host here in America. Fairly large size. He has created a. I think he's calling it George AI. And it's the founders of the United States that wrote the Constitution and everything. He's put all their writings into AI, you know, so George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, all these guys, and they asked them about AI and I don't. I remember George Washington said something about if. Well, something that powerful, you need to have guardrails around it and government needs to be involved. And then. But what stuck out was what Benjamin Franklin said. And he says, I think we're paying way more attention to the shadow that's being cast than the light that's being created.
Roy Castleman: I love this. Yeah.
Bart Merrell: And I just like a lot of people, they're like, oh, you can't do that. It's, it's. But I like, I like how he said, look at the light. Look at what it's going to happen.
Roy Castleman: Yeah. Yeah. No, I love it. So tell us a bit about your book.
Bart Merrell: So my book is monetize your mindset. It's not a what to do book. It is a how to think book.
Roy Castleman: Okay.
Bart Merrell: I mentioned that anything that crosses my path, good, bad or ugly, I always ask how can I monetize it? And I've done that ever since I. We talked earlier about. I've done that ever since I didn't make it into my dream job, which was to get in the FBI and chase serial killers. I just fell back on what my dad taught me by example. He never set me down and taught me the birds and the bees of business, but he showed me by example that because he had his hands in many different things. And I was devastated because I didn't want to go into what I studied in college. I didn't want to become an accountant and go count other people's money. I wanted to do something more. I'm an adrenaline junkie. I like to do things. And so as I'm going through life and doing this for myself, I was actually volunteering at a drug rehab center in. In Salt Lake City, teaching them how to speak and tell their stories. And I was listening to Jen tell her story, talking about how before she went to college, she didn't know that everybody else's life wasn't the same as hers, because when her and her family were out and about, everything was somewhat normal. It wasn't until they got back home that the abuse and the neglect happened. And she thought that's what everybody went home to. And I'm sitting there in this, and I'm thinking, that's the same way with the way people think about money. If you didn't grow up with my dad or someone like my dad, you don't think like I do. I need to help people think like I do. And so that's what the book is about, what it's for. I started writing it then was actually I was driving home from that night and monetize your mindset came to mind. I'm like, surely someone has that. I went to godaddy when I got home, typed in monetize your mindset dot com. It was available. I bought it. I didn't even know what I was gonna do with it. I bought it.
Roy Castleman: Yeah.
Bart Merrell: And so I started writing that book. This is before AI was helping everybody write books. It was very painful. I had a creative editor that we would butt heads all the time just trying to make it. Make it the best it could be. And it just tells. It gives examples of people who have taken what they like to do, what they need to do, what they're already doing, and turn that into a stream of income.
Roy Castleman: Yeah, I love that concept of
Bart Merrell: what
Roy Castleman: they like to do. Because what I see happening so often is the things that we like to do that we're good at. We devalue that in our own minds. Right. So we're like, okay, yeah, yeah, I'm an astrologist. Well, I love astrology. I do all this astrology stuff. I'm not. My partner is. And we have this conversation. Is that okay? Well, then go. Yeah. Every time we go somewhere and someone says, okay, do me a reading, I'm like, why don't you charge them for it. Why don't you do something more with this? Why don't you? Yeah. And she's, oh, I'm not qualified. I'm like, you're more qualified than most of the people I see on Facebook and on Instagram and on TikTok. And yeah, yeah. And, and yeah, the stuff that you do. Yeah, yeah. You understand it at such a level. So, so I see people doing this so often thinking that they need permission from somebody else. Yeah. And devaluing themselves.
Bart Merrell: Right. Yeah, yeah.
Roy Castleman: And yeah, that's, yeah, that's the, the opposite of monetizing your, your mindset. Right. That's not valuing yourself. I read the who, not how have you read that one?
Bart Merrell: I have not.
Roy Castleman: You should very good book and goes through this, this whole process of how do you value yourself? You know, I sit and I do thousand hours on AI and then I go and do somebody do a call with somebody, I change their life in an hour's time and I charge them 200 bucks. How is that valuing myself, Brian?
Bart Merrell: Yeah, exactly.
Roy Castleman: So how do you work out your own value?
d to have my leg amputated in:Roy Castleman: Yeah.
Bart Merrell: A friend of mine's a grief counselor. Not because she wanted to be, because she went through a lot of grief and she's helping people do what she went through. Yeah.
Roy Castleman: Yeah.
had booked. This is. Back in:Roy Castleman: Wow.
she has predicted per se. In:Roy Castleman: Yeah, but.
Bart Merrell: But once again, someone who doesn't value what they have.
Roy Castleman: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. So before we wrap up, if you're going to give people one piece of advice from all the lessons you've learned, what would that be?
Bart Merrell: So my dad, he taught me many things, and even in his death, I learned something great. And it's very important that everybody needs to, to hear. Have you heard the story Acres of Diamonds? So it's an old story. It's. It's act. There's actually a book called Acres of Diamonds, really small. It's about a Persian farmer who sold his farm and he went in search of diamonds. He died broke, alone in a foreign land. He never found his riches. The new owner of the farm, however, was watering his camel in the brook that ran through the property and saw this strange rock. He reached down and picked it up. It was a diamond. The Golconda diamond mine was established right there on what was Alia Fed's farm.
Roy Castleman: Wow.
Bart Merrell: That he sold to someone else. My family, we have a similar story. Instead of acres of diamonds, we call it acres of pig poop. I grew up in a small town in southern New Mexico. We had more pigs than people in this town. Because of us, dad was a pig farmer. Any one time on the farm, we had, I don't know, 15 to 19,000 pigs, 2,000 sows. You know what a sow is?
Roy Castleman: Yeah.
Bart Merrell: A mama pig, for those who don't know. And a mama pig can give birth 2.5 times a year. And on our farm, we average 9.97 pigs per litter. So you mathematicians out there, you can do that math and you're going to figure out that that equals a lot of pig poop.
Roy Castleman: Yeah.
Bart Merrell: We had these three man made ponds that we would divert the stuff to settling ponds. We called them the lagoons. So one year it goes here, next year here, next year here. Now, dad, he shut down the pig operation in his mid-60s, decided to go search for his next next big thing. He died in. He died at age 81 and never found his next big opportunity. Two years after his death, we sold the farm for $235,000, which was a fair price for the property at the time. The new owners, about six months after that, they were leveling those man made ponds. They had been dry on top for years, but the heavy grater was going across the middle of the pond and broke through the crust and sunk up to its belly in this black muck. They call in experts right there on the spot. The experts offered the new owners of our farm, or what was our farm, $2,000 a ton for this stuff. That's a dollar a pound for old tig poop.
Roy Castleman: Wow.
Bart Merrell: 500 plus tons of the stuff was acres of diamonds right under my dad's nose.
Roy Castleman: Yeah, yeah.
Bart Merrell: So I want to ask your listeners, what about you?
Roy Castleman: Yeah.
Bart Merrell: What are you overlooking or are you right there up on Discovery? Don't be like Alia Fed and my dad and overlook the things that are right there within your grass, right in your own backyard. They might even look like a pile of pig poop. So just don't overlook the stuff that's right there.
Roy Castleman: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining, Amir. It's been a pleasure talking to you.
Bart Merrell: You too. Thank you.
