Episode 22:Masterminds: A book club for the eldritch horrors of running a business
What are masterminds? Why should independent business owners join one? What do you need to watch out for? How do you grow one? How do you grow the group as business owners? What if your mastermind starts to suck?
Summary
Nick and Kai walk through what a mastermind actually is, how their group formed after each of them found themselves without a professional community, and what they’ve built over two years. They cover tools, group size, member selection, governance, and how to start one from scratch.
Highlights
- Nick started the mastermind by emailing his list for solo consultants running productized services, after a falling-out at a Chicago co-working space left him professionally isolated and cut off from that community.
- Kai argues a mastermind needs alignment on three things: type of business, intention, and goal. Being the only consultant in a group of SaaS founders taught him this firsthand; the others couldn’t engage with his problems and the group fizzled.
- Nick’s rule: a mastermind is only as successful as its lowest-performing members. He recommends keeping people at similar business stages rather than mixing beginners with veterans.
- Kai pushes back on the common instinct to recruit an experienced guru to lead the group. Peers at the same level, working through shared problems together, produce more applicable answers than one person explaining how they got there.
- An in-person retreat in Michigan produced a concrete change: after hot-seat sessions, Nick committed to doubling down on A/B testing and Kai on podcast guesting, both cutting peripheral work that the group identified as diluting their focus.
- The bare minimum setup is a real-time chat room and a weekly or bi-weekly call. Their group runs on paid Slack, bi-weekly hot-seat calls, and a newer Basecamp thread per member that functions as a running business diary.
- At 14 members (near their self-imposed cap of roughly 15), they elected three administrators by group vote, tasked with monitoring group health, vetting new additions, and mediating conflict. Adding their first new member took four months of internal discussion before anyone approached the candidate.
Read the transcript
Masterminds. Mastermind, whenever I think of Mastermind, do you ever play the board game Mastermind? I’ve never played the board game mastermind. Donald Knuth found a way to solve the board game mastermind in five moves.
I have to Google this board game.
It’s kind of stunning. You’ve probably seen it. It’s like a classic 80s thing.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I played this.
Right? You probably played it when you were like seven or eight years old or something.
Immediately losing all the pieces.
Yeah, that’s reasonable.
Yeah.
So, um, masterminds. Um, we both met, uh, I think we met because I organized this mastermind, right? Like, You came out of the woodwork, and that happened pretty quickly, whatever the order of events was. And I did it I’ll talk a little bit about my motivations for this and just kind of set the table. I worked in a co working space for about two and a half years that was at times co ran and at times ran and then sort of bloodlessly cooed by somebody who Had a lot of social foibles and did not know how to deal with other people terribly well. He was very good at building community and very good at getting wonderful people into the room, which is like 88% of the problem in a city like Chicago. But he was also kind of a jerk. And. It resulted in kind of a toxic relationship. It was getting bad. It got worse. I left. That person basically cut off my access to that community and continues to do so to that day. To the point where, like, we’re not just talking a little bit of hate, we’re talking burning my book at a New Year’s Eve party hate. We’re talking like that level of hate. It was and is grim and disturbing. And in hindsight, it seems that he largely just made an example of me to intimidate others. Which is shitty, right? So I came out of this, point being, feeling very lonely, and didn’t really know how to connect with other people well. Because I didn’t have a whole lot of people that I was connecting with, and I had largely mulliganed my community as a result of this. In the absence of this person wanting to make amends or address the problem like a mature adult would. I tried to find other people. And I went on the internet like most people do when they’re lonely. asked on my mailing list, which was pretty sizable at that point, are there any other independent consultants that focus on like product-based services? So like DraftRevise, like Brian Castle’s product ties, or I was very kind of open and hand-wavy about it, but I laid out a handful of requirements, which was that you had to be a solo practitioner, you had to be running an independent Business. You had to be treating it like it was a business and had to be focused around consulting. And you had to be creating productized consulting offerings. Great, wonderful. And a few people came out of the woodwork. And I think, if I recall correctly, that you were one of them. If you were not one of them, you seized on that email regardless. But I said, you know, what I want is. More professional relationships around this. Let’s just get together and talk about our struggles, share war stories, try and find actionable plans for the future. And that’s basically what a mastermind is. I define it, and Kai, I’m sure you have your own definition, as a group, probably 15 or fewer of independent workers in any field. They can be consultants. For us, it is. that meet frequently and share their struggles. It’s basically like a book club, but for the eldritch horrors of running a business.
Very, very, very well put.
Right. And it’s been going for about two years now. We’re actually going to celebrate our two-year anniversary in. What is it now? Like four weeks.
Yeah, we’re right on top of it. June 12th. Oh, so we won’t be at either of the conferences, but we’ll have seen each other. on either end of that anniversary date.
We’ll be bookending it. It’s fine. We’re just going to have well we’ll celebrate the actual day with quiet contemplation and reflection, but parties on the bookends, you know? That’s kind of how I define it. And that’s very nebulous and open-ended. And the way that it actually drills into application for us, I think, is quite interesting. But how do you broadly define it, Kai?
So I think a mastermind is, like you said, it’s a group of individuals who have come together to share resources and information with each other. And I think a successful mastermind is a group of people who have come together, but they have an alignment of intention, goal, and type of business. And I think those three factors are incredibly important because. If you have a group of people, two of day jobs, two are starting a SaaS, two have products, and one’s a consultant, you’re all going to be tackling like really, really different problems and not able to help each other as much. So. Having a similar type of business is very important. I was part of the mastermind where I was the one consultant for three people who were starting SAS, and it did not go well because They all had resonance with their struggles. And I was like, I’m trying to do a consulting thing. And they’re like, we can’t, we don’t know what are you talking about. And So, having resonance in that type of business is very important. Similarly, intention and goal. And I separate those two because I think they need to be distinct things when it comes to a mastermind. So, an intention would be to help each other get better clients. And that’s actually the intention that we started our mastermind with. We want to support each other in getting better clients. A goal would be Have each of us break six figures. And like, there’s some squishiness in terms of those definitions. And, like, well, is the goal and intention? How do you get there? But I like saying, To successfully start a mastermind, your group needs to come together and reach consensus on your intentions and your goal. And ideally, there should just be one intention and one goal for, say, a year or a sprint or a season of your mastermind. But At its heart, a mastermind really is just a group of people who share a background, who are coming together to share resources and information with each other. And it actually comes out of a book. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, which is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful book. He talks about the importance of coming together To enhance each other’s business as one of his laws of success. And we’ll link to a, it’s a very long but a very valuable two-hour video presentation by this man. On his laws of success and how masterminds figure into it. But yeah, I think that they’re incredibly valuable tools just because if you think about it, If you had the opportunity to have a frequent dialogue with one colleague in your industry, sort of like that red phone on your desk you could pick up at any time and be like, I’m having trouble with a client. How would you word this email? That would be a boon to your business. What if you had two of those people? What if you had five of those people? What if you had eight of those people? The more people you’re able to add into that mix up to an upper bound. The more valuable it is for each member because you’re able to do resource sharing with each other. You’re able to answer questions. In our mastermind, we help each other triage bad clients, write emails, identify new sources of revenues, develop new products. Copy and edit sales pages, write sales pages, figure out what direction should I take my business in, what should I do with my positioning? There are so many questions you ask yourself as an independent consultant every day and every week. Having a group of trusted peers that you’re able to come to and say, I’m trying to scratch an itch here and answer this question, but I don’t know which way to go. Can anybody here offer perspective? Is one of the most valuable things you could do for yourself and that community as a business owner. And similarly to you, when you had sent out that email. I had just moved back from Hawaii, parted ways with a large social group in Eugene, and found myself in a similar position of saying, Well, I want a community here. The business community that I’m finding in Eugene, I’m not really enjoying. What’s the alternative? And your open invitation for a productized consulting-focused mastermind sort of hit at that perfect time when I was saying What do I do? How is this community manifest itself? And lo and behold, the community manifested itself.
Yeah, I mean, it’s a matter of finding kindred spirits that get your problems, right? Not everybody in the group does exactly what it is I do. But there’s enough overlap and there’s enough mutual understanding. And above all, willingness to improve each other. These people are the closest to coworkers that I have. I mean, I love my assistant. She’s great. It’s. She is technically a coworker. But it’s different. It’s different when you understand very rigorously the inner workings of the business. and you’ve put on that MBA hat and you know how to try and improve it. Nothing is off the table in terms of what people can suggest as far as improving my business. People have point blank recommended that. Books I’m making are going to be an unfettered disaster and waved me off of them. You know, like things that I really care about. People aren’t afraid to torch the puppy. You know, we’ll be sad for a minute. There’s another puppy.
But the truth is, often as a business owner, you are too close to your own business to see it as it should be seen. You are too attached to these vestiges of old lines of business that somehow have stuck around. And I don’t want to kill it off because reasons. Or, I don’t know if I should move in this direction because of reasons. You’re obscured. And by having other smart people around you to say, like, well, hey, you know, I’m not as attached to your business as you are, and I don’t understand X, Y, and Z. Can you explain it for me? Sometimes you’re just like, I can’t explain it. And that’s a great sign that you’ve suddenly stumbled into an area where there’s some questions that need to be asked, some hard questions that need to be asked about. Directions and lines of business. To go into a rabbit hole for a second, on a recent episode, we both talked about how coming out of our mastermind retreat We both were doubling down on specific areas of our business. You on A-B testing and me on podcast outreach and podcast guesting. And that almost contrasts an earlier episode. We were talking about how We did not want to niche ourselves down too much because we were afraid of some of the repercussions. And it was only through getting in a room together with some very other smart folks, members of our mastermind. And saying, like, tell us, like, individually going around and saying, like, what are we doing wrong with our business? What are we doing right with our business? That everybody was basically like, focus. Focus is the most important thing that you could do for your business. And we both realized, and I think everybody else in the group realized. There are maybe three to five things each of our businesses are doing. And one of them, I mean, 80/20 rule right here, one of them is super, super successful. The rest of them are like, ah, they’re doing okay, they’re fine, whatever. And if we cut away the eh, do and find whatever ones, you’re left with a much better business. And it’s almost contrasting advice to what we had said in a previous episode for our own businesses. It was only through our mastermind and through smart people taking a look at our businesses for us and asking hard and probing questions about our businesses to our face. That we were able to say, like, oh, the most intelligent thing for me to do or the best line of play for my business is to head in this direction.
I think it’s good for anybody at any stage in their business. I got a question recently from somebody about what happens when everybody’s at varying stages in the business development and that sort of thing. And I actually My humble recommendation is to keep people similar enough that they can understand each other’s problems and that they’re not just playing therapist for one person or three people or whatever have you. I have kind of a law about this that I’ve never really articulated in public before, but Mastermind is only as successful as its lowest performing members. And there is a pecking order, and it’s unfortunate to note this. I would never, ever, ever. Ever publicly denote that pecking order, and I’m sure that everybody else has different arbitrary impressions of what that looks like. Furthermore, everybody is a unique snowflake and is at unique positions in their business. But you can tell when someone is operating on a different level, and hence when they would be a good fit or not, right? So, um Yeah, I mean, don’t get people who are just starting out with their business in there unless you are also just starting out with your business. And want the blind to lead the blind for a moment. So it’s probably more of like a 200-level thing to be doing once you’ve got your footing a little bit and you’re pretty sure about what your positioning looks like and you’re wondering what to do next with it. Yeah, I mean, this is going to sound very cliche and obvious, but the people define what it is, right? Make sure you’re very careful about who you let in.
One of the most frequent questions I get from people who are starting a mastermind, even people who are, you know, let’s say there’s one to five on the business spectrum. One is like, how do I business? And five is like, I am very successful at the business factory every day. People come in and they might be at the two or three, and they’re like, How do I get a level five person in here? How do I get somebody who’s like really experienced that could show us the way? And well, that’s not You’re identifying the right problem. The problem is we have a group of people who want to grow our businesses and we’re not sure of the next steps to take. But the solution you’re self-prescribing is, how do I get somebody who’s really advanced to tell us the way? That’s not the right solution. You hoovering information out of one person’s brain on one thing that they did or one way that they got there. To reference again, Darius’s talk from ExoXo a few years back, How I Won the Lottery. You’re essentially getting that smart person in the room to say, How did you win the lottery and how could we also win the lottery the same way? I think a much more valuable way is to figure out. Okay, all members of this mastermind, we’re at the same level. We have similar questions. We’re trying to, you know, break into the six-figure club as consultants. We’re trying to launch products as consultants. We’re trying to hit whatever the next level is. Okay, what questions do we as a group have about this? Okay. How do we answer these questions? And that’s going to be so much more valuable than finding, you know, some professorial type figure to come in and be like, well, the way I won the lottery was X, Y, and Z and do that too. And well, that’s a guru, and that’s not necessarily going to work for your business. What I love about our mastermind is we all entered into it with that shared understanding of we want to help each other get better clients. And the first six months were us just like repeatedly asking questions, like How do we overcome this problem? How do we overcome that problem? And there was no singular person able to say, This is how you solve all of these problems. There were just people able to say, like, oh, I read a book and I had this bit of advice, and this is how we could apply it here. And everybody was bringing these scraps, these fragments of information together. And through that, we were able to build a corpus of knowledge that we literally released as a book, independentconsultingmanual. com, to teach ourselves how to build a better business. Whenever somebody comes to me with that question again, of, well, how do we get like that really advanced person in here to teach us what to do? I always fire back with the advice of, The most valuable thing you could do is not get that higher-level person in there. Instead, focus on your own businesses. Try to solve these questions yourselves. Because the answers you find will be so much more valuable than the answers that are handed to you from on high by some other figure.
Right. No, there’s so much in there. So, how do we go about doing this? Starting a mastermind? Yeah, what tools do we use to communicate on a daily basis in our mastermind?
So we use three separate tools, and one’s a new addition. The first one is Slack. We’ve got a Slack room, and everybody idles into it. And chats in it, and it basically forms an ongoing rolling conversation. We’re on a paid plan, so we could scroll back as far as we want. But people are able to drop questions in. We have some folks who are in different time zones, so they’re able to read back and ask questions, and we could communicate. Asynchronously and at the same time in there, and synchronously in the same time in there, and ask each other questions and have discussions. We, on top of that, have an every other week Accountability-based call with two people in the hot seat. So we’re able to take a look at their businesses and they’re able to bring questions about their businesses to the group and say, I’m struggling with this. What should I do? And we could go around Robin and just start getting these questions answered for everybody. A new tool we just added was a base camp discussion group where everybody has a thread, which is just about their business. After you’re in the hot seat, your homework is: okay, post the two actions you’re going to take in the next month to improve your business and check in about them. And it’s actually been a wonderful tool to add to the group. We’ve got a little Slack bot through Zappier that just. You know, post updates like, oh, Kai Davis has updated his thread about his business. And it’s wonderful to have almost a running diary or a running log of: okay, this is where my business was. This is what my focus is this month, and this is a challenge I’m running into. And you’re able to look at it, and we’ve only been doing it for about three weeks now, but I think it’s been incredibly valuable for everybody in the group just to have this running log. But if we wanted to strip it down to Minimum necessary mastermind group. I think you need a chat room. I love Slack for this. And I think you need either a weekly or an every other week phone call with the other members of your group. That’s it. That is the bare minimum you need for a mastermind group. And you could probably get by without Slack. I just really like the benefits that a Slack group brings to communication.
I don’t think you can get by without real-time chat, because emergencies happen. Remember the first six months of our Mastermind were basically just us workshopping emails for each other. And figuring out how to communicate. And there were broader takeaways, right? Like stand up for yourself, gain this confidence, don’t reply to this person if they’re being pathological or insane, you know, like stuff like that. But also, more importantly, there’s. It’s just very tactical, immediate, time-sensitive things that need to get taken care of. So Yeah, I don’t know. I think there’s definitely something to the idea of real-time chat. And it can be on Slack, it can be on IRC, it can be carrier pigeons, you can use it in mass texting, sort of do whatever you need. But figure out a way to make sure that you’re getting in front of people and having that sort of telepresence, because that’s going to be tremendously powerful for you. I’m going to add a fourth thing, which is every hopefully every year or so, we’re all going to get together and rip apart each other’s businesses in person. We went to a lakeside retreat in Michigan the other, it was like, what, a month ago now? Something? Yeah. Yeah. And took turns in the hot seat, like we were talking about with these calls, and asked some more broad things about the group and about the independent consulting manual and what to do next with that. And man, that was just so important for building those relationships. A lot of people flew in for it. It was super, super helpful. So yeah.
Yeah, and I think like the core idea of a mastermind is either virtually or physically putting yourself in the same room as other smart people. I wish there was a community or I wish I had found the community in Eugene. That would provide for a real life face-to-face mastermind because I think there’s benefits to it not being as virtual as ours is. But that said, I get so much benefit out of our mastermind that there’s no regrets about it being like, oh, you guys are in Chicago. I’m in Eugene. You’re in Sebastopol. You’re in Russia. You’re in Slovenia. That doesn’t matter. What matters is we’re able to communicate with each other and help each other overcome obstacles in our business.
Yeah, absolutely. You’re helping each other out, and that doesn’t have a time zone, man, unless it’s like. Very obviously not in your workday, like you’re still able to help each other out. So, yeah, I mean, in order to start this, I would just reach out to people, be a little bit gregarious, find between one and five other people and ask if they want to have a weekly call where you discuss a business, offer advice how to grow, and who doesn’t want to grow their business? Unless you’re already doing that with a mastermind, I think people are pretty down for it. So, you know, reach out to a couple of people. I did it on my mailing list and I just said, you know, I’m lonely. I’d like to hang out with people. And then I wasn’t lonely anymore and I hung out with people. Like you have to take it into your own hands and do it. And it can be that simple, really. Just reach out. You can reach out to individual people if you have them in mind. Keep it pretty brief. Talk a little bit about outcomes. Make it clear what’s in it for them, because it’s a business transaction. You got to make something worth it for them.
And you could start with as few as one other person. It doesn’t need to be an eight-person group. It could be two people.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, this does not have to be, I would say, a one-on-one is more like a mentoring relationship. But I think that once the instant you add another person into the mix, you get a variety of perspectives. And so then you have a mastermind on your hands. That’s it. It doesn’t take much more than just communication oriented around attempting to improve each other’s businesses. And that’s about it. You know, and it doesn’t have to be about business. I spent this morning in my mastermind group pasting a link to spam the Subi because we were talking about Spam the email. And I just wanted to talk about spam the meat for a moment, and people were chill at that. It made sense in context. I’m coming off like a lunatic, but These people become your friends after a while.
It’s not just business colleagues and business relationships. I’m honored to think of every single person in our mastermind as a personal friend. And when you cross that friendship barrier, It doesn’t matter if the t if the chat goes off topic for a bit, because it always veers back on topic. And if it’s always business time. There’s nothing to contrast that against. You need humor, you need levity, you need humanity and personality to shine through. We have one person in our group who is basically the Master GIF Wizard. And. He is a wizard at knowing the right GIF to share at any given time, and we love him for it. And that’s a huge benefit to the group because. It provides that moment of levity, that moment of jokiness, that smile that you need.
Yeah. I mean, and I’m really good at pointless digressions and snark. You know, both very important for a mastermind group. You need to have the right mix of talents and the right mix of people that are actually willing to help out. It’s not just in skill sets, but also in your personalities and like who you are. We spend a lot of time on a podcast called Make Money Online talking about how you should not spend all of your time making money online, but like Show your humanity a little and really who you are as a person. Because, what are you? Are you just a robot that makes money? It’s pretty boring. You know, you’ve got interests. I hope.
Yeah, and those interests should be shared and communicated to the group. I think the moments that have been most interesting for me as a member of the mastermind have been when Somebody shares, like, oh, this is a hobby I have, or this is an interest I have, or this is a thing that I do. And it might be something that I completely hate and have no interest in, but it’s interesting to me because it’s interesting to them. And it’s those moments of personality and humanity and vulnerability and sharing that are the most exciting. And I think where a group grows to the next level. And so. For the listener who’s considering starting a mastermind, finding those opportunities to be open and authentic, vulnerable, and real with the group and be like, well, hey, this is a personal thing I’m struggling with. It doesn’t just have to be business things, it could very much be. Personal things. I know that I’ve brought personal issues to the group, other people have brought personal issues to the group, and the group has been supportive and said, Well, hey. How could we support you in this? How could we offer feedback? What sort of love and affection or support do you need in this moment? And it’s been incredible to have that as a resource.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so I feel like that’s almost like a level up in there, right? Like that’s when you’re able to venture personal stuff and have it land okay and have them able to help you, like. Then you’ve got people for life. You know, it’s very helpful. But, like, what happens if you start one and it’s not going like you intended?
I’ve been a member of, let me think here, over the last year and a half, I’ve been a member of seven mastermind groups. Five of them fizzled out and two are still in existence. One of those is sort of like in a half-life right now where it’s just us chatting with each other and no calls. But what I’ve discovered is if you start a mastermind or you join a mastermind and it’s not going well or it doesn’t feel like a right fit. You can end it, start a new one. Like, figure out the one person in there who you have a good bond with and fork off a new mastermind. There’s nothing preventing, there’s no You know, upper limit on like you only get two masterminds in your life, dear listener. Better pick them wisely. You’re able to start and create these things as you like. Mastermind Jam is a wonderful service for pairing you with a group of people if you want to try a new mastermind. If you join a mastermind and it sucks, kill the mastermind and be okay with being open and upfront. I brought it to the table for one of my masterminds. Hey. I feel like we’re all going in different directions here. You guys are doing the SaaS thing, you’re looking for a day job, and I’m doing the consulting thing and want to bridge to the product thing. I’m not sure if we’re all getting the most value out of this. And everybody was like, you’re right. I wasn’t able to put voice to it, but you’re absolutely right. And we decided right then and there to just end the mastermind. And a number of personal relationships continued on out of that mastermind. But being able to say, well, hey, this isn’t working the way I expected it to. I’m going to leave, or this isn’t working the way we expected it to. Let’s revisit the base principles we started the mastermind on and make sure we’re all in alignment here. That’s a really valuable exercise. If a mastermind doesn’t work out, it’s not a personal failure on any member of the group. It’s just because you mix the wrong ingredients together. If you accidentally put some tomato sauce when you’re making a cake, Well, the cake’s going to taste crappy, so maybe you shouldn’t have mixed that in there. Why am I going down a cooking metaphor? I don’t know, but think about the ingredients of your mastermind. Think about Who you have in there, and if the mastermind isn’t working right, if it isn’t gelling right, if it isn’t turning into the right thing for you, okay, be authentic, be honest, say, like, this doesn’t feel right. What do we need to change? Is anybody else feeling this or is it just me? And see if you’re able to either pivot the mastermind or if it’s better to dissolve the mastermind and create something new.
You know how you hear about bands and they break up, and then, like a couple months later, they reform, but without the lead singer, and they get a different lead singer or different drummer. Just do that. I’m not kidding. I mean, there’s no reason you can’t torture mastermind and go off and make a new mastermind without maybe there’s a toxic element at play or a significant conflict or. somebody’s not working out, throw them out. I mean, if you’re running this, you need to be mediating conflict a little bit. You need to be doing a little bit of emotional labor to make sure that people feel welcome and comfortable. And that’s That’s work. It’s not easy to be doing this, but it’s very, very rewarding. And I think, you know, by the time any sort of conflicts arise, hopefully you’ve gotten a little bit of value out of it. So there’s an incentive to keep it going, right? Communities are fragile, but you can it’s easy to identify where things are going wrong and Make sure that you’re doing what you can to address them. You just have to do what you can to address them.
And I think that’s one interesting element of our mastermind that we should chat about for a bit: how we sort of. Built-in administrative board. Want to dive? Should we dive into that for a second?
Yeah, I was talking about the admins.
Yeah, so our mastermind is a bit on the larger side. I think we have 13-ish. 14 now. 14 members now, 14 members, which is definitely on the upper bound of what I’d recommend. Like, there’s a pivot point where it suddenly becomes a community and not a mastermind. And I think that’s right around 15-ish members. So we’re very intentional about limiting how we grow. But to make sure decisions were being made and people were thinking about sort of that meta-level health of the group, we said, okay, we need administrators. That raised the question of, well, how do we elect administrators? So we went to the group and said, like, we’re having an election, and the election is to decide on how we On the format we’re going to use to pick administrators. And we voted and we were like, do we want it to be 100% of people need to agree or a majority needs to agree or something else? And We reached a decision on that, and then we’re like, okay, cool. We’ve decided that we’re going to have three administrators and we’re going to rotate them in this fashion. Okay, everybody put their name into the hat and we’re going to vote on it. And we just used a woofoo form for people to vote. We pick some administrators, and the administrators are tasked with monitoring the overall health of the group, thinking about new people who would be good additions to the group. And thinking about sort of the far-reaching future of the group. What should this group look like in six months, 12 months, 18 months? What do we need to be putting in place now? To achieve that down the line. And also, the administrators are there to mediate conflict. If there is any conflict between members or a member in the group overall, to just be there as A non-confrontational party to say, like, hey, you’re feeling something right now. What are you feeling? Express that to us. Let’s help make sure we figure out what’s going on and how we can make sure you’re happy. And Having administrators in the group, I think, has been a big boon to the group and something that I haven’t seen in other masterminds. I use the word administrator here, but I think a better word for it is bottom liners, people who are tasked with. Making sure the group is stable and supported and can get to that next level.
Ombudsman, public editors.
Yeah.
Yeah. I don’t like. You know, wielding an iron hand when I’m when I’m managing anything. I like Constraining the problem a little bit and then getting out of your way. And the same thing happens as an admin, right? So sometimes we might come to consensus as admins that we don’t know how to solve a problem. All right, time to bring it out to the group. And every time we do that, people are grateful that we’re thinking about this stuff. And we just hoover up a lot more information and usually have a clear sense of what to do next. We take it back to us and then we figure it out. And then we act. It’s important to measure twice, cut once with most things in life, but especially this sort of stuff. Because you’re messing with people’s squishy emotions, and that’s never easy.
Yeah, to jump on the community point again. You might not realize it. And I don’t think I realized it when we started out, but creating a mastermind is creating a community. And creating a community is a hard thing. Making sure members are engaged, making sure people know what to discuss, making sure there’s agendas, making sure that. People are able to take things and bring them to the group, and it doesn’t feel like homework assignments assigned from up high. And Alex Hillman, I mean, writes so much about this and thinks so much about this. And I just point people towards His writing about co-working spaces and communities for a super, super, super in-depth primer on the things you could think about when intentionally creating a community space. We’ve definitely adapted some of those lessons to our group or methods of thinking to our group as we’ve grown forward, because we didn’t know what to expect as we grew. When we started, I think we had. Nine members, and we’ve slowly added people over time, and now we’re up to 14. And it’s been healthy and great additions at each point. But it took a lot of thought. I think the first time we added a new member to our group, it was four months of discussion before we even approached the person we were thinking of adding. To say, would you be interested in this thing? And it was very, very, very deliberate on our part because we knew the tone and tenor of a community is set by the members, and to add a new member changes that tone. So, how do we make sure the group is prepared? How do we make sure the new member is prepared? And how do we make sure that union makes sense?
Yeah. Yeah, I like that. What are we missing as far as all of this?
I think starting points. For somebody who’s listening, we talked about it a bit, but just echoing it could be helpful. For somebody who’s listening and saying, I want this mastermind thing, I want it all over my face right now. What do I do? What would you say?
Reach out to people. And you don’t know whether or not they’re in mastermind. Tell them, I do this. I’m looking for a group of business owners that do this. And I’m hoping that insert outcome here. Would you be interested? I’d be happy to get on a call and discuss further with you. You just found your co-founders. Congratulations.
Yeah, I talk about this a bunch in my writing on outreach: that you need to make any outreach you do, any outbound communication you do. You focused, not I focused. You want to talk to the people, or talk about the benefits to the people You’re emailing and communicating with. You don’t want to say, Hey, I’m starting a mastermind so I can help my business grow. Do you want to help? That’s a non-starter. People will archive that email faster than you could believe. If you say, Hey, I’m thinking about creating a mastermind so we could overcome these things, so we could experience these benefits, so you could experience these benefits. That’s going to start. That’s going to be a thing where people will say, oh, hell yeah, that sounds like something I’d love. Tell me more. So, it’s very important to think about what the outcomes are for every member in the group who is not you, and how you pitch it and frame it and phrase it to focus on those outcomes for people that are not you. Because if you start from a point of I want to grow my business, so come and be my personal business counsel. People aren’t really going to dig that.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You need to make it about them. People, the first thing they’re going to think is what’s in it for me. You think this all the time too with your emails. You can’t assume that because you’re reaching out. You’re not Moses with the tablets, right? Like, you’re there to build a consensus and make sure they feel heard. So, do that. You’re serving them at that point. But I assure you, you’ll get a lot out of it. You have to stay focused on them.
Yeah, and as long as your underlying intention is, how do I help contribute to the growth of this group and the growth of the business of every other person in the group? You have the right direction with your thinking there. Yeah, then they’re going to help you.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
But yeah, one of the most valuable things for my personal life and my business in the last 10 years. I mean, I think I’ve received more business value out of our mastermind than I did out of my undergraduate degree. And I’m excited to see where it goes next and what it comes to. And I think the most valuable thing for me is realizing that even if I torched my business as it stands today, Well, the mastermind will be there to help me figure out: like, well, what comes next? What’s the next evolution of my business? Because the current expression of my business is just one. Shape and formic take, there’s a million shapes and forms. And I have a war council of people who could offer advice on, like, well, hey, Here’s another thing you could tackle, or here’s another way you could approach this, or here’s another expensive problem you could solve. And that is an incredibly valuable resource. That is one of the most valuable resources in my business today.
Yeah. I mean, I want nothing more than for my colleagues to succeed in my mastermind. And I’ll do anything, you know? Like and I think they’re willing to say the same thing for me and to have that mutual back and forth that doesn’t come easy. And it’s a practice. It’s something you continually work at. But God, it’s so rewarding. It’s so, so good for us. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything, man.
Same.