Have you ever led a seminar or sold from the stage? You might know the calculations you need to turn a profit. Let’s say you need twenty people to buy … that means you probably need 150 to show up, which means you need to invite 500, and so on. The pathway to profit is usually reverse-engineered.
We had our very first webinar for The Mastermind Playbook last month, and we had a great turnout. The numbers were right around what I just described - 25 percent of the registrants showed up, and 20 percent of those who attended, invested. I don’t like to reduce people to numbers, but numbers are useful when you’re trying to make projections or reasonable predictions about people.
In fact, that’s what I want to share with you today. Numbers are extremely useful when it comes to anticipating the power of online mastermind groups. In this blog, I want to talk about a general principle they bring that changes the game - not only for you, but also for the members of your master mind group. This is what I call the “Four Things Masterminds Change” - which are speed, knowledge, accountability and relationships.
Speed
Recently, one of the men in our mastermind groups approached me to say he’d thought about starting a separate group to accelerate his income. His business hadn’t been heavily affected by the coronavirus scare, but he felt like it just wasn’t gathering enough momentum. It was an opportunity to put my business coach hat back on for a moment and help him problem-solve.
What we discovered together was that he actually had a lot of ground to cover, strictly within the Iron Sharpens Iron community. Ours is not a business mastermind, and we don’t turn it into a “pitch-fest.” But you can’t escape the intellectual reality that bringing 150 like-minded entrepreneurs together will result in some of them finding ways to do business together.
When I recalled the pace at which we’ve built ISI, that whole reality of the “numbers game” came back into view. I literally spend time every day sending texts, e-mails, video messages, endorsements or handwritten notes to people. All this young man had to do was his own version of that - which was a subject he knew very well.
So one key “selling point” of a mastermind is you find the solutions to your problems faster. In many cases, you’ll also find buyers for your services, with greater speed. If it doesn’t come directly from the members themselves, it’ll come from them recommending and referring you. Money loves speed, wouldn’t you agree? This is why it seems to flow “quickly” to the wealthy, while taking an eternity to get into the hands of the poor.
Knowledge
I hate to beat a dead horse in writing, but if there were a way for human beings to know everything they need to know, somebody would have figured it out by now. If you believe like I do, you understand this world is designed to encourage us to lean on one another’s strengths. If you think you’re a self-sustaining island, I’d ask you to prove it - produce and maintain your own food, potable water, electricity, internet access, livable shelter and indoor plumbing without help from anyone.
Most people understand the analogy, however. They’re happy to be part of a paid professional alliance that can fill in a lot of empty categories for them. It’s great to see entrepreneurs in the early stages of their business connecting with older, more experienced ones. There’s something timeless and wonderful about the father-son, master-apprentice relationships that form within our mastermind groups online. As Robert Bly wrote in the book Iron John, it’s as if “an essence passed from the older to the younger.”
Accountability
Both church and society took a turn for the worse in promoting the concept of accountability. We tried to make it into “organized groups,” like some kind of engineered “program” for people. Authenticity, transparency and vulnerability are three of our top values in ISI, but we don’t force them; we let men’s conduct speak for itself. Usually, if a man is afraid to bear his soul in front of other men who care about him, he’s simply not a fit (or not yet a fit). We’ve had to ask some people to leave ISI throughout the years, because they couldn’t swallow their pride. And others have left on their own for the same reason.
The problem with accountability is that people think it’s like surrendering to the police and turning yourself in to be judged, tried, convicted and imprisoned or executed. But we discovered that so long as we maintain an attitude of love, compassion and non-judgment, our men can find their way forward when they’ve made bad decisions. Don’t get me wrong - we tell the truth in our groups! But we don’t beat each other to death with it. We’re more likely to provide examples and stories from our own lives that mirror the thoughts or actions of the man in the middle. That often helps him to see how he’s getting off-track.
That’s all accountability should ever be - truth and love. I think the difference between us and church or other accountability groups is the solid rock of a shared mission where our members pay to be part of it. Many ministers will tell you, eighty percent of church tithes and offerings are usually paid by 20 percent of the flock. Not so in ISI; every man has skin in the game. As the saying goes, “People who pay, pay attention.”
Relationships
I used to think I was beating a dead horse to talk about relationships in mastermind groups. Now, I don’t think twice about it, especially in the age of coronavirus. Weren’t people already feeling isolated, lonely, anxious and depressed before we all got stuck in our homes? How do you think they feel now?
The funny thing is, no matter how many times I or anyone else talks about relationships, people often choose to remain isolated. You might not be a desert hermit, but you might have big chunks of your life “sealed off” and inaccessible. Do you get complaints from your wife about how the two of you “never talk”? Are your kids always fighting for your attention? Is your smartphone an unhealthy priority? Does your community and church get value by having you among them?
This is why you should begin to live in community, and an online mastermind group is a great place to start. Unlike your hometown, an online group ensures greater privacy, because most of your fellow members are likely to come from a geographic distance. We have men from across the USA, Canada, Europe, Australia and the Philippines in ISI.
You can start, grow and scale your own version of this. I strongly recommend you do it using a turn-key product like The Mastermind Playbook to help you identify areas where you’re strong as well as areas where you need help. Good news - we’ve thought of all of them ahead of time!