Eric Siu explains what makes a mastermind group worth your time and money. He contrasts quality groups like EO and YPO with low-quality ones that waste both, and emphasizes that member quality and long-term relationships matter most. He also mentions his own invite-only group, Leveling Up Founders, capped at 100 members.
Masterminds get a bad rap, so I just wanted to share some of my experiences. First, let's define what a mastermind is. So mastermind is really getting a group of like-minded people together to share knowledge, to share experiences, and then these people will bond. And the goal is for these people to help each other out, become lifelong friends, because when you become lifelong friends, you're building a relationship and it's not a one-off transaction. I've been in a lot of different masterminds or peer groups, whatever you want to call them, so I wanted to share some good experiences first and also some bad experiences as well. So one is being a part of YPO or being a part of EO. These are entrepreneurial networks that are actually global worldwide, and they both have different requirements to get in from a revenue standpoint and employee count standpoint. You know, joining EO when I was maybe 26, 27 years old or so, that was game-changing for me because from a business standpoint, I didn't know what I didn't know. In EO, Entrepreneurs Organization, you join what is known as a forum. Forum had about 10 of us maybe. You know, one person had a SaaS business, the other person had like a video production agency. Other person had like finance background and other guy was like a wealth manager. So it was like a very diverse group of people. You know, I learned from one of the guys in the group when I had no idea what was going on with my business. He said, hey, you have to manage your cash flows. And this is the document that I use. It's Master Cash Flow Forecast. And, you know, we became very close. And so this group, you know, we would meet once a month and that meeting would probably go from about 3 p.m. till 10 p.m. or so. So about a 7-hour meeting. You know, we also grabbed dinner during that time as well. And you learn updates from everyone. You learn kind of what's going well, what isn't. And then one person will do a presentation. Talking about issues that they're facing. People will share stories, and so we really got close doing that. But point is, there's just a lot of amazing things that can happen. You meet a lot of amazing people doing amazing things as well. You get introduced because like-minded people—they tend to know other like-minded people—and they want to also connect the dots. They want to meet people of value because business is really just adding value to the world. Sure, you get to reap the rewards from that, but first you have to add value to other people, and then you'll get what you want. Now, on the other side, I've been in masterminds before where there wasn't a lot of filtering for these groups. Right? And so they would really just accept anyone that would pay the fee, and they started to let too many people in, right? You know, a lot of people in the masterminds, they were more focused on making money than they were on adding value. And that was kind of the premise of it. It was just like, how do I make more money by any means necessary? You can just feel that it feels a little off, right? It's hard to describe this gut feeling, but that's the gut feeling I had. And so those masterminds weren't a fit for me because I like to hang out with people that are long-term minded versus people that are just in it for the cash grab. And you can tell that they just don't really care about you versus people that are actually interested in what you do, and then you are interested in them and you just want to help each other out because you know that they genuinely care about you. From that standpoint, that's why masterminds get a bad rap because of kind of the ones that I've talked about. I'm fine paying the money, but at the end of the day, there has to be the value, right? And really what a good mastermind is, is it's the quality of the people. And so TED, I would say, is like another example of like a community, like a mastermind is kind of a community, right? And so TED, the conference, has a lot of people in the community. A lot of people go. You can pay for a regular ticket, you can pay for a donor ticket. Donor ticket gives you more access to people. Every time I've gone to TED, I've met amazing people. I've met movie stars, I've met hedge fund people that are well known, right? I've met great entrepreneurs, people that I look up to. You know, you can build a deeper connection because everyone that's going to TED is there to learn. They're not trying to necessarily do business with one another. There's nothing wrong with that, but they're there to learn first and foremost, and they're there to kind of connect with like-minded people. Now, speaking of that, we decided to create our own founders-only mastermind. So it's a private invite-only group and it's capped at 100 people and it's called Leveling Up Founders. And we did our event in Beverly Hills recently and the rating was 9.7 out of 10. And we just asked people like, what did you like the most out of the event? And everyone said by far it's the people. Sure, we had amazing speakers, but it's really about the people at the end of the day. And we did, you know, different activities and things like that. wanted to create a lot of ample room for networking because I've been to so many of these events. I just wanted to combine all the elements I like and added my flair. And that's what the Leveling Up Founders Community is all about. And by the way, if you're interested in learning more about that, you can just go to levelingup.com/founders. Final thing I'll say is this: if you actually want to see a clip of Alex Hormozi speaking at our mastermind, you can go over here and you can learn his philosophies. You can learn how he thinks about business, marketing, how he's built his brand up and really catapulted it. So check out that video over there. We'll see you in that one. And yeah, have a good rest of your day.
