Let’s Do a Mastermind

And now with software, it is finally possible. And by the way, it's finally possible in the last like 2, 3 months to set these expectations, let people, again, anywhere, raise their hand and say, I wanna be a part of one of these small groups. Have someone in that cluster of people raise their hand and say, I wanna organize one of these small groups. And for software to be able to— capture custom questions and the answers to custom questions and automate. If people answer a question this way, then put them in this group. So now software is actually ready to be able to help you scale a network of small groups. And by the way, I did this manually, like with all of the other not sophisticated software that exists out there before we had built Mighty Networks. And today, 10 years plus later, There are still 27,000 of these small groups that are meeting once a month all over the world. Woo! Hey, I'm Gina Bianchini and this is People Magic, where we talk about how to create a $1 million community and build a business that you can be super proud of. Hi Gina, I wanna create a small group experience for my hundreds of members after attending some amazing masterminds this year. How would you recommend doing this? I love this question. So first of all, if you don't know what a mastermind is, it's an in-person or a virtual small group between, call it, 8 and 12 people who come together to help each other realize their goals. And specifically, the power of masterminds is in the curation of who is in those groups, typically finding people who are similar in stage Stage of life, stage of business, stage and types of challenges that they are navigating, but also chemistry and the ability to bring people together and create a culture amongst 8 to 12 people that really sort of sets the foundation for, we are here to help each other realize our hopes, our dreams, navigate our fears and misconceptions. ultimately achieving results and transformation that none of us can get on our own. And the kind of OG of masterminds is an organization called Young Presidents Organization, or YPO. And they have these 8 to 12 person forums that are all about bringing business owners together of like $10 million plus in revenue and value. And so the core dynamics of a Mastermind. And again, they can be run in many different ways. So if you've done a mastermind and you're like, Gina, that's not right, I'm giving my impression and, and my best definition of the, the value of masterminds, uh, and, and how they work. And so deep dive problem solving for each person. So you can describe it as a hot seat or a like pain point or whatever that might be, but it's a person being able to share openly and confidentially. Mm-hmm. what they are navigating or what they want help solving, and then the rest of the group is there to brainstorm. Ground rules tend to be it's not about advice, but it's about sharing stories, experiences, and ideas. Not a total surprise that I continue to talk about that as being what opens up trust and relationships in a community, whereas advice tends to shut it down. So really an incredibly powerful community in helping people achieve— it can be business results, it can also be around health and wellness. Obviously, you have incredible examples of small groups around health and wellness topics, from Alcoholics Anonymous to Weight Watchers and so many others, and more modern versions as well, many of which we host on Mighty Networks. And then there are All sorts of other categories, parents groups, uh, and small groups. Any interest or passion or goal has elements of this small group dynamic or this mastermind. So one of the things that I think is so fascinating is that masterminds are an investment. You kind of have to be somewhat enlightened to do a mastermind, both in terms of being able to ask people for help as well as for listening for perspective from others. And also being somewhat nuanced in being able to offer people stories, experiences, and ideas in the context of something that somebody is sharing vulnerably, and in the context of really having the intention of helping that person realize their hopes, their dreams, results and transformation in their lives. That's the context of a mastermind. Now, here's what's really interesting. I spend a lot of my time thinking about how do we use software to offer this kind of small group experience to lots of people all around the country and all around the world who aren't necessarily going to fly somewhere and pay Thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for this kind of mastermind experience. And this is an area that I've experimented in for actually over a decade now, helping different people figure out how do we use software plus culture plus PDFs and courses and live streaming to really be able to create these conditions. Here's what I know to be true. Anybody Anywhere in the country and anywhere in the world can be a part of, can be a part of a small group with clear intention, very clear culture. And I'm not gonna call them ground rules, but let me call them a set of agreements around why we are here, what we are doing together, and what is the most effective way of getting there. So an agreement around confidentiality, an agreement around sharing stories, experiences, and ideas, not advice. Yeah. Agreement around, here's the structure of how we're gonna spend our once-a-month time together. One person or 2 people are going to share, and then we're gonna spend X amount of time offering perspective, offering our stories, offering, you know, ideas that we have that they may or may not accept or take advantage of. And now with software, it is finally possible And by the way, it's finally possible in the last, like, 2, 3 months to set these expectations, let people, again, anywhere, raise their hand and say, I wanna be a part of one of these small groups. Have someone in that cluster of people raise their hand and say, I wanna organize one of these small groups. And for software to be able to— Capture custom questions and the answers to custom questions and automate. If people answer a question this way, then put them in this group. So now software is actually ready to be able to help you scale a network of small groups. And by the way, I did this manually, like with all of the other not sophisticated software that exists out there before we had built Mighty Networks. And today, 10 years plus, Later, there are still 27,000 of these small groups that are meeting once a month all over the world. So now what we have is the ability for somebody who is like, oh gosh, I don't want to— there's not a huge team. I don't want to do that work. But if you have an idea for a community and you think that helping people build small groups is something that would be really valuable to them, you can do it by location. So now imagine in your community, not only could you have local meetups that are more casual. You could also help people organize small groups that are more intentional or more intensive. That is now all possible again, because you can have custom questions that you can ask people, and then you can automate the ability of connecting them to each other because you can basically set it up of like, if they answer this question this way, put them in this space in my community. in my membership, across my courses. And all that you now need to do is to just make sure you offer the context, the intention, the guidelines to how that small group needs to run, or even better, how that small group could run and how the most effective small groups tend to run that deliver the most people results and transformation. And so if you've got a few hundred members, You have their location so that they can find each other, at least on, on, on Mighty. I know that's a little bit different than other platforms, but this idea that you don't have to do a lot of work to meet people who are near you, and then also this ability to automate the creation of a space with the materials in it that would be for those meetings. For that mastermind, it's now super possible to do. Now, questions that I think are really important as you think about this. Number one is, what about curation? What if there's not the right chemistry amongst this small group of 8 to 12 people? Or typically, if you're gonna do a, an, a digital group, you wanna have about 12 to 20 because people do tend to fall out or they can't make the meeting or it's a different time zone. But As you think about this, you can now put them in spaces with everything that they would need to run a small group. And so if you wanna scale that to hundreds of people without that curation, you can absolutely do that. Think about it as if your main community is TED, this would be almost a TEDx model for small accountability groups or small masterminds. The other thing that's really cool about this Now that this is possible with custom fields and automations, if they answer a question this way, put them in this space, is that everyone is going to learn what is the most effective way to help people who are members of the community on the same path achieve results and transformation they can't get on their own. And that is really, really powerful. So I fundamentally believe Everyone, everyone who has intention of accomplishing their goals can benefit from a mastermind. It does require them to make new agreements. It does require them to show up. It does require them to abide by confidentiality and sharing stories, experiences, and ideas, not advice. But you can offer this to people now, and you can offer it as an additional Price, because again, people pay attention to what they pay for. You can offer this as an additional package or plan because people pay attention to what they pay for. You can also offer it as something unique that you do in your community to really stand out. So especially if you're doing, hey, we'll actually introduce you to people who are near you so that you can have in-person masterminds. That's a really powerful option and something that I think we're just at the beginning stages of being able to scale so efficiently and effectively with proper curation. Curation's gonna actually get better and better because of the things that we're building at Mighty Networks, at least with AI, so that we have that feedback loop of that curation can be done in partnership with people magics. Software. And so I think you're at a point where if you are intrigued by experimenting with scaling small groups, there's enough there that is only going to get better that I would absolutely encourage you to spend a little bit of time with and really just think about what were the best parts of the in-person mastermind that you did and how you would love to translate that or could translate that to people self-organizing within your community, across geography, and across different interests or transitions that your members are navigating. So hopefully that's helpful. It is all possible, and more than possible, it is becoming radically easier and more simple to do. And it is so valuable. It's so valuable to create these kinds of deeper, more meaningful connections, and ones that build real relationships between people. And to be able to do that at scale in a way that more people have access to it, there's something really special about that opportunity specifically. So thank you for asking me about it. I hope this has been helpful. I'm Gina Bianchini, and this is People Magic. Woo! Thank you for being a part of People Magic. I could not do this show without you. If you want a deeper dive on any of these topics, how to build a community, run a membership, choose your pricing, I have a 9-part free People Magic Masterclass on our website and the link is in the show notes. This is something that I'm so grateful to have the opportunity to share with you. So hopefully you'll find it valuable. And I can't do this show without some burning questions. So everything that I tackle is something someone just like you has offered their idea or offered their question. We take it and turn it into a show. So in the show notes, there is the link to leave me a voice memo, and I hope you'll take advantage of it.