Episode 072 - How A Mastermind Can Change Your Business

Mastermind. I'm sure you've heard this word in your business travels. Maybe you know somebody who says, hey, you know, I'm in this mastermind, or you've been invited to one. But what does that really mean? What can you get out of attending a mastermind? Or can you even look at the skills that you have developed over the years as a successful entrepreneur, and could you develop your own mastermind to help benefit others and also bring in some extra revenue? These are all great questions. These are questions that we're going to answer in today's episode. I had a great conversation with Liz Scully. I would say she is a mastermind of masterminds. We covered a lot of things. She also thinks that I need to develop my own mastermind. So let's get into the episode. And let's hear from Liz Scully. Liz, thank you so much for joining me here on the Content Amplification Podcast. I'm excited about the topic that we're going to talk about today. You're probably going to talk most about it. It's about masterminds. But before we get into that, in reading through your intake form, you know, you pointed out that growing a business is hard and our audience is small business owners who know that struggle day in and day out. I just want to get your take on what things have been like for your clients over the last year to 2 years with this pandemic and trying to run a business. Now, what have you seen?

Well, I mean, it's always, it's always difficult to run a business. I always get a little bit irked by those bro-preneur, you know, you can do it in a weekend, write a book overnight, you'll be like that. It's just not like that. You have to work hard. And I think as you, as you grow your business, every personal development thing you could possibly have. It's like years of psychotherapy all together at the same time. So all of that is always going on. You're always facing stuff. You're always hitting plateaus and moving through it. But the pandemic, for most of my people, the first 3, maybe 6 months, their clients just froze. They just— like, most of my people are coaches or service providers, copywriters, designers. And to begin with, everyone just— let's just see what happens, which means no money was spent, no calls were made. Everyone just stopped. And a lot of my people also are looking after their families, or they're looking after an elderly relative, Or many of them worked from home and always have. And suddenly their partners and their family are using their Wi-Fi during the afternoon. Suddenly they've had complete access to that their whole lives. And suddenly, suddenly their partners at the other end of the dining table using up their bandwidth. So they had less time. And also on social media, there was all this, hey, learn to make banana bread. Let's take up soda bread. What the hell? This is not the world I've got. I've got less clients, I've got less time, I've got less bandwidth. So initially everybody just froze, but gradually it's kind of opened up a bit. And certainly within the last few months, I've seen in my own business, but also in my clients' businesses, that people are ready to spend again because we can't stay in stasis forever. Is that what you're seeing?

Absolutely, absolutely. I think people are just, they're kind of over it and they're ready to get going. And, you know, we're seeing more people going out, you know, they're not as scared to step outside the home. Kind of like, like, let's just get back to business. And so that's what we're going to talk about is how do you actually, how do you grow that business using the ability to to, you know, gather in masterminds. I'm sure you can probably do it digitally, and you probably talk about that, but my understanding of masterminds is, you know, you get together, you know, on a scheduled basis in a big room or group, and you work on your business together. That's my understanding. And am I correct?

Well, kind of. The problem with masterminds— not that there's much of a problem, but it's the word mastermind. There's many things called mastermind that I would fight you to the death and say aren't masterminds, but there's also, as with coaching, there's many different sorts of it. So the sort of masterminds that I particularly advocate are small group masterminds. So 4 to 6 people in a room, not those big kind of go away for a weekend kind where you deep dive and there's 100 people in a room. They're great. That's a different sort. Now, I've, I've run masterminds in person, but I've been nomadic pre-pandemic. I've been nomadic for about a decade. So all of my masterminds are online, and I am certain that you can get wonderful results and really make people happy and not have to be in the same room. It is very possible, and that's part of why a small group is really helpful. So 4 to 6 people, like an intimate dinner party that meets every couple of weeks. And one of the things that really works for masterminds is that you meet regularly, you make a plan, you hit the goal. And that's the key. By the next time we meet, you will have done your goals. And no one wants to be the person that said they were going to do it and didn't. So it's really effective. I don't want to use the word shame, but, you know, whatever works, right? So there's accountability, but it's also just having a little community of people that are really there for you.

That's great. Now, you mentioned about meeting 4 to 6 people, meaning to achieve your goals. Is everyone working on the same goal? Is it structured where you work on the same part of the business, or are people coming in and working on different things at different times? How does it work?

You can set it up any way you like, but I think it works best if— so I'm a business strategist, and the The only way I really work with people is within masterminds because it's such an effective structure. So each of my clients, we set a strategy for the year because my, my masterminds are now a year long. We set that strategy for the year, which has goals that are 2 to 3 years out. And then we work through those as we go. Now, the real key is that the curation of the group are people that have similar goals, not, not the same, but you can absolutely run a mastermind if you wanted to on, we're going to fix all the copy on your website, we're going to have a mastermind where everyone's working on their marketing. But the sort that I run most often are those kind of business growth ones. And of course, the area that you're growing might be different. You might be working on a new training or a new piece of marketing. And there is something so helpful to have people with similar kinds of business moving at a similar kind of speed. And even if they are not working on the same stuff, to be able to look across the mastermind and see someone else doing something and think, oh yeah, this stuff is tough. Oh yeah, I remember.

Yeah. And from my understanding, like when you had physical masterminds in, you know, say a local mastermind, you tend to try at least I think, not have your competition in the room, right? You don't have like—

yes, you can. But on the other hand, as long as, as long as people aren't in direct competition, you could do that. So say you wanted to run a mastermind of all dentists. I'm not quite sure why you might want to, but should, should you, should you be lord of strategy for dentists, then you could absolutely run it. And you could do it in different ways. You could have people that were doing reconstructive dentistry and people that were doing cosmetic stuff, people that were doing kind of day-to-day stuff. They've all got similar ideas, but they're not in direct competition, but they still have overall dental issues. Now, my people tend to be mostly coaches, as I said, mostly service people. So they've got similar, very similar ends. When I ran them in person, which was— well, I last did that was ages ago. I used to live in India, so it was probably in Bangalore that I last ran them. It was often people that had physical bricks and mortar businesses which are quite different. As you know, service business is different to if you've actually got all the overheads of an office and product and that side of things. So I would keep those people separate. But it's similarity to the type of business is helpful. You can run them all the same, but as you say, it works really well if everyone's doing slightly different but vaguely similar things.

Now, you had asked me before we started, did I, did I have a mastermind? Now, from just hearing you talk, you have masterminds, so you obviously lead the mastermind, right?

I do. I do. Though, to be fair, I am kind of a mastermind addict. I'm not only— I not only teach people how to run them, I not only proselytize about it, not only run them, but I am in them as well. And that's because they work. They— I'm absolutely certain the reason my business grew very quickly was because I was in a mastermind and And because that was going well and I began to run them very quickly, I could see the benefit. They're so good. But you said you have never been to a mastermind, right?

Not in the sense of what a mastermind truly is. And I think if you're listening to this, you may think, well, I've been to one, but I think you might be confused with that as like a networking group that meets every month and they're just talking about topics and they're not really doing what a true mastermind would be.

Exactly. There are, frankly, just a lot of— let's be polite— not fabulous masterminds. And there are a lot of things that are called masterminds that aren't. So you need that longevity to really get the good results, because it's not often in the coaching world that people are with you for many, many months. They might be there 3 months, maybe 6 months, but My people stay in masterminds year on year on year so that people there have an insight into how you work and what happens. And I know that in my own business, I remember there was a period where I was, I was really flatlining in my energy levels. I wasn't really hitting goals, which is kind of embarrassing because that's kind of my job. And I remember saying to the people in my mastermind, you know, if I was a client, I would worry that the goals weren't right, that I wasn't hitting the right stuff. And one of them just went, have you just thought about the fact you might be tired? You always get tired in April. Oh, yeah, no, you're right. I do. You just can't read the label inside the jar.

So what, what makes a mastermind great?

So curation is the key. Well, there's 3 things. Obviously, it needs to be facilitated well, it needs to have someone who knows what they're doing with that. I think having a really great structure helps. Most, most masterminds, many, let's be fair, let's be generous, many masterminds, the people who start running them, they see that you can make a great income from them, or it's an extra, really nice extra thread. They plan to run them, but they don't actually know how. And so having a really great structure, having wonderful curation, so you've got the right people in the room. This is like, this is like any great party. So you've got to, yeah, you've got to have the right space. You've got to have someone who's handing out the right hors d'oeuvres and that feeling of really good coaching. Because of course, when, when you get curation right, you don't notice who isn't in the room. You just think, oh, this is really good. And then when people have come together, the right people in the right space, and they're being sort of gently managed in the right way. Coaching, the curation, the facilitation, it all comes together. And it just feels really natural. A badly run mastermind just feels like a really terrible union meeting. Just, you know, it's not well run, people ramble on. Because that's the other thing, if you're running a mastermind, you are going to have to interrupt people sometimes. And that's not always, but particularly not if they're kind of weeping about some appalling thing in their business. You've got to learn how to go from, well, that's terrible. And now over to Dave, and he's just won an award. I mean, you've got to manage those emotions. And I think that's the key. You can have a great plan, but if you don't know how to manage the community and that building, the culture within that space, You're going to end up with just a pretty awkward party, really.

Now, what's the difference when you take it online? Obviously, you're not in the same room, right? It's not the atmosphere, that type of stuff. What are the dynamic changes with that?

So in person, you could have slightly more people because obviously people can see more of your body. So you can be a little bit more aware of who's leaning in, who's interested. Who's quietly tuning out. When you do that online, you have to be much more aware of that stuff. We've all seen it. When you're looking at someone and you're thinking, you're looking at your phone, they're on Zoom and you're like, I can see your eyeline. You are reading email, man. That is not acceptable. And on Zoom, you have to be in a position where you can say, can I just get your attention? You have to be, you have to be brave enough to be able to just jump in and ask that stuff. But the real key is slightly less people. I would, I would, like I said, I would meet with 8 people in an in-person mastermind. Make it easy on yourself online. 4 to 6 people makes it so much easier because also you can really concentrate that way. And yeah, there's just lots of little tips Like, like online. So this is a— we've probably mostly all worked this out, but online you really want at least one of your hands visible when you're running, because as mammals we feel better when we know where someone's hands are.

Interesting. I've never heard anyone say that.

Just think about it. Like, excuse me, you can see me, right? Both hands, kind of, you know, fair enough. One hand, Okay, no hands. What's she doing?

Right.

It's the reason we shake hands, just to show that we are safe. So just lots of little tiny things like that. And you also have to be aware of what your face is doing. Well, you want to have that kind of, tell me more face, right? Even if you're thinking, oh my God, look at the time, this man's rambling, or this person's going over it. I think that person's about to weep, or good Lord, is that person Someone on their phone, you don't want your face to be really, very stressed. You want to be at that kind of, "Excellent, I am listening. Tell me more." But I think we've all got better at that thanks to the pandemic. We've all spent a lot more time on Zoom.

Yeah. And I've noticed with client meetings, people that normally would not be as tuned into using Zoom and technology, their cameras are framed better, most of them have nicer cameras, right? And they know how to connect their audio, which is is making it, you know, a lot easier that way.

Absolutely.

Just in hearing you talk about this, I'm thinking, you know, people may think you have to be a coach or you have to be, you know, somebody that, that does training and that kind of stuff to really run it. But would you say that, you know, let's say you have a, a, you know, a really well-run, um, retail business in a certain space, and, you know, you know all the ins and outs, you could start a mastermind to help other people in that space, right? You don't have to be a coach.

Absolutely. I would say if in that case, if you find yourself often helping other people grow their business or do something specific, but really it comes down to do you help your clients make decisions, whatever that means, whether it's accountancy and finance or helping them pick the right clothes or lose weight or have the right copy on their websites. If you're already helping people make decisions that lead to a transformation of some sort, whether or not that's more business or looking better in their clothes, then you can run, you can run a mastermind. There is only one caveat. You do need to like other humans. I never used to say this, but then I've met a few people recently that are like, okay, no, you don't like humans. Okay, this isn't for you, but you don't have to be an extrovert. You're fine to be an introvert because you're meeting the same people all the time. Right.

Absolutely.

May I ask you a little, a couple of questions about your potential mastermind?

Let's flip the script here.

Excellent. Yeah, get rid of that. Let's talk masterminds. So what would your mastermind be about?

Well, I mean, my background is in marketing, and I've been doing it for 20 years. And a lot of times just thinking about the clients that I work with, especially the ones that I've had for many years, you know, where We are doing calls every month, some of them every week. And they're not always like working sessions where we're building stuff. It's talking through ideas. It's overcoming a hurdle that came up in the last month, those type of things. So it's kind of like facilitating a mastermind in my mind, but in a one-to-one basis. So we would just need to bring more people into those calls. Right.

That's so— I think there's two types of mastermind. That is, there's the accountability, the, you know, did you write that blog post? Did you post it online? Did you do that? No, whatever the shopping list of things that we're working through and they're great. But the really powerful ones, the higher end, the, let's face it, higher ticket pricing is when people are ideating exactly what you're talking about. Because hard as it is to run a business, there are even less places where you can think about your business. You might get a coach, but you're to have a room full of people that you trust and can be totally honest with. Because as we said, it's, it's quite hard to run a business. There's going to be days when it's just, well, that didn't work. What do I do next? Or I've been thinking about this thing. Is that a good idea? So that kind of stuff, if you had specific structures, you wanted to use the marketing for growth or you wanted to change direction or you wanted, I would imagine, actually, why even imagine? What is the the most common thing that people come to you for?

They come because they don't understand the technology. How to connect all the dots is really what it is. You know, they're starting to create their own content, whether it be a podcast or videos or blogs. They don't know how it all works and they don't even know how to come up with like the content strategy. So, a lot of times, we start to work on just kind of knocking down those, those, those things that they're overthinking and coming up with a simple plan. And it doesn't take that long for them to come back to the next session. And they've, they've figured out most of it. They're just coming back for reassurance and confidence, you know, and maybe then they're like, let's try this next thing, right? So then we just kind of cycle it over again and start to build up confidence in those next, next areas.

So if you, if you wanted, there's lots of places that you could take that into a mastermind. You could have people work one-to-one with you. And then they can graduate into the mastermind. Once they've got the plan and the structure, they could graduate into a mastermind where they then implement all of that. They could do like a high-level starting kind of training structure if you wanted to build a course, if you wanted to work through this and then join the mastermind. It could be that people do a couple of years with you one-to-one, or even if you have a done-for-you service, you can do it so that This is what we're going to do. We will talk about the ideation in the mastermind. My minions will go away and beautifully craft that for you. You do it that way should you so desire. And then you can also do it so that they start with a sort of strategy marketing session and then get into the— now we talk about it because marketing more than anything else takes so much ideation to really think about it. This was working and now we need to tweak it or considering the pandemic, we need to do this or we got all of that feedback from Facebook. Or from ads or from, you know, whatever it is that we're inputting. And particularly something like a podcast, it feels so exciting when you're creating it, but the job's only half done if you're not marketing it as well.

Absolutely.

As you can tell, I'm slightly obsessed. I apologize.

That's good. There's so much passion.

Oh yeah, completely. I truly believe they totally change a business. Both being in one and running one. And pretty much anyone can run as long as you like humans.

That's right. So how do you— how does it work if, let's say, you've got 6 people and one drops out because they're moving or whatever the case, or they're just— it's not for them anymore? Do you bring and fill that spot? Like, how does bringing somebody new into that mix work?

So the, the style that I suggest you go for is that people are locked in for a particular Period. Okay. Because we, we create such a strong group that if one person just kind of— it's different if they've got some kind of personal crisis. So there's some reason where they, you know, from an ill spouse to, to something major, that is slightly different. But if people are just like, oh man, this is tough, I'm just having nothing to do with it, that's very hard. So what I tell people in my business is that if you have any doubts, don't join. You're, you're in for the period of, of the time. And I insist on about 85% attendance. But to be— which sounds high, but most people hit 90 to 95% attendance because they're good, they're fun, you want to be there. And we only meet every other week. Sometimes we run them monthly, but It's perfectly doable to commit to a few hours a month on your business.

And are they usually about an hour, hour and a half? What's the—

actually 2 hours long, because I believe that we actually get much more meaty answers if people have a little bit more time. Because let's face it, for most of us, the first idea that comes out of our mouths is perhaps not the best idea can be improved by a little thought.

Right. And is there pre-work that your, your people in your masterminds have to do before they come?

Well, it depends on the person. Obviously they have to hit the goals from last time or come up with a valid reason why that didn't happen. Again, like the— have you done your homework? But I— everyone has a plan that they're working through. We stay together, we stay in touch as a group between sessions, but only loosely. You could do that in Slack or WhatsApp or a Facebook group or LinkedIn group if you so desired. So people are bringing their questions. The big thing is that everybody must have some kind of question for each time they arrive, because without that, it can be very frustrating on a tight time budget watching somebody think of the question they would like to ask us. That's just annoying. So I do encourage— that's really the only proper homework. Do your goals and have a good think about what you want. But now, of course, that said, in the space of a year, you're not always going to have a question. And for those times, I would encourage the group to just give feedback because probably the people are busy, they're they're achieving stuff, they're doing things. So I would encourage the group to give reflection or feedback. And that, weirdly enough, is often the most useful part of the mastermind because we don't often have someone say, you know what, I listened to your podcast, it was great. And it's not just fluff, right? It really matters. Or even if someone's having a tough time, you know, sure, you've, you've shown up and wept for the last 3 weeks in a row, but You know, you've got tenacity. I really appreciate that. It's good.

That makes complete sense. Now you have, you have an evergreen program called Mastering Mastermind. Tell me about that. That is obviously for people who want to start a mastermind and you tell them how or teach them how or show them.

That's it. That's exactly what it is. I tell them all about masterminds. I am as proselytizing as I am now. But it came from the fact that At the beginning of every year, I would have a chunk of friends contact me and say, so I'm running a mastermind and I don't really know what I'm doing. But it's an 8-week course and I've run it, well, I don't know, probably for a decade. So it is everything I know about masterminds in as easy to digest a form as possible. And people that have done that have gone on to run hundreds of masterminds. It's a beautiful thing.

Sounds amazing. Now I want to ask you, how did your very first one go?

Well, this is going to sound like it isn't true, but I swear this is true. Because believe me, over the years, I have made every possible mastermind mistake known to man. Thus, I know that my course is filled. You can learn from my, my triumphs and my mistakes. But the very first one I ran was in person where I lived in Bangalore. I had heard about the mastermind concept and being the Type A personality I am, I brought the concept to India, set up a company to do it and started charging people for it. I had clueless what I was doing, but it worked very well. It worked really well. And after about 6 months, I was beginning to take off in other parts of my business and the people in it, because it was tantamount to free, really, it was so cheap. They said, we think you're going to stop running it and we'd like to pay more. And frankly, I've never heard of people doing that. But that was the point. I thought there might be something in this, but It was beautiful. We stayed in that mastermind for a long time.

Yeah, that is, it doesn't sound like that would be the first experience, but that's a—

Oh yeah, no, it's great. Masterminds, truly, they're life-changing.

Now, you alluded a little bit to people paying and you can make money off it. What do you expect to, like, if you're going to join one, like, what would be a range that you'd expect to pay for something like that?

Well, you really can find them at any level. There are lots that are at the $500 a month kind of, kind of level. That's a very standard common price. You should definitely be able to find one in your area at that point. You will find a lot cheaper than that, whether or not they're good. Look at their testimonials, see if they're the one for you. But they also go up to— I know lots of masterminds that are at like $100 grand a year. You might want to ease into something like that. But think how motivated you'd be if you're paying that much money.

So, I mean, what I'm thinking here is, you know, if I've never done one, but I've got the knowledge that I feel that I could run one, but it's like, how do I go to market and kind of say, okay, this is $500, this is $1,000 a month when you don't really have that credibility of running one before?

Like, how do you get that? So, first of all, I would work out a specific goal that, you know, you can get people to achieve. So obviously, if they do the work, you can't do the work for them. But say it was create a marketing plan, create a content plan, market a podcast. In your case, it was something that was like, we are going to go from idea to a list of things that you will do. So, you know, you can achieve that for sure, that they will get that. And then Think about the value of that. You know, you can achieve it. You know, there are people you can help. If you are someone who has never coached anyone, you have helped people grow their bottom line or do something very specific. Get clear on that and then work out exactly how that would work. So that might be just helping people at the beginning and then helping them implement. So you get very clear on your results. And then you just start to talk about that. I have never taught it in this form before, but I have 25 years of experience doing XYZ, and here I am to help you. And also bear in mind that if it is something where people don't normally talk about it, like growing a business of a particular sort or anything that is really hard to find out more about, that's worth a fortune. It really is.

I'm immediately thinking here because, you know, I'm getting a lot of people coming to me saying, you know, I want to, I want to launch a podcast. I have no idea how to do it, right? And it's a very relevant topic right now, especially because there's so many elements to it, from the technology to the structure to the marketing, all that, you know, that, that could essentially be a 12-month mastermind just to to run on that?

Oh, completely. So, so what I would suggest anyone does is that their first mastermind is probably maybe only 3 months long, just to see if you like it. Just on the off chance you don't have quite the right mix of people, you haven't— because that's what I did in my first one. I, I think I jumped in with 6-month masterminds. And yeah, that's a long time if you've got the wrong people in the group. Or it's not quite, you know, you want it, you want to make sure that it's a little bit shorter. So you might want to do it as a 3-month and a 6-month mastermind. The first one is maybe make the plan. With a podcast, it might be plot out your first couple of series, get the equipment, get started, name everything. And then the next 6 months would be to implement, to do that. And then you can tell the people in the 3-month mastermind, we'll first, we'll get you started, then you will be front of the line for the next 6 months for the implementation, you'll get a break on the price, everything will be great. And if people aren't quite as, well, focused as they might be, and some people might be more advanced and more senior, and some people might be frankly slackers, and those people, that's a good moment to weed them out into either different strands or move people into one-to-one coaching or even just refer them out. But it gives everybody a little moment to reassess in the middle and you don't feel that you're super committed. If you're like, oh my God, I'm selling something that's a year long and costs 10 grand and who knows, you can do it in smaller chunks.

Absolutely. I mean, Liz, this, this conversation today, we've been talking for 30 minutes. This is pure gold. I think anyone that has been in business for a while has worked with clients could benefit in one way or another by, by a mastermind, whether it be small 3-month ones or growing up to that full year, right? It's amazing. And your business is called Rethink Central, right?

It is.

And you're on Instagram. And I have to give you a big shout out on Instagram because I checked it out before we went on the show. And you're like, the design and the layout of your Instagram page is like, for somebody who has visual OCD, they would love it because of the grid layout and everything is fantastic. So we're going to put that in the show notes as well. As the special link that you gave us, the rethinkcentral.com/bluecow. And I checked out the page and I'm sure that's where people can get access to buying into that program that you have as well. And, you know, a bunch of other elements that you have on the site.

Yes, there's some freebies about mistakes you can make running a mastermind. And there's some videos, there's all sorts of stuff on there, just free resources.

Excellent. Excellent. Now, In your bio, you said 20 years working in big Hollywood films. Before we end off, you want to give us a quick kind of summary of that experience?

So yeah, I'm a geek in case that hasn't come through so far. I worked in visual effects for 20 years, the sort of films that like lots of stuff gets blown up in. So actually exactly the sort of films that you come out of and think, well, that was dreadful. But it looked beautiful. That's what I did.

Excellent. I'm a certified pyrotechnician and fireworks technician myself.

Excellent.

And with a background in video production.

So there you go. We have much in common. I suspect that things that you set fire to on set, I would then augment in the background in visual effects.

Excellent. Well, Liz, thank you so much for joining me. Today and telling us all about masterminds. I think I have something on my to-do list now coming up.

Do it. Start a mastermind. Thank you so much for having me.

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