In this conversational tutorial, the speakers walk entrepreneurs through the essential steps for creating or joining a mastermind group without spending money. They compare face‑to‑face meetings with Zoom, explain that mastermind groups can be fee‑based or free, and describe how to recruit members by reaching out to the local community. The discussion emphasizes the importance of establishing clear expectations, rotating key responsibilities (facilitator, secretary, budget manager), and implementing a facilitator‑elect system to ensure smooth leadership transitions. An anecdotal aside about monkfish as a "poor man's lobster" illustrates the informal, personable tone of the advice.
If you're an entrepreneur, you're going to want to find a mastermind.
Or create. So let me give you some quick bullet points. Face-to-face beats Zoom. I've done both. Zoom is okay and acceptable. Get some face time. Humans need that. Secondly, you don't have to pay for these. You can facilitate it, you can run it, or you can join an existing one. But joining an existing one can be a little more costly because these are formed groups and they may have some fees associated with it. I'm in organizations that facilitate masterminds and you pay A substantial fee. There's other elements besides just meeting, but it's facilitated. And that's a choice. And I love that. Yeah. But you can choose. And we actually have a mastermind called the Essen Collective. It is a fee-based program because I am sharing the best of what I know and I'm facilitating the group. So you can choose to do that. But the poor man's lobster, as my dad would say, version— that was monkfish. My dad used to get this fish called monkfish.
Yeah, I love monkfish.
Oh my God. And it kind of has the texture of lobster. Yeah. And we dip it in butter. Poor man's lobster. Yeah. It was amazing.
So good.
So what you do is the poor man's lobster version is you just run your own event. Reach out to people in your community saying, here, I'm thinking about doing this. There is a challenge of herding cats. You may be gung-ho for this. The other people may say, I'm along for the ride for now.
Yeah.
So you have to put regimen in place. Here's our expectation. Also have a rotation. The same people doing the same function, like you're leading the group and another person is acting as secretary, tracking notes, another person is managing the budget if you do retreats or something like that, that can tire out. So have a rotation. Next tip is have an elect and elect. Right now for one of my masterminds, I am the facilitator. The problem is when my term ends in a few, Months, the next person, if they're not identified, has to volunteer. And it is a responsibility. Yeah. So people are like, I don't want to do it. So what we did is I said, well, who's going to be the facilitator-elect? Being a facilitator-elect, it's kind of easy because you can say, I'll do it. It's a year out.
Yeah.
And I have a facilitator-elect-elect, which means 2 years out. So we have the queue filled up. So when my term ends, the next person's lined up, but there's no resistance because they're already lined up. Gotcha. But since I'm giving a 2-year warning, people aren't resistant to it. So it's very easy to fill the queue.
