In this brief dialogue, the speakers outline key guidelines for creating effective entrepreneurial mastermind groups. They emphasize intentional participant selection to avoid direct competition, ensuring each member operates independently so they can share openly. A formal agreement not to conduct business together is recommended to prevent conflicts of interest and maintain trust. The conversation also highlights the importance of diversity—across background, gender, age, and ethnicity—to bring varied perspectives and richer discussions. The facilitator’s role is to assess each member’s potential contribution and curate a balanced, non‑competitive environment that fosters candid, raw sharing.
Side question. So when the person who's forming these masterminds, are they actually making sure that, hey, we don't want to be, you know, too many degrees away from any one person. Everybody has to be pretty alone in what they're doing, basically. Yeah.
A well-facilitated or managed mastermind is intentionally built that way. Each individual is considered. What do they contribute? What's their backgrounds? Where's the diversity? I think a good mastermind won't have competition because if I feel threatened in some capacity, if you and I are in the exact same business, say serving the exact same customers, Can I really be raw about my business? Right. And vice versa.
No, you protect yourself to some degree at some point.
Yeah. In an entrepreneurial mastermind, I don't think we do business together. Can you imagine you're my client and I screw you over by accident and now we have to help each other? It's like, I think a great structure for masterminds, if it's a business one, is no competition. So diversity there. Secondly is that we do not do business together and agree to that, even though it may feel like there's great opportunities.
Right.
We don't do it. Thirdly, it's a mix of men and women. The best masterminds I've been in, not completely, but for the most part, have been a mix of men and women. A mix of ages. So I'm in a mastermind where we have some millennials, we have middle-aged folks, and we have a couple of people that are retired out. And the perspectives are unbelievable. Diversity in color— ethnicity is probably a better choice of words— which often indicates perhaps a different upbringing, different expectations, a different culture. Those type of elements.
