E10 - The Power of a Mastermind
Transcript for this podcast:
I'm Ant Hodges. This is Less Is The Strategy, the podcast that proves doing less is the most powerful business decision you will ever make. Are you ready to find out what becomes possible when you simplify? Then let's dive in.
I'm keeping this really simple today. I'm actually sat in my hotel room looking over Lake Windermere as we speak. The last few days have been me sat in a room with other business owners who are my peers. I'm a member of a mastermind and I want to be able to travel and record the podcast.
So, I thought, do you know what? I'm going to park myself in front of a great view so I get some kind of inspiration. So, I can just sit here and I can riff and I can talk. I'm going to pack my microphone,
Not my big podcasting microphone that I have on my desk, but I'm going to pack my new lapel mic that I can use because it's got really great noise cancelling on it and things. And I pack that in my bag and what happened is it opened in like a little case, like a charging case. And as soon as you take it out, it powers on. And what's happened? It opened in my bag and it fell out of the charging case, therefore has been powered for the last three days. And yeah, it's got no power. So I'm simply recording straight into my MacBook Pro.
So, you might hear a little bit of echo.
The audio might not necessarily be polished. I'll see what I can do post recording with the audio. You'll probably hear the birds tweeting outside. And if the jets fly over, because they fly over quite low over here, we might get disturbed from that perspective as well. But we'll crack on. Because the idea of simplification is to not overcomplicate things. Overcomplicating things is the direct opposite to simplifying. And just for me to be able to share my content and my thoughts, the simplest way to do that is simply just record myself talking. Now, we watch and we listen to all kinds of things.
You know, news reporters stand outside in the middle of a road sometimes, and they have traffic coming past. And it's just, we focus on the content when we want to listen to the content. So, forgive the recording quality today. As I travel a little bit more, I will remember to make sure that I do things in the best possible way that I can moving forward, to remember my kit and caboodle. And particularly when this podcast turns into a video podcast, which it's going to do soon, very soon, I'm obviously going to need to remember cameras and all those kind of things.
But before we get into any of that, and we get down that track, I'm just going to keep consistent showing up every Monday with this podcast. Less is the strategy. And the fundamental principle of this podcast is really to help demonstrate and prove to you that doing less is the most powerful.
Business decision that you'll ever make. So, I want to talk about the power of a mastermind because the room that I've been in for the last few days with eight other business owners, it's so powerful, so powerful to be in a room of people who've got your back. You know, I think for me, I was able to spend almost an hour talking through some of the challenges that I've got in my business, some of the things that I've achieved over the last sort of period. We met back in February, so sort of 90 days ago.
And we kind of look back at the goals and the actions that I said that I'd set out from February through to today. What did I do well? What did I struggle with? What were the challenges in trying to execute those things? And ultimately, then the
Questions, the deep dive questions from the people in the room to gain more clarity over my challenges, and then the brainstorming and the ideas and the strategies that come out of it. I really want to just unpack for you, you know, what a mastermind is, and how good a mastermind could be for your business more than anything else. So, my hot seat session, which is what happens when you, when you go to a mastermind in and of itself is not a high trying, high priced training product or program. It's not a case that you're going to be paying a huge ton of money just to sit in a room and someone at the front facilitate some training sessions.
And then you've got some group round table discussions. And it's certainly a mastermind, certainly isn't a big group. There's a whole...
Methodology and a mindset behind masterminds being high ticket, high price, exclusivity, all of that kind of stuff. And yes, you can price it from a perspective of high priced. If you wanting to facilitate your own mastermind and you want, bring your customers in and it's, you know, high priced, you know, 20, 30, 50, a hundred thousand dollars a year on the basis of the value of transformation that you bring and the access to that room. And I understand all of that methodologies, but what we operate here with this mastermind, it's a peer led mastermind. There is just a membership re-up of 350 quid, 350 pounds for the year.
And what that basically does is it just gives us a little bit of a kitty. So, for things like, you know, when we all arrive and we just buy a drink at the bar and,
You know, tea, coffee, whatever, all those kinds of things, just those kinds of little things. And then we individually pay for the hotel. We split the cost of the meeting rooms or, you know, we go out for dinner and we split the bill. It's that kind of way that we do things. And there's no one person leading the mastermind. We have a structure that we follow. We have an agenda that we set. And that structure is about every single person in the room getting 50 minutes to an hour to talk about their business challenges and have the room unpack things.
One of the members of the mastermind will also bring a little bit of an insight into their world based on things that we've talked about. So, this week we had one of our members who runs an accountancy practice and CPA.
Company over in the U S and, she basically just shared some ideas around the numbers that we should really be looking at in our business. All of us are successful business owners. You know, we've been in business some time and we know, you know, what we need to do in terms of accounting and finance and stuff, but there were real nuggets about what are the numbers that we really should be looking at in our business and things like that. So, this isn't what I've been at is a true mastermind. It's a group of less than sort of 10, you know, 12 people maximum is really what we should be thinking about.
And I think when you look at mastermind programs that potentially would have 30, 50, a hundred people in the room, you're not going to get a true mastermind experience.
So, let's unpack why we're kind of do what we do here and what it's really truly all about. I think what separates a great mastermind from a poor one is really a bunch of things that, you know, when I was certainly looking for masterminds over the years, there were some key things that I was looking for. The first was, you know, it needs kind of five or six members minimum, probably up to like 10 or 12. That's kind of what I was talking about. I think beyond that, the level of intimacy that you can get from a mastermind, the level of deep dive conversation, the level of relationship building dies when you get beyond that, because you're really not going to be able to one another each other.
Well, you're not going to truly be able to be there for one.
Another's success. I think the second thing would be that you need to have the right peers in the room. You know, maybe you define this from a perspective of a similar revenue stage or, you know, or similar kind of industries. But actually, what I found is that different niches, different industries work really well. So, I love the fact that you could probably really pin it down to a similar revenue stage because the gap in expertise becomes lateral, not vertical. And what I mean by this is a business owner doing maybe $5 million a year and a business owner doing $50,000 a year, they don't necessarily belong in the same room because the challenges that they've got in their business are very, very different.
If you've got people on a similar revenue sort of platform and you're looking at it from a lateral perspective, the challenges may be very similar. And so people
Can bounce off each other. Now, you're going to get people in the room who are going to be doing more than others and some that are going to be doing less. You're going to be some, you're going to have some that are absolutely flying and really succeeding. You're going to have others that have some serious challenges and maybe you're on a bit of a downer. But the right peers in the room mean that you get the right conversations. You get the right buy-in from everybody. And there's no one-upmanship and there's certainly no sort of sense that, oh, this is so beneath me kind of feeling within the room.
The third thing clearly has to be the right kind of structure. So, like I've talked about, our mastermind is based on hot seats. We have an agenda. We sort of time box each other's kind of problems and challenges into that conversation. But things do unpack in between. You know, the casual, "what's everyone working on" formats. You know, I've been in groups and stuff like that where, you know, people, you know, I want you to split into groups or on your tables, just, I want you to ask the question and unpack, what are you working on right now?
You know, and think it's just, it burns time and it really just produces nothing. The fourth thing that I would really say to people is you have to have in-person elements as part of your masterminds. You know, zoom only or online connected masterminds, they only really get you kind of like halfway.
You know, they might kind of get you kind of 60% of the way, but that extra half or the other 40%, it goes missing. And what I'm talking about is the side conversations in between dinner or the walk between the meeting room and going and grabbing lunch, or the evening when you're like we were last night, sat in the conservatory of the hotel, looking over the river. And we were just sat chatting over a couple of drinks. That's where trust builds. The most powerful conversations that I've had in masterminds have never really been in the mastermind sessions themselves.
It's in the in-between.
My own mastermind, I take my clients and those who join my own mastermind. We go away for a whole week and this September, so September 2026, we're going to Portugal. And we go up to the Douro Valley, and that's where we're going. So we're going to fly into Porto, then we're going to get a boat, we're going to go up river, and we're going to go to a hotel on the banks of the river, a five-star spa hotel on the banks of the river, and that's where we're going to mastermind together. But it's going to be on the day that we have boat trip, wine tasting, and a kind of excursion day.
The conversations are really going to be a deep dive. It's going to be in the bar afterwards. It's going to be outside on the terrace, in the outside pool, in the beautiful sunshine. It's going to be in the spa. It's those
Places where the conversations really dig deep. Because what happens is, in session, you'll talk about a bunch of things. And even when it's somebody else's hot seat, things are going to go off in your brain and in your mind. You're going to get inspired. You're going to have thoughts. And then it's in those gaps and in those other times that you start downloading and unpacking that with other people. They're the moments that I've had some of my biggest breakaways. And I know from the experience of facilitating a mastermind for my clients, it's in those moments.
I remember one client, Arturo, last year, he was talking about the most powerful conversation he had was after one of our mastermind days, we'd gone out for dinner, and we were walking back to the hotel, and we decided to go to a bar which is on the roof of one of the port lodges overlooking Porto. And we were on there. There was music. It was a busy atmosphere. We were drinking gin and gin and tonic cocktails. And he said it was in that moment, through the conversations that happened at that moment, that he had one of the biggest breakthroughs that he had for his own business.
And I think the way in which in-person changes the dynamic of a mastermind is unreal. If you are running a mastermind, make sure that you have in-person elements built into the structure of your mastermind. If you're part of a mastermind and you don't have that, I urge you to try and seek it out in some way. Drop an idea and go, "Oh, do you think we should all get together? Do you think we should all meet? Drop it in?" Because that is going to transform things moving forward. The fifth out of, I've got these six points.
So the fifth thing, you know, the markers for a great mastermind is that where members try and onboard each other as friends and colleagues, not as clients.
There's no selling between members. When you've got people in the room who start selling to other people in the room, it becomes a little bit awkward. Because, you know, I think for me, the room has to be almost commercially clean or as commercially clean as you can make it. Granted, the masterminds that I've been part of, I've been able to help other people and been able to do kind of projects and work on things with people. But it's never been my aim to walk into a room and get clients. When I've personally, for masterminds that I've chosen to be part of or that I've applied to and I've been successfully been able to join masterminds, my whole idea is that I'm looking for that peer-to-peer mastermind experience.
I'm not looking for a room full of clients.
It was interesting. A few years back, I actually applied for a mastermind group. It was run by a very successful entrepreneur, someone who I've looked up to for years, a guy called Peter Thompson. And I applied for this mastermind and ended up having a call as part of that application process with Peter himself. And we were just chatting away and he was gracious and he was real. And I think for me, after looking at my application, looking at my profile and things like that, I'm picking up the phone himself to call me to basically say, "I just don't think this is going to be the right room for you, Ant."
Your peers are not going to be in the room. You are ahead of pretty much most people in the room. I think the room is just going to be full of potential clients.
For you rather than something you're going to get value out from a mastermind perspective." And genuinely, I respected that. That's the power of a good facilitator, looking at who he's getting in the room and being able to structure it in the best possible way. It's not about just taking someone's money for the sake of it and putting them in the room. We all know coaches and masterminds that have done that kind of thing. And then they tie you into a contract and all of that kind of stuff for it. But the people who qualify people in the right way and triage their inquiries and their applications in the best possible way, they serve not only the person who's applied, whether they are right or wrong for the room.
They serve that person in the best possible way, but they also serve the room by not.
Having the wrong people in the room. So, the whole no selling between members is an important thing to really think about. And then from a mastermind that's run by someone, not necessarily like our peer-to-peer kind of mastermind, but a facilitator is needed to run the room. You know, without facilitation, the loudest voice will always dominate. And I think quiet thinkers just go quite silent. I've found that the best ideas from a hot seat often come from the person who hasn't yet spoken because they've been sat there and they've been thinking and thinking, and then they just start to unpack, and there's just some gold that gets dropped.
But a facilitator needs to be able to draw that out of others. A good facilitator needs to be able to just ask people to just hold on, just step back a moment.
Let's just give space for this person. And we've got some kind of rules. They're not unwritten. They're written rules around things like not actually working on our laptops while somebody's hot seat is there, giving somebody our undivided attention while they're having their hot seat. I've been in so many different sort of masterminds over the years and stuff, and I've kind of had my laptop open to take notes. I might use my laptop also to record the audio of my hot seat so that I can then listen back to it. But for me, that's one of the biggest distractions.
I close the laptop and then I just have a notepad. This last week has literally been notepad and pencil. And just the sense of just writing and note-taking and stuff, and without distraction, has just been great. And it's just been part of the rules that we've kind of set as our peer-to-peer. And we kind of facilitate between ourselves. But I really think that's what's needed. If you're running a mastermind, it's not about owning the room yourself, because the room belongs to your mastermind. The members own the room. If you're running a mastermind, your job is simply to facilitate the space for a mastermind to take place.
So, you know, too many people in the room, mixed revenue stages, online only, members sort of selling to one another, really weak facilitation.
I think these are really things that you need to consider and look at with that. But I also think you've got to have some kind of follow through. The single biggest test of a mastermind is actually saying, do the people in the room have something to teach me? Do I have something to learn? Can I teach in the room just from my conversation? It's not about standing and teaching. And if you can teach and learn from the room, then you're in the right room. If it's more one side or the other, then you're in the wrong room.
The power of follow through and the power of follow up beyond the meetings is about accountability, being there for one another's success, being able to call people on into the good things. And I honestly, I can't stress enough how important it is to find that
Room that you can be in, where you can unpack your biggest business challenges in a safe space and get input from other people who've been there, who've gone through similar challenges, who have a different view of the world and a different way of thinking. If everything I've described in terms of what a mastermind looks like for you, and maybe this is something that you've been missing in your business, I really just want to tell you briefly about my own mastermind and invite you to email me. You can email me, cmo@anthodges.com or you could go over to my website, anthodges.com and click the green WhatsApp chat button at the top of my website.
And let's just start a conversation. There is an automated message that just says, "What do you want to talk about?" But then that message comes through to my phone directly and we will have a conversation. It's not an automated bot.
System. I'm not getting you to subscribe to WhatsApp or anything like that. It's literally just a conversation. Let's chat. If me unpacking this mastermind and what I do in my mastermind resonates with you, I'd love to chat. There are some spaces available for Portugal in September and I'd love for you to come.
So, the mastermind that I run, we focus on this one in-person deep dive, intensive or what? Immersion event. That's what it is more than anything else. It's about taking you out of your normal day to day into an environment, into a location that maybe you've not been to before.
That's alien to the world around you. As you sit, as you listen to this, as you're, you're in the gym or you're walking the dog or you're commuting or whatever you're doing right now, it's taking you out of that space so that you can spend time working on your business. This is one of the reasons I run, I've, I've pretty much run all of my masterminds in Porto in Portugal. It's a place that I absolutely adore. I love the culture. I love the food, the drink, the people, but you go at the right times of year and the weather is flipping amazing as well.
So, this time we're up the Doro River.
We're masterminding solidly for two days. Then, we have a day where we, as a team go as yeah, as a team, we go out and we do things. And so there's a Thursday kind of day together and it's the decompression after two solid days. And it's where those really important conversations happen. And then Friday is the goal setting intention setting aspect of the mastermind. So, that happens once a year. But what we also do is we have monthly deep dive calls where everybody gets kind of mini hot seats and my mastermind members are also available, invited to be able and able to come to my other in-person meetings that I run throughout the year.
And that's important because it's not necessarily specifically mastermind meetings, but it's more in-person and it's connection. And when mastermind members come together for like my two day simplify summit that I run, they spend time together, they catch up in person and it's really important for those connections to be made. In Porto, I've got a maximum of nine seats because it's 10, including me. And I've got, like I mentioned, a few spaces available for September. We work on the business. We walk through vineyards. We share meals. And everybody leaves with clarity on what to stop, what to start, who can open the next door for us, and how we move forward.
Because it's not just about strategies and tactics and learning the next marketing thing and learning the next growth thing.
It's about going, well, what are the things that I'm doing in my business right now that are preventing...
Me from having success? What are the things that I'm not doing that's helping me to move forward?
We clearly identify those and we talk through those. And then we unpack specific goals and intentions for a period of time. So it might be for a 90 day period. It might be over the next year. This is what we're looking to achieve. If a kind of mastermind where you can be in a room for a week in Portugal in September, you can connect with those same people every month for the year and also come and connect at other in-person meetings sounds like something, then hit me up. Email me cmo@anthodges.com. That's Charlie Mike Oscar at anthodges.com.
Or like I said, head over to anthodges.com. There's a green button at the top of the website.
It's also right at the bottom of the website as well, which says, "Let's just chat." It will open up a WhatsApp chat and we can have a private one-to-one conversation through WhatsApp to see whether we, you know, you've got any questions. If you want to jump on a call as well, I can also send you a link to book a call so that we can chat there.
The Ocoton Douro is the planned hotel right now that we're going to. It's up in the Douro Valley. It's a phenomenal hotel and I'd love to have you there.
If you'd love to be with us in September, then reach out and message me. The important thing that I want you to really take from today's podcast is to understand that masterminds can be one of the biggest tools in your business toolkit for growth for your business, but growth from a personal development perspective as well. You'll develop friendships that will last a lifetime in a good mastermind group. And if you facilitate a mastermind and you do something really well and people get an immense amount of value, the reality is you'll probably end up with the same people for some time.
There's a mastermind that I've wanted to join for a very, very, very long time. And the doors are firmly closed because they maxed out. And I know it's a one in one out policy because it's not a mastermind that opens for applications every year, but I'm on a waiting list. I've been on that waiting list now for seven years, but I'm on the list and I know it's the right room for me because it's the right kind of people in the room. It's facilitated by the right guy and it's definitely something that I want to be part of.
And so that desire to want to be part of, and then opportunity, if the opportunity comes up, I'm just going to grab it with both hands because I'm also friends with some of the people who are in that mastermind already. And yeah, just, I'm going to wait and see. My big thing for you to take away from this episode, more than anything, is to find your people. Find your people and get in a room with them. Facilitate a space for your customers. If you're creating a mastermind, you remember, you don't own that space. They own the space.
But whatever you do, find your people. Facilitate a space for your people. That's what will help people to grow their business, grow themselves and have the success that they're looking for. I've been Ant Hodges. This is Less Is The Strategy, the podcast that proves that doing less is the way to be able to succeed in today's really busy and hustle culture filled business operations. Let's simplify. Let's do this. If you've enjoyed this episode, please consider, wherever you're listening to it, to drop a review. Please share this podcast with someone who might need to hear it.
If you're in a mastermind and you need the guy or the girl who's leading the mastermind to hear this because you can see how it could be improved, send them the podcast.
If you want to get a group of people together and start a peer-to-peer mastermind, send this episode to people and just go, "Do you fancy doing this?" and just do it. But if you want to reach out, you want to come to my mastermind, you want to be in a room full of people who are on point for wanting to simplify their business and move forward, then head over to anthodges.com. Hit the green chat button. Let's have the conversation or email me directly, cmo@anthodges.com. Less is the strategy. It really is. It's time to simplify. I'll see you next time.
Bye for now.
Bye.