Hi everyone. It's Robert Poole with Growing Your B2B Small Business podcast. In this episode, we're going to talk about one of the most effective ways to grow your business. And it's not a marketing idea. Let's get started and find out.

Do you have a small business that sells to other businesses? If so, you probably know that there are plenty of resources for companies that market to consumers or companies that sell to large and Fortune 500 type companies, but what about the small businesses in the middle who sell to other companies? Where do we go to get answers? How do we grow our company consistently while still keeping our sanity? That's the question. And this podcast is the answer. If you're listening to this podcast, you're part of an elite group of achievers who aren't willing to settle for just a nine to five job. You're one of the heroes in our society and you should be proud of it. Welcome to the tribe and welcome home.

Okay, everyone. I hope you're having a fantastic day today. In the last episode, we talked about this podcast and what it's done for me over the past year and what publishing can do for you. If you missed that one, I highly recommend you check it out. A few episodes back, we talked about modeling, modeling the habits and actions of both successful entrepreneurs and businesses. It's not a real complicated strategy and one of the fastest ways to grow your business, find somebody who's already successful and do what they do. That will give you the same results and you can shortcut your path to success. I mean, modeling the success of someone is applicable all throughout business and definitely in our personal lives. If you want to get a six pack of abs, the best thing to do is find someone who has a six pack and do exactly what they do. It's the same thing in business. If you want to be a top salesperson for example, find an outstanding salesperson and model exactly what they do, how they think, et cetera, and you'll have the same result.

And that's a fantastic way to grow far quicker than you could ever do in your own. However, what if you could take that same strategy and accelerated it even faster? Would that be worth something to you? I'm guessing, yes. I've been a believer in modeling since I was first started in business in my twenties, but it wasn't until this last year that I really stumbled on this new strategy of how to really improve it. While it's not new, it was new to me at the time and that's the concept of paid masterminds. A lot of you may be part of a mastermind group in the past or even currently. So if so, don't skip this episode because I still think you'll find the information useful.

First of all, what is a mastermind? As the name suggests, it's some kind of group of peers who are all dedicated to learning a specific skill set. Most of the time it's business related, but there are mastermind groups for just about everything, even if they don't call themselves that. Some mastermind groups are like networking groups, where you meet up with a group of people and indicate what type of leads you're looking for or recommendations on vendor, that sort of thing. In my mind, those are not terrible useful. There are others that are more of a social support group for their members. They're there to encourage each other and help each other with their problems. This again is not something I've been interested in the past because it sometimes turns into a complaint session or just a waste of time talking about things that aren't relevant to my business. This was kind of my main perception of mastermind type groups, where most of my career in business basically is social or lead oriented groups. I've done all the mastermind networking type small groups, lead clubs, et cetera in which I quite honestly felt pretty useless for my company as we're national in scope. I mean, maybe it works for local businesses. Either way, I think there's probably a better use of your time when it comes to actually growing your business.

It wasn't until this last year that I realized that there are actually effective masterminds out there and I was introduced to the concept of pay better masterminds by Dean Grasiozi and Tony Robbins. They actually have a program that teaches you how to conduct a mastermind group. At the time, I wasn't interested in creating a mastermind buying group for myself, but I thought, "Well, maybe I should look further into this for my own use." After considering the idea, I started looking around at different groups. Most of them appearing to be what I thought they were, which is glorified BS network concessions. But then I stumbled on a coaching mastermind program put on by ClickFunnels, Russell Brunson's company. And this was different from the other masterminds out there and different from my perception of what most masterminds were about. In fairness, it's not a pure mastermind as it includes a coaching component, but a big part of it is a mastermind type group.

And it was quite expensive for me and our business, well into the five figures, which is not pocket change for a company our size, but I took the plunge and decided to sign up. And it's been just about a little over a year since I joined. And I have to say, it's been night and day from what I saw elsewhere. I've learned a ton, both from the facilitators as well as the peers in the group. Just a couple of ideas I've gotten had made me far in excess of what the cost of actual mastermind was. And so I'm so glad I decided to give this a shot. In fact, it's been so influential for me that we decided to start a mastermind for our own clients inside our company. It's been a huge success. So back to masterminds in general, I mean, why is this type of mastermind different than... What should you look for if you're interested in the concept?

Number one, this was a paid mastermind. I'd learned early on in my business career that if you give away your product or service for free, prospects are not going to value it. We don't give anything away for free at our company as a way of encouraging people to do business with us. The reason is because we know that people don't do anything with the information we give them because it doesn't cost them anything. If someone pays 5k or 25k or more for a mastermind, what's the likelihood that they're going to pay attention to what's going on the group, take action on what they learned, and offer up the best advice for others? Probably much more likely then if it's a group that anyone and their brother can sign up for and whether they show up or not doesn't really matter. I wouldn't waste my time unless you're paying to be part of the mastermind.

The more you pay the better. I mean, if you can scrounge up 5k, do that. If you can do 20k or more, do that. Basically as much as you can and even stretch beyond what you're comfortable with. So why should you pay big bucks for a mastermind? It's all about proximity. If you're paying a million dollars for a mastermind group, which is there are groups out there like that, who do you think can afford that and what kind of business people are in that group? Those who were barely profitable and just getting started? Nope. These are going to be the highly successful business owners who value the advice of their peers that are looking to grow even further. Imagine being in the same room with some of those people. I mean, who you surround yourself with is who you become so surrounding yourself with successful people like this is one of the keys in business and success in life in general.

One of the biggest benefits to a strong mastermind is the brainstorming of those who are at least where you are in business and preferable even further up the success ladder. When I joined this mastermind, I was a little concerned that I'd be surrounded by a bunch of successful people and feel intimidated, but I realized this is actually kind of an irrational fear if you think about it. I mean, you actually want more successful people in the group than you are because you can't learn from people necessarily that are less successful for you. You want to pay attention to those who are more successful. A good mastermind will call on members in the group and put them on the hot seat. Knowing you may get called on is kind of like being in school. You better have done your homework in case the teacher calls on you.

Often, the question the facilitator asks is, what are you struggling with or what's your biggest challenge in business right now? Well, you want to have an answer to that question just so you don't look stupid in front of the group. That's not really the main reason in my mind. The main reason you need to be prepared to answer that question is because it forces you to clarify and focus on your biggest challenges. You can't exactly ask the group, "How do I get more sales?" Well, that's not specific enough for anyone to really help you. I know when you get called out, it causes you to think through in detail what your challenges are and potential solutions and narrow down your ideas and isolate the issue. And that's when it really pays to have an outsider's advice.

So in addition to getting called on, I think the other huge advantage of a mastermind done right, is the accountability it brings. As I just mentioned, the accountability and coming up with your challenges as part of it, but it can be even better if each person can come up with their goals and commitments to be completed before the next meeting, and then publicly commit to those before the group. Knowing you have to report back to your peers whether "you've done your homework", is an amazing motivator to get things done. Depending on your vision of a mastermind, you might be thinking of a room of 50 people and there are good worthwhile mastermind groups that size. But however, if you want to choose to just have one mastermind, I would highly recommend something with a small group, so you can do the accountability thing.

I mean, if you have 50 people, you can't all share and state your goals. It's much easier to when you have 10 or 12 people, so that's kind of my personal preference for a max size. Either way, whether in a large group or small, you'll get a chance to listen to the problems business owners are facing and the advice they're getting from others in the group. I mean, it's amazing how you can listen to someone state the challenge they are facing think, "Well, I've got that handled," but then someone else suggests a solution you never heard of or never thought of. Even then, you don't have to have that same challenge right now, but the solution that comes out of the group can be used to solve other problems that you have and help you discover the solution to your problems.

I mean, we're all intelligent and successful business people most likely, since you're listening to this podcast. However, we don't know what we don't know and having this access to others' thinking ideas is priceless. I mentioned we have a mastermind at our company and dedicated to helping our B2B small business clients grow their business. When we were first introducing it, people asked us if we could organize it so people in the same industry could be in the same groups. And this is not an uncommon way to do a mastermind. In fact, a lot of businesses masterminds are industry specific. For instance, you might see an all insurance mastermind. There's nothing wrong with that, but in my mind, you're losing one of the big benefits of a mastermind. If you think about it, if you're in a mastermind with everyone being in the same industry, you can definitely learn from your peers and probably a lot of specifics since they already know your business in general, however, that's also a double-edged sword. Because you're in the same industry, it's likely that you attend the same seminars, the same training events, the same continuing education classes, you read the same books, you listen to the same podcasts and so on.

All valuable, all these things are largely going to be the same. And one of the biggest struggles I think companies face internally with employees is sort of that group think as it restricts new ideas because everyone starts to think the same way after a while. In my opinion, the best kind of mastermind is to get in a group with a variety of industry representatives. Just because you're in a B2B business like our company, it doesn't mean you can't learn from a brick or mortar retail store owner. Why is this? For one, it's very common for owners of a business to either have other businesses or prior experience in different fields. So just because they own a yogurt shop now doesn't mean that they didn't own a B2B business in the past. Their experience that comes from owning and running any business is valuable if you're willing to look for answers.

Like we talked about in a prior episode, modeling doesn't depend necessarily on the exact same business model. You can learn as much or more from a business that's a completely different industry than your company. In fact, I submit you can learn far more learning from those that are not in your industry. So I think the best kind of mastermind combines teaching group brainstorming and accountability. In this type of mastermind, you have to have a head facilitator at training. This person typically is kind of the leader, organizes the agenda and keeps the meeting flowing. The facilitator often introduces a topic, does some teaching on a topic, and then starts going around the room and putting people on the "hot" seat. When called up, people are asked to give your thoughts on the main subject and then ask the group for their ideas on how to solve a current problem in their business. And then finally, you get a chance to commit in front of the group actions that you're going to take and set yourself up for accountability.

I personally think three components in addition to being a paid mastermind are critical to get the most out of it. So big picture, why should you consider being part of a paid mastermind group? Well, number one is the obvious knowledge that you can gain from just from listening to people mull over their problems. I mean, that's if you just listened and never participated. I mean, 10 to 15 brains are certainly far better than one and you'll get more knowledge and ideas in this environment than you'd ever get on your own no matter how smart or successful you are. Number two, I'd say you get group accountability to the goals that you set for yourself. I believe in one-on-one coaching. I think it's great. And I have coaches and accountability is usually part of the coaching program, but I've noticed at least with myself that I'm much more willing to show up to my coaching call and report to my coach that I didn't do what I said than I am to report that to a group of peers.

Group embarrassment is much more painful than one on one. So using this tool to get yourself to do these things that you know you need to do, but have been procrastinating on, I mean, that's a huge benefit of a mastermind group. I think the other major benefit of mastermind groups is that if you pay a substantial money for it, you're likely to get everything you can out of it and play full out. It's doubtful that you'll fail to show up for a meeting when you're paying a ton for it. If you're looking for a mastermind, make sure that at a minimum cost as much as you can possibly come up with that uses individual hot seat interaction and accountability for goals. If you get involved in a quality mastermind group like I did, I can almost guarantee you'll get much more out of it than you paid for it. That's all I have for today. And I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening today. I hope you learned something you can implement right away. I know your time is valuable and it's really an honor to serve you. Please subscribe and rate the show on your favorite podcast platform and give me your honest feedback. Also, I put together a short eBook on some of the top lessons I've learned in 20 years, owning a B2B business. You can download a free copy at growyourb2bcompany.com.