There are a lot of ways to get the advice, guidance and counsel you need to grow your inbound marketing agency. You can get individual consulting help, you can join a group and get coaching support, you can lean on a peer network, you can trust your software vendor to help you or you could consider a Mastermind Group.
What’s a Mastermind Group? Good question. To keep it simple, a mastermind group is a collection of like-minded individuals who come together regularly to work on the challenges and issues associated with their businesses. They agree to follow a specific style of meeting and they agree to hold each other accountable for real progress toward solving their specific challenges. If you want more information you can click here to get more details on the definition of a mastermind group.
Here's how you might benefit from a Mastermind Group.
You’ll share specific business challenges with the group and you’ll work together to solve them.
A mastermind group starts with an assessment and a prioritization of the specific issues the group members want processed within the session. These are your issues, your concerns, your challenges. You share the details of the challenge with the group members and they ask questions to help frame the challenge, better understand the details and prepare to give you on the spot guidance and advice.
You walk away with an action plan for your issue from people who know you, your industry and your challenges. It might have taken you weeks to come up with this set of suggestions and recommendations but in a matter of minutes the collective brain power produced some legitimate answers and real actions you can take that same day.
Your fellow group members get to know you and your business intimately.
The best mastermind groups are built on a platform of trust and intimacy. Before each meeting you share a little about what’s been going on for you personally and professionally. This helps your fellow members get to know you and your business in a way most people never will. Of course, the real trust is built over time and the best groups have been together for years.
But by being in a group, you’re making a real commitment to get to know your fellow members and their businesses, to ask good questions, to follow up on concerns and to get to know the people behind the businesses as well as you know the businesses themselves. After all, behind every successful business is a person with all the human frailties we all have in some form or another.
You’ll be held accountable for any changes you agree to work on.
It’s like having an advisory board. The people in your group care about you and your business just like an advisory board might care. They’re going to hold you accountable, not for doing what they say, but for doing what you say you’re going to do.
Each month you’ll follow up with the members to share what you did and what the outcomes were. If you show up and you didn’t do what you said you would do—well it’s not going to paint you in the best light. There are no ramifications for not completing your tasks but you do have an accountability to your group and you want to treat their recommendations with respect. You would never ignore what your advisory board suggested and you rarely ignore what your mastermind group suggests either.
You’ll benefit from what other agency owners have already accomplished.
No matter how big or how small, many of us are dealing with very similar challenges. Finding new clients is a big driver for agency growth. Everyone is doing it, what are people doing that’s working? Almost everyone has something to contribute. Hiring good people. There are 20 different ways to go about it, why not hear and learn from what’s working at other agencies and then simply replicate it at your shop? It makes running and managing an agency so much easier.
In a mastermind group, you set the agenda. If you want to talk about hiring, you make this a priority, process your issue and you get a ton of solid hiring advice that you can apply that same day. When you hear how 15 other agencies handle hiring you might find three or four ideas that you can apply at your shop. You don’t have to do exactly what everyone else is doing but that insight and idea sharing is only available in forums like this.
The collective mind is at the core of a Mastermind group; more brains are better than one.
Everyone knows two heads are better than one, but how about 10, 15 or even 20 heads all working to help you crack the code and figure out what’s holding you back. What if these people actually cared about you and your business, what if they knew the intimate details of your agency and could provide you such detailed suggestions that you simply had to go back and do what they said. This would be valuable to anyone running an agency.
The mastermind group provides you the ability to ask for help, share your challenges and then leverage the collective wisdom of the group to solve your issues quickly and effectively. That sounds like an incredible opportunity to me.
There’s a peer to peer learning style for almost everyone. Once you get your head around wanting to cut corners, skip over potholes and slide over the speed bumps because other people know how to help you avoid common pitfalls, you’ll find that these learning opportunities help your agency immensely.
Whether it’s one-on-one consulting, group coaching or a mastermind format group these opportunities have proven to help agency owners just like you to fast forward their agencies, hit their growth goals and shine a light on some very challenging areas of agency business.
Start Today Tip – What’s your biggest challenge? You really need to know. You probably have more than one. Start listing them out. Is it hiring? Is it helping the agency be more profitable? Is it lead generation? What about client results? These are all common challenges I talk to agencies about every single day. Once you know what your biggest challenge is now you can address it. Can you figure it out on you own or do you need help? Maybe you can figure it out on your own but getting help would mean fixing it faster. Think about what it would mean to your agency if this WASN’T a problem for you. Would it mean more money, more peace of mind, less stress, happier team members? Now how much is that worth to you? It’s going to be worth 10x the cost of any help you’ll get from almost anyone. Now make a move.
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