One of the points no one mentions in business is the importance of mastermind groups. You can often hear or read that you need a mentor to take a step ahead for your business.



When I am working with my employees or collaborators I realized that I discover many more things than when I work alone. You can get more even if you have partners to work with. With partners you can share customers and cross promote. In this way you can promote too many more people and offer bigger and various product solutions.

But the best point is you can share ideas. You enlarge or view and can improve your mission and strategy. You can know things that have never thought before or even you can realize that something you thought was useless or not important is instead good for your business. You can also discover your defects and qualities. In this way you can reduce your error rate and have continuous lessons learned results.

Your partners can also perform the role of a customer providing you with useful feedback on your products and services. You can know in advance if you are in the right path or if you need to change part of your business. If every partner has a different mentor you can share the different experiences and improve your know-how. Also if you partner has the same mentor you can discover something you did not pay attention to. It is like when you made your school works with your school mates. You got better results and in a shorter and faster way.

There are basically two ways to establish and keep your relationship with your partners.

The first is an unstructured way, i.e. you contact them when you need a suggestion or a support for a solution. This is very common when you everyday call one or two of best partners through Skype or Messenger. The second is a structure way. This is suggested when the number of partners you would talk to simultaneously is greater than 2.

These groups of partners are called mastermind groups. Mike Filsaime has always claimed that his success relied also on mastermind groups. You discover you know less when you work alone. But mastermind groups, being a structured way to partner, must be organized.

You should have an agreement before starting a mastermind group. There should be a memorandum of understanding, rules to follow to be loyal to the other partners and not to infringe property protection statements. Also you need to commit yourself to be active within your mastermind group. This means you have to propose ideas and initiatives as well as to guarantee your presence at meetings.

Meetings are the moments when the partners share ideas and support. These should be held at least once every two weeks. Every week would be ideal. The duration should not exceed two hours as we know human concentration is not going to last long.

Meetings should be structured, i.e. there should be an agenda in place.

Two roles must be defined and covered every time. One is the role of chairman, i.e. the person who is going to prepare and distribute the agenda, to prepare the meeting infrastructure (i.e. he/she must check the Internet connection and the details for the chatting room), to prepare and deliver support material, to forward extraordinary rules, to communicate variations or special details, to collect data for the meeting minute, to provide follow-ups for the meeting, etc. There are many other things a chairman should perform and these depend on the way the scope of the meeting is. The second role is that of the Time Keeper. This is the person that controls the time of each conversation. It is important that the conversation is controlled, i.e. not all people talk simultaneously and who is going to speak is mentioned in the agenda (when, who and about what).

The best solution is to discuss every time about the problems, issues and topics related to one of the members. This is suggested especially before a new product launch. In that moment all the partners can provide suggestions, tips and tricks and other ideas to improve the launch.

There are also ethical rules to follow. I would give you some examples but you can use your imagination or focus on your needs to think to other points. It is aimed that everyone commits himself to support the others in the promotion sharing customers, secrets, ideas, etc. It is aimed that everyone respects the others without revealing outside the group secrets or strategies and even not use them if not authorized. It is aimed that you can provide help in forums, groups, with customers especially in difficult moments.

It is appreciated that you have a database where you store all the meeting minutes and eventually tools and materials to be shared. A forum for members only should be set up and everyone has to commit to be active. Many groups start very well and in few weeks you can see that the forum has almost no new post. A moderator for the forum should be assigned every week. Forum posts should be mentioned in the agenda for the next meetings and eventually assigned to a priority or person if related to issues to solve.

Never think that meetings are useless. Sometimes I heard conversations I thought were of pour quality and at the end I found even a single solution for my business that saved me time and money. The mastermind groups are really the secrets of business men even of those who have already a good business in place.

Another good point is that you can ask the members of your group to provide a testimonial for you for your next product launch and support your credibility and notoriety posting in forums, writing articles and press releases on your products, maybe in exchange for a good JV commissions. The price is really worth. With your partners you can also share your training material and discuss about new strategy to create together. Sometimes you can really modify or change your business model.

What is important to maintain a mastermind group is to assure mutual respect and correctness. You can also start a mastermind group with some of your customers or students (if you are a trainer) and you will discover how much more you can learn also from those who are expected to have less experience than you. You have to have a constant learning approach, i.e. every discussion should provide you ideas and suggestions for your next business.

Basically for you mastermind groups you need to have a chatting room, a forum and a database (a server space) where to store your common information. You can only improve your business if you have a mastermind group. Do not isolate yourself and be convinced to know everything and have no defects. Talking to other people you can really discover better yourself and see something that was hidden within you until that moment.