AMA - Where Can I Find a Mastermind?

Patrick from Austin Texas writes.

Hello Victor. Congrats on all of your success. I have followed you for years now. Do you suggest any good masterminds. I currently own 110 single family homes for rentals. I have them professionally managed so I only spend 15 minutes a month on my real estate and I’m looking to expand.

Patrick, thank you for the kind words and that is a great question. Masterminds are an amazing way of elevating your life to another level.

While the concept of a mastermind has been around for a long time, the greatest modern day articulation was in the book Think and grow rich by napoleon hill. In that book Napoleon Hill describes the masterminds of Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie.

I’ve participated in many different types of masterminds over the years. I actively participate in them even today.

For example, I have a call every Sunday morning at 9AM. That conference call is an integrity mastermind. About 4-5 of us get on the phone each week and share what we have discovered in the past week about integrity. Now when I talk about integrity, I’m not talking about the honesty definition of the word. I’m talking about workability. For example, if you have a bicycle wheel with broken spokes, then that wheel is lacking in integrity. The wheel isn’t bad. The wheel isn’t dishonest. It’s just lacking integrity and more importantly, it’s possible to restore integrity. So we look at where things are breaking down in our lives and brainstorm structures that can be put in place to permanently restore integrity in that area.

There are larger masterminds that are run as a business. For example, I used to participate in a mastermind which had about 30 members. The price of admission was $25,000 a year. The host would bring in various speakers to share their wisdom. We had an Entrepreneur who built and sold a business for $800M. We had the CEO of Krispy Kreme donuts. We had a senator. All kinds of incredible people who we probably would not have been exposed to were it not for the mastermind.

My friend Kyle Wilson was Jim Rohn’s business partner for 18 years. Jim Rohn is considered the father of the modern day seminar industry. He mentored Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, and countless others who today have established themselves as thought leaders. Kyle has several mastermind groups that he leads across the country. There’s one in Dallas, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. These meetings are monthly and usually take place over two full days.

The thing to remember is that there is no one way to do this.

I host a monthly mastermind conference call with George Ross. George is 92 years old. He has over 60 years of business experience and he just recently retired at age 89. We record the calls and even if a member of the mastermind can’t make the live call, they can listen to the replay and still get huge value from the conversation with the participants on the call.

Here are a few best practices that in my experience make for a successful mastermind.

1. The members have to commit to absolute confidentiality. If you don’t trust that you have a completely open non-judgemental environment, it’s going to be very difficult to have open honest conversations.
2. You need to be very mindful of who is participating in the mastermind. Don’t admit new members without the unanimous consent of all the members.
3. Keep the mastermind small, usually under 10 people. There are some examples of successful masterminds that are larger, but they’re harder to manage. Unless they’re a “for profit model” and professionally managed, keep them under 10 people (I find that 4-6 is ideal).
4. Start each session with a round-table sharing of wins since the last session.
5. When people commit to be part of the mastermind, they commit to protect that time slot and be a regular participant.