The ultimate playbook for running a masterminds program that scales

Are you thinking of starting a masterminds or a small group program in your community?

If you’re like me, you’ve seen the idea floating around, you realise it’s potential but you haven’t been a part of one. So you aren’t sure how to do it.

You wish it were as simple as:

1. Put your community members into small groups of 3-5 based on some common goals or backgrounds
2. Nudge them to meet every 2 weeks
3. Watch them flourish ✨

But once you get into the nitty-gritty of it all, you realise that it’s more difficult than it seems. How do you ensure members attend the calls? Who is going to lead them? Who takes care of the logistics? What happens when a member wants to switch groups?

Well, lucky for you, Erin Halper has dealt with all of these problems and she shared her current playbook with me on our interview.

“We went through eight iterations of this over the years before we got it right.”

You can watch her explain this in our interview or continue reading my summary.

Too long didn’t read?

Don’t miss out. Get this and other community building lessons in your inbox to read them at your leisure.

Steps for running a self-sustaining masterminds program

Step 1. Wait for the members to want it

Every mastermind group needs a leader who will moderate the meetings. No leader, no mastermind.

If you were building a high-ticket community like Chief, you could pay external experts to be mastermind leaders. But chances are you aren’t. So, you need community members to voluntarily accept this responsibility.

This means the central problem to solve is finding a leader for each group meeting.

Erin’s solution? Don’t start a mastermind group unless a member specifically asks for it. And when they do, ask them to lead it.

Member: “Hey, we want a group of just retail consultants.”

Erin: “Great. Are you willing to lead that?”

Notice how this turns the table. Leading a mastermind just went from becoming a favour to a privilege. That is the only way to ensure a leader for each meeting.

When you think about it, leading a group of your industry can be a great opportunity for the right person. You can further sweeten the deal by offering some perks to the leaders. Erin offers them a 30-minute 1-on-1 session with herself.

Step 2. Keep groups on business

You need to set boundaries for what groups are allowed in your community and reject requests for the ones that don’t fall in those boundaries. For example,

• you shouldn’t allow a subgroup on anything political/religious
• you shouldn’t allow hobby groups like a wine enthusiasts club if your community is about consulting
• you can allow a group for consultants in a particular city or industry if your community is about consulting

Step 3. Train the leaders

Leading a group meeting of even 3-5 people doesn’t come naturally to a lot of people. So you should have a process to train your group leader on the best practices.

Give them guidance on dealing with the shy members (call on them and ask them for their opinion on the topic being discussed).

Arm them with different possible “runs of show” for each meeting:

• Roundtable Q&A: Share a form with the group before the meeting and ask them to write their most pressing question. Then go through each of these questions one by one on the call. Each person leaves with an action item that can solve their problem.
• Hot seat: One member sits on the hot seat and everyone else tries to help them make progress on their situation. This can be a good format when you have a new member join an old group.
• Fireside chat: Invite an external expert to the meeting, the leader interviews them, followed by Q&A from other attendees.

Step 4. Offer them personal assistance

Your group leaders are already doing you a favour by leading the meetings. You should do everything you can to take all the administrative work off their plate. Like:

• Inviting the right people to the group
• Setting up their Zoom meetings
• Sending event invitations and reminders
• Collect attendance reports and feedback from attendees
• Removing inactive people

You basically need to give them a personal assistant to manage these aspects of the group meetings. All they should have to do is show up for the meeting.

Step 5. Be proactive in dissolving groups

Erin has discovered that even after doing all this, there’s one challenge that you cannot solve for - attendance. You will always have people who aren’t able to attend a meeting because their got sick or they are on leave or have an unexpected emergency.

Her workaround?

Instate a rule - If you don’t show up for 2 consecutive meetings and you’re out.

Her reasoning?

“We understand life happens but it’s not fair to the other members”

Finally, if a particular mastermind is suffering from low attendance rates for a while, you should consider it a signal to shut it down.

So the ultimate success metric for any group is - attendance.

More tricks to experiment with

Here are a few other ideas I have seen work in other communities:

• “Unlock” masterminds after a threshold - Trends.vc requires their members to have participated in atleast 5 daily standup sessions before they can “unlock” the masterminds.
• Go beyond accountability - accountability is one of those weird things that people don't want as much as they say they want. What they actually want is venting about like challenges that they're having and troubleshooting each other’s problems. Talk to your members and see if that might be the case for them.
• Don’t make them permanent - in order to keep things fresh, you can keep rotating the mastermind groups every few months. It adds work to your plate but it makes sure that no mastermind

There’s more where that came from!

We’ve written more playbooks covering “magic sauce” of top community businesses. Get them all in your inbox.