Masterminds

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are in another season of interviews and just continuing going through these. We've had so many good ones and this is going to be yet another good one. We're speaking with Liz Scully today and we're going to talk about masterminds. Now this is something we've done in the past. We've done sort of a blended approach. Some of you have attended them and we've tried to make them a little bit of everything. We did a little bit of mentoring, a little bit of masterminding and it sort of evolved over time. Now there will be a new mastermind resetting and much more along the lines which you're going to hear from Liz today. Ours will be coming in the beginning of 24. We're looking for applications and stuff like that in the near future. But I don't want to take away from her. We're going to talk about masterminds. What are they? What do you expect from them? What kind of value do you get out of them? I think you're going to have a lot better, unless you really understand them, you're going to have quite a better understanding of them and what their value is, what they bring and why this is something that you may want to pursue. So I don't want to take too much away from her. So let's get right into our conversation with Liz Scully. So today we've got a new conversation going. We're speaking with Liz Scully and you don't get to see the video, but on the background she's got Obey and Evil Coach and a lot of stuff that could be intimidating to you. You're like, wow, what is this? Is this some sort of weird black magic thing? No, we are going to spend some time talking her favorite topic, which is masterminds. We have brought these up over the years. We've run one for a while, but we're going to deal with somebody now. We're going to talk to somebody that really knows and loves masterminds. They can help us figure out what is the value, how should they run, all of the nuts and bolts around it. So get ready, take notes, because I'm sure you're going to have quite a bit afterwards. That being said, let's go ahead and dive right in and talk with Liz. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, give us a little bit of your background and we'll get going from there. Well, hello. Lovely to be here. My name is Liz, as you know, and I spent 20 years working in film in visual effects, which was wonderful. It was delightful. And I'm now a business strategist, which might seem to be quite a big leap from one thing to the other. It's actually very similar. The film industry is about very talented and extremely focused humans producing something beautiful as quickly and efficiently as possible, which is remarkably similar to the way entrepreneurs work. I ran lighting teams, big lighting teams on those sorts of horrendous Hollywood films that they look great. And somehow they're just always a little disappointing when you come out and think, yeah, that didn't quite work, but it looked beautiful. And I was part of that, but it looked beautiful side of things. And we worked very, very much in small teams and small pods. And when I started my own business outside of the film industry, working on that, we continued to find that working together works really well. At the time I was working, I'd just finished working with DreamWorks in Bangalore. So I left work. I continued to work at that horrendous film pace, just T-Rex typing away in my room for ages. And of course, it doesn't matter how hard you work. You still need people that you want to bounce ideas around. And that collaborative element just wasn't there when it was just me and my keyboard. So quite quickly, I set up and started running Masterminds. And that would be, well, that's well over 10 years ago now. And it has absolutely been the fuel for my business. And it's also something that over the years, I've begun to teach people how to run. And gradually, I've just become a mastermind evangelist because I know the reason my business grew quickly and the reason my clients' businesses grow quickly is having that little group of people that are there with you, lockstep, day in, day out, and can give you the feedback that you just can't see yourself because you can't read the label inside the jar. So I guess to start with this, because we did just dive right into it, what would be a brief definition or how do you describe to somebody if they say, OK, cool, Mastermind sounds awesome. You're either an evil genius or just a regular genius or something. What does mastermind mean? Exactly. Yes, my mistake. We indeed have been bandying the word mastermind around without explaining it. And to be honest, it isn't something that has a very clear definition. Now, it does to me, but the rest of the world tends to slap the word mastermind on all sorts of things. So as far as I'm concerned, a mastermind is a small ish group that meets regularly and we set a goal this time that you will most definitely have achieved next time. So it's very, very simple. And you can run masterminds that are 100 people that meet once a year. I personally think that's more of a gathering for my money. But the sorts of masterminds I enjoy are much smaller. They're four people, six people, maybe eight people. And you see each other really regularly. You meet once a month, once every two weeks. That's my favorite because that gives you enough time to think, I can do that. I can hit a goal and then still sort of rush to finish them. Because part of why it works is the accountability of having a bunch of people waiting for you to. So you said you do those things, Rob. Have you done them? And nobody wants to be the fool that turns up and says, yes, all that stuff I said I do. I haven't done it. Works really well. As well as accountability, you have you can ask questions and there really aren't many places you can really ask a question, not the sort of secret. Am I good enough? Kind of question that most business owners have at some point. Those three AM questions. It does have that, you know, along people along with the ride, you know, long for the ride with you that that has that that sort of ability to look into you a little bit. It has and has that knowledge that they can give you something that is something better than just, oh, yeah, it looks good. You know, it's it's something that's that gets a little bit more under the level under the surface and says, well, hey, you know, things may look good on the surface, but hey, here's some things we need to be thinking about. Or and this goes into my first question is, I find there's things personally. And even when we got into masterminds with small groups is that there would be things that they sort of they get missed. It's like, I'm going to get this done. And then that goal gets pushed and pushed and pushed. And so it's how do you have you run into that? And I'm assuming you have with the number of groups you've dealt with is it. How do you as a group really help come together to get somebody past that, whether it's a blocker or maybe they just don't have the other, maybe it's focus or something like that, where they're just not they're not achieving some of these goals, even though you can see it for them. Well, there are many reasons why we don't achieve goals, but they tend to fall into two or three buckets of what it is. So it could be that you've just chosen a goal that's too big. Conquer the world by Tuesday. You might need to sort of break it down a bit so it's more helpful. So make it into smaller, more attainable stuff. The other is the other big bucket is that you're not achieving it because you're avoiding it, as you say. And that could be either that there's a piece of information you don't have and a mastermind is a great place to ask that. Sure, I will change X to Y. I just have no idea of how to actually do that. So there's that there's the kind of missing information in sort of avoiding stuff. And then, as you said, there's blockers. So for me, one of the things that turns up all the time in business growth mastermind, which is mostly what I run, is people come and ask questions about pricing. Very, very simple question. You know, what should I charge? How should I fit it together? Had all the tiers work. And when people have asked that question more than three times in a row, they actually have all of the information. And if they're still not putting their pricing together, it's because of an underlying issue. And that underlying issue is often am I charging too much? Who am I to charge for this at all? Why would anybody give me any money of any sort to do anything? So at that point, there are certain things that raise a red flag. But normally, if you're still procrastinating about something after getting some great information and still do it, and we all do it, God knows we've all we've all sat there thinking, why has this one last thing be moved across all of my to do lists for the last six months? So I would begin to really look at that. And as the person leading the mastermind, I feel it's my job to sort of gently and kindly prod people a bit. And then once the prodding has finished and they've got good questions occasionally, very nicely sort of slap them about a bit so they get on with it. I mean, that was love, obviously. That's the important thing, as long as you kindly slap them about. So that leads into something too is in a mastermind, because it is such a group activity, where do you see the difference or the value maybe even of or even the directives of somebody leading a mastermind versus it just being like a gathering as opposed to so instead of just a gathering of, hey, everybody gets together, they have drinks or coffee or whatever and talk about stuff. But actually having that like maybe agenda that a mastermind would have that somebody that leads it would actually drive it to from point A to point B. So I reckon I mean, it's helpful to have a group of your friends together and to talk about them. That's great. But it can just descend into a kind of a group whining session, if you're not careful, or it's sort of like a high end coffee clatch, really, which is of no use to growing your business. So I do think a structure is really helpful because you want someone who can jump in and say, you know, let's let's hear what other people let's hear what other people have to say if there's one person who's going on and on so you can help move things along. You can keep it keep everyone to time. So there's just kind of procedural stuff. And the way I run masterminds, I make sure that everybody in the mastermind has something to contribute to it all times. So there's nobody going to go, actually, I don't have anything to add to that. Well, in that case, can you sort of comment generally on the catch up you've just heard? There's like a whole bunch of other stuff. And what I've discovered is that often it's those throwaway moments where someone saying, I can't actually help you with Facebook ads. I can't help you with that part at the moment. But here's a thing I've noticed about you. You're really tenacious or you know, that thing you did last week, which is well done. I know you worked on that for a very long time. And those little tiny bits of praise or feedback, which can feel so inconsequential when you're running a business yourself, you don't necessarily hear them. You might you might give them to your employees. But that little pat on the back or that 360 appreciation, you're like, OK, no, that is a good thing. And time and again, people come back to me and say, that was the moment that I realized I was doing the right thing because because that showed up. So really helping people have that structure. You know, every time someone asks a question, the whole group pitches in to answer it. I think if you don't have that, you can have someone who's on the call, but secretly checking their email or, you know, patting the dog and not really thinking about it. You want everybody really involved. And that's why what makes a meeting a mastermind when we're all leaning in together, many minds together as averse to yet another Zoom meeting where one person's talking a lot and nothing else is getting done. So that actually touches on something. Do you like to keep do you like to keep the mastermind as a affirming, positive kind of thing? Or or do you also at times sort of step into that accountability and maybe a little bit of like, you know, like said, it's I guess it's kindly slapping people around and saying, hey, you know, you've been, you know, for example, somebody you'll see this in any group, you know, you'll go through and every time you come through, they say, oh, I don't really have anything to add. You get to, you know, everybody in the group goes, it's like you haven't had anything to add the whole time. Why are you breathing? Maybe that's a little bit a little bit a little bit harsh, but it's why are you here? Like you have to value yourself because we want to hear you're not serving us. You're not helping the process if you're sitting there saying I have nothing to add. So how do you and particularly when you're running it, is there sort of a way that you like maybe you start with the bad news and want everybody to leave with the good news or things like that? How do you make it something that is that is productive, but is also something which I think is I'm assuming what is part of the goal is it's uplifting or energizing. So when they come out, people don't feel like, gosh, I'm I hate doing that. Why am I walking into that? And instead they're like, gosh, that that's the best hour I've spent this week, this month, this year. Well, it's twofold. So first of all, you need to make sure that you're curating super carefully. A lot of free masterminds, because anyone can run a mastermind. That doesn't have to be a fancy paid thing. But a lot of free masterminds, the curation, they've just asked whoever's available on Tuesday at two o'clock. That is not curation. That is a calendar date. You want to make sure that the people in the group are going to be the sort of people who are going to be supportive and open and are willing to take feedback, all the sort of obvious things, but also have skills that as a group they can share and are willing to share. If you have someone who is in the mastermind trade, we call it the sort of person who should do all over people. You should do this. You should do that. You should not helpful, really, because the person who should be doing all that, they might there might be a lot of reasons why they haven't chosen that. So you don't have people that just talk continually, that talk over other people. And if they do, it is your job as the person who is facilitating that to jump in and say, actually, let's just let them speak first. And, you know, simple stuff. But I do actually think that one of the hardest things that new mastermind coaches need to learn is how to how to shut people up, how to just jump in while someone's talking very politely, tell them to just, you know, thanks. And also worse, worse still, if you run a mastermind well, it feels like a super safe place. You've got the right people in there. You're talking about the big stuff. And after a few months of that, often people will suddenly become very emotional because running a business is going to bring up every personal problem you have ever had in your entire life and a whole bunch you didn't know you had. All of that's going to come up. And this is a super safe place where you can talk about that. So quite often people will be a little more open, a little more emotional. And it is it is a tough call. The first time you have to stop someone who is crying and and moving on to someone who's had a triumph. So we go, so Dave, that's awkward. You and the divorce. So moving on to Dave over here. Second, Dave, who's got no. So all of that is just a skill. And part of it comes from bravery to say, yep, that's tough. Let's take that into a different meeting. Let's let's take a moment. It's all sympathize. And now we move on. So it's learning to put those pauses in that. Also, I might add, crying is not mandatory in masterminds. It is perfectly possible to run a mastermind with no tears. But that safety, that honesty of being able to go, you know, I can't tell anyone else this thing. And particularly when you're running a business, I think there's a lot of problems where your family's bored witless with your new business. Your friends are probably sick to death of it. Nobody else actually understands whatever it is you actually do. So having a group of people that you can really get down into the nitty gritty with super helpful and having that means you can open up and say a lot of things you might not say elsewhere because it feels so safe. Part of why it feels safe is there's somebody going to give that space, but also shut down anything that feels very negative. Make sure that we are acknowledging this is a difficult time. Exactly that to feel held in a space is why you'll finish it. Go, well, that was a really tough session. But you're right. I have a group of people who are with me and that's OK, because it is just hard. This stuff is hard. And having a group of people that are going to going to be there with you makes a massive difference. Talking about the curation side of that, when you're putting together a mastermind group, is there a I guess there's two things. Is are you are you looking for mixing skills in a way or so that's more heterogeneous versus homogeneous? Or is it like is it a bunch of people doing the same thing or a bunch of people doing different things? And then with that is how are you because you've mentioned that the trust factor that you want to want to build. How do you how do you do that as you're getting is this people that ideally already know each other? Are you do you go through like trust exercises? How do you start stepping into that? Trust exercise that makes me think of trust falls. God, yeah, it doesn't work the same as Zoom. Oh, I get the pillows. We got you. Everything. No, I don't do any of that, but I'm tempted to. Now we've talked about it. So I don't I don't do trust exercises, but I do explain to people very carefully what I expect from them in the mastermind. And most people that, you know, most people are kind and intelligent and really care, particularly if they have chosen to be in a mastermind. So they want to give back. So there's that's that's part of it. You tell people the behavior you expect. And on the first couple of masterminds, people just want to get it right. So is that when you've just been hired at a new company? Really, what you want most of all is to show that you are of value and it is helpful. And in a mastermind, you want that. But you also want I have spent my money wisely if you paid for it. And at the very least, you want to know, OK, so I've committed to spend time with these people. I hope they're OK. I hope they're nice people. So people come in with that feeling. And as for curation, there are two ways you can go. Yes, you can have all real estate agents or all dentists if you wanted to. If you do that, you need to make sure that people on actively competitors for each other. I mean, I generally believe that the people aren't the really isn't a direct competition for most things, because the reason you would choose something is so different. It's either a personality or a location thing. So you can do that. But if you were in the same town. So if you were working with realtors, for instance, you might want to choose people that worked with million dollar and up factory stuff of some sort, or people working with commercial people working over retail, people working with much more kind of in condo. So you could choose like the same city, but with completely different customers. Or you could choose across the nation. You could choose people that worked with, you know, 50 million dollar high rise apartments sales, that kind of stuff. So you could choose that we're the same, but we're in different places. We kind of have the same industry, but we all do different things. But the sort that I run most often are different people from completely different trades who are at the same kind of point in their business. So they have a similarity in that they are maybe getting their second round of funding or they are developing their first website, depending where they are. They're all doing, roughly speaking, the same amount of cash in, just because that feels about the same level. And they're moving at the same speed to their goals, because I know personally, I have learned most in my industry from people who are from completely different worlds, because that's where the real learning is. Like I said, I come from film and I have certainly found that really helpful in running my current business. But the person I learned most about strategy and customer management and the whole sort of experience of working with me was from a manager of a six star hotel chain. And his concept of how a guest is treated made me entirely rethink my onboarding. Now, if I'd had a bunch of other coaches with me, as I often do in masterminds, lovely, but I would never have learned about the white glove treatment of how people who how people expect to be treated in really fancy hotels from a back end point of view. It's fascinating. Yeah, actually, and it may be the same person that has heard a speaker that is and I forget his name and I'd butchered anyways because it's a German kind of name. But listening to that, to me, I have no I've only ever never worked in a hotel. I've just slept in hotels. That's that's the closest thing I've ever been. And I have been in some some seedy ones and some really nice ones. And I know there's a difference in expectation. But it's not until you have somebody that knows that that just like lives and breathes it and you get a little bit, you know, you get a little behind the curtain in that sense. And you say, oh, wow, this is why these things are done this way. All these things that you almost take for granted. You realize that this was this was intentional. This is something that somebody said, if we do this, this is going to make you comfortable. This is going to make you trust us. This is make you come back. And finding that in different industries has always been fascinating to me. Is it where the once you get underneath the surface where you're like, oh, this is banking or this is real estate or this is, you know, entertainment or whatever it is. And then looking underneath it and seeing how people drive those businesses. So we get to see the in production. We don't get to see all of the stuff that was left on the, you know, on the cutting room floor from a movie perspective analogies. There's all that stuff. And people are amazed when it's, you know, there is a movie that's hour and a half long and there's hours and hours and hours and hours, days of film and stuff like that, that never saw the light a day. And it's like that in so many other industries as well. I think there's all these little things that it is. Like you said, I think that's those little pieces that you can say, hey, wait a minute. I can use that in my business. That would apply to me and make it very useful to me. Maybe, you know, turn in the corner and make it a big step forward. Absolutely. And it's also often I find that when people are talking to someone else who has a business problem, that it's never occurred to them would be an issue in their business. They will be giving help. Their mind is totally open. They're thinking very beautiful ways to help them. I can't tell you how many times mid sentence they have stopped and went, hang on, I could do that in my business because it just it's it's like looking at someone else's love life. You can look at them and say, oh, they should not be together. Oh, my Lord. Look at look at the problem there. But in your own life, I feel like I don't see the problem. Everything's fine. Whereas seeing across the table like that. So it frees up your mind to think more creatively, thinking about other people's business and learning, as you say, from the inside. It's just like it's astoundingly helpful. And it's a place where you can catch and talk about any any of the difficulties that you really don't want the world to see. But also, you can simply just ask questions, which I know you can ask questions, lots of places, but it is important to be able to ask a question of a staggering level of stupidity. The sort of question that you would not be able to ask anyone else that just because it's that stuff that holds us up. It's those little things like, but I don't actually know what a website is. Obviously, I don't think there's actually any one of the planets that you could say that with now, but something of that level of. But but how do you do that? Where a group of kind and friendly humans who know you well and know that you are an intelligent human normally. And this is just a glitch will sort you out. It's so helpful. It's really freeing in a way to to know that week after week, you can go and ask questions of startling dynamism or like blinding stupidity. Very lovely. Yeah. And this leads into actually mentioned earlier on that you like every two weeks. And that that to me is like a. It felt very comfortable because that to me is like the sort of the schedule I work on. I figure like two weeks is enough time to get something done and enough time to have wiggle room in case life steps in, because it always does. And it always ends up being at the end of that two weeks, those last few days. It's like scramble, scramble, scramble to get stuff done, to try to say, yeah, I got that done in for this little two week period. Is there. Like an ideal length of a mastermind of a session that you typically see, because I have seen situations where they're there. Some are lengthy, you know, half day, day long things. Some of them are, you know, an hour or two. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are in particular experience with the the effective effectiveness of it and how much people can be effective if you're sitting there having something that I would say heavy for long periods of time. Well, I think you're right. There is there is an upper limit to how much concentration humans can do. You can certainly do full day in person events or weekends. They're lovely mastermind weekends are delightful. But assuming that we're talking about online masterminds, for me, the sweet spot is two hours because I have four or six people in my groups. Most of my fancy, as my fancy masterminds are four people because I like everybody to have a hot seat. So four people, they get slightly under half an hour each, which is really helpful. So that means they can ask a question and get proper feedback. And then we can extract a very clear goal from that. It will be achieved next time. Six people, you do it slightly differently. The structure I use is three people get a hot seat and three people do a catch up. And then you swap over next time you meet. So two hours is great for me. 90 minutes feels better when you are thinking about it in advance. But 90 minutes, if you're running them, you have to be really to be quite abrupt with people just as they're hitting a breakthrough. You have to go, well, that's it. Move it on. And that's not helpful, really. So for me, I the first ones I ran back in the early Cretaceous period, they were all 90 minutes long. And what I discovered was that difference between having 20 minutes for your question and your input and half an hour is the difference between I like not a bad answer and that is the gold. And I think it's partly because we as humans, we tend like we tend to alert. Sometimes the first thing that comes out of our mouths. And as you hear other people say stuff, you're like, oh, actually, no, now is it. Now is I hear the adults speaking. I feel I should add some extra stuff to that. So for me, two hours is vital. And I run every other week because I used to run them weekly and weekly is is a leash off. And that comes around very, very quickly. And so you need to have smaller goals. You need to break them down into into smaller stuff. But for most of us meeting weekly to have two hours every week, that's that's a that's a lot of the group. And you want people to have time. I think to leave, leave the session, think I will get to that. As you say, have life get in the way, forget a bit and then pick up the pace again. And for me, that's every two weeks. Now you can run them very successfully every month. The problem with monthly is that once it's rolling, it's great. At the beginning, it can take a long time for everyone to get to know each other if you don't already know each other, because if you think about it, it's a six of you and you only meet once a month. It could be six months before you properly. Everybody's had time to be featured and time to really get to know each other. Whereas if you're meeting every two, two weeks, obviously in three months, which is a much more doable amount, you're going to properly have hung out together. You can do monthly monthly works well if you meet in person the first time. So that kind of getting to know you side is done. I know you've run masterminds. Did you have an in-person element or was it all online? Yeah, we've always had we always started and ours actually was, which was I was going to ask you a little bit about that as we started in person and had that had had relation beforehand. So we knew each other. We knew, you know, knew the people as part of the group. And we started actually saying that we started weekly. We did every week and it was exhausting. And we after about I think we only lasted like two months. And then we went to every two weeks and we did that. We tried. We actually then went to monthly for a little bit in a partially because it was just during like vacations and the time of year where it's so hard to do stuff anyways. And we realized that that was actually a little bit too big a step for us because we hadn't adjusted our goals. We would do two week goals and we just had four weeks to get them done because we assumed life was going to be too busy. And amazingly, life was too busy. And so we didn't get we still struggled to get, you know, the two weeks done in four weeks. And we will pause right there. Don't worry. We are not done yet. We're going to come right back in our next episode and continue with part two of our interview. And we're going to get a lot deeper into how she has grown her her masterminds, how she's figured out how to work them. And some of the sort of the gotchas that she's come up against along the way, which are maybe some things for you to look for if you're going to join a mastermind, if you're part of one or if you want to create your own. But I don't want to take up too much of your time. We will come back next time. We'll continue with this. But until then, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Please check out school.develop-a-noor.com. That is where we are starting to pour a lot of our content. We've taken the lessons, the things that we've learned, all of the things that make you a better developer. And we're putting it there. 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