Evaluating New Members - Business vs. Life Experience
We had a new potential member create his one page profile and submit it to my Mastermind Group that met last week. He is a very early stage business - in fact he currently has a full time job and is working on his business part time. One of his goals is to transition to full time and continue to grow his company.
Usually such a candidate is not ideal for our Mastermind Groups. Most of our members are beyond the startup stage and have between $100,000 and $2,000,000 in annual revenues. They have hit a ceiling and need help getting to the next step. This new member, however, was referred by an existing member and I always meet with someone who was referred.
I'm glad I did.
What the new potential member lacks in business experience, he has made up for in life experience. To protect confidentiality I cannot go into detail in this post but the candidate has definitely seen a lot in his life to last three lifetimes. He could offer some valuable insights to the rest of the group and definitely bring a different perspective.
The group read his bio and agreed to meet with him for his test meeting next month. Whether he gets accepted into the group or not depends on how he interacts with the other members and if everyone feels like there is value being created but it was a valuable lesson to learn that life experience can sometimes be just as important as business experience when you are looking at adding new members to your group.
Before any new member is accepted in one of my Mastermind Groups they must submit a one page overview of their business which will be reviewed by the group. The one pager typically covers the candidate's business experience and shares some personal information their own skills and background.
This overview is submitted to one of the Mastermind Groups who will review it and decide if the candidate should be invited as a guest to the next meeting.
As my groups develop and get more mature, each one takes on its own personality depending on members in the group. They start to decide what characteristics they are ideally looking for when recruiting new members.
On Thursday evening, my third Mastermind Group named itself The Visionaries (instead of PMG-3 which stood for Peer Mentorship Group #3) and we discussed the profile of a new potential member for the group. The group named itself The Visionaries because each member had big visions and dreams for where they wanted to take their companies. They, therefore, also want to bring on new members who share the same philosophy.
A suggestion from one of the group members was to ask new candidates to share with them on their one pager what their 3-5 year vision of their company is. Where does the candidate see herself going? This way the members can decide if the candidate had a big vision and would be a good potential member in the group or not.
I thought it was a fantastic suggestion and will be implementing this rule for all my groups. Any new candidate now who submits a profile to be reviewed by one of our three groups has to include in that profile a 3-5 year vision of where their company is going.
The strength of a Mastermind Group comes down to the people in the group. Anything you can do to improve the chances of getting the right people will make the experience more pleasurable and valuable. I am looking forward to implementing this new tactic and helping my groups attract more ideal members!
The other day, I was invited by an experienced coach & friend to attend a coaches' gathering at her house. She invited about 8 coaches who all graduated from the same professional coaching school iPEC Coaching. Some of us hadn't seen each other for months, and some of us had never met. The purpose of the meeting was for us to catch up, meet new colleagues (some coaches just finished their training), and to determine if there was any desire for us to meet on a regular basis.
It's always wonderful to meet other professional coaches, whether from the same school or not, to compare notes and possibly make new friends. I'm always curious about their business experience, coaching niche and personal stories. I believe I can always learn something from everyone I meet.
Making new friends and having fun is important. On the other hand, if we were to meet on a regular basis, I'd like to make the most of our time together and really learn something valuable from the group. After all, we are a group of professional coaches who can offer a lot for one another.
There were 6 of us there, and everyone showed interest in meeting on a regular basis. So, when we discussed what we would like to get out of this group, and the directions we would like to focus on, I suggested that we made our group a coaches mastermind group.
After a lively discussion, we agreed to establish a coaches mastermind group for:
mutual support
mutual accountability
interpersonal contact
We would like to use our meetings to focus on our roles as coaches through:
coaching skills practice
coaching case studies
business how to's
presentation skills
shared resources
networking & referrals
We also envisioned that we could collaborate to create coaching-related programs & events in the future, and create "energy dominoes" (ripple effects) to the society at large through our mastermind group.
We've agreed to commit ourselves to this group process, and we would send out invitations to the other two coaches who couldn't make it that day. The group decided that we would plan to meet once a month, and test out the group meeting format & frequency for the first couple of months. At that point, we will re-evaluate the effectiveness of our mastermind group. Depending on whether everyone would accept the invitation to form this mastermind group, we may or may not invite more members to join our group.
I hope for great success from our new mastermind group.
EvanCarmichael.com is the world's #1 website for small business motivation and strategies. Evan also runs a series of successful Mastermind Groups in Toronto for entrepreneurs.
