Keys to the Game for Christmas

Deep in the heart of everything we do and teach at View From the Top is the priority of human interaction and relationships.

This is as important as the day is long if you’re running a mastermind business. You need a good mentor or coach reminding you of this. And if you’re like me? You probably could use The Mastermind Playbook to help you establish written goals and procedures for it.

For this Christmas season, we’re placing a strong emphasis on the theme of how we relate to others. God, our families, friends, acquaintances, employees, and customers. They all deserve a version of us in a mode of continuous improvement.

Angels in the Details

Details of people’s lives - their families, hobbies, travel activities and so forth gain new levels of importance when you welcome them into online mastermind groups.

Over the years we’ve run the Iron Sharpens Iron mastermind, we faced some learning curves in gathering and leveraging this data.

I always wanted to do this for people. What changed for me was that the mastermind business is not like previous industries where I’d been an entrepreneur.

I went from being paid to stock and sell consumer goods, to being paid to build luxury homes, to now being paid to help people build solid lives.

Any business or Christian life coach will tell you how raw and real that gets.

I wouldn’t say the members of my mastermind groups held expectations I’d remember intimate details that were special to them.

There’s a good chance, however, that when I went to the trouble to remember, it would give them occasion to think something like, “That sounds like something Aaron would do.”

So as our business model evolved, I made the decision that this had to be more of a priority than ever.

I can definitely say that I’d like for my paying clients to think of me that way. I went ahead and made the assumption when creating The Mastermind Playbook, that you do as well.

Make the Call

Who do you regularly pay a fee for service, who also takes time out of their day at random to call and say, “Hey, I was just thinking about you and wanted to encourage you to keep going”?

If your mastermind group is at all concerned with people’s professional and personal growth, you’re going to want to make this a habit.

The men in Iron Sharpens Iron agree to live lives of authenticity, transparency, and vulnerability. It puts me in a position of intimate knowledge of their inner worlds.

You add to that the layer of accountability and ownership expected of our members, and it would be negligent of me to leave them to totally fend for themselves.

Carving out time in your schedule to take a few minutes and call some of your members each week will bring you deeper into the circle of trust and buy you a boatload of goodwill.

For this to happen, you need a lot of other business matters that will compete for the time to be ironed out and systematized. The Mastermind Playbook will provide you with the resources and tools you need to achieve the balance.

Welcome Aboard

Another question you have to ask yourself: “If I had five people raise their hands and write checks to join my mastermind today, would I be ready to request, receive, collect and process all of their information?”

For most business coaches, the answer is definitely “No.”

Do you know what information to ask for? Where to store it when they provide it? Do you have a spreadsheet to track who has paid versus who hasn’t? How do you make sure they get included in all of the correct e-mail contacts, group texts, private Facebook groups etcetera …

… while also continuing to prospect and close more members?

I’ve said it elsewhere, the mastermind business is like the game of baseball. It goes from zero to sixty miles per hour in seconds flat. You’ll spend months, maybe even years building up toward launching … and then when you do, it’ll start to gather steam like a locomotive.

When that happens, you’re going to get flooded with details that will be difficult to track … especially by yourself.

You will need an assistant almost immediately, and good customer relationship management tools to know what to do with all of this data.

More than ever, at that moment, you’ll wish you’d invested in The Mastermind Playbook.

The Playbook for Christmas 

The reason I bring all this up ties into Christmas. At any time of year, business coaching services require a strong attention to personal details.

Let’s face it, though. Christmas can be one of the loneliest times of the year for people, and that includes entrepreneurs who “appear” to have relationships - intimate ones like spouses and children.

The one area where you should not let your foot off the accelerator for the holiday season is in expressing care, concern, and support for the people closest to you.

As an extension of this, your members should receive parallel guidance from you. But they will only listen to you once you’ve established that foundation through a demonstrated interest in their well-being.