I Decided to Start a Mastermind

For years I wanted to gather a group of strong entrepreneurs for strategy sessions. Here is why it matters, who belongs at the table and how our meetings run.

Our environment accounts for 50% of the results we get in life.

For a very long time I wanted to gather a group of strong entrepreneurs to work together in strategy sessions. In the West this format is called a Mastermind.

Since I am an entrepreneur myself, my circle is full of people who are also building something of their own. We share the same diagnosis. We work a great deal, we keep far too many processes on our own shoulders, we earn well, we burn out from time to time, we drop into illness or apathy for a couple of weeks, and then we rush back to the office again.

We all have a team, and we all have ideas and projects that are bigger than our current capacity. We are always busy putting out fires. Our brains hum with current tasks and obligations the way a refrigerator hums.

When I look back at my whole business path, I see that my current results came from just a handful of strategic decisions:

1. Grow every day: read, listen, ask questions, study. Be a student, not an “expert.”
2. Open an office in 2014 and hire my first employee.
3. Take the “Real Marketing” course in 2016.
4. Move from Nova Kakhovka to Kyiv in 2017.
5. Start running free seminars in 2018.
6. Start leading a group of people on Zoom in 2019.
7. Start publishing three videos a day on TikTok in 2022.

Each of those decisions lifted me onto a new spiral of growth and results. I want to learn how to make such decisions quickly and accurately.

Every entrepreneur’s attention is split across four levels:

1. Strategy — a new direction for the business, a new product, a new partnership and so on.
2. Tactics — reviewing income and expenses, hiring, training staff, moving to a different office and so on.
3. Operations — accepting payments, publishing content, assigning tasks to the team, talking to clients and so on.
4. Trivia — scrolling social media, dropping parcels off at the post office, refilling the printer and so on.

If I learn to make just a few correct strategic decisions a year and spend the rest of my time on tactics, my business will keep growing.

That is exactly what we gathered our Mastermind for. The average income at the table is above 5k, which guarantees the quality of the business conversation. The combined audience of everyone in the room is 750,000 people, which guarantees an understanding of human psychology and of social media algorithms. And everyone shares similar values — no grey or questionable businesses.

How a meeting runs

We meet once a month. Going around the circle, each person states their question or their problem. We share experience with each other. Nobody coaches and nobody teaches. Everyone gets three minutes to give their point of view and suggest options.

Then we make a plan. Each of us takes one concrete strategic task for the coming month. Later we report what worked and what did not, and we analyse it.

Last Friday we held our first Mastermind. I will share some of my insights from these meetings from time to time.