Jay Abraham on building mastermind groups that actually drive outcomes

A well-run mastermind group can do something almost no other business resource offers. It puts a room full of experienced, invested peers around a problem and demands accountability. But that version of a mastermind is harder to find than most people expect. Too many groups prioritize experience over outcome, and members walk away with memories instead of results.

On today’s episode of Strategic Edge, Jay Abraham, Executive Coach, Founder and CEO of the Abraham Group, continues his series on building mastermind groups that produce measurable outcomes. 

The foundation of an effective mastermind

The foundation of any effective mastermind, Abraham says, is commitment. Members must hold each other to higher performance standards.

“They’re there to grow. They’re not there to be necessarily entertained. They might enjoy it intellectually, but they’re not there to go partying,” Abraham said.

"It's the equivalent of, for a carpenter, everything is a hammer or a nail. But they get that they are purposely trying to transcend their own rigidity."

Most people enter a mastermind carrying the limits of their own experience. They have spent their careers inside one or two industries. That becomes the boundary of what they believe is possible.

Be repetitive without being boring

People resist revisiting material they have already seen, yet research shows repetition is exactly what drives growth.

“The ones that I model and believe in are the ones based on the same kind of learning process the military uses, medicine uses to train a doctor, they use to train a pilot. It’s over and over progression. It’s revisiting and progressing, revisiting and progressing,” Abraham said.

To keep engagement high, Abraham builds repetition into his masterminds without making it feel repetitive. His sessions run on a hot seat structure. Each member arrives with a ranked list of their most pressing challenges. The group works through them in 10 to 15-minute rounds. By the end of the first pass, a pattern emerges. About 80% of what members raise turns out to be a problem everyone in the room has faced but never fully acknowledged.

At the end of each round, every member names the single most useful insight they took away from their own session and from listening to others. Then they state publicly what they will do with it. Those commitments are written down and shared with the full group, creating an accountability structure that extends beyond the room.

Draw from outside your industry

Abraham avoids filling a room with people from the same industry. He draws members from across industries, disciplines, and business models instead.

“If you have 40 or 50 members and they’re all reading different books and paying for different consultants and operating in different worlds, and you bring them together, you’re getting this expansive perspective amalgam that really opens your mind,” he said.

Every industry’s best practices eventually become standard operating procedure. Once everyone knows them, the edge disappears, he says. Knowledge brought in from outside an industry is harder to replicate and slower to spread.

Peer confirmation changes everything

Abraham pushes for strategic alliances on every mastermind group he runs. Find businesses and associations that already have access to the market you want to reach, he says. Align with them, and it can shortcut years of growth.

Abraham pointed to two specific cases where alliances led to massive growth.

“One of them was about a $12 million specialty SaaS company. And he made one connection that added a million seven in recurring EBITDA and about 20 million of enterprise value. The other one was a trucking SaaS company. They found an independent insurance agency that was national that served only trucking companies, and they aligned, and they grew six times with one relationship,” Abraham said.

Even with success stories like that, Abraham says, some members find reasons they don’t think it will work for them. But when they see a peer getting real-world results, they start to pay attention.

How to find the right mastermind

Finding the right mastermind starts with patience. Most people jump at the first option that excites them. Abraham recommends interviewing 10 to 15 members independently before committing. Skip the testimonials and ask for tangible results.

"If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room."

“I live in the world of the bottom line. What’s the tangible impact you can cite that is the return on time, effort, capital, attention, and opportunity costs that you’ve gotten out of this?”

Abraham lists a set of questions you should consider before signing up for a session:

• Are these people you can trust and respect?
• Do they have knowledge and perspectives you don’t?
• Have they achieved more through the group than you have so far?
• Can you add value to them in return?

“You’ve got to ask, am I someone who will really apply, implement, and execute? Am I open to collaboration? Am I willing to let go of traditional industry-specific thinking? Because if you can’t answer positively on those, then you shouldn’t do it.”

In part one of the series, Abraham breaks down what separates a real mastermind from a social club and how to screen for members who will actually do the work. That episode is available now at ASBN.com.