By Joe Vitale & Bill Hibbler
For a vacation or home remodeling mastermind, you might want to go with five or six couples. For most other types of groups, ideally, you want five to six members. When you have more, meetings can drag on too long.
If each member gets 20 minutes and you’ve got six members, that’s two hours. Getting the meeting started, taking a short break in the middle, and wrapping things up will add a half hour. That’s two and a half hours. Beyond that is too long, especially if you meet once a week. So if you choose to go with more than six members, we’d recommend limiting each person’s turn to 10 or 15 minutes.
On the other hand, when you have fewer than five members, meetings are unproductive when one or two people can’t make it. You’ll end up either canceling meetings or having people drop out.
It’s possible that you will need to start out with more members than you ultimately want. The Wimberley Group currently has 6 members, but we’ve had as many as 10. Over time, you’ll find that one or two members have a problem with attendance. Or they’ll decide the group isn’t for them.
Early on, with the Wimberley Group, we had members missing two to three meetings per month. We’d have three people one week and nine the following week. Because many had been absent for weeks, meetings sometimes ran four hours because extra time was needed to get caught up.
Out of concern that our group would drift apart, we announced that we wanted to narrow the group down to six firmly committed members. We asked all members to either commit to regular attendance or let someone else have their spot. It was a bit awkward at first, but we ended up getting a strong core group with consistent attendance.
Another way to go about this initially is to just seek one other person to mastermind with. Make sure you get along well and trust this single mastermind partner. Once you’re comfortable with him or her, start looking for a third member together, taking the same approach. Once you’ve integrated the third member and there’s a spirit of trust and harmony, the three of you can begin looking for a fourth member. And you can continue this process, adding one member at a time, until you reach your ideal group size.
If you take this approach, your chances of building a strong mastermind are great, but you’ll notice that each time a new member joins the group, you’ll have to take a few steps backward before moving forward. That’s due to the mandatory “getting to know each other phase” that all groups go through. A trio, for example, that’s been meeting together for several weeks will develop a level of trust that allows them to be comfortable sharing certain information. When a new person joins the group, the older members won’t feel that same level of comfort. Once everyone feels comfortable with the newest member, that level of trust will return.
So how many people are in your mastermind group? Let us know using the comments section below.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I like 4 myself. As long as all four are good about showing up. Anything over six seems like a major time suck.
Hi Chris, with four members, I agree, showing up is key. One member goes on vacation and another skips and you don’t have much a meeting.
Bill,
Please write something about the level of the members. I was in one group where I became the teacher, and another where everything went over my head. These were both Internet marketing focused groups.
Connie
Great suggestion, Connie. I’ll do it.