The importance of masterminds with Drew McLellan

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Agency Management Institute community, where you’ll learn how to grow and scale your business, attract and retain the best talent, make more money and keep more of what you make. The Build a Better Agency podcast presented by White Label IQ is packed with insights on how small to mid size agencies survive and thrive in today’s market. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey, everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. This week coming to you with yep, another episode of Build a Better Agency. This is actually episode 285. So we are marching our way to episode 300. I’m not sure what we’re going to do for episode 300. So if you have any ideas, I would love to hear them. Just shoot me an email because I’d like to do something commemorative and celebratory. If there’s a special guests you’d like to hear, if there’s a bunch of questions you want me to answer, whatever might pop into your little brain, I would love to hear what you think we could do to make that episode special. But nonetheless, this is episode 285. It is one of my solo casts. So no guests today. Just you and me hanging out. I got a note from somebody this fall saying that she listens to the podcast while she’s on her riding lawnmower.

So I know that I get to do all kinds of crazy things with you. I walk the dog, I’m on treadmills. I play golf with some of you. I’m on the subway. So happy to be with you however that may be and grateful that you’re here. I know how crazy busy your world is. So I appreciate you coming back week after week. So because it is my solo cast, you know that with every solo cast we announce a winner and the winner has a choice of either attending one of our workshops live or accessing one of our on-demand workshops.

This month’s winner is Rich Cannava of CSI. So Rich, you are the winner. I’ll reach out to you and let you know. So here’s how Rich one. If you have not heard this before, and if you have heard this before, maybe you have not taken action yet, so all you need to do to get into the drawing for a free seat at one of our live workshops or one of our on-demand workshops, all you have to do is go to wherever you download the podcast and leave us a rating and review. That’s it.

Then what you need to do is you need to take a screenshot of the rating and review and email it to me at [email protected]. Because when I look at the ratings and reviews, which I do, and I read them all and I’m grateful for all of them, but anyway, when I read them, the fact that your Baseballlover2020 doesn’t tell me who you actually are. So I need you to help me by sending me the review, a snapshot of the review and letting me know who you really are and then you’ll go on the drawing.

Here’s the deal. We’ve been doing this ever since the podcast started. So some people have tried this and some people haven’t, but there aren’t as many names of that hat as you might think. It’s not thousands and thousands of names, it’s hundreds of names. So you have a pretty good shot at winning and by the way, we just keep drawing until sooner or later you’re going to win. So odds are pretty good because we’re going to keep doing this podcast thing. So odds are pretty good you are going to win sooner or later. So why wouldn’t you do it? It just takes a couple of minutes and each course is about $2,000, 17, $1,800. So I say, get a free course. So if you will go leave a rating and review, but Rich, I will reach out to you.

Congratulations and we’ll find out which workshop you would like to participate in. The other thing I want to talk to you about before we get into the episode is we are excited. Excited is not even a big enough word. We are … I just cannot wait for the Build a Better Agency Summit. I cannot wait to be in a room with a bunch of agency owners, learning and sharing stories and commiserating on what the last year has been.

The conference isn’t until August, of 2021. It’s August 10th and 11th in Chicago. So we’ll all be vaccinated by then. Everyone will be in great shape to be together and to do what we love to do, which would tell stories and learn from each other and the conference is two days. It is packed. I’m talking packed with amazing speakers, great conversations about everything from getting your agency ready to sell and what are buyers looking for and what do they care and not care about to imposter syndrome, to how to build multiple revenue streams to come inside your agency to sort of level out the highs and lows that clients sometimes throw us in, to the best practices and biz dev, to the AI tools that agencies our size are using today with great effectiveness and efficiency.

I promise you, it is going to be a killer two days of content and connection. So if you’re interested, if you’ve already been vaccinated, if you know you’re going to be vaccinated by then, grab a ticket before we sell out. Go over to agencymanagementinstitute.com and the very first navigation button along the top of the website is the BABA Summit, Build a Better Agency Summit. Click on it, grab your ticket now. Like all conferences, the tickets get more expensive as we get closer to the event.

So grab your ticket now, or tickets. This is not just an owner event. This is not an event for entry level people, but anybody on your leadership team is going to find great content there that is relevant and valuable for them. So grab a ticket. There’s a discount for multiple people and I will see you in Chicago. Cannot wait. Just cannot wait. Here’s what I want to talk about today and I want to talk about surrounding yourself with excellence. I want to talk about surrounding yourself with people who care about your success, as much as you do.

I want to talk about surrounding yourself with people who are going to say, “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, Drew. Don’t do that.” So in the broader sense, I guess this episode is about masterminds, but I want to talk about them in a way that’s very different. I want to talk about them in all of the various forms and functions that they have. I’m a big fan. So Agency Management Institute, as many of you know, is founded, really it started with these agency owner peer groups, which are in essence, a mastermind group.

So 13 agencies. So, we usually have 15 to 25 agency owners, depending on how many of those agencies have multiple partners. 15 to 25 agency owners out of 13 agencies come together twice a year for two and a half days. They have multiple dinners together, multiple breakfast, lunches. Of course, we’re agency people, so drinks. So they have all this informal time to learn from each other and then they have all of this formal time, which is the agenda of the two days of meetings.

Basically that’s a big mastermind group. That’s a group of people … Some of these people have been in this group since the late 90s. So they know each other incredibly well. They can talk about each other’s staff as though they’ve known them for decades. They also have personal connections. They care about each other as people. They celebrate weddings, they empathize with funerals. They are very connected to each other in a plethora of ways. So anyway, these peer groups that AMI was founded on are big mastermind groups, but they’ve got some of the core tenants of what makes a mastermind group work.

As many of you know, if you’ve heard the story of AMI, you know that I was a member of AMI as an agency owner long before I owned AMI, still as an agency owner. So I experienced the power of that particular model of mastermind, but I’ve also been in two other masterminds that are very much more what you would think of as a traditional mastermind. One of them I have been in, I think we figured out. If you’re listening to this in real time, I’m recording this in March, of 2021.

I think I’ve been with these guys for at least 16 years. So the guys in this particular mastermind, none of us are in the same business but we all own a business and we formed this group, gosh, almost 20 years ago. Here’s one thing that you need to know about masterminds. However you think it’s going to play out, however you think the structure is going to work and all of that, it’s actually going to be different. It’s going to morph over time. We built this on purpose to be something that would last for a really long time.

So we literally have been in this mastermind group with each other for 16 plus years. These guys were the very first guys, when I had the opportunity to buy AMI. These were the very first guys that I said, “Hey, I have this opportunity. I want you to help me think this through. What are the pros, what are the cons? Do I want to do this and all of that.” So these guys have been a part of my business think tank for a really long time. I will talk to you about the differences between these groups, because as you think about what kind of a mastermind group you might want to be in, or you might want to create, I want to give you some options.

Then the third one I’m in, I’ve only been in about probably three or four years. The people in this peer group are kind of in related businesses to mine. So everybody in this peer group serves agencies, at least that’s how it started. Again, it’s evolved since then and I’ll talk to you more about that in a minute, but let me just give you the broad scope of the value of a mastermind.

What a mastermind does for you as a business owner is it gives you other people who have some shared experiences, some different perspectives on those shared experiences, and also have your best interest. So I think the first thing that matters when you’re thinking about a mastermind is being in a mastermind with people who genuinely care about you as a human being and care about you in terms of your business success. They are committed to you being successful because sooner or later, what happens in every mastermind is that you turn to these people and ask them for help or an introduction or feedback, or you ask them to hold a longer meeting because you’re having a crisis inside your business.

These are also the people that a lot of times, when something amazing happens or something horrific happens in your business, these are the people that you’re texting on a Saturday afternoon saying, “Everything just hit the fan. Do you have 10 minutes to talk,” or whatever. So, first and foremost, I don’t care if it’s an organized thing like AMI with the peer groups, or it’s an informal thing that you plan on your own, whatever it is. First and foremost, these have to be really good beings.

So I don’t care if you want to be with a bunch of people who are movers and shakers, or can make great introductions. If they’re jerks and they’re self-centered, and they’re selfish, this is not going to work for you. So, number one, they have to be really good caring, giving people. Number two, they have to be people who are willing to give you feedback, good and bad. They have to be able to call you on your own BS. They have to be able to say, “You know what, Drew, I don’t see how that aligns with your values, or I don’t see how that aligns with your goals for the year,” or whatever it is.

They have to be willing to have the hard conversations with you, because you’re going to be bringing them big challenges and big opportunities, and you need their candor. You need to know you can count on them to tell you when you are on the right path and when you are heading off to the wrong path. The other thing you need to do is you have to decide if you want people who are in your industry, who basically walk your walk. So that’s what the AMI peer groups are all about is these are other agency owners who know your life and have lived your life for a long time, or do you want people who have something else in common with you?

So is it a bunch of just business owners? Are they entrepreneurs? Do you get together with people who don’t have employees, but just have contractors? So think about who you would want to surround yourself with in terms of their experience set and their knowledge base. Then the next thing you have to do is you need to do this with people who are committed, because you know how busy you are and you know how easy it is to blow off. By the way, mastermind meetings are not an hour long. They are a couple hours or longer. If everyone’s going to get some time to talk about their stuff, it can’t be a 45 minute meeting.

So these have to be people who are going to commit to making these meetings a priority, no matter how busy they are. At AMI, the peer groups are mandatory. You show up where you don’t get to stay in the peer group. In more informal masterminds like the other two that I’m in, we cut each other a little bit of slack, but we work very hard to be present with each other. If we set a date, we work very hard to never not show up. We work really hard to be there, mind, body, and soul. So it’s not just being there physically, but it’s also being present.

So those are the things you want to look for. Now, there are some advantages to the formal groups like a Vistage or an EO or an AMI peer group and the advantages are, there’s a set agenda. Somebody else does all of the planning and organizing. Somebody else vets the members for you. If it’s something like Vistage group, they plan the meals. If it’s something like AMI, we’re booking hotels for you. So you’re traveling to the meetings. So there are a lot of advantages. The other advantage to a more formal mastermind is there’s usually a facilitator.

So you want a facilitator who has a couple of different skillsets. Number one, that they understand business and ideally your business. So again, I facilitate the peer groups because I’m an agency owner, have been for 26 years and I own AMI. So I facilitate our peer groups. Craig Barnes, who facilitates our virtual peer groups, also owner of 25 plus years, been around AMI for probably 20 years. So he gets it. Vistage groups, again, those facilitators have typically been business owners, especially trained, but not only do you want them to have knowledge because you want them to put their two cents into the meeting, they also have to be good at facilitating the group.

They have to be able to handle all the group dynamics. They have to be able to handle the politics and the emotions and all the other stuff that comes with a bigger group of people in a mastermind. On the informal side, odds are, if you’re an agency owner, my guess is you’re going to be the organizer. Why? Because that’s how you are. In the peer groups that I’m in, I’m the organizer of both of them. So I make sure we have the meetings. I make sure we know where we’re meeting. I make sure we decide if we’re going to have food. One of them is the guys that I’ve been with for 16 years, they all live in the same city that I do.

The folks that I’ve been with for three or four years, neither of them live in the same city. So we do it virtually. So then I wouldn’t have to worry about food or any of that sort of thing. Anyway, so you want somebody who is, can add to the conversation if you’re going to have a facilitator and can help you organize the details. In the informal, you just want somebody that keeps everybody teed up and doing what they need to do.

So there are a lot of structures to a mastermind, and I will tell you the masterminds that last have a structure. So the idea of just bringing six business owners together over dinner or cocktails or a lunch meeting or whatever, that sounds great that it’s informal and you’re just going to talk. But what you’re going to find is you end up just chit-chatting through the entire time, as opposed to getting down to business. So most masterminds have some way of kicking off the meeting. Typically, that’s something like just kind of like what we do in traction.

The best personal and professional best news since you last got together. So everybody goes around the circle and shares that. That just warms everybody up to sharing and talking and kicks the off and gets everybody focused on the content of the meeting. Then you can do a lot of different things. So some masterminds will allow you to have … Everybody gets about 20 minutes to put a challenge in front of the group, and everyone gives some feedback to the challenge. So it’s basically, I’m going to tell you my challenge. You can have a round of questions and then you offer advice.

Other groups will say, “You know what? There’s five of us in the group. So we’re going to divide these three hours so that everybody gets 35 or 40 minutes and you can do with what you want with that 35 or 40 minutes. So you can show us a plan. You can tell us about a problem you’re having. You can walk us through a decision you’re trying to make, and then we’ll give you feedback.” It’s much more of a dialogue than a structured conversation.

In other cases, some masterminds do a hot seat. So what they’re going to do is everybody gets a turn. You rotate it around. Everybody gets a turn and goes in the hot seat and in some groups, they share their goals for the year in the very first meeting of the year. Then when it’s your turn in the hot seat, everybody comes prepared to ask you questions about how you are getting towards your goals. So they’re going to ask you questions about your finances or your people, or maybe a product launch or whatever it may be, tied to your goals. Then they’re going to give you input feedback, critique about where you’re headed and what you need to do.

In another case, you might have multiple people sitting in a hot seat. So you have to decide how big your group is because that’s going to dictate the agenda. So I want to talk about the size of the group in a minute, but first let’s take a quick break and then I’ll be right back.

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I am back. We’re talking about masterminds. I think sometimes the word masterminds get a bad rap. That they’re a little self-serving or a little woo-woo and I think honestly, they can be an incredibly valuable tool for you to propel your business faster. I think of my mastermind groups as like a board of advisors. So I run things by them and I get their opinion, but I also ask them to hold me accountable. I have often said the best thing about being a business owner is you’re accountable to no one. The worst part of being a business owner is you’re accountable to no one.

So if you’re doing traction or something like that, internally, you know the power of being held accountable. If you’re self facilitating traction, my guess is that accountability isn’t as strong and as firm as it should be, especially for you, the agency owner. So that’s one of the reasons why I like surrounding myself in mastermind groups, with people who are sort of my peers. They’re not my direct reports. They don’t work for me. So they have no qualms. Believe me, no qualms about holding me accountable, about pushing me, about calling me if I’m not doing something that I’m supposed to.

That happens because we’re not beholden to each other inside the organization. So they are free to give me their real opinion. So I told you we’re going to talk about size. So I think that the size dictates how long the meeting has to be for everyone to get a lot of meat out of the meeting. So I told you the AMI peer groups, we come in on a Tuesday night, we have dinner together and then we meet all day, Wednesday, and then have dinner or go do something together Wednesday night. Meet all day Thursday, and then go have dinner or do something Thursday night.

So we’re together for like two really long days, and then a dinner. So that’s because we have 13 agencies that all have to make a presentation and share their financials and talk about their challenges and share some ideas with each other. So we need that much time. So again, remember that’s 15 to 25 people. So most masterminds are not going to get together unless it’s a formal one, like AMI, are not going to get together. So most people are going to do two or three hours.

Some masterminds, I know, go for a half a day. I know Vistage is a full day a month, because again, they’ve got more people in the room and even in that case, I used to be a member of Vistage. Even in that case, everybody doesn’t get to talk every time. So let’s assume you’re doing something more informal and you’re creating it. I think five people, five or six people is about as big as you can get. If you really want to give everybody a chance in, let’s say a three or four hour period of time to get some feedback and some direction from the mastermind group.

So you can either do the hot seat where not everybody gets to talk every time in depth about their business, or you need to really limit the size. The one that I’ve been in for almost 20 years, we started as a group of four, and then one of the guys decided to sell his business and take a job and one of our rules was you had to own a business. So he left and the other three of us decided we weren’t going to replace him. We were just going to stay with the three of us. So I think he was with us for maybe a couple of years. So for almost 15 years, it’s been just the three of us.

When we get together for two or three hours, and we have a hard time getting everything in that we want to talk about in that timeframe. So we start with everybody giving everyone an update on what’s happening. Some big wins personally and professionally, and then we divide the time up. So each of us gets that 45 minutes or so to really pick the brain of the other two people or to share what’s going on inside their business or whatever. Then at the end of each person’s time, what we say is, “What’s your homework for next time? What do you need us to hold you accountable for and how?”

So I might say, “I want to launch a new course, or I want to do something,” and they’ll say to me, “How do you want us to hold you accountable?” I’ll say, “Well, I’ll email you as I get each module done,” or whatever it is, but they hold my feet to the fire. They make sure that I actually get it done, and that’s true in my other mastermind group as well. We also complete our report or our time with a here’s my homework. Then we check in on each other. So that for me is how to think about the sizes.

It’s got to be small enough that everybody can get something out of every meeting. I personally don’t love the hot seat model where maybe I don’t get to talk about my business in depth for three or four meetings. I really want input because business moves so fast today. I want to go faster. So I want their opinion in both of my groups. I want their opinion every month. Another model that you could think about is, again, everybody checks in, talks about their best win personally and professionally, or their biggest challenge that they’re facing right now. Or some people might do a check-in where they say, “Well, you know what? I’m a seven out of 10 today. I don’t have as much energy, I’m tired,” or whatever it may be.

So there’s lots of ways to do the check-in, but then another component you could put into your mastermind is a set topic. So for example, you might determine in the March meeting that in the April meeting, you’re going to talk about employee reviews and everybody’s going to bring their samples of how they do employee reviews and you’re going to spend most of the next meeting talking about that topic. So that’s another option for you.

There are a million ways structure this, but again, what I want to emphasize is the importance of having a structure. Another thing that happens in a mastermind group is sometimes no matter what structure you have, somebody is in crisis. So in both of my mastermind groups, we have an understanding that if you’re in crisis, you can either in advance or once the meeting gets started, say, “I need to go first and I might end up taking all of our time, because I’ve really got a big problem,” and everybody understands that that’s okay to do.

That it’s all right to declare that you are going to monopolize the meeting because something is really going down, whether it’s a bad thing or an amazing opportunity, but you really need to own most of the time. In both of my groups, I’ve had that happen a handful of times over the course of the years. There’s great comfort in knowing that you can command everyone’s attention and they are willing to give you that time and attention. So there’s nothing wrong with adding that into the “rules.”

By the way, now at AMI, we have formal rules for how the meetings are conducted and how people get put into the group and all of that. In my informal mastermind groups, we don’t have anything written down. We just have an understanding of the rules. Another thing that we do in my 16 year mastermind is somewhere in the fourth quarter, we call it a planning mastermind. So we each basically get up and on a whiteboard or a bunch of post-it notes, we map out our plan for the next year.

So we’ve had to think about it in advance, but now we have to basically pitch it and sell it to each other about what our goals are for the year, how we’re going to accomplish those goals, what financial metrics matter to us, whatever the benchmarks are, we share those and typically that meeting is a little longer. We usually probably go a half a day for that meeting so that each of us can get all of the plans for the year. So that’s another thing about masterminds. You can have a set pattern and then maybe once or twice a year, you might have an aberration, like a planning meeting.

Another thing that I do with the guys that are local is sometimes we will just get together to go to a ball game or to have a long lunch or whatever and it’s not the formal meeting. It’s just touching base because obviously, we were friends prior to forming the masterminds. We’ve been friends for a long time. So sometimes it’s nice just to socialize. With my folks that are virtual, it’s harder to do that, but we see each other at conferences and other things. Then we don’t have regular meetings. Then we’re just socializing together for that.

Another thing that you can think about is how do you want to hold each other accountable? So in many masterminds, somebody is the scribe, the note taker, takes minutes or whatever and really all they’re doing is probably in an email while you guys are meeting, they’re logging what each person’s accountability is, and then they’re sending it out to the group. So it’ll say, “Drew said he wants to get a new course out. Babbette said, she’s going to call him on this day to make sure he’s done it,” whatever it is.

So it’s just basically a what’s each person accountable for, and in the group, how are we holding that person accountable? What are we going to do to make sure that they actually accomplish their goals? Then another thing that sometimes happens in the meetings is sometimes you just want to celebrate. Something amazing has happened and you just want to use your time to celebrate that and to get some feedback and attaboys. So again, there are times when you don’t honor the exact agenda, but honestly, having an agenda is probably one of the most critical elements of whether or not this is going to work.

So again, the key elements for this are, who’s around the table with you? Are they good human beings who care as much about your success as you do? Two, what’s the structure look like? So how many people are in the room and what does that tell you about the structure of the meeting? One of the things I haven’t talked about yet is how often you get together. Most mastermind groups try to get together once a month, if they’re only meeting for three or four hours. Obviously if they’re meeting for a longer period of time, like a peer group or a Vistage group, something like that, I think Vistage groups also do some two-day retreats somewhere in the mix of their year, but at AMI, obviously our peer groups meet twice a year.

Now they talk to each other all throughout the year in between the meetings, but they physically are together twice a year for those two and a half days. So you have to decide who do I want to surround myself with? Again, is it people who do the same thing I do and who have walked my walk, or is it just do I want different perspectives? That’s sort of the Vistage model of you’re going to have the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker in that room. I know a lot of you joined Vistage as a biz dev opportunity as well, but who do I want to get feedback from?

So are they good human beings? Are they going to be generous with their thinking, with their resources? Are they going to say, “Oh, I’ve got a copy of that. I’ll get that for you, or let me share this with you.” Are they going to be excited for you when you succeed? Then how many people and what’s the structure look like and then building out the structure together.

So, does everybody get to talk for a healthy period of time in every meeting, or do you want to use the hot seat model? How do you want to kick off the meetings? Does everyone quickly go around and fess up whether or not they hit their goals for the last month or not? Or do you do the best news personally and professionally since the last time we were together? Again, having some sort of, almost like an icebreaker that signals to everyone, okay, we’ve chit-chatted for a while, but now we’re going into the meeting and this is how we always start the meeting. Then how do you want to structure each person’s time?

Is it a, I have to report against my goals? Is it, I get to talk about whatever I want? Do you want to have certain questions that everybody answers when it’s their turn? Do you want to have a topic that you all talk about like the employee reviews, and do you want to create some special meetings once or twice a year around year end planning or something else? Those are the decisions you need to make. Here’s what I would recommend is think about some folks that maybe you already turned to for business advice now and then, or think about what’s missing for you.

Man, I really would love to hear what other agency owners are doing here or there. By the way, shameless plug, if you do want to talk to other agency owners and you’re not in the Facebook group for this podcast, what are you waiting for? Head over … Because I’m telling you, every day somebody is saying, “Hey, how do you handle this? Or my employees want new different titles. What are we doing? Or how do you do reviews or what project management software are you using?”

So if you just want to chit chat with other agency owners about what they’re doing and get into some conversations, maybe a great start is the Build a Better Agency Facebook group. So hop in there for sure, but anyway, sorry, I digressed. Decide who you want to be around. Think about people who you’re already reaching out to, who you already have a lot of respect for how they run their business and say to them, “Are you in a mastermind group? Do you have any interest in one? Would you be interested in building one out with me?” Maybe each of you bring two other people. So you’ve got six total.

Now I will tell you in all of the cases of the informal mastermind groups that I have formed, something has changed. So in the first one, the one that I’ve been in as almost 20 years, we lost the one guy who decided to get a job and sell his business. In the other one, the virtual one, one of the people in the group was very agency focused and then he changed his business model. Now agencies aren’t his clients at all, but he’s a valuable member of the group. He has great insights.

So we didn’t boot him out because he didn’t fit the criteria anymore. We just modified the criteria because we were in a groove. It was all working for us. So be careful about being too rigid about the structure of this, if you’re creating your own because I promise you, things change. So anyway, reach out to one or two people that you already know, that you already trust, that you would be comfortable confiding in. By the way, some mastermind groups ask everyone to sign an NDA.

Other mastermind groups don’t. So that’s up to you, but then come together with two or three people and build out the structure that you think would best serve all of you and then invite two or three other people to join you. Honestly, it’s a little sloppy in the beginning. It’s a little messy. You forget the structure but that’s okay. Just keep trying it and pretty soon, you fall into a rhythm and everything is fine and it works. I will tell you, I think about that some of the decisions I’ve made over the last 20 years, and without a doubt, prior to buying AMI, my AMI peer group, who I’m still super close friends with a lot of those people today.

The guys that I’ve been with for 16 years and my virtual peer group, all of them have a different perspective that they generously give me as I think about how to best serve all of you. I take them ideas and problems and questions and their perspective and honestly, the questions they ask for me help me see with a clarity that I couldn’t see if I was doing it all by myself. So again, whether you surround yourself with people that do what you do, or they’re just other business owners, I’m telling you, if you commit to this and you pick the right people in the group, this is going to be one of the most valuable hours or couple hours a month that you spend.

I look forward to being with my masterminds because I know I’m going to walk away from that two or three hour meeting with incredible clarity, with some new ideas, with some new energy and I also get to contribute to their business, which I also find incredibly gratifying. So I am a huge fan of mastermind groups, whether it’s informal or formal. If you are feeling like, I think most agency owners do, if you are feeling like the lonely guy that lives in the lighthouse all by himself and doesn’t have anyone to talk to about the business or the challenges, this is a great way for you to surround yourself with people who you can talk about your business to, and who can give you incredible input and feedback and you don’t have to feel so alone as the person making all of these decisions for your shop.

So I’m a big fan. I would love to hear if you’re in a mastermind group, how does it work? What’s the structure? What do you get out of it? If you’re not in a mastermind group, I really, really encourage you, whether it’s a formal one or an informal one of your own creation. I really encourage you to delve into this and see, and feel, and benefit from all of the wisdom that you can get from a small group of peers who really care about you and your business, because it’s pretty awesome, I got to say.

All right, that’s it for me today. A couple of things that I want to remind you about. We have a lot of free resources. If you’ve not subscribed to our YouTube channel yet, it’s Agency Management Institute, just search for that and you’ll get to it. We have all of the weekly videos. We have all of the question of the week videos. We’ve got some of our webinars and other things all on that channel free for the taking. So if you have not subscribed, please do that. Again, I already gave you a plug in the middle of the podcast, but I’m going to do it one more time.

If you’re not a part of the Facebook group yet, you have to answer three simple questions. I will not let you in if you don’t answer the questions. So I’ll send you a Messenger message a couple of times and if you don’t answer me or you don’t see the message, then I’m just going to decline that you’re asked to come in the group. I’m looking at every URL to make sure that people aren’t coming in there to try and sell us stuff. Trying to keep it super pure.

So please answer the questions, but come join us because really there are lively conversations in there every single day and you’re missing out on that if you’re not a part of it. So I would love to have you there. It’s absolutely free. You don’t have to be a member. You don’t have to do anything, but listen to this podcast to be welcomed into that group. So would love to have you there. As always, I want to say thank you to our friends at White Label IQ for being the presenting sponsor of the podcast.

They make it possible for us to come to you each and every week to bring you the amazing guests that we bring you. So thank you to them. If you’re looking for a partner to do some white label design dev or a PPC, head over to whitelabeliq.com/ami, because they’ve got a special offer for you there, but they are awesome people, awesome at their work and they are the savior for many AMI agencies. So go check them out.

Now, next week I will be back, but I’ll be back with a guest. So I promise we’ll get you thinking differently about your business. We will give you some new ideas to chew on and in the meantime, if you’re looking for me, you can track me down at Drew@agencymanagementinstitute, or you can just go to the AMI website and fill out the form and I’ll see it that way. Thanks so much for listening. Super grateful for you guys and I will see you next week.

That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of Build a Better Agency. Visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to check out our workshops, coaching packages, and all the other ways we serve agencies just like yours. Thanks for listening.