One of the ways we provide value to you as a Local Link is through our monthly networking opportunity, Adapt and Thrive Local Business Mastermind.

So what is a Mastermind?

Lots of people immediately have notions of high-powered CEO summits and clandestine meetings in faraway places when they hear the words, “Business Mastermind.”

But a Mastermind Meeting does not need to be exclusive, bougie, or clique-y.  The benefits of Masterminding should never belong exclusively to those who run multi-million dollar companies.

So what exactly is a Mastermind to us?

The following is an interview we transcribed from one of our weekly Livestreams, which happens every Thursday at 4 PM on YouTube.  Read on to hear the founders of Adapt and Thrive, Brian Fife and Matt Quirk, explain the Mastermind to you in their own words…

MATT: Hey, everybody, welcome in. We are live on the You’s of Tubes and we are here talking about the power of masterminding for any business owner, small, medium, large enterprise, local. It doesn’t really matter what size business you have. The power of being a part of a mastermind is really one of those things that can elevate your business and take you to the next level.

So thank you guys for joining us today. Appreciate it.  And what you’re going to get at today’s session is really just some key pointers about what a mastermind can do for you personally, for your business, and how you can leverage that power to kind of create your own community.

You could do this for your customers. You could do this for a peer group. You could do it for a recruiting tool. There are many different uses that you can leverage a mastermind and building of this community for, and that’s kind of what we’re going to go over today.

BRIAN: That’s right. Well, thank you, Matt. Welcome, everybody. We are, as Matt said, live on the You’s of Tubes and we’re talking about masterminds, which is near and dear to me. And I want to lead off with why masterminds are near and dear to me. And the reason actually stems not from the mastermind itself, but from my background as a creative writing major in college.

For those who don’t know, that is a degree you get when you don’t want a job after school that pays you well. 

I’m kidding.

I’m not kidding. It’s so true. 

And anybody who’s getting an English creative writing degree right now, expect the unexpected or, well, I guess expect the fact that you won’t get paid by it!

But the reason I bring up English creative writing is it’s all about constructive criticism.

It’s all about workshopping things. And the mastermind itself is, in essence, a workshop. 

It’s an opportunity to consider your ideas and put them out to an audience that is there to give you feedback from their experience, to take from their understanding, and give you insight that you might not otherwise have because you haven’t walked in their shoes. In essence, we like to bring this to the table because every local business has very similar struggles.

We all have the same business issues. They’re just a slight variation different because one is in retail, one is in food services, one is in “you name it.” Whether you’re a business service or a retail service, you ultimately have very similar issues that you’re facing on a day-to-day basis.

With Adapt and Thrive, our goal is to bring you together to help you brainstorm, mastermind, or workshop ideas to solve the problems that you’re existing in today. So you can make your future better. Right?

MATT: Yeah, exactly. It’s all about being able to leverage the power. I don’t actually know who started it, but I learned the concept from several of my mentors here locally in the Pheonix area. Napoleon Hill might have been the first one to write about it in a meaningful manner in Think and Grow Rich. But the whole concept is really exactly what Brian said.

We want to get you out of your own brain and get you looped in with others who are like-minded, but from different perspectives so that they can help provide ideas. The mastermind is literally just taking a group of great minds and putting them to use on one particular problem or idea or question.

We talk about it in the business sense. It could be personal development. It could be anything to help advance you. The goal is really just to leverage the power of multiple minds focused on one core concept, one idea, question or problem. That’s really why a mastermind is so powerful. You get so many more people than just you adding to the pot, mixing in the ideas, and then you take bits and pieces of that and leverage it as you see fit; and to Brian’s point, do better in life and business.

We started this back in 2020 and we started out doing weekly meetings. We are now meeting monthly as everyone got busier and busier and we needed more time for our own businesses. And so did other business owners.

We meet on the third Thursday of every month at 4:30 p.m. Pacific Time.

And we find that to be a good time for even East Coasters, even though it’s a little bit late in the wintertime. But for during the summer months during daylight savings, it actually works out.

The format is a little bit of education on the front end. Brian or I will typically lead one of those education sessions between 15 and 20 minutes and then we use the rest of the hour to mastermind and get in smaller breakout groups.

You have a core, tight-knit group of typically four to six people in each room. Each member gets between five and ten minutes, depending on how many people we have and how much time we have left in that hour. We maximize the value that you receive for spending some time with us. The thing that we don’t do, however, is charge money to join the mastermind. It’s free for everybody. We encourage as many people as possible to join because we want to be providing as much value as possible to our marketplace.

Our goal is just to grow this mastermind. That is the number one priority on our minds right now, and we want you to be a part of that.

BRIAN: So let’s talk about the brainstorm, the mastermind, the breakout rooms.

Oftentimes we have new members that are not sure what to say. What do we always get? “I don’t really have anything to talk about,” they say. Right?

MATT: Yeah, exactly. Most new people who join don’t necessarily come prepared because they’ve never experienced it before.

One thing that I would highly recommend is just thinking about one thing. All you have to do is identify one thing that you either want feedback on, a problem you need help solving, or a question about something new you want to try.

If you have an idea for maybe a marketing promotion, a new product line, or a new service that you want to provide to your customers, just focus on that. You don’t have to have a whole list of things, just one.

That’s all we need. Just one thing, and that’s the best suggestion I could give to be prepared.

BRIAN: Do you think it’s oftentimes the anxiety around admitting that you have issues that people come into? I always wonder that the first time. It’s oftentimes you don’t know the people you’re with.

It’s trust level. Right? And so that anxiety around admitting that there are things that you would do differently. Or that you’re facing issues. I’ve talked to many people and found that oftentimes it’s about getting in front of people that they trust first.

And that’s very understandable. So what about that for you, Matt?

MATT: Yeah, that’s a great question. 

You know, Brian and I have worked with local businesses for many years doing marketing sales, development stuff as a service provider to them. And one of the things that we recognized very early on is that they’re more apt to stay in their lane and not try new things because they’re oftentimes operating on very thin margins. 

So when we started working primarily with local businesses, we were focused on restaurants and mom and pop restaurants. The month to month, week to week revenue generation is not really focused on increasing your margin all the time so that you have a budget to do all these other things. It’s more just about getting customers in the door, turning them over. Hopefully, you’re giving them a great experience, so they come back.

That’s the extent of the business plan. We really wanted to make sure that they had the access to different options so they can still service them in some capacity.

Just staying in contact, being forced to stay indoors and stay home, for the most part, it’s kind of sucky. I’m very much an extroverted introvert. I don’t mind going out in the world and being chatty and talking to people and starting conversations. It doesn’t bother me, but I also love my me time. And you know, working from home is a blessing. When it’s forced on you, you have a tendency to see things in the negative rather than see the opportunity.

In lieu of thinking about the future and what the future might hold, you’ve got to do both. There’s a good balance there because if you stop putting yourself out there, if you don’t use social media, do any video marketing on YouTube or you stop connecting with them because you know you used to send them coupons in the mail and they bring the coupon in and they would hand it to you.

You can still do that in a different way. It’s just different. It’s not worse, just different. And that is OK, and you need to be OK with stretching your wings.

So that’s the crux of what we wanted to do with Adapt and Thrive, help business owners and operators understand that there is something else that you can still do, even if you can’t be physically with your customer.

BRIAN: Yeah. And I think that goes to what we’ve seen over the last year and almost nine months now.

You said it: stretch your wings, Adapt to Thrive. 

I mean, these are just variations of the same model. At Adapt and Thrive, we strive to ensure that you’re thinking outside of the box and thinking about what you can do in addition to your existing services, existing products, whatever it is. This is a hard fact that I know people don’t like to hear, but old school is dead. Old school does not exist. It can be a variation of what it was, but the world is going to continue to change. We hope not to have it change in the way that it did during the pandemic, but the world was changing for local businesses long before the pandemic. 

That applecart got kicked over long before the pandemic. The pandemic just smashed the apples and you couldn’t pick them up anymore. And so if you are a local business today, you should be preparing to deal with another pandemic. But don’t count that out. You should be preparing to deal with a new way that your customers are going to want to connect with you. 

What was Facebook is now Instagram and Facebook. After Instagram and Facebook, there may be a completely new tool that you are not aware of because it doesn’t exist yet today. But it will play a role in your transactions, in your connections, and your lead generation in your customer interactions.

That’s not just technology, but that’s the evolution of human interactions because the Yellow Pages was a disruption to someone.

MATT: Yeah, for sure. I mean, you think back to even running ads. There’s a lot. We could go down a rabbit hole with all of the privacy.

But you know, there was a time in our past where we didn’t have access to that. So it’s not that advertising is dead. We just have to think differently about it. You have to be thinking about what things might happen and be open to learning about the technology that is popular today. Maybe you don’t think the technology is there with your audience, but what we have found is that throughout the pandemic, people are doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on person to person marketing, person to person advertising, person to person interaction because we’ve missed that so much.

BRIAN: Well, I think you had a huge point about awareness. We can read only so much in the day and do the job we can.

With the mastermind, you will find that you pick up on things that other people bring to the table that you never even thought of that could bring value to you. And now suddenly you have a new opportunity.

It takes a lot of trial and error for that to happen, and if you’re simply relying on your own research and not getting in with other minds who are doing their research, if you’re not bringing together, as we say, the mastermind, you’re missing out on so much information. You’re relying exclusively on yourself. And I’ll say this as a business owner that being a business owner is stressful in ways that neither of us ever knew it would be. If you’re relying on yourself exclusively, you are going to make yourself a little batty. And so bringing the mastermind together, crafting a new plan takes multiple minds.

Oftentimes, even if you have a group of your own, even if you have a business with three or five other managers that work, there’s always an opportunity to learn more from other people who have adjacent or different perspectives.

Did I miss anything?

MATT: No. Well, actually you did. You missed one thing. Where do they go to register?

BRIAN: Oh, that is key. So you go to Https://locallinks.online/adapt-thrive/