Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - The Best Way for Experts and Thought Leaders to Make More Money - 004

Episode Date: July 19, 2017

You’ve got something you’re great at. You’re an expert, a thought leader, or an authority in your space. So, shouldn’t you be rich? After all, there are people out there who have a burning need for your knowledge, so shouldn’t you be able to command top prices for it? With the power of a mastermind group, you can. Bedros Keuilian and Craig Ballantyne will show you how.   Here’s what you’ll discover:   0:59 - Who can and should run a mastermind group (this most likely includes you, even if you don’t think you’re “qualified”). 2:45 - How to get 20-30 potential coaching clients into a one-day workshop where you can easily close them on higher priced programs. 8:23 - How to close high-end coaching clients over the phone. 12:29 - How to run a mind-blowing mastermind, even if you’ve never hosted an educational event before. 18:15 - The best time to recruit more members into your mastermind group (and how).

Hey, this is Craig Balentine, and I'm here with Badros Kulian. We're going to help you build an empire, but first there's a question that's probably going through your mind if you're a thought leader or a coach. And you're thinking, I've built my rep, I've sold my book, I've done the work. How can I take my expertise and make more money? What is the solution? The solution is creating a mastermind group, Craig. And as you know, since we have a mastermind group together and I run two other masterminds in addition to that, it is the place to, to start if you are a thought leader, have a following, have created books, courses, and products.

Yeah, absolutely. So you can build a mastermind group, but who the heck needs one? You know, a lot of people think that they're not qualified to run a mastermind, which doesn't make sense to me, because if you're a thought leader or an expert or an author, or you're good at teaching Facebook ads, or you're good at teaching people how to eat right and exercise, I mean, these are all things that are mastermind worthy, even if you are a good writer and you want to help people write a book in a 12-month period, think of all the excuses people give themselves for not writing the book or not getting around to it. Creating a mastermind just for authors to be is a great mastermind.

So really, if you have some kind of value, expertise, or service to offer to a community and industry, a segment of the population, you are worthy of creating a mastermind. You know, I'll tell you one mastermind that just sounds crazy to me, but it is filled up with a lot of people, is this woman came to one of my Perfect Life workshops, and she does a mastermind coaching group for people that have overcome significant back pain and injuries. And so this is an area where the person is going to give them that expert advice. They're all going to be connected, held accountable, and they're going to achieve superior results. And that's really the power of the mastermind, right? That is. It is a 10x whatever outcome that you want to achieve because you're being held accountable by peers who are on the same path.

Okay, great. So it sounds awesome. Instant mastermind. Can you just pour water on something or how do you start one? Not quite. So let's assume that you have some kind of following, maybe an email list, Instagram following, Facebook following, you know, a database of addresses of some sort to a community that has a like interest, right? And so if you have this, you're going to start off very simply by running a workshop. There's really three ways that we're going to talk about. here, how to start a mastermind. Way number one is the workshop, and this is the easiest, lowest risk method. And what you're really going to do is you're going to send out four to five emails over a two-week period saying I'm running a one-day workshop where I'm only inviting 30 people to this workshop. I like the number 30 because it's enough to really communicate and hot-seat everybody in that group. You go 40, 50, and now you've got to go two-day workshop. Yeah, and it's not as intimate. It's not as intimate. So 30 people,

That's a sweet spot. 20 to 30 people at a one-day workshop, and you say, for example, when you and I run one, we say, we're doing a one-day workshop. We're looking for X number of people who want to create an information product and launch it and make it profitable within 60 days of our meeting.

And that is a very quantifiable goal. So let's use the example of the person who's going to teach people how to write a book, for example. And you might say, after this workshop, you are going to be in a position that you'll have created the entire outline and structure within the next 30 days to write your book. And that is huge. Most people are not are not even close to creating an outline, let alone writing the first chapter. If they had the

outline, they could write the first chapter, second chapter, et cetera. And so as long as you can promise an outcome that they're going to get after that one-day workshop, you're going to be able to fill up people, 20 to 30 people for about $1,000 to $2,000 is the sweet spot for that one-day workshop. Now, when you do, you are then going to teach them your best tactics and strategies for whatever it is. So if you're a restaurant guru, if you're a personal training guru, if you are a make money online guru, right? Whatever it is you're going to teach you. You teach them their best tactics, and then you're going to spend about two hours hot seating each person. The hot seat process is really simple. Each person just needs to answer, where are you right

now in your quest, in your journey? Where do you want to go in the next 90 days? And I explain why 90 days in just a moment. And of course, what is the bottleneck stopping you that I can help alleviate, right, from getting to that goal in the next 90 days? Once you've hot-seated them, they're going to tell you exactly where they are, what their biggest pain and problem is, and of course what their goal is to achieve in the next 90 days. And the thing about the hot seats is they're the most fun part of the day. And that's where you just show your expertise. And all of a sudden people go, oh, my goodness, this person is a guru, right? Yeah, because where they thought they were out of opportunities, you're able to list off so many opportunities, just like we do when we run our workshops.

And we explain to them how they actually are not missing upsells. They've just built their upsells into the main product. And we actually take the main product apart and show them what their three upsells are and they have that aha moment. Right. Or we show them what the front end product is and we let them know what their big back-end coaching program should be. Because every information product in the world, as far as I'm concerned, should have some higher-level coaching. flagship product on the back end. But anyway, going back to these workshops, once you've done your hot seats, once you've given them the aha moments, and you've asked them where they want to be in the

next 90 days, you then say, hey, look, would you like me to do a little more accountability, support, and handholding over the next 90 days? Because 90 days from now is my first mastermind. And it goes for 12 months. 90 days from now is the starting line for the first one. And I think you and you and you, everyone in here is going to be a good fit. And we pass out the applications and we typically want to make them an offer that they can't refuse. And the offer that I like to make is we cut the buy-in fee. Let's say if you have a $6,000 buying fee, we'll cut the buy-in fee in half or waive the buying fee completely and say your monthly payments are $2,000 or $2,500 a month for 12 months.

And they're going to start in 30 days? They're going to start right away. Well, they're going to start right away. Got it. And their next official first mastermind is in 90 days. But when's the payment going to start? The payment would start right away. Got it.

Right away. The payment's going to start right away. And the reason you want to do this is because now, just like a regular mastermind, we meet every 90 days. Well, we now look at this as the first mastermind. They're already paying you. You do the monthly coaching calls. You put them in a Facebook group and the accountability and support and help starts until the next 90 days, which typically when you get there for the 90th day, they're not going to come to you with, hey, the world solved all my problems. They're going to come to you with new problems.

All right, I launched my product or I wrote the outline. and now I need to write the first chapter. What do I do to start writing? And this is where you give them more coaching, accountability, and support. You talked about an application. What is on this application? Is it one page? Is it 10 pages?

You know, is it something about their financial history? Is there more about their business? What are we getting in the application? So the application is typically a two-page application. It's the basic name, email, phone number, et cetera, because you always want contact info, even though you had it likely to follow up with. But it asks them where their strengths are. So the one that we have literally goes into a 25 question.

Check off if you're a one or five or a 10 on marketing, systemizing, priorities, managing of people, selling. We want to know where their strengths and weaknesses are. And there's another section that talks about, tell us about your info product, where you want to go in the next 12 months, where you want to go in the next five years with your product or with your book, in this case, that we're using as a hypothetical. And of course, the very last page is what was their income in the last two years in the last year, and what would you like it to be in the upcoming year? And, of course, then they fill out their payment information, credit card, or write you would check, or pay in full or whatever is what they would do.

So that's strategy number one is the workshop method. You fill up a workshop and then pass out applications. Got it. Strategy number two is getting them on a call. Okay. And this is really simple because you'll send them to what you. page like Bedros and Craig, what is our page? Is it?

Bedros and Craig Live.com. Baderos and Craig Live.com. That's what I'm here for. Yeah, that's really what he's here for, and the good looks. And when they go to a page like that, they're going to watch a two-minute video. You don't have to make the video elaborate. You tell them who you are, what you're an expert at, what problems they're probably facing right now, and how you're going to solve it by getting them on the phone.

That's it. That's what the video consists of. And they watch the video, they fill out the application to get on the phone with you. And it's a strategy call where you figure out if you're going to be able to help them in their desired outcome. And if the answer is yes, then you are able to say, you know what, I've got a mastermind that starts in 90 days. And so why don't you make the payment now, buy into it. I'll coach you between now and the next 90 days until your payment starts. So you almost get pretty much three months of free coaching as long as they pay their buy-in.

There you don't discount the buy-in. You do charge the buy-in because that's where you're using as commitment to coach them over the next 90 days before the first mastermind starts and their payment starts. How many people are going to be at my first mastermind? Should I have 20 people? Is it good enough to have five people? Like, you know, what's comfortable for the first mastermind so people see the value? Actually, you were there for my very first mastermind, and we had seven people.

It was me and seven others. And so as long as you have half a dozen or more, you're good. You know, people think that, do I have to get 15 to 25 people in the group? Well, ideally, sure. Yeah, if everything lined up, the stars and moons lined up, you'd get 25 to 15 to 25 people. But you start that thing off with 6, 7, 10 people, and you are good to go because there's a learning process that you have to go through as a coach, and you're better off probably learning with 6 to 10 people than 15 to 25 people. But you can fill 15 to 25 people in a mastermind group. And is that strategy number three when you really sell it gangbusters?

Yes, and strategy number three, of course, is when you run a big live event like the fitness business. summit or the online info summit that you and I run. And so when you're running a live event, you really are in a place where it's almost like standing naked in front of hundreds, in front of hundreds of people and exposing yourself and your soul to them because you are about to make a pitch and you don't know if anyone's going to take the offer and you wonder to yourself, what if only one person takes it? What kind of mastermind is this going to be? But I can promise you this because I've done this a lot and I've also coached many people

and across a variety, over a dozen different industries to do this, that you run the event and you deliver the value during the event, and I promise you that when you take the stage, you will close at least 10 to 15 people on a mastermind with the application process that's sitting on their tables right in front of them. And that is truly like what I consider fishing with dynamite, because there's no easier way to get 10, 15, 20. In my case, last year, we got almost 105 people filled out the application. We ended up. of bringing 90 some odd new mastermind members on board into the program. Now, this is my 11th year doing it, so that's typically not the outcome that you might get.

But even on my earliest year, 10 to 15 people right off the bat, there's no... Out of a 200-person audience? Yeah, yeah. And when we first started, it was like, yeah, about a 200, maybe 250 person audience. But you look at buying units, because, you know, a lot of people bring a spouse or business partner. We probably had, like, 160 buying units. And we got 10 to 15 people on board. to start off with. And that's, by the way, the info mastermind. If you remember the way I started

the seven-figure mastermind when you first joined, it was just over the phone. I think you got me to join by email. Actually, it was by email, because I didn't want to talk to you on the phone. Yeah, yeah, you still don't. After a decade, he still doesn't. But anyway, that's something I can talk to my therapist about, not here on the Empire show. So what else can we go down on? All right, so how do we perform this mastermind where it just blows people away, where they come in, They go, okay, I'm going to this thing. There's going to be 12 other people in this room. We're going to sit around.

I don't know what to expect. And then you just wow them by doing. By doing this. You run a two-day mastermind, and day one is all hot seats. And it's got to be hot seats, and here's why. Everybody's coming to you with their problems. And they don't want to wait an extra day to get to their problems. They want the answers to their problems right now.

And so the hot seats and the forms that we use are very simple, which again, I talked about, where are you right now in your business or in your writing or in your path, where do you want to go over the next 90 days, and of course, what is it that's stopping you from getting there? And when you're doing these hot seats, what's really great about it is they're not just tapping into your knowledge, they're tapping into the collective knowledge of all their peers. And so oftentimes, I've been able to give an answer, and then someone else gave an answer that was not only better, but completely different than the way I was going to answer that question. And so you're tapping into your peers' knowledge. You get a lot of different

solutions that you can solve your bottleneck with. And of course, when you're running a mastermind, people go, well, you know, what about breaks? What about the lunches and breakfast? And so you do want to start with a breakfast. You do want to have lunch. I mean, remember, this is a very high-end service they're offering. You're charging $2,000 to $2,500 per person per month. Feed them breakfast, feed them lunch, take those breaks. Make sure dessert comes in and dessert stays around for a while and make sure there's coffee and water. This is not the time to be cheap. You and I run our masterminds at destination spots,

like Miami and Las Vegas and San Diego. Do you have to do that? No, not necessarily. You can certainly invite them to your headquarters if you have a headquarters. But if you want to have a destination spot and you're just starting out, well, that's going to work in your favor

because people love to travel and stay extra days and kind of make it a vacation or a holiday. And so on day two is the big teaching day. Now that they've got their questions answered through the hot seats and they feel a little more comfortable because the whole day has gone by. Day two is when you want to do the teaching. What's working in your life, in your business, in your publishing practice, whatever.

More than that, you and I like to bring in guests. Who are the guests experts that you can bring in that your audience can learn from? And it's like a celebrity factor too. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, let's face it, you're not the only guru in that space. There's other gurus and you're probably connected to them. And if you're not connected to them, you should be. And as you bring them in, you're really exposing your clients who otherwise had no access to these gurus and celebrities to the best of the best in the industry.

And so they get to learn from them. And what's really valuable again is the lunches and the breakfast. And then, of course, we do that big dinner. Just one big dinner where they get to network with your guests, with each other. And everybody leaves happy and with their marching orders for the next 90 days. Right. So it's every 90 days. It's not monthly.

They pay monthly, but it's not monthly meetings. Correct. And I can tell you this, that the months that you're not running a mastermind program, we're talking 92% profit margin. And on the months that you are running your masterminds, which is three times a year, I suppose you could take all the money that you got from those clients for that month and just blow it on an extravagant mastermind at a great destination with a fancy dinner, which we've done. Or you can be a little more conservative and have, let's say, 30 to 50% profit margins.

But, man, this is a really high-profiting business that you can run that's got very little moving parts. And just to see your clients get an accelerated result is, I don't know, it's very gratifying to me. So what goes on in between the masterminds? What are we delivering to keep the people really stoked, really excited, and really moving ahead? Because if it's just in person, you know, some people just won't do the work in between if they're not hearing from us. So what do we deliver? True. And so here's what I love about the Facebook groups.

Those Facebook private groups are priceless because you put the people, the members in the Facebook private group. And organically, there's always going to be a leader or two that rises to the top. You know that. And so those leaders kind of keep the conversation going. They keep everybody excited and motivated. One thing that you and I do, and I think that I've taught this to everyone that I teach how to run a mastermind is to do the transformation contest. Oh, right. So to keep people excited on getting, you know, doing the work.

Remember, you taught them the information, you gave them the wisdom. them, but are they going to do the work between now and 90 days from now? We don't know, but what we can do is we can stack the odds in their favor to do the work because we do a transformation contest. The way that looks is very simple. Craig and I will say, all right, the person who comes back to the next mastermind with the biggest transformation, it could be a biggest list, it could be the most sales, it could be the highest converting sales page that have written, whatever it is.

We pick three people out of all of our clients to get up and present for 10 minutes on that big teaching day, on that Friday, on the second day. By the way, we run the masterminds, I should tell you, on a Thursday and a Friday, leaving Saturday for a travel day for you, so you can still have a weekend when you get home. And when you have that transformation contest, not only is it validating for the rest of the mastermind members, remember all throughout the year, you're adding new members by doing the strategy calls and workshops, et cetera, so the mastermind's growing. These new people want to see that your veteran clients are actually getting results. And so to really take your three best performers from the last 90 days and get them in front of their group and have them teach what's working for them and give wisdom and knowledge.

But then the audience, they get to vote who got the biggest impact and made the biggest transformation in their business. And you and I will pay for their flight and hotel for the next mastermind. So this transformation contest is priceless because it not only encourages them to do the work, but it also gets social proof right in front of your audience. And what we do now is we'll actually do a Facebook live during the transformation contest and we'll broadcast that live to showcase to the world, exactly how our masterminds look. And so now you're pumping out testimonials to the world. And one of the best times to actually send out an email to recruit more mastermind members on board is literally the day or two or three after your mastermind.

Because the community is hot and excited about it. Right. And it elevates the status of the people in those transformation contests. And one other thing that we have is a bit of a trick, because we've grown our mastermind so big and strong, is that we have Group A and Group B, and people in Group B, our beginners, are always trying to get up into the Group A where they get more advanced coaching and access, right? So isn't that powerful? That is very powerful. That ascension process and giving people, it's almost like in martial arts or karate, where you get the white belt and you get the yellow belt and the orange belt. Everybody wants to ascend up to that next group.

So as your mastermind grows big, and you start thinking about, how do I scale this thing? because you can't replicate yourself. Well, you're going to have a group A and a group B. And the way we run it is group A will come on Wednesday, and they'll do their hot seats. Group B will join them on Thursday, where we do the big teaching day. And then, of course, Group A leaves. And on Friday, we have Group B where we do the hot seats.

Now, remember what I said earlier, you want to do your hot seats first thing. Well, once you're scaling, you can't necessarily do your hot seats first thing. So Group B gets their hot seats on day two. Or you could have one of your superstar coaches come in and do the hot seats. seats the same day, right? Yes. Yeah. And in fact, for my seven-figure formula mastermind group, since we have almost 200 members in that

group, we have six different coaches all running a hot seat session. And so we've got, you know, 20 to 25 people per room on day one, all the coaches running hot seats. On day two, we all come together, and it's almost like a seminar where all the coaches now we're teaching, we do the transformation contest, we bring in a couple of guests, and we go out to dinner that night and it just ends with a big bang. Awesome, awesome. So what's the most valuable part of the mastermind?

Is it the networking? These are the guest teachers. Is it the hot seats? What is the biggest value? Because, I mean, these are all incredible and so important to make an amazing mastermind. Yeah, I don't know if I can necessarily define what the biggest value is, but I can tell you that it's really all of the above. Because, again, going back to your courses, products, the book that you wrote,

people get the information, but they're not usually digesting and implementing the information as quickly and with as much tenacity as you want them to. But when you're in a mastermind and you know that in a mastermind and you know that in 90 days, you got your marching order, in 90 days you're going to be back there again, your clients work their butt off because nobody wants to be that person that comes to the next mastermind and say, I didn't do anything. Right. Right.

And so going back to that Facebook group and how we hold people accountable, we do those weekly coaching calls. We used to do them one-on-one. Now we've gone away from the one-on-one, and I realize you can do a group coaching call. Get your clients on a weekly group coaching call and teach them something for 10, 15 minutes, and then open up the lines for Q&A. We also take advantage of using the Google Hangouts where we do kind of a live hangout

with anybody who wants to come on board. We'll do copy logics because we teach people how to write copy and create an info product. But you could really have any kind of FaceTime experience that you want. Since you've got a private group, you can go live. When you and I were driving here, we filmed the video in my car,

and if we wanted to, we could have gone live in any one of my private groups and drop some knowledge and wisdom there and give them their marching orders. And so it's so valuable to have that private group and to have those many different touch points through a weekly group coaching call, Google Hangouts, and of course

the Facebook lives that kind of stimulate conversation and thought. And I'm telling you, man, when those clients come back 90 days later to that next meeting, they're just taking quantum leaps in their business or their experience or they're writing, whatever it is that you're teaching them. You know, and the icing on the cake is, you know, somebody out there's thinking, oh, my goodness,

well, you know, there's all this group stuff. But what if I have an emergency? And the thing is, you can offer the emergency email contact or emergency phone call so that, hey, if you're running a product launch or if, you know, you're finishing up your book and you got a deadline, you need some help from the guru, you can offer that kind of lifeline just to up the value that they're getting. So they have the meetings. They have the interaction with other people. They have the coaching online. They have the Facebook groups and they have the emergencies. You've taken care of everything that they are possibly going to need so that they can accept.

accelerate the results and not just, again, be given the information and then have to go and do it themselves, but you're helping them get it done, right, and building their empire. Yeah, that's exactly. And what's really great is if you do your job right, then they are going to not only stay, but they're going to ascend up to being your coaches who you ultimately use to scale your mastermind, which is such a good progression to see. When you think about guys like Mike Whitfield or Shauna Kaminsky who have come into our mastermind coaching groups, and today they're able to coach and, and, work with so many newcomers into the group. It's valuable for them and it's it's really gratifying for us as coaches. Right. Absolutely. So that's how you go and create the mastermind. You fill the mastermind. You deliver the mastermind. Anything else we're missing on everything about masterminds? No, I think we pretty much covered it all. One thing I can say as we close here is that because you're the expert and you know your shit, you're probably going to give way more information than you should at that

first or second and third mastermind. The first year, you feel like, I just need to over-deliver value. And what typically ends up happening is they're drinking out of a fire hydrant. Remember that. Even though they read your book and went through your courses, I've been following you for years, they still don't have that ability to process all that information that you've given them. So if you find that you launch a mastermind group and you have a high level of attrition, people quitting and leaving very quickly,

it's because they feel so overwhelmed with information because you wanted to deliver the value, but you kind of went overboard and over-delivered. and they don't know where to begin. So they've got pages of notes, and they go, you know what? I can just drop out and do this for the next year and a half to come. So remember, you just want to teach them what they need right then and there, and then save the rest for the next mastermind to come. And I think it'll be a great experience for your clients as well as for you as you run

and scale this mastermind. And by the way, if you're someone who wants to grow this mastermind or you want to start a mastermind program, you don't know where to begin, it's just something that's within my zone of genius. I've helped over a dozen thought leaders, experts, and gurus create their own mastermind. And so you might want to consider joining our Empire coaching group where I can help you gain the clients that you need and help you scale your mastermind to multiple seven figures. Anything else we should add here, Craigie? No, this is amazing. I love mastermind groups because I get to hang out with you when we do them.

And I know that everybody listening, once they have their mastermind in place and they're able to help people and impact them on such a high level that they are going to love theirs to. Yeah. We'll see you next time. Thank you.