Most successful people attribute a significant portion of their success to having access and being part of a mastermind group. Almost everybody I have ever learned from and considered a mentor has shared this insight with me.

Recently at Affiliate Summit West, during the Millionaire blogger panel, at least three of the four panelists talked about having a group of peers that hold each other accountable.

I decided to invite some of my close business friends to start a mastermind group. The benefits of the group are a mix of accountability, camaraderie, and mastermind objectives shared with like-minded individuals that are committed to their own success but also want to each other.

I'm taking tips and guidance from other people about how to run the group. I've been reading a lot of Pat Flynn's blog posts about his own masterminds, I've taken lessons from my friend Bob Watson and his super successful social media mastermind (SMMOC), I've also ran the Dot Com Lifestyle group and the Free Lunch Friday events.

I think the biggest challenge will be fine tuning this and finding out just how much I don't know yet about this. You would think that having so much experience teaching, running groups and attending groups I would know exactly how to do this but I'm smart enough to know that there's a whole lot that I don't know.

At first, I thought it would be good to make it a fully democratic endeavor and ask everybody for input before making decisions. That didn't work.

Everybody has an idea of how it should work and the input was so varied that I couldn't come up with a clear majority on anything, from topics to discuss, to schedule or even what type of medium we should use to meet and discuss things.

For any given issue I asked the members I had as many different responses as the number of members in the group.

I had to just step back for a little bit and take the reins. I hope that works out in the long term. The main goal is to help our businesses grow and to help each other with online marketing.

All the members are already good at what they do, some have physical businesses, some are in the service industry, some of us are bloggers, but our biggest common goal is growing our business.

I launched the group with a handful of friends and we meet using Slack to discuss issues, ask questions, and give each other tips and advice throughout the week. Once a week, we meet "face to face" using a Google Hangout.

I'm interested in sharing my experience about this mastermind group here in the blog, and perhaps invite you to join us. This has been something that I wanted to do for a couple years now, my friend Emily and I have talked about starting it as well, but the timing didn't feel right before.

I think that the right time is now, so without any more hesitation, I started it. I've had experiences with other masterminds and I can vouch for the positive outcome and the value I've derived from those groups.

I hope that I can replicate some of that in this mastermind and I want to provide value, support, and encouragement to all members while learning from them as well.

If you feel like you could be a part of this, let me know.

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