In this episode, Danielle and Brandon share their experiences with masterminds & accountability groups, and why they highly encourage everyone in business to be apart of one.
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welcome back to the on business podcast with tons of experience in different
Industries in Canada and the United States Danielle and Brandon give you real talk no-nonsense expert advice
about running and owning successful companies here’s your host Danielle Jenkins and Brandon White
hey Danielle what’s happening hey Brandon how are you well I’ll be better if your mic was
working today but um but it but I know it’s not we are
talking about our experience in being in
I’m hesitant to say this but they’re called masterminds but I really have
I haven’t been in a quote unquote Mastermind has been more like a Founders
group or or what we started in business school called the entrepreneur Dinner Club
how about you I’ve been a part of the same thing they would be considered Mastermind groups that we called them
accountability groups um and honestly I love them I value
the experience the the you know the accountability obviously behind it I
value it so much I’ve been a part of a few different accountability groups still am a part of them for million
dollar women CEO women things like that and honestly they’ve been such a part of
My Success whether it’s a part of you know my company’s success or just me as a person I’ve grown in both ways
um and having these groups so valuable to me and I just wanted to share today my experience your experience and why
they’re so important for any successful business owner and entrepreneur how have your groups worked
so my we’ll call them accountability groups on my end um so my accountability groups a part of them usually about 10
to 12 women um again you have to be Million Dollar Plus
um and I’m not talking you know net worth by any means I’m talking your company or your brand or whatever
business you’re doing it’s Revenue based Revenue based yes so you have to be a
part of that because as we know problems change or issues change or challenges
change as your Revenue changes so you know zero to five hundred thousand you have similar problems five hundred
thousand to a million a little bit different and then a million plus you’re dealing with a whole different ball game
of challenges so being a part of something like the one group which is a Million Dollar Plus woman
um the structure of the accountability group was amazing and I still value it I still love it we do it once a month and
when you come in you talk about what is happening now you get like three minutes
and you talk about current issues that you’re facing um what is happening in your business
slash brand slash company right now and so when you’ve shared that then
everybody gets a chance to give you Insight maybe experiences maybe some advice based on their failures their
wins their successes um and everybody chats about it together helping these 10 to 12 women and I
really like that because everybody has different experiences because everybody has yes A Million Dollar Plus brand or
Revenue um in their business but everybody has experienced something
whether it’s a difficult client like we’ve talked about on here um a difficult employee branding
um lawsuits whatever the issues slash challenges could be we can all give
insight to that because we’ve all went through them once you hit that kind of Revenue so that’s what we start with and
then by the end of it everybody is held to an accountability um task so the ring leader we’ll call
the ringleader the or the leader of the group um they go around asking what everybody’s accountability task is that
they should or you know work towards by the next meeting so after everybody has
talked about those challenges everybody’s given insight to what can help what can benefit their experiences
Etc get your brain spinning then everybody has to report their accountability task whether that is
Health mental in your business whatever it may be you know my challenge right now is lack of Staff my accountability
task is to hire three new staff by next meeting and that you get help to that and then by the next meeting you have to
share if you have met that accountability task and when you are around 10 to 12 or even sometimes 15
million dollar women you definitely don’t want to let them down and say that you haven’t done it or even try to work
on it and if you haven’t met it you need to at least share that you’ve tried you know I’ve held 10 interviews all of them
were useless you’ve tried you you know you’ve done what you should have done towards that task you may not have met
your goal but at least you tried so it does keep you on track it does keep you accountable and that is the most
important thing because we all have busy lives we all so much going on work can make you work 20 hours a day sometimes
without even taking a sip of water so when you know that you have to share this by next meeting
you definitely uh it definitely keeps you on track that’s for sure
yeah as you were talking I was thinking about I was reading some
probably makes me sound geeky if you’re just listening to this for the first time but uh it’s actually true I am Kiki
is reading some scientific studies on
goal attainment and as it turns out there was a meta-analysis which is sort
of seen as the definitive type work as it relates to research at that moment because it goes back and looks at all of
the research on that topic it then filters those out to more
comprehensive studies with larger sets of groups so if you had someone who did
a study with five or seven people that’s just not going to be as significantly
statistically significant as a study that had a thousand people over
four years so that’s the sort of meta-analysis and the punch line is
which I’ll save everybody a long-winded answer is that
when you write your goal down and
tell it in public public meaning this doesn’t mean you need to post it on Instagram or
Tick Tock or whatever it Facebook whatever it is but when you publicly outside of your immediate
Circle meaning your what your significant partner whoever that is it’s
sort of outside of that is that you are more likely to attain that goal and what
you just described is exactly what that study sort of well it doesn’t sort of it validates
that that’s what works so I think that it is important when you have these
goals I’ve and I experiment on myself all the time had these goals where I just keep it to
myself and then three weeks later I I’m not doing it and I’m wondering why
and there’s a hundred reasons there’s always a hundred reasons why you didn’t do it I was laughing when you said you
can go through the whole day without drinking water because actually yesterday when I was finishing trying to finish writing this book that I’m
working on I think I went four hours without water and I knew I did but I was I just didn’t want to get up I
just wanted to keep writing because I was in that State and I didn’t want to move it so that’s actually true but
I think that there’s a lot to having a group in
addition to the other thing that you said which is what I found is that just having I think you said
when you have 20 other women in the room or people it doesn’t matter whether they’re women or not that have a Million
Dollar Plus businesses there’s a there’s a higher standard
in there and a momentum or energy that comes from that
that almost lifts you up into a place that is otherwise hard to get to it’s
sort of like jumping on your Peloton and with no music and then all of a sudden
you turn on AC DC and your Cadence goes up and you’re you know you gain five
miles an hour and your watts is uh up 100 Watts I mean that’s the type that
would be the analogy I would give to what happens in these groups do you agree I 100 agree and uh I was thinking
similar to that like going to a regular kind of one of those like life motivation things or you look at
something like Tony Robbins where he’s making you like jump and scream and arms flying before you even think about it
because it just gives you that motivation um and that extra pump up
I think there’s just something also being in a room as a founder or CEO you’re
generally I I’ll say you don’t want to be the smartest person in the room but you are
up there as it relates to your company because you’re leading it you came up with the idea you’re leading that team
and you’re at the tip of the spear so to speak and then you find yourself and you put yourself in this situation where
you might not be at the tip of the spear there’s probably someone else making more Revenue than you making more money
than you and it just changes your mindset and elevates you because in
general Founders CEOs are
type A in general not everybody but there has to be some sort of internal
motivation to basically get you to do something and turn nothing into something and then something into a
business so there’s just inherently that thing and it is it’s like turning on AC DC
and watching your Watts go up on the Peloton I mean that’s what happens and
then there’s this you have to publicly say what your goal is I mean and
you’re not going to come back to that meeting or if you do you’re not going to come back to many of them with that
failure you’re eventually going to show up and you’re going to show up whether you’re embarrassed or whatever it is it
doesn’t matter it’s it’s almost that I think you said this you don’t want to let those other
people down as weird as that sounds
not letting them down you don’t want it is embarrassing you know because unless something major happens in your life
you know unfortunately I don’t know something unfortunate happens an awful event really you know a lot of these goals and
things that you need to work on in your business are attainable you should be doing them
especially if you know you need to be doing them so you know to show up there and go oh you know I had four events
every weekend and so I couldn’t work on this I couldn’t work on my branding
whatever it may be because of that they’re gonna think you’re pathetic I mean those are just excuses for not
doing what you need to do to continue to grow I mean that’s why we’re a part of these groups is to hold you accountable
to give you insight to give you experiences from other successful people but to grow we want to increase Revenue
we want to make ourselves better personal development make our companies better make our leadership better all of
those things so if we’re not doing those tasks we’re not going to get there and it makes you look like a pathetic human
being I’m sorry I feel that way I’ve been in those groups where you know I haven’t completed my accountability task
and I feel like a flipping loser it’s true
it is it is true the and I I think it elevates it in the military
the operators what they’re called in Special Operations after Missions at night they
meet in what they call Hot wash which is really an accountability type
meeting it’s a little bit different than what we’re talking about but it is the same and they do a review and the point
that I want to make about that hot wash is that it’s brutally honest it’s protected
it’s a protected environment meaning everybody knows that this
doesn’t leave this room but everybody’s really honest and I think
you need that brutal honesty a lot in life for someone to say like hey
Danielle what the f are you doing you if you don’t it’s very clear based
on what you said that if you don’t do this then you’re not going to make this or you’re not going to be profitable
this year and if you don’t do that what the hell are you doing I mean or
yeah that idea just doesn’t sound good and having that whether that person’s
right or wrong challenging your idea to think
further about it because as a Founder you’re in an echo chamber you become a
self-looking ice cream cone I mean you do you it’s true you you say
oh I think this is a great idea and you can convince yourself that it’s a good idea because as a Founder you have to
convince yourself on a regular basis that you can do something that you don’t know you can do and
and you need someone to say like hey look that’s just not smart and here’s why because
I’ve already made that mistake five times I’m not saying that you can’t figure it out but here’s the challenges
that have happened and you should get off that high horse and start to think about this and I think that that’s
basically what you really need I actually also last night was watching on Netflix the
story of the Basketball Team USA basketball team that got the gold medal
back because I think and I get the years wrong I think we lost in 2004 we sort of lost our way I think 2008 we wanted we
Contin got the gold medal back and the Duke Coach which I am not a fan of although I
respect him because I’m a UNC Tar Heel and the Tar Heels and Duke have a big
rivalry but they showed footage from that with these Elite basketball players
I mean LeBron James Kobe Ryan I keep going down the list here
Carmel Anthony and he basically brought them
down broke them down and took the egos
out of it not that he was trying to strip their egos because you have to
embrace the egos it’s just having that brutal honesty accountability and that’s
what in that series the footage whether you’re a basketball fan or not we really
see how he as a coach was able to do that and in these groups that we’re talking about
whether it’s a Founder’s group accountability group that’s what’s happening and
as much as I sometimes don’t want to hear some BS about how I didn’t do something
the truth is you need it you’ll hear AC DC in your head and you will make it
happen so yeah um I think it’s it’s been important through my whole career as well yeah I
mean there’s a lot of people who get um mentors coaches you know I do a lot
of small business mentorship in my community as well but just having that accountability group or some kind of
Mastermind you know again we don’t want to use that word but any kind of group you know there’s that famous saying that
everybody knows and it’s you become who you hang out with and I don’t care what anybody says that is one thousand
percent the truth I’ve seen it with former friends of mine I’ve seen it with
business colleagues Partners things like that and again as CEOs as you know
Founders things like those positions you are that self-looking ice cream cone you constantly have to amp yourself up
nobody’s really telling you unless it’s a pissed off client nobody’s really telling you what you’re doing wrong
because not many of your employees or managers are going to come to you and tell you how bad you are at something or
how it was about bad idea because you’re ultimately the founder I mean good on you if you can take it but it doesn’t
really happen and so if you’re in those positions you need to be around people who are also in those positions because
they are going to make you better um they’re not your employees and I’m not saying that employees are beneath us
by any means but they’re not making the decisions that you have to make so to be around those people in those groups
those again they’re making the million dollar revenues they’re making those decisions they have built a business or
a company or a brand um they will make you better you need to surround yourself with those kinds of
people who will make you and challenge you to do better yeah I was a member and it just because
of Cove had stopped there was a Founders group here in Silicon Valley we met every other Friday in Palo Alto and
the great thing about that group was one is here in Silicon Valley
and really just the they Silicon Valley is a specific spot that sort of the word
has grown to include the whole Bay Peninsula so I’ll just say that as it relates to when I use that term it’s
really the whole San Francisco Bay Peninsula area actually including
Oakland as well there’s a lot of big companies in Oakland now the the bar that was in that group was high
the accountability when you went around it was you felt like you were
you were playing varsity I mean you’re on The A-Team and you get so many ideas
from this group whereas if you’re all with a one-on-one coach
and I’ve had a one-on-one I had a a sports psychologist that I work with
through high school because I had an early injury I tore my ACL when I was in
seventh grade I was just really hard there’s a lot of mental stuff that you got to go through when you have a major
injury like that and you’re trying to play for back then the best high school
in Lacrosse in the country it’s just you you need that and you don’t realize that there’s a lot of things in your life
that are affecting you my point with that is that the one-on-one coach is great
for some things and it’s great to have that but again both you and that coach become a
self-looking ice cream cone and you’re only getting ideas from one person versus having a bigger group of ideas
and I think in the founders group that I was a part of that’s what’s happened in
and I’m I’m just bringing this up because you told me before we started recording that you wanted me to talk about the entrepreneur Dinner Club which
was a club that a group of us in Business School
I went to UNC Chapel Hill and we used to get together on Saturday nights anybody
who is interested in being an entrepreneur or was an entrepreneur because in business school it’s not as if you’re
just in college some people have already had businesses or already have at least a semblance of a career and an idea
maybe that they wanted to do when they graduated and we met every Saturday night and it was
this group it was a very hardcore group in the
sense that we were serious we are competitive and we were honest and if you couldn’t
take the honesty then you just opted out and it wasn’t
mean nobody there nobody would tolerate being mean it was simply asking those hard
questions like if you have an idea how are you going to make money how does that work
well how does that work and the question is four layers deep and we would ask
those questions and turns out out of that group several of us
I would say a large majority I’d have to go back because the group sort of wax and wanes
there was a core group of us there’s guy built a 150 million dollar business in four years I built a million
multi-million dollar business coming out of there uh another woman built a multi-million dollar business out of
there and I’m not saying that it’s a direct result of that group or not but what I am saying is is that sort of
rigor and accountability on a weekly basis over two years in business school
really worked and I carried that out into a group in Easton when I lived there Eastern Maryland and started the
entrepreneur dinner group there and actually I think within three weeks of
starting that someone got funded who just didn’t even think it was possible that that’s the thing that comes out of
those groups is is that this person had a cool business and it was actually a
toy business and I just think they didn’t think that they could raise money or that they
could raise money to get their business to the next level and it happened I’m just that just jumps out at me there’s
there’s just I could keep going down the examples of this but having a bigger
group for me with all of those ideas is just immensely valuable and in some
cases I’ve missed it in the sense of having several people and I think
virtually does work but in person if you can pull it off at least on a
every two quarters or once a year or twice a year in person
just really changes that Dynamic it turns it up to 11 when you
can get into that room for a few hours so my experience has been immensely useful uh even you and I have been doing
episodes I mean we started on the other podcast and then we spun out our own
show but even that was accountability I mean coffee with Danielle is really how it started was
hey what’s going on this week and what are you doing and and I remember saying
like hey you said you were gonna do that or you’re like hey you told me that this is how it was going and and just having
that because you say it in public really makes a big difference the last thing I’ll say is
accountability for me has also meant that it’s not voluntary
meaning yeah that I paid for it we we did pay fees at the entrepreneur called
they were Mouse nuts but at for there for the other Founders club we did pay
money that went into someone to run it to I mean there’s Administration
things that have to go on and you need the administrative things for the accountability yeah because
someone’s got to write that stuff down and do all of that stuff so for me
the payment was more about the commitment
and on the days that I didn’t want to show up because I made because I said
I’m busy because I said hey have you made excuses Yeah well yeah whether
they’re excuses or not I mean the truth is we all have things to do in our business they’ll always be excuses there
was always this thing in my mind I was like well I paid twelve hundred dollars or in
one case one group called tens of thousands of dollars a year you’re like yeah I need to go to that because I paid
for it it’s worth it and it’s going to make me better so it’s almost that that also increased the
motivation for me so I’m just saying that for people listening who say well I never pay for that or I’m going to do it
voluntary you’re if you think if you take an honest look at things in your life that you got for
free versus the things that you paid for which is your accountability
get back to me and tell me which ones you actually followed through one thousand percent I one thousand
percent agree with you on that um the one group that I did um after doing a million we paid
I believe it was 199 a session so 200 bucks a month
um so what’s that 2400 a year and just like yourself there were times where I was tired I’d rather you know I had an
exhausting day and I didn’t really want to sit on Zoom for two hours um but I knew that spending that money I
was going to get it back tenfold and I did every single time something got better so I learned something and I made
that money better um and back like I said 10 10 folds and one time I was a part of a group uh that
was before doing the million dollar women group and I think you had to do 500 to a
million uh like 500 000 to a million so it was a smaller Niche group
um but at that point I was doing around 600 000 and I was struggling Brandon and for all of our listeners I was
struggling I was wearing like 30 hats I was doing it all myself and out of every
single session that I did with this smaller group one takeaway that I paid for um and I
think that one was a hundred dollars a month so again for small Revenue group um but very valuable everybody was on
the same page everybody had ideas and things and one takeaway that I really that I can
remember um that changed my whole life was I was burnt out like I was literally fading
away and I was at this group I was exhausted and my biggest challenge was I didn’t know what next to do because I
didn’t have the time and I had no time I was working 23 hours a day barely
sleeping my health was bad and we’ve talked about on the show before when I was doing that because a lot of business owners do and that was also ran the same
way almost like an accountability and so I was sharing my Challenge and one of the ladies said Danielle you need to
write down the tasks that you are doing that are technically not your position
and that really struck with me because I was thinking well they’re all my position and she said what is your title
and my my job was to grow the company not posting on Instagram not answering
emails just about basic things my job was was to get the clients get the stuff
at that time and so she said you need to write down all of these things that you’re doing that are not your job and
you need to then delegate them and that is when literally three and I said at
that group I said my accountability task was to hire an assistant and I did three weeks later I hired an assistant two
days a week eight hours a day and I took that on and from that point within like three months I hit my million dollar
Mark and from then on we’ve grown exponentially um just from having an assistant to do
two days a week to take those tasks on and I was able to do so much more so that was something you know without that
group I would have never done I would have just keep burning myself to the ground maybe would have never hit a million dollars who knows
yeah you and I just had an accountability session before we started recording because I try to convince you that we shouldn’t be posting on our
website herself and and you’ve been resisting for for six months but for
listeners uh it’s one of those things where I just learned I’ve and I am Danielle
and I are very much alike in many ways and and probably different in some is
that we always want to take on all those tasks ourselves we want to do it ourselves we know we we quote air quotes
for those not watching know that we can do it better and sometimes you just have
to scale and you and I had that discussion I’m like this it’s not going to work if we scale if we do another episode a week or we do this and your
thing is it only takes 10 minutes and I’m like well it’s 40 minutes and it my point is only for listeners that you’re
listening to say that the discussion that Danny yell and I are having is not
trying to put ourselves on a in another place or something that it doesn’t
happen to us it happens that’s the type of discussions that happen in these groups that people ask people ask
they do ask why questions but they’re really asking what and how yeah how does that work how is it going to work for
you Danielle to schedule all of your people to clean all these houses and get new
customers and do the payroll and and and and it’s these how and what questions
that that that come up and then the question the how question is well
how’d you do on that goal that you set for yourself this month so I I think it’s
you know we don’t have to be beat a dead horse in any way but I think it’s a good discussion and I think
I think that while this is out there as a known thing
for business owners I think sometimes we forget me included because a group Fades
or something happens sometimes these groups I just had one Mastermind so it was a mastermind uh Marketing Group it
just faded it just didn’t work I guess the people who ran it got tired no one really wanted to step up because they
know how much work it is and it fades but it’s a good reminder to say hey gotta find one you and I for this
episode it’s not that we have a recommendation of one or anything like that it’s more
you got to find one that you got to find one out there that works or and try it
and I believe that the ROI on that is huge it has been for my entire career
and you too I mean just saying that you were at 600 you get to a million and now you’ve got several million
whether that group was solely responsible for that or not hard to say but what was the first step
the turning on the music when you’re riding on the Peloton to basically get you another 100 Watts I mean that’s the
point it it starts to bring out the best in you well and and for maybe those people listening and maybe they are
almost at a million you know or maybe over a million I mean again there’s there’s challenges that people in
different Revenue tiers let’s just put it that way are going to experience and whether
you’re doing a hundred thousand a million or 10 million there’s always issues like people that think that at 10
million there’s no issues trust me there’s that saying where it says More Money More Problems it’s one thousand
percent true the problems just change and when I transformed or changed into my new group the million dollar woman
my first expansion came from that group there was a lady there
um and she had a business and she ran like a lawn care business and she started in just one small community like
I did and she was now a franchise my motivation to change areas not franchise
because that’s something that I I’m not planning uh on doing just for a quality
control reason and then we can get into that on another episode but getting into other areas in other communities and
hiring managers and things and area managers that all came from that group because I was like okay well you know
say Orangeville is only at one cap one level that I can reach maybe I can only stay at three million dollars in
Orangeville but moving to different areas came from my million dollar women group a few years ago
um so trust me it does encourage you it does motivate you it does take you to the next level because you’re like well
she can do why can’t I do it and that’s where it comes from so um anybody who’s listening I highly
encourage getting a part of a group even if it’s just five six seven people get a part of one
yeah and make sure that there’s an Administration otherwise it won’t run correct correctly one way or the other
so there you have it uh anything else that you want to cover no I I think that’s uh I think that’s
that just everybody needs to have accountability um that’s not themselves because we all need accountability
all right well hey have a good week you too bye everyone
we’re I’m going to cut this off and come back so that you
um I’m gonna stop recording
