Setting up a mastermind group

In January this year, I invited 3 business owners I knew, but didn’t know each other, with non-competing businesses, and different skills, to be part of a mastermind group – we now call it Great Minds Group (which is much easier for email communication because you can abbreviate to GMG!).

I thought I would share the process with you for a few reasons:

1. It has been immensely beneficial for Tribe Research
2. Lots of people have personally asked me about it
3. There have been LinkedIn questions about Mastermind groups, indicating their appeal and curiosity about them.
4. We are presenting a day at Small Business Month indicating the success of our group.

At the first meeting everyone gave an overview of their business and how they came to starting it. I researched Mastermind groups on the internet and provided a summary.

The group then decided:

• Meet monthly for 2 hours in the city
• Each meeting would focus on 2 businesses (an hour for each)
  
• The issue to be dealt with at the meeting to be emailed the week prior to the meeting so it can be considered
• To operate with an understanding of confidentiality, not a signed agreement
  
• Any member can be asked to leave if there is a conflict and people are free to leave themselves (neither has happened yet)

Our first meeting wasn’t awkward, everyone was excited by the opportunity and accepted the consensus of the majority. Another business owner has been invited and they were happy with the decisions already made.

For me, our Great Minds Group is useful for getting other business owners views and ideas. It is a support crew that I regularly catch up with, share success with, and don’t feel the same isolation that you can feel when it isn’t all going according to plan.

My Advisory Board that meets every 6 weeks, and has been for just over a year, can then be used for strategic and financial issues – where the ideas from the Great Minds Group are discussed and strategic direction is developed.

At a Great Minds Group meeting a few months ago we formed the idea to host a day at Small Business Month. We saw how we provide total business solutions for each other and on a monthly basis spend 2 hours working on our business. Read more about: Total Business Solutions – A Day Working ON YOUR Business. Hope to see you on Sept 22 and help you spend a day on your business.

I would love to hear your views about mastermind groups…

Peace offering: published pieces

To compensate for a blog silence in June and early this month, I’d like to make a peace offering – my video appearance on Kochie’s Business Builders and a number of articles I’ve recently published on small business development.

Each piece focuses on a different aspect of developing your small business via your relationships with each of your important tribal groups; suppliers, yourself, mentors, customers and stakeholders. I welcome your comments and feedback and trust they’ll provide you with some useful tips for your organisation. 

• Supplier Relationships: Supporting your brand, Tribe K, (2008) Flying Solo
• Solo business growth strategies, Tribe K, (2008) Flying Solo
• What I have learnt from my mentor, Tribe K, (2008) Flying Solo
• Seeking feedback from stakeholders to remain competitive and grow your business, Tribe K, (2007) Kochie’s Business Builders video:

 

 

Managing feedback

I am not a regular watcher of Today Tonight but was on Monday because Geraldine Cox, the founder of Sunrise Children’s Foundation, was scheduled to be on. But today I wanted to write about another story they aired. The story was about a restaurant that responded poorly to negative customer feedback that was delivered by email. It is a great example of the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

The feedback was an uninvited email citing a recent poor experience. The response by the restaurant owner used poor English and rejected the feedback. On receipt of the email the customer forwarded the email to a few friends and the forward kept going until it came to the attention of Today Tonight. The restaurant is now closed.

The lesson to be learned is how to deal with feedback whether it is positive or negative. Providing a channel for customers to provide feedback and then dealing with the feedback properly improves customer satisfaction and loyalty whether it is a formal or informal process.

If people who provide negative feedback are thanked for raising an issue, changes implemented, and then those who provided the feedback are made aware of the changes, these initial critics are more likely to feel valued, might try your product/service again, and tell their friends about the positive experience.

I’m not saying that you have to jump on every word of negative feedback and make changes exactly as suggested, sometimes the solution is to educate your customers on why you do things the way you do.Let me give you an example. Your business is based on high quality products. Your prices are high to reflect this. You receive feedback that your prices are too high. But, your prices aren’t the problem, the perception of value for money is the problem. So, your solution is to educate your customers on the value they receive from your products, not to reduce the prices.

Positive feedback creates great testimonials and collateral to guide your marketing.

So have a look at your feedback procedures. Do you ask your customers regularly about their views? If yes, do you then act on the information you receive, whether it is good or bad? If you answered no to one of these actions then you need to change this, so your business doesn’t fall victim to poor word-of-mouth and close like the restaurant in the Today Tonight segment.

Protecting IP by using Wikis

I was talking to my mentorees as part of the Australian Businesswomen’s Network program MentorNet about the benefit of using a wiki for your company’s policies and procedures. It has a few main benefits over the traditional word document.

Firstly, it can easily grow as your business grows. It isn’t up to the business owner to build the procedures, everyone can discover new ways of doing things and add their own content. You can add RSS feeds to your wiki and subscribe yourself so you know when content has been added. This way you can quality control the content.

Secondly, you have the added security that staff can’t easily email the contents to themselves when they leave and this protects your intellectual property of your business.