The hidden cost of business masterminds

I’ve spent thousands on business masterminds over the years.

Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash

I’ve paid for online and in-person masterminds. Online masterminds are convenient. You can join the weekly accountability calls and check-ins on your lunch break or at night.

But I find all those weekly Zoom calls and live cohorts exhausting. It’s also hard to get value from a program where you must wait your turn to ask the facilitator a question. I’ve sometimes paid more to circumvent that problem and get 1:1 time with the facilitator.

In-person masterminds are more fun.

I’ve met people from industry and niche at masterminds like these. Learning from someone two or three steps ahead is more straightforward than following an online guru. Ideally, I pick up some strategies for solving a problem in my business, too.

In 2023, I went to a Mastermind where they talked about hiring. I realized I was overpaying a content editor for one of my sites by at least $1k a month. Wondering about the merits of keeping them on, I checked their work and found many overlooked mistakes. So, I let them go and indirectly saved myself the Mastermind’s cost.

A few years ago, I flew from Dublin, Ireland, to a mastermind for bloggers in Austin, Texas…