276: The Best Decision I've Made in My Business (and It Wasn't a Course)
The best decision I've ever made in my business wasn't a course or a tool. It was joining a small room of people who actually get it.
In this episode I walk through why a curated peer mastermind changed how it feels to run my business, and why it's almost never the thing people assume it is.
In This Episode
- Why the big decisions get lonelier as your business grows
- What changes when you stop deciding alone
- The hot seat, and why you can't do it for yourself
- Why curation is the whole product, and what it actually means
- The real cost of staying in a room of one
Resources mentioned
- The Creator's MBA Council: lab.destinicopp.com/council
- The full article on this topic: destinicopp.com/blog/curated-peer-mastermind
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Listen to Inside the Council →Episode Transcript
00:00Hi there, and welcome back to the Creator's MBA Show. My name is Dr. Destini Copp, and I'm so glad you're here. Today I want to talk about something that took me a long time to figure out, and that honestly turned out to be the best decision I've ever made in my business. It isn't a tool or a tactic, and it's probably not what you'd expect.
So let me walk you through it. You know the calls I'm talking about, the ones where you have to decide whether to kill an offer or keep it, whether to raise your price or hold it, whether to move up market or stay where you are. Those are the decisions that don't have a clean answer, the ones you turn over for weeks, where you finally make a choice and then spend the next month wondering if you got it wrong.
01:00And the hard part is that the people in your life can't help you with these questions. Your partner is proud of you, and your friends think what you do is great, but they don't run a business like yours. Most of them are working a nine-to-five job, or maybe they're home with their kids. So when you're staring down a real decision, you're mostly going at it alone.
I did that for years, and I figured that was part of the deal. You're the founder, you're the entrepreneur, you make the calls, and that's the job. Then I joined a small peer mastermind, eleven women who are all running real businesses, and it turned out to be the best thing I've ever done in my business.
02:00Not the best course I've taken or the best tool I bought, but the best thing, full stop. And I want to walk you through why, because when I tell people a mastermind changed everything for me, they assume I mean the strategy and the tactics and the swipe files. That's not it at all.
You've probably heard that line, that you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with. The people around you set what you think is normal, what you think is possible, and what you'd never even try. So when you put yourself in a room with people who are playing bigger than you are, your ceiling moves up. You hear what they charge, and suddenly your own prices look low. You watch how they handle a launch that flopped, and you stop panicking about yours. You see them make a call you'd have been too scared to make,
03:00and it works, and it changes what you believe you're allowed to do. That, my friend, is what a good room does for you, but only if it's the right room.
The first change I felt was that I stopped making the big calls alone. Before the room, every big decision lived in my own head, and I'd sit with it for weeks. I'd finally decide, and then second-guess myself for a month. Now I bring those decisions to people who have actually made them, the same calls about whether to sunset an offer, whether a price is too high, whether it's time to move up market, and I'm hearing back from people who have stood in exactly that spot.
The decision is mine, and nobody makes it for me, but I'm not second-guessing in the dark anymore. And I can't tell you
04:00how much that changes the way it feels to run this thing day to day.
The next part is what happens when it's your turn in the hot seat. It comes around a few times a year. You put your business on the table, the funnel, the offer, whatever you're stuck on, and the whole room gets to work on it for a full hour.
That's the part you can't do for yourself, because you're too close to it. You've looked at your own funnel so many times that you've stopped seeing it. But a room full of sharp, smart people looks at it fresh and finds the thing you've been ignoring for the past few months. I've walked out of those sessions with a single sentence that changed my entire quarter. That's not something you get from a course. You get it from people who
05:00are in it with you.
Something else caught me off guard, which is that you finally have a place to say the real thing. When something big happens in your business, good or bad, think about who you'd actually tell. Most people in your life can't fully understand it, because a big win sounds like bragging when they don't understand what you had to do to get there, and a scary month is hard to explain to someone who's never had one. So you end up carrying most of that by yourself.
In the room, you can talk about it openly, whether it's a number that scares you, or the win you've been chasing for two years, or the doubt you've never put out anywhere in public. And the people there get it, because they've been there too. For a lot of founders, it's the first place they've ever had that.
06:00And the part that means the most to me now is the people themselves. You don't just walk away from a room like this with a strategy. You walk away with people who cheer you on, who check on you when you've disappeared, who stay in your corner for the long haul, both in business and in life.
The strategy was great, but almost two years in, the strategy isn't the part I'd cry about losing. The people are.
So let me come back to the part I told you matters the most, because everything I just described only happens if the room is right. Get the room wrong, and you don't get any of this. You end up with a group chat that goes quiet after two weeks, or one person teaching while everyone else listens, or advice from people who haven't actually done the thing. So the real product was never the calls or the agenda or the curriculum.
07:00It's the curation, and it comes down to who actually gets in.
And here's the part a lot of people don't understand. They assume curation means everyone has to do something different, with no two people in the same niche. That's not it at all. Some of the most useful people in my room do work that's close to mine, and that's exactly why they get it. They understand my problem on the first try. They've already run the experiment I'm about to run. That overlap isn't a threat. It's often the gift.
Curation is about something else entirely, and that's level and
08:00character. What I'm looking at is whether someone is past the basics, whether they show up, whether they tell the truth, and whether they give as much as they take. And when you get that part right, everything else takes care of itself, because the decisions get pressure-tested, the hot seats go deep, people say the real thing, and the friendships form, all because the right people were in the room to begin with.
Now, a room like this costs more than a course, and I know the first thing that pops into your head, because it's the same thing that popped into mine. You should be able to figure this out yourself. And you can. You've proven that already, so that's not the question here.
The real question is what it costs to keep deciding alone, and that price usually shows
09:00up as one offer you should have killed six months sooner, or one launch you should have run differently if somebody had warned you, or one whole year you spent stuck on a call the right room could have helped you make in an afternoon.
That's the real cost, and it isn't the membership fee. It's the mistakes you make in a room of one. The loneliness has a cost too. It's harder to put a number on that.
So here's where I want to leave you. If you take one thing from this episode, let it be this. At some point, trying to do all of this by yourself stops being a strength and starts slowing you down. The fastest thing you can do for your business might not be another course or another tool at all. It might be finding your people.
I believe in this so much that I went and
10:00built a room of my own. It's called the Creator's MBA Council, and it's a small, curated group of established creators who are in each other's businesses every week, with me in the room as a strategist, and two in-person retreats a year.
If you'd like to see how it works, I'll put the link in the show notes, along with an article I wrote that goes deeper on all of this. But whether you join my room or go find another one, the thing I want you to hear is to stop trying to carry all of this alone. Go find your people. It might turn out to be the best decision you make in your business, too. Bye for now.
11:00Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you love the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day, and bye for now.
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