278: Why Our Peer Mastermind Didn't Fizzle Out
Kate and I did not know each other. We live twenty minutes apart in Atlanta, and in the exact same month we were both quietly trying to build the same peer mastermind. One person got asked by both of us and said, wait, is this the same thing?
This episode is the behind the scenes of the Weird Hermits, the peer group I credit with more business impact than anything else I have paid for. What made it stick when the other peer groups fizzled, what a normal week actually looks like, and what we talk about that we do not talk about anywhere else.
In This Episode
- How two people building the same group in the same month found each other
- The commitment rule that kept this one from petering out like the others
- Where the name came from, and the one it replaced
- What a week looks like: the call, the ads call, the Telegram thread
- The debrief calls where we share the numbers nobody posts publicly
Resources mentioned
- Kate Kordsmeier's business: Success with Soul
- The peer cohort I built from this model: The Creator's MBA Council
- Walk through everything included, in a private podcast: Inside the Council
The Council is the room I built after two years in this one. Same weekly rhythm, same in person meetups, same expectation that you actually show up. If you would rather hear it all laid out before you decide, Inside the Council is the private podcast that walks you through it.
Learn about the Council →Episode Transcript
00:00I am excited about this conversation, and I have one of my dear friends with me, Kate. Kate is in my peer mastermind, and what I wanted to do was bring her on today so we can talk about that peer mastermind and take you behind the scenes on how it got started, what we do, and what the benefit is for us.
I have said several times, and if you have been around my world for any length of time you know this, that it is one of the things in my business that has made the biggest impact. And we have been doing this, Kate, for over a year. Maybe a year and a half now. I cannot remember the exact time.
I think close to two years.
Close to two years. So I am going to turn it over to you, Kate. First, tell the audience a little more about you and how you help people.
01:00My name is Kate Kordsmeier. I am so glad to be here. I did not even know Destini before the Weird Hermits formed, and we will talk about that name in a minute. I am so glad we met, and we are both here in Atlanta, so we get to have lunch dates. We just had a pool day the other day, and it has been so fun to be here in person.
My business is Success with Soul. Destini and I are cut from the same cloth, and interestingly, before we knew each other, we both had programs called MBA. Mine is called Mindful Business Academy. I take a slightly more spiritual approach to some things in my business, but I think we are both naturally very strategy minded. We are both INTJs. I feel like we are soul sisters.
02:00What is really fun about doing this interview in particular is that we both tried to form these masterminds separately and ended up coming together. I am excited to tell that story, because it goes to show that great minds think alike.
Let's jump in and tell people how this started, because I do think it was the universe bringing us together.
I will tell my side of it and then you can tell yours. I was at a point in my business where I personally felt lonely. I had been in a mastermind with somebody who was very lovely, but I did not feel the connection with the other members. It was more that we came to hot seats with her and she coached us on our business.
03:00What I wanted was a very small peer mastermind where we could get together every single week and help each other, support each other. That is when I started thinking about people in my world, people I had done collaborations with, and I started reaching out and saying, this is what I have in mind, are you interested?
And one of them, I think you had reached out to them too, Kate. This was Steph, Steph Blake, who is in our mastermind, and she raised her hand and said, wait, is this the same thing? Because she got asked by both of us. And we said, no, it is not the same thing, but it would be great if we could all do it together. That is my remembrance of how everything came together.
04:00Same, and what is serendipitous about it, and I just got goosebumps as you said that, is that it was not like we were months apart. We were both in the exact same month trying to build the exact same thing. We just did not happen to know each other well enough to ask the other one to be in it. So thank goodness for Steph saying, wait a second. She said something to me and I said, could I reach out to Destini and see if she wants to combine these? And we did.
We had a lot of similar people in mind, if not the same exact people. When we first started we had a larger group, and we came to that first call and said, what do you each want out of this? What are you looking for in a peer mastermind?
And then naturally some people dropped off. Oh, you know what, I do not think this is what I am looking for. I think we all handled that really well. There was no drama or hard feelings.
05:00The core group that stayed really knew what we wanted it to be, and we knew we needed a strong commitment from people. This was not going to be a mastermind you show up to once a month and sometimes miss and it just peters out. The people who said, I cannot commit to that right now, fell off, and we were left with this amazing core group. It has changed a little over time, but it has been the same main people since we started.
So do you want to tell everybody what the Weird Hermits is, and where that name even came from?
Definitely. But first I want to mention something. You and I both live in the Atlanta area. I am in the suburbs, you are closer to the city, and I did not know you before this. That was crazy, right?
06:00It really was. I think I had just participated in one of your events for the first time. I knew your name, but we had never met. We had never done any of the same things, at least not at the same time. Now we have found out that we both did these programs, we just were not doing them together. I wanted to mention it because it is a fun fact.
But in terms of the Weird Hermits, I do not even remember the background. Remind me, Kate. How did we get that name?
Most of us are pretty introverted. We kept making jokes in the first couple of months about how one of us had not left the house in a couple of weeks. We would ask, what did you all do last weekend, and everyone would say, just hung out.
07:00And somebody, I want to say it was Tara, said, because I am just a weird hermit. And I said, oh my God, that is what we should call ourselves. One of our original members who is not with us anymore, Sage, had wanted to give us a name.
That sounded like she died. She is still out living her best life. She is just not part of the Weird Hermits anymore.
Sage had wanted to give us a name, and we were like, do we need a name? But we had been calling ourselves the Six Figure Mastermind, and we thought, that is lame, we want something better. So as soon as I heard somebody say, I am just a weird hermit, we all said, I am a weird hermit too. That is it. That is our name.
I love that. And I do think it was Tara that said it. I think we all resonated with it, because we are all deep into what we are doing in our businesses.
08:00I want to go back to something you said earlier, about when we were forming all of this and talking about the commitment. I do think that is the glue that has kept us together, getting the commitment from people. Some people decided they could not do it, but the people who stayed are super committed.
Super committed. And we have had several periods over the last two years where we have had to ask people to recommit. Okay, we are going into a new season here. No hard feelings if this is not for you right now, if something is going on in your personal life or your business, if it is just not what you need. So we have had some people leave, but the people who stay say, okay, I am really all in on this.
One of the questions I wanted to ask you is what each of us was missing at the time that made us say yes to this, because for me that was a huge piece of it. I had been in other peer masterminds and other paid masterminds.
09:00My experience with the paid ones was that there was a leader and a host, and we were all there for her, or him. It was not as peer to peer. Sometimes I made great friends there, but it was a different vibe. And the peer masterminds I had been in all fizzled out pretty quickly, because there was not that buy-in. I do not mean people paid. I mean there was not that commitment from people. There was no expectation set.
I think part of what makes us Weird Hermits is that we are all maybe weirdly committed to our businesses, and we are all very comfortable expressing our needs and saying, this is what we want and these are the expectations. We can have a difficult conversation, and I think that is unique. A lot of people are not as direct. So that is a long way of saying that for me, that was what I felt like I was missing. What do you feel like was missing for you?
10:00I wanted a group of peers, women, who I could go to and say, this is what is going on in my business, I would love your feedback on it. Because I felt like I was in such a silo, in my own brain. As a solo entrepreneur, even though I have team members, I really am making all the decisions myself. My VAs are not making that decision. I am. And I missed having someone, or a group of people, to bounce ideas off of. Even though I felt pretty clear on the direction I was going, I would think, well, what if. I needed somebody to look at what I was presenting and poke holes in it.
And so we had that first call and we all went around, and there were over a dozen of us on that call, and everybody said what they were looking for. Some of that came up.
11:00Another piece that came up, and that has really proven true, is that we were looking for collaborators. We did not want to be so siloed in our own businesses that we could not work together on things. A lot of us have done JV webinars together. Any time one of us is hosting an event or a podcast or a panel, we are speaking at each other's things. We are doing newsletter swaps and sharing each other's stuff. We are all affiliates for each other. That part felt really good too, and again, it is different from other masterminds I have been in.
I love that, and you just reminded me of a Telegram message I responded to this morning, and I think you did too, where one of our members raised their hand and said, I am looking for newsletter swaps, does anybody want to do that?
12:00You raised your hand, I raised my hand. We are definitely all in on that. I love that about what we are doing together.
That is really fun. And to your point earlier, we are spread all over the place. Yes, we are both in Atlanta, but the rest of our crew, and I think we are nine people right now, or are we ten? I cannot remember exactly.
I think it is ten.
So we are all spread out. Let's walk people through where everyone is, and whether that has ever been an issue remotely, not being in the same place.
To expand on that for those of you listening, we do meet in person at least twice a year. We also do some other events where we might go to a conference together. But at least twice a year we all get together. We have one person in the UK, one person in upstate New York, somebody on the West Coast in the Seattle area, two people in Dallas, one person in Florida.
13:00I am sure I am missing some.
And Chicago.
Chicago. I forgot about Chicago, yes.
We are pretty North American. Tara was in the group for a while and she was in Canada. I think she was our only Canadian. Most of us are in the States, but Ruth has been with us in the UK the whole time. The only thing that is challenging is time zones, and they are always a little challenging even just West Coast to East Coast. But I always feel bad for Ruth, because she is meeting late in the evening her time. It seems to work well enough for her, but that is the only remote struggle we have had, and I am sure she would love another UK person to share that load with.
14:00Honestly, I would love to do one of our in-person events over there and meet her. Speaking of in-person events, our next one is in New Orleans, so I am excited about that one.
I cannot wait for that. That is going to be fun. What have we done so far? We have done Atlanta twice. We are doing New Orleans. And I know we have done some conferences together. Destini and I and Monica and a couple of others went to Austin, I think it was.
Yes, that was in Austin. And a bunch of us are going to Mexico in November for a retreat that is separate from this mastermind, but we do end up doing other things in person together.
When we were in Austin, we were with some other friends who are not in our peer mastermind, but they have their own, and they were asking us, so how does this actually work for you all?
15:00They have been doing theirs for a decade. Theirs is much smaller, but they really wanted to know what the commitment is, because we keep talking about the commitment. So let's tell everybody what a normal week looks like for us and what we do on the call.
We get together once a week for at least an hour and a half. A lot of times it honestly runs to two and a half hours.
I know. There have been some where I have been on the call for three hours.
So that is a commitment that everybody makes. Sometimes there are vacations, or somebody is speaking at an event and cannot be there. But for the most part we are there on a regular basis.
Destini and I will meet sometimes and say, okay, do we need to get some recommitments going if people have been missing for a while? It is that you need to show up for 75% of what we are doing, and if you cannot do that, it is okay. We are not mad at you. It is just that this is not the right group for you.
16:00We want to actually get to know each other and feel safe. We share mostly about business, but we have a lot of personal conversations that come up too, about what we are struggling with. We want that kind of relationship, where it is not, oh, who is this person, they have not been on the last ten calls.
For sure. So we have that call. Then we have our ads call, which you do not have to attend, it is more if you want to. A lot of us are looking to run and improve ads, so people come and go from that.
And then we have our Telegram thread. Kate, do you want to talk about that, because it is something I love and I go in there often.
Me too. I love our Telegram, and sometimes it can be a lot, because it gets hopping in there. I like it because we used to be on Voxer, and Voxer is great for a lot of reasons, but one thing you cannot easily do is thread conversations. On Telegram we can keep things organized by thread.
17:00We use Telegram in between calls, and every day somebody is posting something in there. Sometimes it is, did you see the news about this AI thing that just happened. Sometimes it is, I need support with this, or who knows about this. It is asking questions and sharing what is going on. Send good vibes my way, I have a webinar today. It is a way to stay connected between calls and do it in the time that works for you.
I want to expand on that. One of the things I love about the Telegram is that in this world we live in with AI, things are changing so much, and we keep each other updated on the latest.
18:00You might share something, I might share something, Monica might share something. To me it has been one of the ways I have kept up with all of the AI advancements and the things that come up as we go through our daily lives that you might not know about.
Without having to be on social media. Sometimes it is somebody saying, here is a news article, did you see this. And sometimes somebody will come in and say, oh my gosh, I just had Claude do this thing for me, I cannot believe it. And then we all say, tell us your ways, and we all go build the same thing. So there are different ways we are keeping up with it. Sometimes it is objective news, and other times it is, I got this cool idea, look what I did.
Should we tell everybody what we talk about in the meetings?
Let's do that. One of the cool things about our group is that we talk about stuff I have not always been able to talk about in other groups.
19:00We have an NDA for a reason. Everybody signed that, so we will go ahead and put that out there.
Exactly. So we can really come and talk about what is not working, where we are struggling, what we are failing with. Of course we celebrate lots of wins too, but there is a lot of screen sharing of, wait, how did you do this? Or, let me show you the problem I am having, how would you all handle this? Or, what do you see when you look at my ads manager? Or, if you look at this sales page, what is wrong with it and why do you think it is not converting? That is my summary. Would you agree?
I love it, and I love the behind the scenes. You have done a lot of debriefs. You have had some launches, and you give everybody the behind the scenes. Monica does it too. It is a way for us to learn what is working right now.
20:00Because things change so often.
So often. And one thing I would say is that we are very structured, and I think that really strengthens our group. Yes, sometimes we come on and three hours later we are all talking about our family drama and it has nothing to do with business. There is flexibility for that and for our humanity. But we also have a calendar of calls and an agenda.
Once a month we have a debrief call, and that is where people come and we say, okay, Kate is going to debrief her JV with so-and-so, and Destini is going to debrief how this launch went and this event.
We really do share the behind the scenes numbers you do not often see. What was the ad spend on that, and what did you have to pay out in affiliate commissions? What were the refunds like, and what customer service nightmares are you dealing with now?
21:00So we have calls like that. We have another one we have not been as good about keeping up with. We got this strategy from a different group we are in, called Swipe My Strategy. Everybody comes to the call with five minutes to share one thing they are doing in their business right now that somebody else could replicate. You do not have to be able to replicate it in five minutes, you have to be able to explain it in five minutes.
Then we have open Q&A. But that structure really helps us get the most out of each other.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that we set it up so the same person is not leading the call every single week. You might lead it one week and I will lead it the next. Everybody takes a turn, which is so valuable, so one person is not carrying that heavy workload.
22:00And it makes it more peer to peer, instead of there being a host or a leader and everyone being there to learn from Kate or from Destini. No, we are all here for each other. I think that helps get the buy-in from everybody too. You cannot be doing other things while you are on the call. You have to actually pay attention. You might be hosting this week. You have to move through the agenda.
We have an agenda that people add to before the calls each week. I want to make sure we talk about this. I have a question about that. And sometimes it is, I just want to talk about what is working in Skool right now.
There are a lot of things a lot of us have done over the last two years or so that I do not know we would have done without the group, and one of those is Skool, moving our communities to Skool and creating these programs over there.
23:00So we come on these calls and say, what is everybody doing in Skool, why should I move? And some people said, I am never doing it, which was maybe you, Destini.
Eventually I did it.
That is so cool, being able to come in and see how people are doing something you might not have thought of, or considered, or tossed aside too quickly because you decided it was not for you. Then you hear about it week after week and think, wow, this is a strategy that actually could work for me.
I would put myself in that category of saying no, no, I am not doing Skool, and now I have two communities on Skool because of this. And it is going great. I should have done it a long time ago. But to your point, this is an environment where you can internalize and think about things and get feedback and make sure you are going down the right path for your business.
24:00That is one of the reasons I love it. And I can tell you that for me, I can say 100% that my business would not be where it is today had it not been for this peer mastermind.
Same. 100%. So many ideas, so many things I never would have tried before, even the confidence to try different things, having the support. Be honest, what is something you have brought to this group that you would not have said anywhere else?
That is a really good question. I would say that one of the things this group, and you in particular, because you have been so forthcoming with your numbers. That is not something I used to share in the past, because I thought, it almost seems like I am bragging.
25:00As a woman in this industry, we have always been told not to brag. And I still feel that tightness when I do it. But I have definitely started sharing my numbers and been more forthcoming about that. Honestly, I think my audience has appreciated it. One of the things I did in July was share behind the scenes of what happened with HobbyScool, with all the numbers for our event, and I am going to continue doing that. So this group has definitely made it so I know it is okay for me to do that.
And especially in the age of AI, this is one of the things AI cannot do for us and for our clients, being really transparent and authentic about what is actually happening. So I love that it has become part of your business.
26:00And I am just nosy. I love hearing everybody, and I have no qualms about talking. Money, sex, religion, family drama, let's bring it all, I am an open book. What about when you have a hard week? Has there been a time the group has really caught you?
Yes. Especially the Telegram thread, being able to go in there and post, this has happened, how should I handle it? Or, here is what I was thinking about doing, does everybody agree with that? That is where I would point, and it is very uplifting and gives me the confidence to move forward.
Definitely. What about you?
I have brought so much stuff to this group. We always talk about how we all want Faith to be our personal one-on-one coach. She is so brilliant and such a good coach, and so kind. Everyone in our group I could describe that way too.
27:00But one was when I was doing a big webinar and I had 7,000 people registered. I had never spoken to a group that size. I was so nervous and anxious, and I remember coming to the group and just being honest about it. What is really cool is that at first you feel embarrassed. You think, I should be beyond this. And so many people in the group said, thank you so much for sharing that you are actually nervous about this, because I would be, and now I do not feel bad about it.
And then you all gave me one of the best pep talks I have ever had in my life. I had been spiralling all day. We have our calls on Thursdays and the webinar was the following Tuesday, so I still had almost a week, and I had been so anxious. From Thursday to Tuesday, all of my anxiety was just gone after that.
28:00So having the support of real friends who really get it. I have my regular friends who are not my business peers, but they do not get what we are doing in the same way. I hate the word game changer because it is so cliché, but it has been such a game changer to have this group.
So Destini, we are coming up on the end here. If someone listening is feeling what we were feeling before this group, that loneliness and isolation, what would you tell them?
Number one, get yourself in a peer mastermind like this. There are a lot of different ways you can do it. You can do what Kate and I did.
Build it yourself.
Build it yourself. That is certainly an option. I can also tell you that this has been such a game changer for me, and I know we are trying not to use that terminology.
29:00But it really has been, to the point that I wanted to build a place where people could come together and experience exactly what I have been experiencing, and that is the Creator's MBA Council. I designed it basically how we run this peer mastermind. It is going to have the two in-person events, because getting together in person is important, and we are going to do the weekly meetings and the Telegram or Voxer thread, just like we do in this one.
If you want to learn more about it, I am going to put the link in the show notes, and I do have a private podcast that walks you through everything included in the Creator's MBA Council.
If you are listening to this and you feel like, I want to be in a peer mastermind like this, I want to do things but I do not know anybody yet, here is how we got here. I joined other masterminds first. I paid to be in the room first, and then you meet people at those things, and those relationships evolve.
30:00It might not be in the cards for you, especially if you are brand new in business, to have a group of peers you already know that you could invite. But joining something like the Creator's MBA Council is how you start creating that group and start networking, and you never know where it could lead after that. So if you cannot build it yourself, that is a great reason to join a group that will help you do it now, and maybe later too.
Thanks so much, Kate, and thanks for joining me today. I loved having this conversation and reminiscing about how it all got started.
Me too. It makes me so grateful for our Weird Hermits.
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