What is the Million Pound Mastermind?

If you sell over £100,000 GBP ($130,000 USD/€115,000) per month online in ecommerce, and can get to London regularly, this may be for you.

The Million Pound Mastermind is an outgrowth of the original 10K Collective Mastermind.

The 10K Collective is a highly select group of e-commerce entrepreneurs who meet in person once a month in London.

Running since Sept. 2017, the 10K Collective Mastermind has been a huge success for its members.  Many members have been experiencing some astonishing leaps forward in their businesses.

With that in mind, and by the request of some 7-figure sellers, we created the new Million Pound Mastermind.

We aim to bring the same kind of success that we had taking sellers from mid 6 to 7 figures a year (£300K-£1 million) and bring that process to taking sellers from 7 to 8 figures a year (£1.2 million to £10 million upwards) .

The Million Pound Mastermind met first in November 2018. In 2019, we meet once every two months. We mix one-day meetings in London, with 2-day meetings in various venues in Europe. 

I should be clear that both masterminds are application only and require a substantial paid commitment. They are for the serious seller and committed member.

While it's not for the fly-by-night, for those who commit to the experience fully, membership has brought deep rewards to its members.

Not least, more than one member has experienced a doubling of turnover since joining us in autumn 2017. These are not subtle improvements.

Click here to fill out the form and start your application.

What is the Value of the Masterminds?

In members’ own words...

“One of the biggest values of the masterminds for me comes when we talk about our wins, lessons learned and results from specific action. 

This provides inspiration, positive vibrations and is thought provoking.
It then goes into a very good discussion which leads to even more thought provoking ideas. “

Scott Rosenberg (Million Pound Mastermind)

Clarifying your own thoughts

“I always feel like I learn a tremendous amount simply by explaining things - ‘if you can explain it, you probably understand it well’ 

Therefore when explaining things - it points out where your own understanding of what you’ve been doing is lacking.”

Ashley Pearce (10K Collective)

Sharing with those who get the advanced stuff

“The  chance to talk about geeky advanced stuff with probably the only 10 people in the country who would understand it in context is MASSIVELY valuable to me.”

Ashley Pearce

Click here to fill out the form and start your application.

What do we discuss (Content)?

Like any mastermind,  entrepreneurs privately discuss their challenges, take situations apart and put them back together, and solve problems in real time. 

But there are some critical differences.

We believe (like Harvard Business School) in the value of the case study. 

Unlike academic institutions, however, we believe in the value of our own, in-house case studies. Experience gained by the members’ own cash, own experiments and own successes or failures. 

It’s basically like a laboratory meets a training camp.  

We support, encourage and challenge each other, swapping strategies, techniques, vendors, technologies and resources. 

Here are some of the specific values members get: 

Prioritization

All members take a lot of action outside meetings.  But meetings are a forum in which to decide WHAT actions to take.

For any fast-growing business, this is critical.  

Sharing skills

• Technical skills - eg Amazon ranking; Supply chain management
• Mindset - being inspired by others' massive action to your own actions
• Experience and natural talent - for which there is no substitute!

Sharing Experience from the Amazon Battlefield: 

 We are looking for members who are “Drop dead shrewd” (in the words of Sir Alan Sugar, The Apprentice). Fortunately, we already have them. If you also qualify, you can join them...

Creative Challenge: 

“Here’s why I challenge your plan” - another extremely valuable process. 

Trust

In a world of Amazon sellers discussing things in “general” terms, and defensively, as we get to know each other really well, we really "open the kimono" (as they say in ...the States!)

What we don't discuss (Content)

The basic unit of this group is not the “hack” (or even worse, a hack being misnamed a ”strategy“).

Important as the latest ranking tactics are, we believe it’s the wrong kind of focus for a serious business owner. It’s short term and it’s small scale. 

Our experience is that imagination matters; that strategic (big picture) focus is critical; that long-term thinking creates long-term growth. 

It might surprise you, given what I do, but I am usually NOT listening to the  latest Amazon podcast in order to extract real wins for my entrepreneurial homies. I find that boring and, from experience, likely to be dead within 2-4 months. 

As likely as not, it’s coming from other business models outside the Amazon “Echo Chamber”. Examples would include a business theory popular in the 1960s (The Star Principle by Richard Koch); the deep implications from a business theory from the 1880s (The Pareto principle);  or best practices in marketing a hit theatre show.  

The average Amazon seller  member who just wants PPC ads hacks or ranking hacks doesn’t belong in the 10K Collective masterminds. 

Our masterminds are for people who know: You can get that almost anywhere these days, but they know you need something else… something NOT being served up at a £250 “Masterclass” or webinar.

We are also not very excited by unproven theories. We'll consider the latest "guru" pronouncements, and one or two members may even feel they are strong enough hypotheses to test in the laboratory of their Amazon account.

But we are much more interested in following the realities of trying to implement the theory. We believe that the value of a proven idea (proven preferably in members' own businesses) is massively higher than that of a theory.

That said, we are happy to use solid theoretical frameworks to articulate what is happening in successful (or unsuccessful) business practices.

And we are happy to use theory as a tool to dig into why things are working or not. We just tend to look outside the "Amazon Echo Chamber" for long-term, approaches proven by decades of business. 

Click here to fill out the form and start your application.

What is the format? (meeting rhythm etc)

The Million Pound Mastermind  is a live mastermind group that gathers for an intensive meeting once every two months. We plan to alternate 1 and 2 day meetings for 2019. 

You get a generous time slot to present your marketing and business challenges to the group, with about a dozen sharp minds working together to solve your problems and see advantages and opportunities that you didn’t see. 

Million Pound Mastermind Meetings Include:

• 5 Meetings in 2019 (6  from 2020)
• Meet approx. every 2 months (in 2019: Feb, May, July, Sept, Nov.) (we avoid August and December)
• At least 2X48-hour immersion meetings in 2019
• One-day meeting 
• Minimum 30-minute Dedicated Hot Seat for each member at each one-day meeting 
• Monthly Group Video calls on non-meeting months 
• We will not accept you into Million Pound Mastermind  unless we are confident that we can help you achieve a 3X to 10X investment on your membership fee (or more).
• OUR FIRST GOAL is to pay for your year’s membership in the first 60 days (and ideally during the very first meeting)

Hot Seat

I started the 10K Collective Masterminds in 2017. But I’ve been running masterminds for Amazon sellers since 2014. The format that works most powerfully has always been 70-80% hot seats. 

Each member tells the group exactly what’s going on in their business. You get an insider’s view of several businesses at every single meeting.

After a year, you’ve built a case history of hundreds of situations and your “muscle memory” is armed with correct responses to hazards that derail most people.

This is a robust, tried-and-tested format. But we are constantly tweaking the details of how we implement it. 

Click here to fill out the form and start your application.

FAQs

Is this about Amazon ranking and conversion hacks?

I want to be very clear about something: while we do have a focus on Amazon  on a sales channel,  the intent of the group is not to be about the latest way to sell a product, get sales, or run Instagram ads, although that stuff does indeed come up fairly often.

The focus on the group is to facilitate exponential growth by focusing on case studies. 

We are pragmatics. We trust empirical evidence over the latest fashions. 

Is this just the same as a guru/expert-lead Masterclass?

Absolutely not. There are no gurus here. 

My role is not the traditional “guru’. I’m the mastermind convenor.

I’m the guy who starts and keeps and grows the whole thing.

Who attracts good people. Who takes applications; conducts interviews. 

I’m the man at the red rope; the door-keeper; the porter at the lodge of an exclusive private members’ club. 

In meetings I’m the referee; the facilitator; the raiser of awkward questions; the summariser of discussions; the notetaker. 

Do we ever work with experts?

While we may hire in experts from time to time as needed to work directly on members’ businesses, the core of our work is peer-to-peer advising. E-commerce business owners helping other e-commerce business owners by sharing their experiences, good and bad. 

 There are plenty of offers, online and offline, of expert-lead classes. They can sometimes be inspiring and what you need. But there is no substitute for learning from, and developing with, you’re peers. 

In our experience, the ROI from these mastermind meetings can be literally - 1,000-100,000%. This is based on actual revenue increase attributable to masterminds. There is no substitute for our method. 

By the way - when I say “no gurus”; most so-called “Amazon gurus” (of which I do NOT claim to be one, by the way) make a maximum of about £1 million a year. That is below the  minimum to even be considered for membership of this mastermind. 

As they say in the States., “You do the math.” Before you even walk through the door, you can come in knowing that every member of this mastermind is above so-called "guru" level. 

Access to members’ inner circle of advisors & suppliers

The cost of The Million Pound Mastermind is about the cost of a part-time VA in the Philippines or other low wage economy.

You will gain access to the member’s address books of lawyers, accountants, supplier insiders, which would cost you time and expenses to find on your own. 

As a result, this  investment, equivalent to a part-time VA in the Philippines, is the equivalent of a C-Level advisory board that has a vested interest in seeing your business grow.

There is not - as yet - a formalised way of doing this, but it is a very real and powerful benefit. 

Click here to fill out the form and start your application.

What is the current cost of membership?

Currently, since we are in the process of getting full momentum, we haven't fixed meeting dates for the rest of 2019 yet. We do believe in planning ahead, but we are gathering members and fixing dates that work for the majority. 

For that reason, for the moment, we currently have a hybrid payment model. 
 
You'll pay just £50 a month to be a member of the mastermind; for each meeting you can attend, you'll then pay an additional fee of around £250 per day's physical meeting (so around £250 per one day event, including lunch; and around £500 per two-day event, plus hotel/accommodation costs). 

In future, following the successful models from the 10K Collective, we will move to a subscription model.  So, rather than paying per meeting, we will move to a monthly or quarterly subscription, with meetings planned out well in advance .

Is it a fixed-term commitment?

Not at the moment. 

In future, I'm very clear that I'll want to transition to semi-annual (2x a year) or annual membership subscription. The reason is simple: the more commitment individual members put in, the more value there will be for all members. I want to grow a group of serious and seriously dedicated people. 

However, for 2019, we will not be moving to that model. 

For the moment, it is a month-to-month subscription, which you can cancel at any time. Later in 2019, we will probably transition to a quarterly or 2-month subscription, depending on what seems appropriate. 

Click here to fill out the form and start your application.

Am I going to just get pitched on other products/services when I join? 

Absolutely not. We have a free discussion about products/SaaS and other services that members use. If I ever mention a resource myself that I think is useful, I'll disclose if I'm an affiliate for that service. But I'm not there to pitch. You pay a substantial fee to be part of the mastermind; once you're in, I'm not interested in disturbing the trust and flow of the mastermind by trying to make a few bucks. There is no mileage in that for anyone.  

Can I turn up and just listen initially and hide my own product details?

I'm afraid it doesn't really work that way. 

It is only natural - and indeed sensible - to get to know each other better over time, and thus open up more and more over time. This has indeed happened over the course of over a year in the 10K Collective Mastermind. 

However, the entire value of the mastermind concept (at least in this format) is that people are able to be open and trusting, and to quite a high degree, from the outset.  

I take great care to engineer a genuinely safe space for businesses (see the other FAQs around this). 

By the same token, your role as a member is to share, generously, from your experience and expertise. 

You can't just turn up and listen; that's not in the spirit of the mastermind. If that's how you work, I respect the wisdom of your approach in 99% of cases and wish you good luck. But please don't join us; it's not a match. 

Likewise, while we don't expect you to share highly sensitive information from the off, if you're unwilling to share basic product details, it's going to be very hard to help you properly.

If that's how you operate, while I respect (and understand) your decision, I'd ask that you respect our ethos and don't join our mastermind. It's not going to work for you or for the other members. 

How do I know if I'm sharing with the Competition?

I take great care to ensure there aren't any direct conflicts of interest in the mastermind. 

To my sadness, I actually turned away a seller doing really well and (when we last spoke) doing £150,000 a month on Amazon, because I perceived that there was a direct competition between him and a current member.

That's how serious I am about this. 

Click here to fill out the form and start your application.

Are we protected by Non-Compete (NCA) and Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA)? 

Yes, we do have signed NCA and NDA agreements.

The reality is that this is another commitment rather than something easy to enforceable legally (this is well known among serious business people in any case). Still, it's another declaration of intent.

The selection of the members, the quality of people and quality of relationships (and thus of behaviour towards each other) are by far the best protection to you and your business, in my experience. 
 

If you're really determined to keep everything secret, to me, the solution is simple: never get any outside input into any aspect of your business. That's 100% your call. That said, it precludes any form of business coaching, masterminds or indeed professional input (outside, perhaps, your lawyer's). Indeed, many Amazon sellers operate in this way. 

Nobody is here to dictate how you do business, least of all me. All I can explain is what we offer - and we don't offer. 

The decisions are all yours (assuming that we feel we are okay to offer you a place). 

In the end, the willingness to trust - based on a carefully created and curated group of people - is at the core of the leap of faith required to enter the mastermind. 

We can of course discuss these things in our interview, if you choose to apply. In the end, though, only you can know what feels right for you and your business. 

Perhaps it's coincidence but all the serious (and fast-growing) ecommerce business owners I know personally are members of masterminds. I guess there are some isolated people out there killing it, and I respect their success.

There's more than one way to do anything. In the end, all I can do is offer a way that has proven very successful for our committed members.

Is it all deadly serious?

More than anything, masterminds have been making business fun! I can't think of a better combination than growth, mutual support and enjoying business.

If you feel the same way, and you are eligible, I suggest you take the next step... 
 

We currently (April 2019) have 2 places available. 

Click here to fill out the form and start your application.

Next steps

If you qualify for the minimum Revenue (based on the last 6 months' trading), and are serious about committing to a group like this, you can apply for the mastermind. 

The process of getting to full membership consists of three stages: 

1. Filling in our simple application form (5 minutes)

2. A video online interview with me to find out your needs and what you can bring to the group (30-60 minutes) (if accepted through the application form) 

3. You subscribing to the group and committing to our ethos. (assuming that we accept you and that you want to go ahead!)

Click here to fill out the form and start your application.