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In this episode of GradBlogger, we interview Dr. Matt Hotze about the power of mastermind groups to achieve your goals. We discuss how they can keep you on track by making you accountable to other group members. We also discuss the different types of groups and what to do if you can’t find a mastermind group that meets your needs.
Disclosure: Some of the links in the podcast show notes and transcripts are affiliate links (indicated with [Affiliate] in front). If you choose to make a purchase through these links, GradBlogger will earn a commission from that purchase at no extra cost to you.
Introduction
Chris Cloney: 00:08
Welcome to Episode #12 of GradBlogger, where we’re helping academics build online businesses through blogging, podcasting, and video. Our goal is to change the world with our research companies, side hustles, and businesses by sharing our knowledge and expertise online. I’m your host, Dr. Chris Cloney. In today’s episode, we’re talking about mastermind groups, and we’re talking with Dr. Matt Hotze of teamhelium.co. Matt, thanks for coming on the show today.
Matt Hotze:00:32
Thanks for having me. I’m grateful to be here on the show.
Chris Cloney: 00:36
I’m really excited to have you as well. In addition to working with his teammates at Team Helium, Matt is also administrator/director at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He has a Master’s and a Ph.D. in environmental engineering, which is close to my heart because I’m a chemical and mechanical engineer. He also has a post-doc CNRS from Carnegie Mellon University. He’s the previous managing director of the American Chemical Society, and also managing director of NEWT Engineering Research Center.
The reason why I wanted to bring up some of those background points is that he’s very active in academic spaces and research spaces, and he’s still doing things online, which I really like.
Chris Cloney: 01:14
Maybe some people I talk to don’t resonate as much because I’m running my independent research company and this online business, but I’m not a professor, although I do sit on boards for a lot of research projects. I want to make sure that I bring on people who are also active in the space, to resonate a little bit, and Matt is one of those people.
Chris Cloney: 01:33
At teamhelium.co, their big goal – and Matt will go into this more deeply – is elevating research. It helps early career researchers land and master the faculty positions and gives an inside perspective on what it means to be a leader in research and academia, which really resonates with the GradBlogger message, so that’s really great to have him on for that.
How Did Team Helium Come About?
Chris Cloney: 01:56
How did Team Helium come about? What is its background?
Matt Hotze:02:02
I’ve been in and around academia for years now. It’s more years than I care to admit at this point, I think. My story involves being in a post-doc, being in a second post-doc, interviewing for faculty positions, and really feeling like even though I had good mentorship, people weren’t guiding me in the right direction in terms of the science. I felt very alone, isolated, and overwhelmed when it came to applying for faculty positions and figuring out the right way to approach the problem.
Only later on did I discover that there are all these great resources out there in the entrepreneurial space, where people have learned how to deal with some of these problems, because being an entrepreneur, being a solopreneur, as you are, really, I would make the case that as a starting academic, and even as a post-doc, you really need to behave in that way.
Let’s just take one example where both people have a runway. They have a certain amount of cash as an entrepreneur or as a starting professor, or as a post-doc. They only have a year or two worth of funding after they got a startup package or something. The mentalities that both of those people need to bring to their jobs are very similar. I did not really have access to the entrepreneurial spirit that was out there, because I’d never thought about looking in those corners.
Matt Hotze: 03:46
Later on, now that I’m further along in my career and my academic ambitions didn’t really work out, I look back on that time and I really, genuinely want to help people who are in this position, who are transitioning into their faculty positions and also just starting out in their faculty positions, because I’m sitting at the table now and I realize that I’m 10 years older than the people who are just now getting hired, and I’m thinking, “Wow. I’ve got this 10 years of experience being in and around academia, working with people who are in the National Academy of Engineering, viewing what’s working for people, what’s not working for people.”
I said, “It would be a real shame to not bring those people on, not only for interviews but also just to share my own personal experience with the journals and other avenues of academia and help these folks do a better job with their job.”
Matt Hotze: 04:56
We say that the hard part of the research should be the research and not all the other stuff that you have to learn about, like management on the fly. I think management is a really good example. Maybe you mentored somebody during the summer one time, or maybe you were given a couple of grad students to work with, but it doesn’t become real until you’re on your own, there’s nobody else to help you, and you’re now responsible for raising these academic children, for lack of a better word.
Matt Hotze: 05:35
That’s a long-winded way of saying, “I have personal experience in struggling in this area, and I saw a need out there for people to have more resources, and mentoring at large through this podcast and other resources that we provide.” That’s where Team Helium came from.
Chris Cloney: 05:54
I love it. I’m going to follow up with a couple of points from that story because a lot of them resonated with me, actually. Just the fact that you have a struggle, you have a difficulty. I’m going to try to address that with the people who are coming up next as this is a really, I’ll call it, smart, but smart makes it feel like it’s manipulative, but it’s smart in that it’s a good idea. Because you know you’re helping. You know you can help people. It’s not like you’re selling umbrellas in Texas, or something that’s completely irrelevant.”
Matt Hotze: 06:25
Well, in Houston-
Chris Cloney: 06:26
Well, yeah.
Matt Hotze: 06:26
… it might be.
Chris Cloney: 06:26
The other point was the runway. This really resonated with me because I had a runway when I was coming into my Ph.D. I worked for five years before I started my entrepreneurship journey. I saved six months of salary so that I could pay myself. So I had a runway then. I blew it all out. Ran out. Then I finished my Ph.D., so I had a runway where I’m going to have to get a real job. Five months after that, I had my first son, who’s eight months now, so I had the runway that that was happening, and then I had the runway of my wife going on mat leave.
Actually, the reason that really resonates, is that my business has a team and a fixed cost every month: salary to myself, salary to my team, tools, technology, everything. We were down just under the two-month mark recently, and I think, “If we get within two months, then I really need to figure out what we’re doing next, so we can bring on more income to move the business forward.” I had to think about that last couple of weeks, and then yesterday, I just started ramping up our sales process on some other things we have going on, like advertising memberships, and I brought in a whole month’s worth of income for the team just yesterday. So, we went from two months to three months runway, and by the next two or three weeks, we hope to get back up to six, seven, eight months, and we can run things out.
Chris Cloney: 07:50
The entrepreneurship journey is runway. The academic journey is runway. And, I’m going to add, your life is probably runway, and if you don’t think it is, then you’re probably leaving some of that life on the table and not getting to those next steps. Really interesting discussion. I hadn’t thought of it that way.
Chris Cloney: 08:10
So Team Helium is a two-member team. Yourself, Dr. Matt Hotze, and Dr. Christine Ogilvie Hendren?
Matt Hotze: 08:29
Yeah. Nailed it.
Chris Cloney: 08:31
Ah. There we go. So they have the website teamhelium.co, but they also run a podcast, which I think is either Team Helium or Helium Podcast.
Matt Hotze: 08:40
Helium Podcast.
Chris Cloney: 08:41
I encourage others to go check that out as well. As we mentioned, it’s really about helping academics get through this journey of getting to the next level in their graduate degrees, or post-graduate degrees, even.
Matt Hotze: 08:55
Yeah. We really see it as three transitions.
- Into your first faculty position.
- Mastering that faculty position and feeling very comfortable
- Feeling like you can start leading larger teams
That’s where Christine really comes into play because she’s been studying team science and those areas for many years. That’s where we started partnering up because I really think about those early career researchers landing their faculty positions and Christine is thinking about team science stuff. She’s really the expert in that area.
Chris Cloney: 09:38
Well, it sounds like I’m going to have to get Christine on the podcast, as well.
Matt Hotze: 09:42
Yeah. She’s a good interview, too.
Chris Cloney: 09:44
I like that. I like the middle step especially. Mastery is a word that I use quite a bit in my thought process, as well as growth. For example, how do I actually grow a research team? They’re very important topics that we’ll touch on in this episode, but each one’s probably its own podcast episode as well.
How Can You Balance Your Academic Position With Your Online Work?
Chris Cloney: 10:06
Before we jump into that stage, do you have any thoughts or recommendations on how people can balance this life as an academic with online business, or online entrepreneurship, or their entrepreneurship journey? What’re the takeaways that you’ve learned in the years that you’ve done this?
Matt Hotze: 10:23
One is that I think it’s worth it. Some people see it as a non-traditional way of approaching things, but I think there’s a lot of value in having people on your team who approach problems from different directions. I’ve found so much value from the time that I listened to entrepreneurship books, podcasts, all this stuff because a slightly different take on a similar problem helps.
Matt Hotze: 11:10
One good example is marketing. They don’t think about that kind of stuff at all, and it’s so important. Let’s say that people are doing a review of your paper or review your research center. They respond to marketing like anybody else does, so you’re doing similar things to try to get people to resonate with the story that you’re telling as a researcher. Those are the things that people are going to take home and remember from the conference, or from the visit. Everything else will be forgotten.
Matt Hotze: 12:05
So, to answer your question: yes, splitting my time is worth it, but it’s also very difficult because I have to put very strict limits on when I’m working and what I’m working on. The way I split my time is 80/20. 20% of my time is spent on Team Helium stuff right now, and I have a specific amount of time. I have two children, so these are the hours that I can work. When I’m working on the Team Helium stuff, that’s what I’m doing. There’s so much energy that is lost from switching tasks. We could do a whole podcast about that: task-switching.
Chris Cloney: 13:01
I just recorded it yesterday. It will come out in two or three episodes.
Matt Hotze: 13:06
That’s great. I think I wrote a blog post about this once. It’s like those basketball sprints that are called suicides. Probably not the best term in the world, but you see these kids running down the court. It’s a lot easier to run 100 meters in a straight line than it is to run 100 meters by doing it by changing direction every 10 meters, or reversing field, in some cases, These suicide sprints are really, really hard, and basketball players hate doing them, but they have to do them.
Matt Hotze: 13:50
So, if you can imagine your day as those sprints, if you can just say, “I’m going to take my day and do a 100-meter dash instead of 100 meters of suicide sprints,” then you’re much better off. It’s easier said than done. I’m not saying I’m perfect at it, but you need to get back to the 100-meter sprint, and away from thoughts like, “Okay. I have to work on my business, and the academic piece, and my family life, all at the same time.”
Your brain is exploding because you’re like, “I can’t do all of this stuff at once,” and you’ve got to really focus down. That’s the key. It doesn’t always work but you have to remind yourself to get back to that state in order to keep being productive on all of the things you want to work on.
Chris Cloney: 14:50
Yeah. I think that’s a really key point. I just looked at the podcast schedule. It’s actually the next episode. This is episode 12 of GradBlogger. Episode #13 is called Getting Things Done Using The Capture Sort Do System. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: the ‘do’ is exactly what Matt’s saying.
Matt Hotze: 15:08
That’s awesome.
Matt Hotze: 15:09
I’m glad I’m resonating with the episode themes here.
Chris Cloney: 15:13
Yeah. It’s perfect timing for that. I want to go back to another point that you brought up, which is the 80/20 because I think this is really powerful too. There’s the do, which is great, and we’re an episode ahead on explaining the do, but there’s the what should you do, as well. You really need to be ruthless on how you break down what you’re doing. When you said 80/20, you actually made me think of [Affiliate] The Richest Man in Babylon. It’s a really old book. It says something like, “10% of every dollar you spend, you should save it. Should go to your net worth, either as savings or …” They’d probably say just savings, actually, not even paying down debt.
Chris Cloney: 16:00
But I remember writing the notes in that margin of that book, that 10% of your work hours should be spent working for yourself. My work hours at that time were not 40 a week, but I assumed they were. My work hours were more like 60 or 70 a week, but if they were 40, I said, “I have to work on myself for four hours every week, or for 10% of my working life to be on myself.”
I was doing things like looking at real estate investing, looking at startups and all this stuff. This was before I found solopreneurs and online business, which is a much easier route than trying to find funding and creating a startup. But it just rang a bell. I hadn’t really thought of that idea in a long time. As I said, it’s probably in the margins of that book.
Matt Hotze: 16:42
I love that book. It’s such an easy read, and there’s just so much wisdom in it. I hadn’t thought about that book for a year or two, but it’s a good one.
Chris Cloney: 16:52
Cool. The big point there was that you need to be really ruthless on how you lay out what you want to do, and then when you’re doing it, you’re only doing that. You’re present with that idea. You’re present with that concept. You’re not thinking about the paper that’s due next week, or … I was going to say that you’re not thinking about your family, but that’s probably not a great thing to say.
Matt Hotze: 17:13
It’s not that you’re not thinking of your family. For example, this weekend, I’m not going to be trying to check my email while I’m doing Legos with my daughter. She’s going to get 100% of me during that time. I’m not always perfect at this, but that’s the track that I try to get back on all the time because I don’t feel guilty about not spending time with her now because I know when I’m with her, I’m going to be with her 100%.
Chris Cloney: 17:48
I’m not even going to add anything to that because you just summed it up. It’s a mic drop. There’s nothing else to add.
Matt Hotze: 17:56
Thank you.
What Role Has Mastermind Groups Played in Your Journey Today?
Chris Cloney: 17:56
We’re going to move forward to today’s topic which is mastermind groups. I guess a good place to start is by asking what role have mastermind groups played in your journey today?
Matt Hotze: 18:36
I’m in a mastermind group on the entrepreneurship side. It’s not very well known in academia. I wish it was, and I’m trying to make it more well-known, but I actually have a mastermind group that’s been going for about two-and-a-half years now. Really, there should be more than two of us, but there’s two of us, and my mastermind group partner, for lack of a better term, is a man named Marcus. The reason why I brought up marketing is that he’s in the marketing space. He’s just pure businessperson, and he was wanting to start his own thing on the side, too, and that’s how we got connected. He wanted the accountability of having a group that would meet every couple of weeks so that he knew that he was making progress on his personal development and personal business. Very similar to my situation.
Matt Hotze: 19:42
We meet every couple of weeks. We can talk a little bit more about how that works, but it certainly helps me because I know that I need to go back to him and say, “Here’s what I’ve been working on.”
If there’s a day where I don’t feel great about starting a new thing or trying to get something done on Team Helium stuff, I know that Marcus is waiting for me and I’ll have to report back to him about my progress. My wife cares about my business, but there’s only so much you can share with your own family before they’re like, “I am sick of talking about this.” It’s a great support group for making progress in general.
Chris Cloney: 20:37
I like it, and I want to bring up a story. This is one I told a number of times, although not on the podcast. We’re going to get into what you should look for in a mastermind group, and I just realized that this story actually jumps the gun, because we’re going to talk about what to do if you can’t find a mastermind group, but I’m already down here, so we’re going to go through it.
Chris Cloney: 21:00
I remember when, early in my Ph.D. career, I read the book [Affiliate] Think And Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. He has a section that says you need to have a mastermind group. This book is old. It’s not as old as The Richest Man In Babylon, but it’s from 1937, so it’s still pretty old.
He said, “You need a mastermind group of people you can go to with your difficulties with your struggles, for accountability, and to help you.” That was a really powerful concept, but I always thought, “Well, that’s great to say, but I can’t find these people.” So I created a mastermind group.
Chris Cloney: 21:45
Your Ph.D. thesis committee is generally the first concept of a mastermind group you have. You bring problems to them and they bring problems to you sometimes. But my other idea was of a virtual mastermind group.
I took the top five people in my field, not all of whom were alive at this point in time. I would contemplate my Ph.D. thesis, and think, “Okay. If I sit these people down in a room and ask them this question, what would they tell me to do in this research direction, and this position?” That’s really easy to do, in the sense that you don’t have to go ask somebody. The accountability’s a little less, because if your virtual mastermind group is yelling at you about doing something, you may have a medical problem.
Chris Cloney: 22:31
But this virtual mastermind group is something that I’ve used quite a bit and then, in my entrepreneurship journey, I follow people. I listen to every podcast they’d have, I get to know them, and then I pretend that I could ask them questions. I’d always have a group of three to five that I’d make up.
I actually tried one recently, with a very diverse group: a guy who does Brazilian jiu-jitsu in Brazil, a real estate trader in Nashville, a Quant trader in New York, and another guy, I think he’s in the UK. It’s this weird, eclectic group, and I’m not even sure how I got hooked up with them. I knew one of the people, and they said, “You should check out this group. We all have different goals we’re going for.”
I did that for a couple of months, but their goals were so disparate to mine that it didn’t work. It felt more like a chore to me. That’s a little bit of a lesson.
Chris Cloney: 23:28
Then I’ve had great groups, communities like Beyond the Professoriate and the self-employed Ph.D group. I’m there every two weeks, and we’ve been meeting for years now. There is a wide range, from virtual, made-up mastermind groups to really disparate groups that maybe aren’t that helpful.
What Should Listeners Be Looking For In A Successful Group?
I guess that’s the question I want to put forward to you: what are some things that you should be looking for in joining a successful, we’ll call it successful (real) group, not the imaginary one? I’ll give tips for a successful virtual mastermind group in a separate podcast episode, but in a real group, what should you be looking for in creating or joining these groups.
Matt Hotze: 24:11
I don’t want to get too far off track here, but that imaginary mastermind group- that’s the first time I have ever heard of that. That’s awesome. I’ll listen to your episode when you talk about that. That’s really interesting to me.
Chris Cloney: 24:23
You know what the worst part of that is?
Matt Hotze: 24:24
Yes.
Chris Cloney: 24:28
I’ve been talking about that for probably two years, and I’m not going to say he copied me, (because he didn’t) but just two weeks ago, Pat Flynn mentioned this on his podcast Passive Income. He said precisely what I said: if you can’t find a mastermind group, make up a virtual one. He called them virtual mastermind groups, and I was like, “Oh, there you go. I’m shot. My idea is ruined. I can never write my book anymore.”
Matt Hotze: 24:48
No, it just means you’re smart. He’s not writing a book on it yet, so, you got time. I think the first thing to realize is that you don’t have to be co-located with these folks. They don’t need to be on your campus, they don’t need to be in your city. There are a lot of things about the internet that aren’t beautiful, but one of the great things about it is that you can find people who you’ll resonate with quite easily. You can join forums and online groups and really look for people who are struggling with the same things you are, whether or not it’s entrepreneurship or searching for a faculty position.
Matt Hotze: 25:54
One of the things that we’re trying to get started is helping people find their own mastermind groups in academia so that it’s not just about the research. It also covers some of these other problems that people struggle with. If I was just starting out trying to find a group, that’s what I would do. I would go on Facebook groups, or LinkedIn groups, or Twitter, and just take some time to figure out what people are doing.
Most people are pretty honest and you want people who are going to be forthright in your mastermind group anyway. If people are sharing their struggles online, they are the kind of people who are going to be very helpful in a mastermind group because they’re going to be honest. They’re not going to come to the meeting and say, “I’ve got it all done. Look at me, how awesome I am.” They’re going to come to that meeting and share the things that they’re struggling with, and that’s what you actually need, right?
Matt Hotze: 26:53
Because you can help them, and by helping them you’re also helping yourself because you’re teaching things and reinforcing these concepts in your mind. But, at the same time, you’re also realizing that it’s not just you. It can be a very isolating experience.
We talked about the parallels between entrepreneurship and starting out in academia. Both things can be very isolating, and just knowing that there are people out there who are struggling with the same things you are can be very empowering. So is knowing that you’re going to show up once a week, once every two weeks, maybe even once a month, and talk to these people, and they’re going to be resonating with you.
Matt Hotze: 27:39
To me, it’s super-helpful mentally to know that it’s not just, “Oh, I’m flawed, and I can’t get my to-do list done, or I put something out there and no one paid attention to it.” That happens to everyone, right? Like I said before, you can only talk to your family about this stuff enough times and they’re just like, “Oh, I heard this story before.” But people who are trying to do this exact same thing, they’re like, “Yeah, yeah. Okay. Here’s what I did the last time that that happened.” Or they’ll say, “Shake it off, try it again next week, in a different format.”
Matt Hotze: 28:21
To go back to the point: it’s like finding people who you know. You can say, “I’m starting up this group.” The worst thing they can do is say no, and you just move on. Or maybe they never even respond to you, and it’s fine. You’ll find enough people to start a group eventually.
What Should You Do If You Can’t Find Your Group?
Chris Cloney: 28:49
That’s what I was going to ask: what do you do if you can’t find the group you want? Do you have any recommendations there? I have some that come to mind, but you’re the expert we brought on the show, so I want to let you go through it.
Matt Hotze: 28:59
What do you mean by ‘can’t find a group?’ You just can’t find the right people, or …
Chris Cloney: 29:06
Yeah. If you’re struggling, if you’ve spent some time doing it and you can’t come up with the right mix, and you’re stuck. What’s the next step if you’ve tried and you haven’t found the group?
Matt Hotze: 29:21
Well, if you’re stuck, the approach I suggested was scouting for a while and then asking people one-on-one. At some point, you might go into one of these forums and say, “Hey, I’m starting a mastermind group, but I’m not sure …” And this is where I would qualify it. “I’m not sure who and here are the three qualities that I’m looking for in the people who would be in this group. And if you think that they would fit with yours, we should talk.”
Don’t just accept someone into the group right away. Have an initial chat with them to see if you might click before you go out there and say, “Well, we’re going to commit to a long-term project together, in terms of a mastermind group.” That would be a way because sometimes people are also scouting out other people and not being visible online, but they’re ready for a similar opportunity.
Matt Hotze: 30:26
That’s one way you could do it. You’ve got to stick your neck out there, though, and say, “Oh, I’m looking to start one of these,” which is a little bit harder because you’re not communicating one-on-one anymore. That’s hard in academia because we like to put on this façade suggesting that we have everything together and everything in our life is like a perfect presentation of our last research paper, where all the data is within these perfect error bars, and we’ve never made any mistakes. You’ve got to step out and realize that everyone’s struggling, everyone’s barely keeping up with their email.
Matt Hotze: 31:14
I’m rambling a bit, but what suggestions do you have, Chris, about starting a group?
Chris Cloney: 31:21
Well, you hit the nail on the head. You not only said what I was thinking, but you talked about the next steps. I was going to say, “If you can’t find your group, there’s nothing wrong with starting your own.” And then you qualified that with “Okay, well, how do you start your own?”
I did this with the GradBlogger Connect Community, which isn’t really a mastermind community. I think it has 350 members now. But the same issue existed: I couldn’t find academic entrepreneurs, and this was two-and-a-half years ago. We’re starting to grow, and there’s more of us, and there are some podcasts now, like GradBlogger and Team Helium, that are helping push this message.
Chris Cloney: 32:01
Back then, I felt very alone. I just started on Twitter. I didn’t even know hashtags like #psycomm and #withaphd even existed, and it’s like, “Okay. Well, I’m going to create my own.” Then there are the hints that you gave, where you need to come up with some guidelines about what the group is, what we’re going to do, what we hope to achieve, and what kind of person we’re looking for. I just made those guidelines up, but they actually sound pretty good. Then you can reach out to people and bring them in.
Matt Hotze: 32:30
I want to add to that third. Maybe if there are sub-bullets to that third point, I would say, “Try to find.” You actually alluded to this earlier. I’m not sure how well these types of groups work unless you’re in a similar place in life. Maybe you don’t necessarily need to be a similar age, but you need to be struggling with similar issues because it’s just really hard to make it work otherwise. Let’s just say I was in a group with someone whose business was making $100,000 a year. That’s not a mastermind that’s going to work, because I’m not in a similar place. They’re trying to scale to a different level than what I’m trying to do.
Matt Hotze: 33:21
Right now I’m still in the community-building phase of the business, and we’re not going to struggle with similar things. Even if the person was really nice and I like them, it’s not going to be very productive because I won’t have anything to contribute to that person’s journey. That person might have advice for me, but it might be just one way, or maybe they’ll have forgotten what it was like to be at that stage.
Let’s say it’s a grad student just starting out, with a senior post-document. Those people probably don’t have exactly the same problems, so really finding someone that lines up with the timeline that you’re in, in terms of your career progression, is really important, I think.
Chris Cloney: 34:26
Yeah, I like it, and I’m thinking of a couple of things. A mastermind group really should be very two-way. There should be value gained all around the table. If it was a case of one member getting a lot of value, and the other members just showing up, then it’s not really a mastermind group. That’s a coaching relationship or a mentoring relationship, and a lot of the same things actually apply.
Chris Cloney: 35:00
I’ve been a part of many online paid communities, so I’m part of a lot of self-employed Ph.D. communities, but I’m also part of an entrepreneurship community for online business, not related to Ph.D. I’m probably the only one that’s focusing on Ph.D.-specific topics. But I’ve done a couple of these because I couldn’t find the right place. Some might be for people who are just starting out, some might be for people who are trying to get their first sale online, and some might be for people who are ‘scale and grow’ like we are.
Chris Cloney: 35:38
You’ve got to find your sweet spot, and there’s nothing wrong with those kinds of communities when you’re testing the waters. If you create your own group, by creating the guidelines, finding the right people, and testing it out, you can say, “Okay, we’re going to meet bi-weekly and we’re going to do three sessions, and then we’ll have a chat and say, ‘Hey, does this work? Do we need to change anything? Or should we just blow it out of the water altogether?’” There’s nothing wrong with that process and you may end up with something that does work a lot better for you, if you take those steps.
Chris Cloney: 36:14
This will be the last part on the mastermind group, and then we’ll try to figure out what’s next for Matt and Team Helium, but way back, at the very start of the mastermind group, I wrote a note that says, “Advantages of having a leader in the group.”
Out of the groups that you’ve been part of, have you seen the advantages of having someone that’s directing traffic and saying, “This is the process we’re going to use?” If you have led by committee, you can run into some struggles with these things. Do you have any thoughts along those lines?
Matt Hotze: 36:57
Well, the best teams have different types of people on them. If you had a bunch of people and all of them want to direct traffic, then it’s not going to work. Or if you have a bunch of team members that all just want to go and do their own thing, that’s not going to work either. So you need a good mix of folks.
The same thing probably applies to mastermind groups, where you have someone with a personality that gathers people together. That’s my personality, so it’s not something I have to go out and seek from others. If for some reason, my mastermind group, like Marcus, couldn’t meet anymore, I would be out there looking for a new mastermind group, leading the charge on that.
Matt Hotze: 38:08
I can understand that there are other people who don’t want to do that, but then you need to find someone that’s on top of it and willing to put in that little bit extra effort just to send an email to remind everybody or just even set the calendar invites, and herd the cats, as they say in academia. I think that’s really important, but it’s also really important that you’re not all trying to do that, because like you said, it would make it a mess.
Chris Cloney: 38:45
Yeah. I tend to lead towards the idea that there should be somebody who’s leading the charge, and only one person is really good. Partnerships can also work but if you have it led by a committee, then it will not be as effective a meeting as it would have been if someone led it.
Matt Hotze: 39:09
Yeah, and it’s hard if you don’t know who’s in charge, right? Even for something that’s supposed to be friendly and somewhat casual, there needs to be someone in charge. Some groups successfully rotate that. They rotate the who’s the in-charge person each week. I haven’t seen that really work in the three mastermind groups that I’ve been in, but maybe it works for other groups, where they’re like, “You’re the line leader. This is your job for this week.” That’s an example from my daughter’s life.
Chris Cloney: 39:46
I like it. Okay. I’m going to go through a brief summary. This has been a really fantastic talk, and we covered quite a bit of ground. We started at academia, how you may be feeling isolated and alone during grad school looking for a faculty position, and how that really mirrors entrepreneurship as a whole – being a solopreneur, being a business owner and developing your own business. They both can be pretty isolating.
We talked about Team Helium and how it helps people get started, obtain mastery in their position, and then grow and scale research teams, which is really interesting. We talked about life balance a bit. I don’t really like the term life balance. I like life segmentation, which is really what Matt’s talking about with 80/20.
Chris Cloney: 40:47
Then we talked about being present in the things that you’re doing. Again, tune in to next week’s episode (Episode #13), where I talk specifically about that. It’s already recorded, but it will come out after this. We talked about entrepreneurship in general and we talked about mastermind groups and how they can play a role in guiding your thought process and your goal-setting, as well as providing accountability. We gave a bunch of tips, and we’ll mine out some of those tips and come up with a tip sheet for finding or creating the mastermind group. We’ll put that with this podcast episode. Then we talked a little bit about how to lead a mastermind group and find your people.
What’s next for Team Helium and Dr. Matt Hotze?
Chris Cloney: 41:27
So, Matt, what’s next for Team Helium and what’s next for Dr. Matt Hotze?
Matt Hotze: 41:36
Our goal for the summer is to launch a new service. It has a mastermind element wrapped up in it. We’re trying to get people who are searching for faculty positions. I talked about feeling isolated and overwhelmed with the whole process, and so we’re looking for people who are interested in small-group coaching.
There will be a coaching element to this initiative, which is called The Faculty Position Project. We will also integrate a mastermind element where we’ll pair people up or have groups of three or four people and then after the course is over, your mastermind group is still intact and you can keep working with those folks toward your goals of achieving a faculty position.
Matt Hotze: 42:43
If you’re out there, and you’re thinking, “Well, how am I going to find this group for my particular goals?”, what we’re trying to do is facilitate that through this group coaching course. When you leave the course, you don’t leave the benefits behind. You continue, especially if you’re resonating with your group. You continue to meet with your group and check in on your goals. It’s something that I wish I had as a post-doc. I’m trying to create something in the world that would have been awesome for me at the time.
Chris Cloney: 43:21
I love it and I’m excited to see it develop. If I ever end up back in academia myself and am looking for a faculty position, you may see me as a member. If somebody’s interested in this group, where’s the best spot for them to go? Is it teamhelium.co, or is there anywhere else?
Matt Hotze: 43:46
There’s a specific landing page. We’ve got an email course that you can sign up for. It’s a warm-up for the project. If you’re interested, you can go to www.teamhelium.co/fppcourse. That will lead you to a page where you can sign up for the six-week email course.
If you sign up, we will send you one email a week. We record audio for each email, so you can listen to it at the lab bench if you want. We walk you through some of the things that you should be thinking about when looking for a faculty position. We start at the very beginning by talking about time management, mindsets when approaching this long-term project of finding a position, those kinds of things. We go through it week by week in bite-sized chunks so that it’s not a big, overwhelming task.
Chris Cloney: 45:06
I like it. That was teamhelium.co/fppcourse?
Matt Hotze: 45:11
Yes.
Chris Cloney: 45:11
That’s for the Faculty Position Project. I definitely recommend that people go check that out. If you’re feeling isolated or stressed, then you don’t have anything to lose by doing this course and having a little hand-holding. You’re going to be quite a bit farther along if you just listen to this podcast episode, but if you go check that out, you’ll probably get pretty far down the tracks as well. I’d recommend checking that out. We’ll put it in the show notes gradblogger.com/12.
Matt, I really appreciate having you on the show. I hope to interview your other half in the business in the future, and also get myself on the Team Helium Podcast at some point as well.
Matt Hotze: 45:59
Awesome. We’d love to have you on.
Conclusion
Chris Cloney: 46:01
That was the 12th episode of GradBlogger with Dr. Matt Hotze. We were talking about the power of mastermind groups to achieve your goals, and we went through a lot of great topics in relation to that.
If you want to get the transcript for this episode, you can access it, as always, from the show notes at gradblogger.com/12. We’ll put together a tip sheet for people, so if you’re looking for a mastermind group, or looking to start your own, you can go grab that tip sheet from the show notes.
If you want to connect with Matt, you can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn. Teamhelium.co is the best place to find him.
Chris Cloney: 46:44
I appreciate everyone listening to GradBlogger and hope you have a great week ahead. I look forward to continuing to help you build your online business, do blogging, podcasting, and video, and make your dent in the universe.
Tune in next week for the already unveiled episode number 13, which will be about getting things done with the Capture Sort Do Process.
Want to join a mastermind group or create your own? When you subscribe to GradBlogger, we’ll send you our FREE cheat sheet with seven tips on building a mastermind group and what to look out for if you are joining a different community.
