Whatever it is you want, you can get it faster, stronger, better, through the principle of mastermind Hello, My name is George Madiou. I am the publisher and founder of The Network Marketing Magazine, and I am excited to have the opportunity today to interview a great friend of mine, Roger Salam. Roger is an expert in mastermind, and we’ve been working together, especially for this coming month’s issue. NULL
It’s our 7th Anniversary Issue and we have in store for you a tremendous amount of new and innovative ways of being able to bring the life of network marketing to you in an exciting and dynamic way. So Roger, Thank you for being here and inviting us into the mansion in Tampa, Florida. What I want you to do right from the beginning is tell us a little bit about yourself. You’re known as the guru of mastermind. We know that Napoleon Hill was the one person that really helped those of us in network marketing understand the concept of mastermind, but I wonder… do we really understand the power of mastermind? Can you tell us a bit about yourself? Roger: George, Thank you so much. It is a pleasure and privilege to be here. I went to UCLA and I bumped into Anthony Robbins very early in my career. When I went to see him I was so mesmerized I said to myself, “I want to master what he is teaching, instead of dabbling.” What better way to go than to actually work for him? He will make me live it, otherwise he will fire me. So I did that. I used to be on the road 48 weeks out of the year. I was his #1 Speaker and Trainer. I did that for most of the 90’s.
Then I jumped onto the Internet bandwagon, back in 1997 when people didn’t even know quite how to spell ’email’ and ‘Internet’, because that’s what I saw as the future. I was literally so into it that if Al Gore didn’t claim he invented the Internet, it would be me.
I was a dot com millionaire, took a company from nothing to $2 billion in market capital as part of a team. When the market crashed I went from dot com to dot gone and had to rebuild. This was right around the stock market crash in ’99 and I jumped with both feet, into real estate. I knew nothing about real estate. You know it was late night, can’t fall asleep, I had lost everything with the Internet thing and this guy says, “You can make money in real estate with no money and no credit” so I said, “I qualify” and I jumped with both feet. My partner and I rebuilt 500 houses right here in the Tampa Bay area. This is the latest acquisition, this 38,000 sq ft mansion. I bumped into the mastermind concept because I am a student of success.
I am a student of success and I’m always looking for the one thing, the holy grail for success. There’s no silver bullet but the closest I have come to it is the concept of mastermind.
You mention Napoleon Hill and it’s right here, in 1908, Andrew Carnegie commissioned him to study the most successful people of his era. People like Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, you know, ordinary, successful people. He wanted to know what the one thing is that successful people have in common, that is explained in the book, Think and Grow Rich, and he came up with 17 principles for becoming rich. Of the 17 there are three that are known as foundational and the other 14 are supporting principles. Of the three foundational principles, number one is definiteness of purpose, which is knowing what you want, because if you don’t know what you want nobody can help you. But the moment you know it, you find out what it is you want, that means you have definiteness of purpose. Principle number 2 for achieving success if the principle of mastermind. I go right there. Anything you want to do in life, I’m not sure that you have to do mastermind, but I believe if you want to do it faster, stronger, better, cheaper, in a more beneficial way, there is nothing better than mastermind. What is mastermind? From a definitional standpoint it is when two or more people get together either for a common cause or to reach their individual goals, with the aim to pursue that goal collectively.
When two or more get together a third mind appears and that is collectively known as the mastermind. It is something beyond what the two can do individually.
At Winner’s Circle we call it where 1 + 1 = 11 George: Roger, tell me a little bit about the history of mastermind. Roger: Although Napoleon Hill is the one who popularized the mastermind concept, it started, as I said, very early on. You could say Jesus Christ and his disciples demonstrate the mastermind concept. When two or more people get together for a common cause, with a mission to accomplish, they accomplish it better. So throughout history, if you go back, as Napoleon Hill says, anyone who has accomplished greatness, on a small scale or a large scale, they consciously or unconsciously applied the principle of mastermind. The world has been using the concept of mastermind from the very, very beginning of history. It’s just that it wasn’t used in a formal manner. Napoleon Hill popularized it in his book, Think and Grow Rich, and one of the chapters that is probably quoted the most is the chapter on mastermind. I focused on it and perhaps re-popularized it in the 21st century. I have focused single-mindedly just on the power of mastermind and created the largest, most successful mastermind forum called The Winners Circle. That’s where the entrepreneur’s and business leaders come to do mastermind here at the mansion. George: Roger, I understand how mastermind can be a key to the success of the people that engage in it but tell me a little bit about the use of mastermind in your success over the years. Roger: That’s a good question. I actually tell people, anything good and great that’s happening in my life right now is almost a direct result of my mastermind forum called The Winners Circle… not indirect. The Winners Circle started as a formal mastermind group in 2007. I was looking, I’m a student of success, and during the Robbin’s research days (Tony Robbins), the only thing we studied was why is somebody successful and somebody else is not? They go to the same seminars, they read the same books, they join the same network marketing company… somebody just goes to the stratosphere and somebody else was not. They were trained by the same company, they have the same product, everything is the same, so what is it about them that’s different?
A couple of foundational beliefs that I have about mastermind are one, I believe that who you hang around with and who you associate with and listen to will determine your destiny.
Would you agree with that? George: I totally agree. Roger: And I have yet to find anyone who would disagree with me on that question. If you really believe it then why not live your life by design that you hang around successful people? You’ve probably heard the statement that your income will be the average of the five people you hang around most, yes? George: You’re right, absolutely. Roger: I believe it’s not only true for your income. I believe it’s true for your health, your wealth, your happiness, your attitude and just about everything else. If you want to become a millionaire, why hang around with broke people? If you want to be healthy, don’t hang around with couch potatoes.
So when you, by design, actually hang around the winners in life, they will uplift. The rising tide lifts what? All the boats. ALL of the boats. You hang around with winners they’ll take you with them.
When you hear that it’s lonely at the top, it’s not lonely at the top when you take the people that helped you, with you. The truth is, it’s awfully crowded at the bottom. Where we’re sitting here, this mansion, is a direct result of my mastermind. How it came about – Our mastermind is very focused on ROI – return on investment, and it’s very relationship focused. It’s not a ‘wham-bam-thankyou-maam’ thing, it’s a very focused, by invitation only forum that we started. The right kind of people come in. One of my members actually had this house as a listing. That’s how it’s a direct result of The Winners Circle. They were trying to fractionalize this place because it’s so big, it’s like a white elephant, so they thought they had to create bite size chunks, but it was at the wrong timing and they couldn’t move it. It was right at the peak time of ’07-08, not the right time. Because it didn’t sell, I had an opportunity that turned into good and I formed a relationship with the owner who is my mentor, my financial mentor now. So I came here and I couldn’t afford it. There are 39 separate AC units in this place! I just said I’m not in the same league… but, it’s because of my relationship that he’s helping me to acquire the place.
Relationship is more important than skills. That’s why I keep emphasizing, when you come to the mastermind, it’s not only the content, and the ideas, the most important thing is the relationships that you actually have.
My life is about right now, unlike the Tony Robbins days of going after the masses, it’s now about fewer, deeper relationships… fewer, bigger deals… fewer, better people. That’s why I don’t do large seminars. I do masterminds once a month. Only ten people get to come and stay with me at the mansion and build relationship for three days and nights. We live in a world of tweeting where you’re limited to a world of 140 characters to express, so when you have two full days, three nights, that’s like an eternity. There is no one else here but us. The entire facility is just for us to sit there and with no rush, no 5 minutes of networking then off to the next, just us. And the environment is uplifting, the setting, everything, is by design, it’s not by accident.
When you have great people together, great things happen regardless, because of who they are. It’s nothing with me. But when you orchestrate it, when you actually design every day, every process… magic happens.
George: What I love about our relationship is the fact that it came about as a mastermind. What amazed me about you were the great questions you ended up focusing on about who was in the network marketing industry. Who were the, not so much the movers and shakers, but the people that really, really were leaders in the industry. The ones that were making a difference. You know, you talk about relationship, the relationships that we ended up talking about with some of the leaders were individuals that knew one another. They may have been in different companies, they may have been company owners, top leaders or even trainers but they were people that knew one another. They already had relationships with each other. It was a quick yes from me when you asked what I thought about doing a mastermind that really revolved around the network marketing industry but specifically bringing it to a whole new level with the leaders that are in it. I was intrigued. What you end up teaching the top people of other industries can so easily end up being incorporated here in the network marketing industry. Roger: What you’re referring to here George is what I call a peer group mastermind. And I love peer group mastermind because a peer group mastermind provides the ROI the fastest. Like when I first started, my first mastermind group was real estate gurus. Real estate investors, real estate gurus, because we already know exactly what you go through as a real estate guru, as a real estate investor; I didn’t have to come in and tell you what it is I do. I knew exactly what your back office is. Similarly, if you have a mastermind with attorneys then they can share the best practice of the attorney and there is very quickly an ROI. However, the other mastermind is where people can be from different professions. Those are also great but they are more for idea generation, that’s where new ideas and innovation happens because of cross-pollination because attorney’s think totally different than a real estate investor, than an entrepreneur, and all of these people.
When approaching you, what appealed to me was that you are sort of a neutral body here, you are the Switzerland as the magazine publisher and founder. It has never been done before in this industry. Nobody has gathered leaders of this industry to brainstorm and share best practices from each other.
George: One of the things I love about what we’re ready to do in this peer group mastermind with the network marketers is that there is no begging with the mastermind. We don’t have to beg somebody to come to the mansion. We will attract the best of the best and what will result from us holding this mastermind? You and I don’t know, but we do know it will be something absolutely fabulous. The people that participate in the mastermind will get far more out of it than they could even dream. That’s what I’m excited about. Roger: This is not for the masses. This is not for everyone. That’s why the invitation is going out to hand-picked people by you. Since you’re already involved you know the leaders. That’s why they are invited. And we’re only looking for eight. Out of the thousands in the industry. Eight is not an artificial number. There are only ten bedrooms in the mansion. You’ve got one, I’ve got one, so two are gone and that leaves only eight more. No room additions and no tents allowed. We need eight people to apply and they need to tell us, because what makes a great mastermind is the people in the room. That’s what you and I are going to determine. They have to apply and tell us why they should be one of those eight to qualify. I promise you, they have never experienced anything like this in an exceptional environment to uplift. George: Okay, so tell me the key benefits that these eight individuals, actually ten individuals, are going to get from this special mastermind that we are going to be holding. Roger: That’s the other beauty of it. Because it’s not a seminar, it’s not a coaching, it’s not a mentoring, this is mastermind. It’s not one size fits all. I have detailed questionnaires and I want to find out, through the questionnaire, from the eight people we end up selecting, what is their need?
The mastermind is based on them. It is customized. We’re not talking about 80 people or 800 people, there are ten of us so I can customize the whole mastermind based on their need. And we can make it industry specific.
What is the biggest industry challenge? There is something I call the gap analysis – G and G – the gap and the growth. In other words, no matter how well we are doing, we all have gaps, so if I can plug in the gaps, ROI will happen. The second thing is the growth. What is working really well? What product, what process is working really well for you? If I can add fuel to that fire you’re going to see that. So the gap and the growth, it’s fully customized for each group because I don’t know who the eight are who will be coming so I don’t know what the content is going to be but I can tell you the key benefit, above the content, above the spectacular building, those are nothing compared to the relationship. George: You keep mentioning a couple of things. One that I keep hearing is ROI, return on investment. It
makes me perk up because I’m always looking for not only a return on my investment but a great return. Roger: And I am so confident, I am so confident on the return on investment part of it that I’d give it to you in writing. If you attend, not just one day, the entire time, and if at the end you believe you haven’t received your money’s worth in any way… I’ll not only give you your money back, I’ll add your airfare to it, so that’s the only other thing you have to spend to be taken care of here. Everything is taken care of here. The moment you land the limo will pick you up and bring you to the mansion. The private chef will take care of your meals, the maid will take care of our rooms, all of the mundane stuff is taken care of so that we can focus on nothing but each other. How to help each other.
What I do is prepare the others to take care of the other eight or nine people. You don’t have to focus on what you are getting. Just come prepared to give, the getting is automatic.
The Universe will take care of the getting part. You come prepared to help the other people in the room. Every minute, from the moment you land, is prepared for you. This is not our first rodeo, we’ve been doing mastermind here. We are very process oriented and not so much time bound. We maintain time but we don’t have to go anywhere. Every meal we are together so the relationship, the bonding, is happening not only inside the conference room but outside, everywhere, pool side, at the cocktail hour or the movie theater or when we’re playing basketball, everything is designed to be a bonding experience for us and the relationship we take away from there. This is the beginning. George: Again, I’m going to step back to the ROI because so often in our industry, we have coaching, we have seminars, we don’t hear about return on investment. As a matter of fact, so many of the leaders that I know, they’re the ones that are giving the seminars and the coaching and everything else so I’m hearing that that’s a unique part of the mastermind. What else does the attendee end up getting from this two day, three night program? Roger: Again, what they’re getting in terms of a specific challenge, I would have to know them and their challenge but there are a few modules that we have created that are just phenomenal and a plug and play for us. From a content standpoint I want them to tell me… I am like you, I am Switzerland, because when I was with Tony Robbins I attended many different conferences or conventions with many network marketing companies. The joke you hear there is that with network marketing you’re joining the NFL. NFL means no friends left. Instead of the old model of writing down friends and family, which probably still works, but let’s talk about how to grow your business using modern technology. How do you use Social Media? How to find a unique marketing tip for marketing you as a leader of the industry. How to position you so that you don’t have to go to people, people come to you. The only people you talk to are the ones that raise their hand. And that’s probably one of the things I can share the most as far as the content. I can assure you that no matter who comes from the network marketing industry, we can take them to raising the level of connections. For example, I use Linkedin, with people in the three levels of linkedin, in my personal network I have close to 25 million people. I’m not bragging, it’s just that I have a Linkedin concierge that manages my Linkedin account. But I can share with you that all of those eight people, even the ones who don’t use Linkedin today, within 30 days I can take them from zero to a million, several million, in their network if they will just follow through with what I am sharing.
You want to make a way that let’s people raise their hand, so that you don’t constantly have to badger people for the opportunity.
And if you believe in the opportunity, which obviously you do, that’s why you joined, now let’s have you position yourself for people to reach out to you instead of you reaching out to people. Let’s turn around that marketing. George: We have far more than eight or ten people that are going to be listening to this. We’re going to have thousands of people listening. Do you have any kind of gift that you might be able to share with our listeners? Those people who are listening in, they might be that typical person who is sitting in the stands, they’re not in the arena doing battle yet but they’re watching what is going on… do you have something for them that could give them a little taste of what these eight leaders are going to be experiencing? Roger: Here’s what I’ll do, as I said… this is not for everyone but I can promise you mastermind matters. If I could just summon the ABC’s of mastermind, that are why anybody listening, even if they don’t join our mastermind, why they should be seeking out or starting their own mastermind it would be these three things. The A is for ACCESS. Because we both know it’s not what you know it’s who you know. And I teach one step higher than that which is called ‘who knows you’. B is for BEST PRACTICES. You don’t have time to make all of the mistakes yourself. Come and let’s model other people’s success. People who are already getting results. And the C is for COMMUNITY OF LIKE MINDED PEOPLE. Community of like minded people because it’s hard out there, but not as hard if you create a community of like minded people who understand what you are going through. So that your hard times are not as hard and in your winning times you have friends to share it with you. I’ve been trying to summarize mastermind with one word and I have not been able to with one word.
The closest I can come to explaining mastermind and the greatest benefit of mastermind is two words: accelerated growth. Whatever it is you want, you can get it faster, stronger, better, through the principle of mastermind.
For your readers and listeners, I will send them a gift, which is my book, The Holy Grail for Success, which is the concept of mastermind. I share with you the history of mastermind in much more detail than I did here today because of time. And I’ll give it, no strings attached, completely free to your listeners so that they can also find out about the real reason to do mastermind as I shared with you. I’m very, very excited that this is the first time I am doing a mastermind with you just for the network marketing industry. I’m looking forward to the peer group mastermind. To get the book they can write to you or go to my website, http://twcmastermind.com, TWC as in The Winners Circle, and they can get the free book from there. Thank You! George: Roger, I can’t thank you enough. I am so excited about our relationship and I’m even more excited for the people that are going to be engaging with us in the mastermind. You and I are going to be doing a lot of things the remainder of this year and beyond. I’m excited about what will develop with our relationship that has come from mastermind. It’s literally going to change the face of The Network Marketing Magazine and our readers are going to end up realizing, and they’re going to see in a tangible way, exactly what I mean by that. Again, thank you and thank you for inviting me and our leaders to the mansion here in Tampa, Florida
ROGER SALAM Mastermind Forum Founder, Professional Speaker & Consultant, Connector, and Bestselling Author of six books on Sales & Marketing, Real Estate Success, and Mastermind. http://www.thewinnerscircleinc.com
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For the past 17 years, George has been the publisher and founder of The Network Marketing Magazine. He is the creator of the 27%er Success Training System, one of the most effective MLM educational platforms on the market today. He is the host of the live podcast, oddly enough called, The George Madiou Show, where he has a "conversation" with the legions and movers in the network marketing profession.
George has 2 degrees in Marketing and Management from New York University.
His family is everything to him. George is married 44 years to Debbie (who is the President and the brains of The Network Marketing Magazine) and has 2 adult children, Sara is married to Greg with grandson Jacob and granddaughter Taylor Ann, and his son David is married to Katy with grandson Jackson born on June 1, 2022, the very same day as his younger cousin Taylor Ann (boy that was some big day!) You can see why George is crazy for his incredible family!
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