But they can see the hidden obstacles of clients very easily. The question is, what are you going to do about it? 

The Founder’s Blind Spot

When you built your practice, you made hundreds of small decisions – about who to take on as a client, how to price your work, how to describe what you do, which engagements to pursue and which to decline. Most of those decisions were good ones. 

By the time a practice is four or five years old, most consultants, trainers, speakers, people who sell expertise, run into a number of predictable problems – some of which are invisible to them. 

If you are still doing the same things you did to run and grow your practice before 2020 think about this for a moment. 

Literally everything in the market has changed. 

Buyer behavior, the media landscape, the Zoom call, the competitive landscape, the economy – every single variable you based your business on years ago changed – except how you run the business. 

But you are unlikely to figure out what you need to change by yourself. 

Why Smart People Stay Stuck

Independent experts are, by definition, very smart people. That competence can work against them when it comes to evaluating their own business. The skills that make someone effective at solving client problems do not automatically transfer to diagnosing the structural problems inside their own practice.

Enter confirmation bias. When you have been running a practice for several years (or decades), you have a significant investment – financial, professional, and psychological – in the decisions you have made. That investment makes it genuinely difficult to examine those decisions with the same rigor you would apply to a client’s situation.

This is why peer groups are becoming increasingly popular again. Growth minded consultants, coaches and experts are turning to peers – people who are building similar but non-competing businesses to significantly accelerate their own practice. 

What Changes When Someone Else Is in the Room

The value of an outside perspective is not that other people will tell you what to do. It is that they will ask questions you have stopped asking yourself. They will notice the thing you described in passing – the client you mentioned almost as an aside, the engagement you declined without much explanation, the pricing exception you made three times last year – and they will surface it as something worth examining.

They will push back on bad decisions or confirmation bias precisely because they are detached. 

That kind of observation does not happen in a coaching relationship, where the dynamic runs from one person to another. It happens in a room full of people who are all close enough to your situation to recognize the pattern, and all far enough outside it to name it without flinching.

The problems that get solved in that environment are not always the problems that get put on the table. Often the most useful work happens when someone in the room says, quietly, that the problem being described is not actually the problem.

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While they have many strengths, they share something else in common. They are each corporate offerings, built for scale. 

Built for Scale, Not for You

The dominant peer advisory models were built around business owners across the spectrum of industries, business models and maturity. 

Selling HVAC systems is very different from selling professional services and expertise.  The mechanics are very different in almost every dimension. That is not a criticism of those organizations. It is a structural observation. They were designed for a more general audience. 

The Franchise Tradeoff

Most of the established peer advisory brands operate through a franchise or licensing model. A certified chair runs a local group under the parent organization’s methodology, curriculum, and brand standards. There is consistency in that approach, and for some participants, that consistency has real value.

The “chair” is running someone else’s playbook. A generalized “curriculum” and materials. 

The tradeoff is that the curriculum was built for a median member, not for sellers of expertise.  The facilitator’s training was designed to serve a broad population of business owners, not a narrow population of people who sell intangible services, have to exhibit expertise and have deliberately stayed independent. 

For someone running a professional services practice, the gap between what those groups offer and what you actually need can be significant.

Unicorn Groups

There is no shortage of peer advisory options for the entrepreneur who built a company. There is a significant shortage of structured peer environments for the independent expert – a person who makes their living from knowledge. It’s a unique type of business that needs a unique kind of peer advisory group. 

The Independent Expert Advisory Council was built to fill that gap. Ten seats. One facilitator with nearly four decades in independent practice. Every person in the room is already successful and operating the same business model. The problems that get worked in each session are the problems that often arise with running this kind of practice – price pressure, poor fit clients, drifting positioning, operational challenges, etc. 

The fact is these kinds of businesses tend to experience the same learning curve between years three and ten. It’s slow and painful. 

The right peer group can speed knowledge acquisition significantly. 

How to Evaluate Your Options

Before committing to any peer advisory group, it is worth understanding what each of the major options actually offers and who it was designed to serve. The differences in structure, cost, membership criteria, and facilitation philosophy are significant, and the right fit depends heavily on the kind of business you are running and the kind of problems you are trying to solve.

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Franklin himself credited the Junto with accelerating almost every significant development in his professional and civic life.

That is the original model. What passes for a mastermind group today bears almost no resemblance to it.

What Franklin Actually Built

The Junto was not a networking event with a structured agenda. It was not a room full of people paying to be around someone successful in the hope that proximity would transfer. It was a working group, built around a shared commitment to honest inquiry and mutual accountability.

Franklin’s rules required members to declare, on their honor, that they would engage with every question sincerely. Members were expected to produce questions for group discussion and to respond to the questions of others with genuine reflection rather than performance. Criticism was not only permitted – it was the mechanism. 

The group’s value came precisely from its willingness to say things that were difficult to say and useful to hear.

The size was small by design. Franklin understood that the depth of engagement he was after was incompatible with a large room. You cannot have a serious conversation with 40 people. You can have one with a dozen, if those dozen are the right people and the structure supports it.

Carnegie, Hill, and the Tradition That Followed

Nearly two centuries later, Napoleon Hill reportedly spent years studying the habits of the most effective industrialists and thinkers of his era. What he observed in figures like Andrew Carnegie – who reportedly attributed much of his success to the counsel of a small, trusted circle of advisors – became the conceptual foundation for what Hill called the mastermind principle in his 1937 book “Think and Grow Rich.”

Hill’s formulation was straightforward: a coordinated group of people, aligned around a common purpose, produces a quality of thinking that no individual member could generate alone. The group creates something – a collective intelligence, a willingness to challenge assumptions, an accountability that self-directed effort cannot replicate – that is genuinely greater than the sum of its parts.

Whether or not Hill’s framing was precisely accurate to what Carnegie practiced, the underlying observation has held up. Small groups of committed, capable people, operating under clear rules of engagement, reliably produce better outcomes for their members than those members produce working alone. And they do it faster. 

What the Word Has Come to Mean

Somewhere in the decades between Hill’s writing and the current proliferation of online group programs, the word mastermind lost most of its meaning. It became a marketing label applied to almost any paid group format – cohorts of strangers assembled around a course, one time motivational seminars, networking groups, every except a stable group of successful people solving real problems. 

The defining features of Franklin’s original model – the vetting, the rules of honest engagement, the expectation of difficult feedback, the small and stable membership – were largely abandoned because they are difficult to scale and impossible to franchise. 

Most people who have participated in a modern mastermind group recognize the pattern. The conversations stay at the surface. The experience is social. It is not particularly useful. You leave enthusiastic but forget the event a couple weeks later. 

The Standard That Still Applies

The Independent Expert Advisory Council is built around the original model, not the modern one. 

It has: 

• Only ten seats. 
• A stable membership that develops shared context and trust over time. 
• A structured session format designed to move through problems with rigor rather than to fill time pleasantly. 
• An expectation that members will give honest feedback and receive it without defensiveness.

The most common failure mode in peer advisory groups – including well-run ones – is the drift toward encouragement over truth. It is socially easier to affirm than to challenge. It is more comfortable to validate a plan than to identify the flaw in it. A room that has drifted in that direction is a room that has stopped being useful, regardless of the quality of the people in it.

Franklin’s Junto worked because the members held each other to a standard of honesty that most social environments do not support. That standard is not a feature that can be added later. It has to be established at the outset and maintained deliberately. It is the difference between a group that produces genuine value and one that produces a pleasant way to spend a morning once a month.

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