Building A Tribe (Personal Board of Advisors)

Read time: 4 minutes

What do drug addicts, alcoholics and ambitious founders have in common?

The ones who are serious about success - have support groups.

The Story of Alcoholics Anonymous

In 1935 Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by Bill Wilson & Bob Smith.

They pioneered a new format of shared, vulnerable connection and commitment in real life which has since supported over 2 million in their journey to sobriety.

Crazy fun fact, but Bill Wilson was introduced to LSD and actually claims his journey to sobriety was accelerated by the powerful psychedelic.

Anyway, the 12-step program, and the format of small sharing circles inspired various other concepts.

Young Presidents Organisation

In 1950, a guy called Ray Hickok inherited his family's 300-employee company in New York at the tender age of 27. Like many founders - he didn't have a fucking clue what he was doing (sound familiar?)

He and other young presidents began meeting regularly as a peer network, looking to become better leaders by learning from each other.

Within this, and taking inspiration from Alcoholics Anonymous - he created 'forum' - whereby a group of 8 leaders commit to meeting every month and working through their challenges. Sort of like group therapy.

The group is highly exclusive and costs around $25,000 a year to join - and your company needs to be generating at least $10M per year. I was recently invited to join, and though I was tempted - I declined.

Little do they know... I'm already in a version of it called a 'cube' (and I was inspired by their model years ago, studied it for myself, and created my own version for my Foundrs community, called a Tribe).

WTF is a Tribe, how does it work, why should I care?

A group of 8 founders/CEOs (though I am sure it could work for other categories, but I'll focus on my experience) meet once a month, every month, for 4 hours - during work hours.

If that sounds like a huge commitment, the point is, it really is, and you know you're in the right company if every one of you thinks that's far too much to ask.

Together, you do a training with a facilitator who trains you in the 'gestalt' framework.

Put simply - you are trained to not give advice, but to speak from experience.

This is one of the hardest psychological shifts to pull off - but you are all trained to call each other out if you offer advice - it takes a few months but eventually....you stop (and become a much better person for it!).

Every month, we run through a summary like this:

Then we have 5 minutes each to share our 'update', others listen. You share whether your challenges are a '1 or a 2' (1 being urgent/important, 2 being less so). If you think it's important, but not to share today, it goes on the 'parking lot' - which is a list the group keeps of all challenges, in case there are recurring themes (and to remind one another of our progress through life).

Once you've all shared - the group decides which issues warrant a 'presentation' - usually 2 people will present.

To do this properly - we use a 'presentation sheet' - each presenter gets 15 minutes to prepare, focused on these questions:

----
​The situation I’d like to present is x

1) For me, this situation represents an important: Business / Personal issue

2) What am I unsure of? In what areas do I have lack of clarity? Where do I feel stuck?

The Exploration

Get your tribe members up to speed with all the relevant details

1) Background to the problem

2) Current situation

3) Options I am considering/ evaluating:

What is at stake for me and those around me, and where do I feel most vulnerable about this exploration?

My feelings about this situation are (list all)

What experience sharing and feedback would be most helpful?

--

Post Presentation

Your tribe engage in asking clarifying questions, and try to share examples of times when they've felt a certain way and what they did about it.

This is where the very powerful and clear 'emotion wheel' comes into play:

Wheel of Human Emotions:

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Everyone in the tribe goes round for 3 minutes - sharing their experience if they can, with insight from their own lives (which limits random advice).

At the end, the presenter summarises what they heard, and learned from each other person's share and how they will approach the next step.

Accountability

The Tribe's role - to hold that person accountable to taking action and facing their problem head on, now they've spent the time unpacking and understanding it better.

7 years in to doing mine, and almost all the most powerful unlocks in my life have come from my time with my Tribe.

We're still going strong (2 people have left and been replaced). We also commit to doing a 2-3 day retreat together every year - this was easier when none of us were parents, now most of us are!)

I've just returned from ours yesterday - here's a photo of us at 'Monkey Island' together, running through a busy schedule of personal development challenges.

Group therapy, AA, forum, tribe, whatever you call it - finding a personal board of advisors is something that the most successful people all have in common.

Whilst I'm too busy to run this as a service for people, I'm thinking of creating a very comprehensive course with documents, exercises, and everything you need to run it with your own group.

Is that something you'd pay for?

If so, click here and fill in this quick form to let me know.

With love and success to you and your future tribe,

Dan

💡 Success at the Watercooler 💡

I'm fascinated by great stories of entrepreneurship - if you ever wanted evidence you can make it in any category - take inspiration from the most ridiculous category - water.

Making a killing​
​Liquid Death - valued at $1.4 billion

Fiji water - not sure on valuation but makes over $50 million a year!

VOSS water - sold for over $100M

The 3 brands have exceptionally different strategies and yet, all they do is sell water. The key difference in their success? Branding and strategy. Here's how they did it:

VOSS water:

Norwegian brand recognising the gap in the market for premium water - their cylindrical classy glass bottle design made them a must have fashion-like acccessory for celebrities like the Kardashians.

Whilst bottle design is smart (it's also how we stand out at my company, Heights) - it's their strategy of targeting high end restaurants, hotels and events that was truly unique and meant others couldn't compete.

Fiji Water:

In 1996 Canadian entrepreneur David Gilmour was at an aquifer in Fiji (obvs, who isn't?) and discovered the beautiful mineral rich delights of the island's fresh spring water filtered through volcanic rock for extra minerals.

Bottle design played a key role again - this time small and square - and the branding of tropical exotic leaves immediately justified it's famously high price tag reserved mostly for rich snobs or water snobs (and hotel mini bars where the price of everything already feels absurd so what's $10 for water anyway).

Liquid Death:

Saving the best until last - the new kids on the block are my (and most people's) fave case study. As the story goes, creative director Mike Cessario was often on tour with rock stars. They were sponsored by Monster and were meant to drink out of those cans on stage. However, Mike noticed that most rock stars actually emptied it and filled it with water - after all, that's a lot more helpful on stage for hours (I imagine). So he had a lightbulb moment.

Using this insight, and his brilliant creative brain - he redefined the category with an idea to 'murder your thirst' and made these absolutely rockstar cans that they'd be proud to drink from, and the rest is history!

SOS (Science of Success) Curated:

LinkedIn of the week: The rule breaking 9 year old and what we can learn from him​

My Tweet of the week 7 methods to learn more in 5 minutes than most people learn in 5 years​

🤔 Question of the Week:

No community question this week - which is lucky cos I feel like this email was already getting kinda long!

Hit me up if you do have one though...

Dan

1-1 Coaching with Dan

In my goal to help more entrepreneurs/ people who are looking to level up their careers, I've just started taking 1-1 consulting calls (only 1 a week)

Why book a call? Some of my expertise/success:

• I've built 5 startups. 1 win, 1 fail, and 3 still going.
• Community: I built one of the UK's top entrepreneur communities (Foundrs) - a non profit.
• Media/Podcasting: I built Kindling Media - a boostrapped media company that makes the UKs top business podcasts like Making Money and Secret Leaders with over 50M downloads.
• E Commerce: Co-Founded Heights - with revenue over 10M a year.
• Health/Mental Health: Managed to overcome burnout, insomnia, depression & anxiety in pursuit of success
• Angel Investing: I've invested in over 85 startups
• Coached & Mentored: Certified coach & done lots of mentoring
• Personal Brand: Have grown to almost 100k on Linkedin and X (Twitter) in the last 12 months

So if you're interested in booking a session with me to talk all things business or building a personal brand, click the button:

Science of Success Vault

I'll be constantly creating more visuals that summarise my most powerful (usually that means most viral) ideas.

These will be stored in the ever growing 'Science of Success' vault - you can always access that from here

That's all folks,

I'm recording on Matt Willis' podcast today as a guest, and recording 4 of my own for Secret Leaders Podcast tomorrow so.... wish me luck, it's a busy week 🤞

Dan

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Want to take your success (even more) seriously? 👇​
🧠 Fuel your brain and feed your gut, try Heights here (use code 'SOSDMS' for 15% off your first month of any subscription

🎧 Check out my podcast Secret Leaders here​

👍 Book a coaching or mentoring call with me, for 30-minutes or 45-minutes. (limited spots)
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