The Peer Advantage by Bula Network is now enrolling charter members. Today's show is a brief outline of why you may want to consider applying today.

This is a paid, professional peer advantage group (a mastermind group, if you please) where we collectively work to help each other grow our business, our leadership and our lives.

The objective is to help each member hit the trifecta of successful business building:

* Getting new customers
* Serving existing customers better
* Not going crazy in the process

L.U.G.

It's all about doing the work to help ourselves Learn, Understand and Grow.

All the details are found at ThePeerAdvantage.com.

 
What provoked your interest to launch a peer advisory group for small business owners?
 

I was not yet 30 when I began to distill building a business into 3 buckets of activities. Gambling isn't something I do. For decades I attended CES (Consumer Electronic Show) because I was in the business. It's in Vegas. And I've never placed a single wager. But I did know enough about betting to know that a trifecta is a bet in which the person betting forecasts the first three finishers in a race in the correct order. It's also defined as "a run of three wins or grand events." By the time I was approaching 40 I knew the 3 buckets were a trifecta of successful business building. More appropriately, these 3 activities represented hitting the trifecta of business building:

* Getting new customers
* Serving existing customers better
* Not going crazy in the process

Experience taught me that the first one could be insanely hard, and the second one equally so...but that third one seemed the most difficult of all.

Mental health, especially among small business owners, wasn't discussed much just a few years ago. It's gaining more traction, but it still doesn't get nearly enough attention. But that third leg of the trifecta - when I came up with it - wasn't aimed at proper mental health or illness. It was far more everyday language expressing the daily frustrations that every entrepreneur fully understands.

I've always been an "I wonder if we can" kind of a guy. Maybe I bore easily. Maybe I just think there's got to be a better way (I catch myself saying that often). Improvement - well, the quest for improvement - is a constant pursuit. It seems a far more exciting way to roll than to be complacent.

A decade ago, after over 3 decades of running businesses with lots of employees, inventory, trucks and hard assets I stepped away to begin serving CEOs, business owners, executives and leaders. The trifecta was almost always in play (city government and non-profits being the exceptions). In every "for profit" enterprise, the trifecta was ALWAYS the needed focal point. Everybody I encountered - and still encounter - was woefully challenged by one or more of the three. Mostly, that third one was universally difficult.

That's what led to an epiphany brought about when a client was invited to check out a professional peer advisory group of CEOs. I was invited to consider running such a group. Up to that point, it was never on my radar.

Sure I had read Napoleon Hill's book, Think And Grow Rich, when I was a teenager. It was the introduction of a mastermind group for most of us. But I never gave it much more thought.

Enter the Internet and I began to be invited to a few. I gave a few of them a shot, but they were utter failures because I had nothing in common with the people inside. The conversations weren't deep or meaningful. Mostly,