Demboski: I have gained so much from my study group in that it is the one place where people feel very comfortable to tell me that I don’t know things. When you have a study group, you have people who know you, trust you and respect you, and there is enough common rapport that they’ll tell you, “Actually, that’s a terrible idea, John. You should not do that.” And that, I think, is the main thing — that if we don’t have a study group, then we run the risk of being in a little bit of an echo chamber where we have our clients who think we’re amazing, we have our team who thinks we’re amazing, and we don’t have that objective force that helps propel us forward.

Bedoya: We’ve had our study group for the last 10 years. It was not intentional that we wanted to start a study group. It was just a realization that after an Annual Meeting, it was very helpful to get together with like-minded people, friends, people we knew and trusted, and just discuss the meeting. We talked about what takeaways we could apply, what reached us, what information was helpful, what was not, and how that information, that new knowledge, those takeaways, could help us grow.

We hired a coach to help us structure what we now started calling a study group. But it was completely unplanned. It was a concerted effort to do that, but it worked out beautifully.

A lot came as a result of our involvement with MDRT; all members in our study group are MDRT members. We all go to the meetings. It truly elevated the quality of our professions.

Di Bella: I’ve been a part of the study group for 15 years. I was looking for personal and professional growth and just knew I really couldn’t do it alone. So I was seeking out some guidance. Ultimately, our group came together very organically. Similar to your story and meeting at MDRT, we met at various industry events. We were like-minded people. A few of us actually went to a baseball game, so that’s kind of how things started. Then we formalized and added a lot of structure to our group.

I started working with a partner, who was my dad. It was a very interesting dynamic: two very different people with two very different visions and goals. My dad was very much the old-school insurance salesman, and he was great at it. I wanted to go in another direction and get into holistic, comprehensive planning and asset management, which was really foreign to him and not what his passion was.

He was actually in our study group for many years, and the group spent a full day at our Annual Meeting really helping my dad and me create a structure and strategy in our own practice where we could both thrive in our different directions and our specialties. I’m not sure that that difficult conversation would have happened had it not been for the support of our study group. It really was transformational for me and for my family, and for my dad as well.

Bedoya: We didn’t really know how to structure a study group. There wasn’t a lot of material even within the Resource Zone at MDRT on how to start a study group. I love the word Joe used, “organically” — that is how we started navigating this process. We hired a coach who had coached advisors for many years, and she led us to a book and a system called “The One Page Business Plan” written by Jim Horan. There are many versions of it, including a version for financial advisors. It offers very specific simple steps to follow to create your mission statement, your vision statement, your objectives, goals, tasks, etc.

We followed that process so that we all knew what each one wanted to accomplish during that year. The key is holding each other accountable. The combination of structure and method with the safety that we all felt were the key elements that contributed to a successful study group.

Demboski: This is a really good place right here, right now, to find whom you might want to pull together for a study group. What are you going to talk about? What’s your agenda going to look like? What’s your format? What’s your structure? For our study group, we organized it into backstage ideas that we are going to talk about — things like running the practice, organizational, operational, technology, HR, front stage — which is more client deliverables, presentations and marketing. We call it “relationship development” instead of “business development” because we are all in the relationship business. The ideas were: How are we going to develop? What are we going to do? What are the things we’re going to do to develop relationships?

Di Bella: I was in two study groups. One failed and one thrived. Spending time and determining why the one failed was really important and helped lead to why our current group is so successful. Part of it is the structure of our annual retreat. We put together a very thorough agenda. The group is small enough where we can get feedback from the other members to make sure that we are touching upon all the things that they want to talk about during the meeting. But I want to make it clear that during our group’s annual meeting, there were times where some of us, including me, wanted to leave the group.

The reason was that I didn’t feel like I was getting what I wanted from the group because there wasn’t clarity in setting expectations for the members in what they needed to come to the annual retreat with. Instead of complaining and just calling it a problem, we took action — myself and another member who’s here — and we built out a thorough agenda. That was really key. The other piece is that we meet once a year for five days. This is a big commitment. We’re asking each other to take time away from our family and our business.

So we have to find value, and we have to have takeaways. Several years ago we created this round robin, where each member has the other seven members at the end of the meeting tell that member about their biggest takeaways and what their changes should be based on the discussion that we had throughout the week. What it results in is an action plan that each member now has to take home with them and follow up with, which is awesome. Then we create buddies where two members of the group come together monthly, and it’s just an accountability check-in to use.

This was a process. We did make a lot of mistakes. The other group that didn’t work was really focused on investment and planning strategies. It was a one-day quick data dump, and there was no additional connection. That group just fell by the wayside, unfortunately. It was a great group of people, very intelligent, very successful, but there wasn’t that emotional tie-in, which is what I was looking for in a group.

Murdock: I think that resonated a lot with me because in my group, a couple of things were similar. First, we had one person leave the group and then come back about six to 10 months later begging to get back into the group.

Di Bella: Did you let the person back in?

Murdock: We did let him back in, but it was really interesting to see. He left the group thinking that it didn’t provide value and came back when he was ready to see that value. But I do think another element that’s very similar for us is the need to have accountability after the fact. You have these people whom you can reach out to, or have these expectations of you, but it’s also accountability that you show up with a plan. In our group we all check in. We say we’re documenting whatever is going on in our life, and here’s where we are, and we’re going to be present. And then we go into what we call the “5 percent update.” This is about the biggest wins or challenges that we have right now, and we’re supposed to pick two. A lot of them are business-related. Sometimes they are personal-related, but it allows us to peel back some of those layers of vulnerability and dive into the two greatest things that have been impacting us. Then we talk about the feelings that are associated with it, how urgent it is. Then, as a group, we vote on what we’re going to talk about.

Sometimes it’s a very personal situation. Other times it’s a business challenge that we vote for, kind of saying, “OK, well none of us has anything that’s really urgent on the emotional scale, but we all are feeling this challenge. Let’s have a business discussion about this specific topic.”

Then we do what’s called asking clarifying questions to someone whom we nominate. Then we get into the nitty-gritty. But this structure we mapped out, we go over it every time and make sure we stick to it even when some of us don’t like to follow rules. It really allows us to have that combination, Joe, that you were just talking about of emotional and personal, mixed with a lot of professional planning, because we are all in the same industry.