The Real Reason You're Exhausted Delivering Your Mastermind (and How to Fix It)

Are you secretly wondering if your mastermind business model is what's draining your energy - or if there's a smarter way to scale without burning out? I’m sharing what really causes exhaustion for coaches and consultants, and exactly how you can build a thriving mastermind business model that supports your biggest ambitions AND aligns with your personal life and goals.

What You'll Learn:
00:00 The real reason why you are exhausted delivering your mastermind
01:53 Too many calls? What to do instead
03:05 My 4-week mastermind cycle
09:30 High ticket does not mean always on
11:09 Boundaries, notifications and how we use Slack
13:18 Can your mastermind grow without you?

Take a look at what's feeling heavy, take a look at some of the reasons that I share in this episode, and consider where you can restructure your mastermind so that it’s way more congruent for you within your life, and also as an ongoing, sustainable, high-profit business model.

LINKS:

FREE GUIDE: Sell Out & Retain Mastermind Clients in 2026: https://ellieswift.com/mastermind2026

Connect with Ellie on Instagram: https://instagram.com/elliehswift

Subscribe to Inside The Mastermind Newsletter: https://ellieswift.com/newsletter

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@elliehswift

Keen to work together?

1. Sell Out Your Mastermind: The Mastermind Model - https://ellieswift.com/model
2. Be Coached By Ellie to $500k+ : The Scalable Freedom Mastermind - https://ellieswift.com/scalablefreedom

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Let's talk about the real reason why you are exhausted delivering your mastermind and exactly how we're gonna fix it. So there's a season that I see in so many clients' businesses, and this was absolutely true for me as well, where you set up your mastermind and you get to this point where you feel like you're holding far too much. You've created your mastermind, you've got a reasonably good sales system going, and then suddenly, before you know it, you've capped your income and you don't know how to scale without completely burning yourself out. What can happen is that you get to this point and it's really easy to make the business model wrong. You start telling yourself that having a mastermind isn't actually a good business model. You don't want to have clients. High ticket is way too much work. And it's at that point that you usually need the reminder that all businesses have their trade-offs. And also, high ticket doesn't have to mean heavy. There are some really smart and powerful ways that you can change the structure of your mastermind so that you aren't exhausted like you are now. And in this episode, I'm going to take you through them. Hi, I'm Ellie Swift. If you're an online coach or consultant, a paid mastermind is the smartest way to scale your online business for freedom. Welcome to the side of the internet that teaches you exactly how to do that. As someone who's made more than $4 million running masterminds with retention rates that average 80% plus. Before I continue on, just a note to share that if you want the sales and retention guide to blow up your mastermind in 2026, then you can just click on the link under this video or in the show notes to access it now. It's free. They're the strategies that I'm personally focused on for 2026 and also teaching my clients. Okay, so in this episode, I'm gonna take you through the reasons that you likely feel exhausted right now in your mastermind and exactly what we're gonna do about it. So, reason number one why you might be feeling this way is that your mastermind is currently way too coal heavy. So, one of the most common ways I see people burn out is that their mastermind offer becomes completely overstaffed with calls. And it happens really sneakily at the start. You know, you believe the fastest way to impress and retain your clients is to give them more of what they want. So they ask for more and you add on more calls, but before you know it, they're completely overwhelmed, you're completely overwhelmed, and you don't know what you can take away from them because it's really tricky to add something into your mastermind and then take it away. If that's you, I've got a solution for you. So I personally found that one of my bigger sources of stress in the first few years of running my mastermind was that I didn't have a clear call schedule. I was taking calls every day at all times of day. The best thing I ever did was to ask myself the question, how do I actually want to work? So I sat down and I devised myself a system where I was able to map out my ultimate month, one that felt really spacious and where I was also able to do epic client delivery and also time on the business for me. So, what I'm gonna do is I'll give you a snapshot of what it looks like. If you're listening and you're on the go, maybe you're walking along the beach, you might want to come back and take notes. We'll timestamp in this where I kick off having this conversation, talking about the four-week cycle. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take you through each week in just a moment. But first of all, I wanted to speak to the structure of my week themselves. So these days, since having Sunny, my toddler, I do a four-day work week inside the business. Mondays are my no-call days, and there's a couple of really specific things that I do on my Mondays. So the first thing that I do is I make sure that my team is briefed for the week. So I go through and have conversations with my team members, specifically with my business manager, so that they're super, super clear on exactly what our priorities are within the business that week. And so everyone knows exactly what they need to do to achieve those objectives. So making sure my team is set up, really clear, feel great about what's coming for the week is a massive priority and super important as CEO. What I find is that if I don't have those conversations consistently, everyone's kind of a bit untethered throughout the week. And that's where things aren't as efficient as they could be. So that's the first thing that I do on a Monday. The second thing is I use Monday as my like project day. So for example, the Monday just gone, I went through and I mapped out a keynote that I'm running next month. So spend a few hours like deep in project work on that. Something else that I might do on a Monday is go through and, you know, maybe write out a new workshop or update a new funnel or create curriculum, like those big meaty project things. And then the third thing that I do is content. So I batch my content over a month. And on a Monday, I'll do one piece of that batching process. So it might be that I'm scripting out podcast episodes. It might be that I'm going through and writing captions, it might be that I'm doing some B-roll, whatever it is, I'll always do that on a Monday. So that's my Monday, like big CEO focused day. Then Tuesday to Thursday within the week are where I take calls. So again, I'll talk about the weeks in a moment, but just know for now that Tuesday to Thursday during the week are the days that I take calls. I used to be a little bit more like brutal about taking like big cold days and getting them done over maybe one to two days during the week. I find that nowadays it is so much more effective for me if I split up my calls over those three days and I have max three to four calls a day. It's usually more like two calls. I average around five to eight hours of calls per week. But knowing that I set it up in that way means that there's more spaciousness within my calendar. My team know the exact slots that they can book clients into across those three days within the week where I take calls. And from there, I know cold days Tuesday to Thursday with clients. I'm good to go. Friday is my day completely off with Sunny. The only thing I do on that Friday is I'll check in with clients when Sunny's napping. Pray for me that that nap lasts as long as possible. Otherwise, I'll check in with clients first thing in the morning before she wakes up. So we've talked about the week. Now let's talk about the schedule of calls. So I split up my calendar so I operate on a four-week schedule. Week number one is a group mastermind call week. Week number two is a one-to-one client call week. Week number three is a group mastermind call week. Week number four, no calls. So let's talk through that in more detail. So the way that I have my mastermind set up and my mastermind model program is that I run group calls. So for me, most of my time is spent in calls for my mastermind. I then run one group call a month for the mastermind model. My group calls are all set up in weeks one and three of my month. So I know that I've got those group calls on weeks one and week three. Then I have the majority of my one-to-one calls. So for my clients, I take some of those one-to-one calls. If you join my mastermind, you get some one-to-ones with me. You don't have to do that inside your mastermind for the types of women I support, the level of business that they're at. I know that it helps to fast track their process. And I honestly love doing one-to-one. It's like one of my favorite things. Um, so that is week two where I have the majority of my one-to-one clients. And then week four, I have no calls. What do I do in that week? I do things like this. I come into the podcast studio and do a full day in here. I have bigger strategy days where I'm progressing like bigger pieces of work. And, you know, I shared this on the podcast last year, but I found out that for me, the way my brain works, being more of an ADHD brain, like having things segmented in this way works so, so well for me. And in fact, I've I've almost created more layers over time and more structures and more systems with things like batching content that just support me to be able to do really big things, hold my clients in, you know, big ways, and also know that it's set up to support me as well. So I'm not saying right now inside your business you aren't taking too many calls. You might be, in which case you'd want to look at how you can reduce those calls for yourself and also supporting your clients by either bringing support coaches in to take those calls or reducing the structure of calls from your overall mastermind. If you were a client or you in the mastermind model, that is something that I would help you do. So it's a way where everyone wins. But it might just mean that instead of that, you actually just need to look at how you can structure your month in a way that's really going to support you, not burn you out, make you feel like you have so much energy to give, because you've always got that built-in time where you can like move through different seasons of your business. You know, we as women, like we're cyclical beings. And if we've got a really rigid structure inside our business where we don't get, you know, call time off, where we don't get more of that time for creativity, for play, for fun, for deep focused work inside our business, then that is when we usually end up burning out. And so looking at the structure of how you're running your business is key. Okay, so reason number two is that you think high ticket being accessible to your clients means that you need to be always on. So if you're running a high-ticket mastermind and you have the opportunity to be coached between calls, you have between call support inside your business. For us, we use Slack for that. And we have pretty high levels of accessibility of both myself and our support coach, NIV. If you have that structure inside your business, you are going to feel completely exhausted by that structure if you don't create really clear boundaries both for your clients and for yourself. So I call this container criteria. The framework that I use when you're structuring your mastermind is five C's. One of them is container criteria. And inside of that container criteria, you want to first of all be really clear with your clients on the boundaries of how and when they can access you. And more importantly, when they're going to get a response. So our clients know that inside our mastermind, they can message us anytime within Slack. They are so free to do that. And they will get a response either same day or next day. So for me personally, I know that as leader, as head coach inside that mastermind, I can have messages sitting there in Slack. And that does not mean that I'm always on or that my energy needs to be fragmented and everywhere just because I haven't replied to those messages. I'm unwavering in knowing that I go in and I check Slack once or twice per day. My team is in Slack twice per day to reply to those messages. But where you start feeling always on is if you decide that if there's unread messages, that that means you can't switch off. When actually that is not the case at all. You switch on only when you decide you're going to be showing up inside those channels and you switch off when you tap out. Where your energy starts getting really fragmented and drained is when you have notifications on. I cannot even imagine a world of having notifications on. So if you have those on right now, turn them off, please. For the love of your business model, for the love of your sanity, turn off notifications. Take the apps off your phone. I don't have Slack on my phone. I will download it if ever I'm like out and about for the day and I want it to be on my phone. So for example, right now it's on my phone, but usually not on my phone, only accessible on my desktop. And again, my clients will tell you like we are pretty accessible inside the mastermind, but I never feel that feeling of being fragmented or always on because I'm really clear that I'm on when I'm in Slack and I have a one-touch rule. I see the thing and I'll respond unless I decide that I need a little bit of a moment to sit on something, in which case that becomes the decision and I park it and I come back later. But otherwise, it's one touch, I reply, I'm out of there. I'm not thinking about being in Slack or when I need to be in Slack next. I'm really clear on those boundaries. So if you feel like you're always on, it's probably more of an energetic issue than it is structural, unless you need to create better structural boundaries for your clients, which is just a case of communicating those boundaries, communicating the container criteria. But for you, you need to be the leader who is unwavering. Running a mastermind requires peak leadership. You need to be able to be the person who can hold that energy of I come in when I come in, I respond when I respond. And guess what? That energy helps your clients to get better results because you're leading in a way that is strong, magnetic, unwavering, discerning, and clear. And that's the type of mastermind leader that people actually want. Okay, so reason number three is that your business doesn't pass the scalable freedom test and it can't currently grow without you. So if you want to scale your mastermind, you truly cannot do it alone. Delivery, sales, systems, it all requires time. And yes, while at the start, it may just be you. Your job as the business owner is to work out where your time is best spent as you scale. My clients who are running masterminds with 30 plus people, they're not doing it alone. They have one or more of these three specific types of mastermind support backend systems, coaching and delivery, and sales closes. Now, they might start as the only coach inside their mastermind and they might run the sales process themselves. But as the business grows, they bring in more infrastructure. You're gonna need to do the same if you want to scale, want your mastermind to be sustainable and have it as a key part of your business for the long haul. So let me give you a personal example here. Back in 2024, I went on maternity leave for three months. I literally didn't open Slack for three months. My co-coach Nivran all of my calls. She served my clients completely and beautifully with zero problems. Now I'm personally the head coach. So what I chose to do during that time was I changed the rate that I offered my clients because it made sense to do that to honor the relationship and as a reflection of the value. But my point is that the business continued to run. In fact, 95% of my clients during that time decided to continue on. Before that specific MATLAB window, I spent three years trying to conceive. We did 18 months of that doing IVF. For the first two years of my journey, my clients didn't even know. And I share that to say that my mastermind was and is set to handle life as well. I think that especially if you're a woman aged between like 30 and 55, you're in what society tells us is the biggest time of our lives. We need business models that work with our lives. And I think the endless chaos of, you know, chasing passive revenue models actually creates more chaos inside our nervous systems and to our businesses. And what we actually need are businesses that we love working in, that generate amazing profit and that we can be flexible inside so that we can build these big, beautiful lives alongside them. So I'd really encourage you to ask yourself: does my business currently pass the scalable freedom test? These are some of the reasons that I see as to why your mastermind might feel heavy right now. I'd really encourage you to not decide that it's a business model problem, because again, this is just a trend, a pattern that I see is that we get to a point inside our business where, you know, we've scaled to a point and we go, this is not it for me. This is not the business for me. When usually what we need to do is go through and just tweak the process, tweak the strategy, tweak the system so that it does actually work for us, especially as we're scaling. It means that we might need to change some infrastructure, means that we might need to tweak some calls, we might need to tweak the program, we might need to tweak how we're showing up inside the program. Every single business model will have its trade-offs. And I say that as somebody who myself has run multiple different business models inside my business, but it's also coached my clients through one-to-one agency, membership, masterminds, digital programs, like all different structures. And for a mastermind in particular, this is one of the snags that can occur, is that it can feel heavy because we're selling these higher ticket products. However, it is not a thing that needs to stay that way. And if somebody's telling you that it does, they just haven't mastered the things that I've shared in this episode. So take a look at what's feeling heavy. Take a look at some of these reasons that I've shared and consider where you can restructure so that your mastermind can be way more congruent for you within your life and also as an ongoing sustainable high profit business model. Okay, so if you've loved this episode, I'd really encourage you to subscribe. You can subscribe over on YouTube, just forward slash LEH Swift, so that you can get weekly episodes about all things starting and scaling your masterminds so that you are running a sold out mastermind business, whether it's your only offer inside your business or it is part of your offer suite. Can't wait to be back here with you again. Till then.