Why there’s more than one Circle

We’ve been asked a fair question a few times lately: if every Circle runs the same way, why does it matter which one you join?

The format really is identical. Twelve people at most, one hour a week, the same faces each time, a trained coach keeping it moving. You report on what you said you’d do, work through whatever got in the way, and leave having committed to one thing for the week ahead. That doesn’t vary between Circles and it isn’t going to.

What varies is who else is in the room, and that matters more than we expected when we started.

Summit is the original, and the mix is the point

Summit came first and still does the thing the club was built to do. Thursdays at 7:00pm UK, which is 2:00pm Eastern, and a room of people working on entirely different things.

That mix is not an accident of who happened to sign up. It’s the most useful feature of the format. When somebody is stuck on a business decision, the person who unsticks them is frequently not another business owner but somebody training for a race, or writing a book, or six weeks into a new job, who recognises the shape of the problem without any of the assumptions that come with knowing the industry. You get asked the obvious question that people in your own field have long since stopped asking.

It also means nobody is competing. Nobody in that room wants your customers or your job, which makes people considerably more honest about the week that went badly than they tend to be among peers.

Atlas exists because of the clock

The second reason to run more than one Circle is boring and practical. A Thursday evening in the UK is the middle of the working afternoon in New York and the small hours in Singapore, so no single slot works for everyone.

Atlas meets Thursdays at 7:00pm Eastern and was set up for people in North America who had looked at the existing times and worked out they didn’t fit. Same format as Summit, same mix of goals, different hour. Between the two of them, most of the people who were previously deciding this wasn’t for them on the basis of a calendar clash now have something that works.

Horizon exists for a different reason

Horizon is for business owners and entrepreneurs growing something, and it exists because that group has a specific version of the problem the club was built around.

Work for someone else and there is structure around you whether you asked for it or not. Somebody notices when a deadline slips. Somebody asks, in a meeting you didn’t arrange, how the thing is going. It can be irritating, and it’s also doing a great deal of work.

Run your own business and none of that exists. Nobody sets your priorities, nobody checks whether the plan you wrote in January survived February, and the urgent arrives with exactly the same insistence as the important with no one around to help you tell them apart. The work that pays this month crowds out the work that builds next year, gradually enough that a quarter can disappear before you notice.

A room of people in the same position is useful in a way a mixed one isn’t, simply because nobody needs it explained. When someone says client work ate the whole month again, everybody knows precisely what that means and the conversation can get straight to what to do about it.

How to choose

Start with the time, because a Circle you can’t reliably attend is worth nothing at all. If only one slot fits your week without negotiation, that’s your answer and you can stop reading.

If you’re in North America and evenings suit you better than afternoons, Atlas.

If a UK evening works, you have a genuine choice, because Summit and Horizon run at the same hour. Take Horizon if you’re running a business and you’d rather not explain that situation every week. Take Summit if you’d rather be asked the obvious question by somebody with no idea how your industry works.

Still unsure? Come to a workshop first. They’re free, they run twice a month, and an hour in that format will tell you more than anything we can write here.

Every Circle caps at twelve, which is what makes them work and also means they fill.

See which Circles have seats here.