Business Mentorship 101: What Gym Owners Need to Know

And if you want to talk about mentorship, just go to gym owners united.com. That's our free group run by my company, two Brain Business set up to help gym owners for free until they're ready to help get a mentor and make progress faster. There's over 10,000 gym owners in that free group, gym owners united.com . You can go there right now and join up while you're listening to this podcast.

Now I wanna talk today about mentorship and coaching. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but business coaching is different from mentorship. Mentorship and coaching are really essential for entrepreneurs looking to save time and avoid expensive mistakes. If you read the biography of any entrepreneur that you really admire, you'll find that they have both paid and free mentors in their life.

And sometimes we say coaching, sometimes we say mentorship, but they're not the same. And so knowing the difference can mean the difference between quick wins and long-term success. So first, let's just take a moment and define the difference between mentorship and coaching. Mentorship is done by people who have been where you are right now.

It's a long-term relationship focused on strategic guidance over time, looking at the future and saying, here's how we get there. It's usually niche specific, meaning that fitness business mentors understand gym ownership and it's different from coaching. Coaching is usually a short-term relationship that addresses specific obstacles like, Hey, I need help fixing my ads funnel.

It's usually tactical with knowledge specific expertise. You don't hire a referral marketing specialist to work on your ads usually. It usually focuses on removing immediate roadblocks like hiring and Instagram ads, and sometimes even mindset.

So just briefly here as a summary, coaches are tactical, they're specialists, mentors are strategic, and they take a long-term vision and they can usually connect you with the specialist that you need right then. So I'll give you two examples. I always am working with a mentor and I'm usually working with a mentor for two to three years at a time.

This is one-on-one, they know what my goals are for my company and they'll work to help me build a roadmap and then break that roadmap down into specific steps. Chris, do this right now. Chris, you need to hire for this role. You know, here's your deadline. Let's, here's the tools that you need to hire for this role. Let's work backward to do it.

A coach is usually brought in on a short term assignment to, to fix a specific problem. So for example, I have a speaking coach that I speak to, her name's Janice, and I start talking to her in the April every year and I give her my summit speech. She goes through it, we tweak it up to make it better and more impactful. And then I record myself giving that speech probably a dozen times between April and June.

She gives me feedback each time and coaches me to get better. Now, a coach , uh, are really, really, really specific in their knowledge base. You can hire a coach at your gym to coach, you know, your method if you want to. Um, that's not the same as hiring a mentor. A mentor can connect you with the specialists, the coaches, the tools, the resources as we do in two brain .

Uh , but a mentor usually takes a longer term view and says, here's where you want to go and here's the steps to get there. And they can do that. And they can do it most powerfully because they've been there themselves. And so they can kind of guide you along the journey. Okay, so, you know, I have different coaches at different times.

They usually come in, spend two to three months working with me on a specific thing. And I have mentors who work with me longer term to get the company to where I want to get it to. Two brain business is a mentorship practice. There are four different models that you're gonna encounter in the fitness business that are I see right now.

So these are one-on-one mentorship, one to a few mentorship, one to a big group, group coaching and round tables. Let's go through each one here just to give you the pros and cons. Let's start with one-on-one mentorship. You know, a one-on-one mentor saved my gym and one-on-one mentorship has the best results of any type of coaching or mentorship that I've ever seen.

It's really hard to measure and compare, but the reality here is that like most business coaches who operate in a big group don't measure results and they do that on purpose because they don't wanna be accountable for your success. Mentors measure your results and are therefore accepting the challenge of making you more successful. Now they can't do it for you, but you know, let's talk about how it actually works.

So in two Brain , when you sign up, you are paired based on your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities with a mentor that you're gonna work with one-on-one. And they're going to first work with you through some basic things like how to set up your day to get work done. And then they're gonna give you specific things to do, build an on-ramp, learn to sell it, build a pricing binder, et cetera .

And at first these wins come very, very quickly. It doesn't take a lot of time to do these things and the mentor will do it right with you on the call just to make sure that you get it done.

What they're really doing here is helping you get some quick wins, make you know , a quick return on your investment, but also they are teaching you to focus, they're teaching you to make progress and they're teaching you to get things done that will actually grow your business. So the pros of one-on-one mentorship are that it's personalized.

You know, you don't have to sit on a call waiting for a topic to come up that's interesting to you. You're gonna talk just about your business. It's a long-term focus. It solves your individual problems quickly and it's ideal for planning and strategy. The cons of a one-on-one mentor are that you really have to have a good client mentor match. You know, if you're matched with a mentor, that's not a good match for you.

They're not gonna get their best from you. You know, some people want to be told, Hey Chris, let's go do this right now, get it done by Friday. Some people don't. Some people want to hear the why, you know, and you need to know that coming into mentorship with 56 mentors on our team, we're pretty darn good at matching people up.

And we've also done this 2,500 times, like we're good at knowing when a mentor match is good. But you can always switch to , there's also a risk over time when you're working with a mentor one-on-one, that that relationship will become too friendly. And this for me is the first red flag. There's a fine line to walk here between accountability and , uh, empathy. And so you want , uh, a mentor who is empathetic.

They've been where you are, they've gone to where you wanna go and they can help you get there. But you don't want one that's too sympathetic, like, oh, I understand why you didn't do your work this month. You have to really get somebody that can walk that line. And over time, if you're with one mentor for too long, that relationship can become too friendly. It's cool to get a Christmas card from your mentor.

It's not really cool to get like a new sweater, you know, it's, it's , that's friending not mentoring. And this is why also like we really think that you should have a mentor that you pay because when you just have kind of a mentor who's a good friend, maybe he's your uncle or your aunt and they show up at your house and they give you some advice, you're not, you know, likely to take that seriously.

You really need somebody who is objective, who is paid, and they are invested in you. It's you are invested in them. Okay? So we start with one-on-one mentorship with everybody to create replicable systems. Like last year we had 288 owners get to earning a hundred thousand dollars per year from their gym for the first time. That's what you get when you've got that like , really good ma mentor match one-on-one.

Now let's talk about one to few mentorships . So this is when the business coach or the mentor is working with a small group of three to let's say eight people at a time. These are usually called masterminds because the people in the room are pre-filtered to for success. You might also hear these called boards in some organizations. There's a lot of pros here. Number one, there's pure support.

I mean, let's face it, the bigger your company gets, the more lonely you're going to feel. You can't really brainstorm with your staff at , at a certain level because they start thinking like we're doing this, or they start getting frustrated. You can't really turn to your staff for support. Like, golly gee, this is so hard. You shouldn't be posting that stuff on Facebook, but you need somebody.

And so the one to few , the , the masterminds, the boards, that's really where you can get this kind of support.

Um, you also get some varied experiences in networking, you know, so for example, years ago when I was thinking about how can I help two brain gyms promote themselves and like spread their message for them, I was working on in a mastermind with a gentleman who had a business coaching practice for lawn care companies and he said, oh yeah, we have this , uh, video contest.

We give a $10,000 grand prize and everybody submits their video and then they use those videos and we use the videos and everybody gets benefit outta this. And you know, that's kind of something that we've done up till this day is we've had video contests, we've had prizes, et cetera . We even sponsor other people's video contests now. So masterminds are great. Here's the problem or the cons of a mastermind.

Number one, you have to have strong filters in place, right? You have to know who else is in that group. And you, the participant need to know that everybody is like at your level.

If they're a little bit above your level, that's great for you, it's probably not that great for them because there's a risk of getting bad advice if you don't have those filters and you just assume like everybody here is doing great, what can happen is that , uh, other people in your group are just guessing, they're sharing opinions, they haven't been where you want to go. They're not even where you are at yet.

And so what they're doing is just saying like, well, you know, do this. But they're not saying, I think this is a good idea. They're speaking is if they have experience when really they don't. So the , the better a mastermind is, the fewer of these filters you have to know. For example, I'm in a mastermind that's called Strategic Coach. It was one of the original business coaching programs, it's run by Dan Sullivan.

You might have read his books like who not how 10 x is easier than ten two X, et cetera. I know that in my group everybody is earning at least a million dollars a year. I'm just giving that as an example of one filter.

Now in our Tinker program at Two Brain , we know that like to get into that mastermind, 'cause that is a mastermind, you have to be making at least a hundred K in net owner benefit per year from your gym. These are some of the top 10% gyms in Two Brain . They have to qualify to get into that mastermind.

But once they get in there, now they've got a peer group, they've got some brainstorming, they've got varied experiences, they've got networking, you know, at that level nobody's an expert on everything up to that level of getting you to a hundred K and owner , uh, net owner benefit, you know, making your gym really profitable.

There are fewer options and fixed paths and a lot of clarity, but when you get to that level and you're thinking about buying multiple gyms, there's no one expert anymore. You really want to be in a room, but you don't wanna be in a room full of beginners. You don't wanna be in a room full of people who had a gym, went bankrupt and got a job working for a software company, right?

Like the stuff that you see in a Facebook group, you want that filter in your mastermind and that's what makes a mastermind really good. We use a mastermind at our highest level program in Tinker because we know that people have gotten to that certain level and now they have freedom of time, they have freedom of finances, they can travel, they're speaking from experience, they're not guessing anymore.

They have a certain level of knowledge about how accounting works and investing. They've done it before themselves. They're not just firing from the hip anymore. So that's a powerful filter and that's what makes a mastermind really, really good. Now, most masterminds are going to be expensive, and the reason is that people who are in a mastermind, number one, can afford it.

But number two, the people who are running the mastermind keep that group small on purpose. They're not playing a volume game, they're not gonna get 300 people. They are going to put together a very high value group with maybe eight, nine people in it. And that means they're gonna charge for that. And that's part of the filtering process too, by the way.

Now let's go to the third option, which is one too many group coaching. So in this type of program, you're on a call, you know, maybe it's Wednesday or Friday or Monday or whatever, and maybe the call is 60 to 90 minutes and there's one person leading the call. And what they're gonna do is bring up a topic, they're gonna present that topic and then they're gonna say, okay, bring up your challenges.

And in a good group coaching setting, the group coach is usually a moderator. It's not just kind of like their word over everybody. What they're doing is saying, okay, Chris has this challenge. Who else has overcome that challenge? And in great examples they're saying, do you have experience or is this your opinion? Is this just an idea? Now in bad group coaching programs, you don't even have that.

You basically have a Zoom call with one person giving advice at the center of it. And unfortunately this means a lot of wasted time. It means a lot of filtering, a lot of time spent asking like, do they really know what they're doing? Do they really have experience in all of these things? You can't really take what they're saying for granted is true. You know, you gotta take everything with a grain of salt.

You're basically there to get opinions and frankly, you can get opinions for free. This is why we don't do a group coaching program at Two Brain right now. There are some pros to a group coaching program. Number one, there's a bit of community accountability. So if you're in a big group call and there's 30 people, you can stay anonymous. You don't even have to turn your camera on, nobody's even gonna notice.

But if within that group you take the initiative to make two or three friends start a subgroup of your own, like a breakout or your own kind of mini mastermind, you can hold each other accountable. So that is possible. Next, the pro is really that it's scalable for the coach. I mean, the reason that people run these models is to create a lifestyle for themselves, not for the people who are in the program.

For the coach. It's a coach centric business, one-on-one mentorship Two Brain is a client-centric business. We build it the way that we do it to help you best. Not because it scales faster, not because it's cheaper , not because it's the most profitable model for the coach, but because it's what's gonna get the client the best results. Group coaching is a coach centric business. It's a lifestyle business for the coach.

They don't have to do a lot of work, they don't have staff to manage super duper profitable, but there's not a lot of accountability, right? They're probably not measuring the client results because they don't wanna own responsibility for getting the client results. There's also a lack of personalization.

You know, you can sit in a lot of group coaching calls without finding anything that's really relevant to you, and then it's up to you to figure out like, is this what I should do or not? It's usually reactive rather than proactive. They can't go around and build an annual plan for everybody. What they can do though is you get on a call and you say, I've got this big problem with my coach.

You might be able to find something to help you fight that fire. Okay? So you know, this is something that we include , uh, in our program at No Extra Charge, and it's called Office Hours. So what some people do is they charge for this, this is their whole program. They do group coaching, you get on a call, we just build it in for people that want extra support.

So for example, this Wednesday in our office hours, we have a sales role play . You know, Nick Hach , who's a mentor at Two Brain comes on the call, he's got a topic to start people off, and then he helps people role play , get better at the thing that they're weakest at for an hour. And it's topic specific.

You're that he's not just coming on the call one minute beforehand, waiting for people to bring him topics and then just shooting from the hip and trying to make guesses about what works. If you can't tell, I do have a bit of a bias against group coaching programs because I've been in 15 of them. And it's always the same thing. It's, it's great for the coach, it's not great for the client.

The client has to spend a lot of time trying to figure out like what's best for them. Right? Now that's usually just playing defense. It might be helpful in putting out a couple of the big fires that you have right now, but the reality is it's not gonna evolve into a long-term plan that's gonna grow your gym. In fact, the most successful group coaching programs out there are selling to other group coaching programs.

It's kind of this House of cards effect where you've got these business coaches selling business coaching to business coaches who will turn around and sell business coaching to business coaches. You know, I don't wanna call it a pyramid, but when there's one person at the top doing all the coaching, you know, it kind of takes that shape. Now the fourth method of mentorship or the model is round tables.

And the pros of a round table , you just, you show up an event, it's probably cheap, it might be free. And you know, you sit down with 12 people and you're probably just sitting in a random spot. Maybe you know these people, maybe they're your friends, maybe they're not. Maybe you're even placed at a table. It's an open discussion format, right? Like nobody is the expert, right? Sounds good. People are free to share.

The cons are, there's no filters. You have no idea what kind of context is coming from this person who's sitting beside you giving advice. Are they as successful as you? Maybe maybe not. You know, if you're at a CrossFit round table , they might say, oh, I own a 13 year affiliate. Does that mean they've been in business for 13 years or are they the third owner? Like, you don't have these filters. You have to ask.

And most people don't. There's also a risk of misinformation or harmful advice at a round table . So, you know, I'll , I'll use the example of the , the CrossFit discussion boards. And I don't just mean to pick on CrossFit because a lot of organizations do this, but what happens is you've got 10 people at a table, right? Everybody wants to help, everybody wants to contribute.

And so they're all giving advice, but there's nobody asking, is this advice based on experience or is it your opinion? Or is it a random idea that you just had right now? Like, has this actually worked for you? There's also, you know, the risk that what worked for one person won't work for anybody else because there's no way to track data, there's no centralized repository of like truth.

So often you can tell me if you disagree with this, but the loudest voices in a round table tend to dominate, even if there's no clear leader. And regardless of their expertise, they tend to be giving advice. Now, look back to the CrossFit story. Before there were in-person round tables, there was something that was called a CrossFit message board. And if you're an og, you're probably chuckling listening to this.

I made the mistake in 2008 when, when I, you know, I was a brand new affiliate, I was so excited, how do I do this? Go on the CrossFit affiliate board, and you ask advice if you ask about money at all. First of all, they were like, you're in this for the wrong reasons. Get out. Quit CrossFit. So now you're scared to ask about money, even if you're losing it.

If you ask like, how many people should I have in a class? They're gonna tell you something. If you say like, how much should I pay my coaches? They're gonna tell you something. And taking the advice from the message boards I thought was coming from successful OGs, I had no idea, right? Most people were using their real name, but I couldn't go visit their gym, they wouldn't show me their books.

And if I asked 'em about money, they would be like, get lost loser. You know, you , you greedy bastard. So I couldn't ask them about money, I couldn't see any proof. There was no data set , there was no comparing who was actually doing well. And so I took all of the advice at face value.

Well , in under a year I had a bankrupt affiliate, and I was feeding that affiliate from the revenues that I was making from my personal training studio, which kept it afloat until I figured out that the advice that I was seeing on the CrossFit message boards was A wrong B harmful, and c sometime delivered with ill intent. So I had no filters for that, right?

I, I was so enthusiastic about the method CrossFit that I believed everybody, everybody on those message boards was my hero. And while there were people out there giving real advice, like Brian Trump and Josh Murphy, there were also people out there who really didn't know what they were talking about. Like, you know, what kind of beer should you put in your fridge? That was a really common question on those boards.

Back in those days, we weren't talking about the things that mattered. And so because you had no central figure saying this is what's more important, you still hear things like, if you just get your coaches more credentialed, you'll have a better business. Well, of course that's false, but it's what people wanna talk about at a round table . And so it's what gets said and what gets heard.

Let's talk about choosing the right model for you. Now. First, there's a few guidelines. What I would start with always is a one-on-one mentor. But who do you pick? Is it, you know, aunt Sally? Is it the gym down the street that appears to be doing better than me? Or is it somebody who does this all the time professionally? Well, you know, I'll, I'll liken this to fitness.

When people come to you as a fitness coach, it's because they're tired of taking advice from, and Sally, they're tired of asking for a , a program from the dude next door and they want somebody professional who only thinks about fitness all day long. And that's all they do. And that's what we do at Two Brain . We train mentors, we certify mentors, we , uh, have like continuing education requirements.

We drill, we practice, we get people better outcomes because that's what we're focused on. I think everybody should start one-on-one with a mentor to solve their individual problems and then to build an individual plan for their gym. Like no two gyms are the same.

Even if you're in a franchise, your needs, your market, your coaching, your staff, you as the CEO , your different, you wanna work one-on-one with people to start over time. After you've hit kind of the bare minimum goals, you know , a hundred k take home , that's when you can progress to a mastermind or even group coaching because you'll have developed those filters of what's actually working.

And you'll have a sense of who should I listen to? Who should I ask, who should I connect with here? And who can I kind of avoid or ignore? Okay, when you're scaling from one successful gym to many gyms, varied perspectives become really valuable, but they're only valuable because you've got the skill as the CEO to filter them to tell who's valuable and who's not.

And it really helps when you're joining a mastermind to know what the filters are to get there. So if you're not asked how much are you making or bring your p and l or are you earning over this much? Can you prove it? There's a chance. There's no filters and anybody's coming in, you know, I was in one of these, these group coaching programs this one time and a guy from my own town was in this program.

He'd been my client when he was a kid. And you know, we're placed in the same round table . Of course, you know , I've got a business that is maybe a hundred to a thousand times bigger than his and he is giving me advice. And finally I was like, you know, is this experience or is this ideas ? And he's like, oh, well I heard it from somebody else, but he'd never done it himself. But he was willing to help.

He wanted to help, but he didn't understand that maybe his advice wouldn't be the best for me or wouldn't apply in my situation. And so when you're in these round tables or even in a mastermind, you have to burn a lot of mental calories figuring out what advice to take and what to ignore.

So that's why you gotta be really careful, especially with round tables masterminds, a lot of that filtering is done for you, especially if there's like a barrier to entry. I'm in one mastermind where I have to show a p and l every single quarter or I could get kicked out.

The larger your business grows, the more important it is to have a mentor guiding you strategically and coaches who are helping you tactically, you know, quite often I'll use a specialist coach to help me get through like one little thing in my business, but I always have a mentor who's got an eye on the long term , and quite often the mentor is the one who connects me to the coaches too.

Here's the main takeaways today. Mentorship is a long term relationship. It's strategic, it's best when it's niche specific, like you want a fitness business mentor working with your fitness business. Coaching is short term , tactical and knowledge specific.

So for example, let's say that you, you want to build a nutrition program, you should be able to work with somebody for four or five weeks, get your nutrition coach set up, and then they go away, right? Like that's, that's not a long term relationship. If it's part of your program, if all you're doing is nutrition, then by all means like have a nutrition mentor for the long term .

The right model depends on your stage of growth and the challenges that you face. So you want somebody that's familiar with your business, who's been where you are, who's gotten to where you want to get to and can show you the steps to get there. You should be able to ask a mentor at any point, like, what are the five biggest steps to get to where I want to go? And what's the next best step for me?

And they should be able to tell you. So evaluate what you need right now. Look, people wait too long to get a mentor. They wait till they're failing. They think like, oh, part of the entrepreneurial journey is figuring this out. Making guesses, that's impossible because none of us are an island. We need to learn from the mistakes of others.

If you have to learn only from your own mistakes, it'll take you five times as long, it'll be five times as expensive and most of the time you won't get there. That's why gyms go outta business, not because the owners are not hardworking, but because the gyms don't make enough money and it's because they don't learn from other people's mistakes. They try to do everything themselves, figure it all out from scratch.

And only when they're desperate do they finally reach out their hand for help. It's not exclusive to the fitness industry, but it's really prevalent here. Two Brain , as I said, works one-on-one. At first, we wanna get you really quick results. We wanna solve your issues, build you a specific plan.

We wanna hold you accountable and give you all the resources that you need without overwhelming you by talking about stuff that doesn't really matter to you right now.

You'll always be available when you're ready for it or when you need it, but there's no sense dwelling on problems you've already solved or tackling challenges that you might not even be faced with you might be able to avoid when you buy mentorship or coaching. You're not just buying advice, you're buying speed.

The right guidance can help you build the gym and the life you've always wanted faster than you thought possible and much faster than you could on your own. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Want a Profitable Gym. And if you want to chat in our free program, go to gym owners united.com. This is a bit of a round table . You're gonna get a lot of advice, but we've got mentors in there.

I'm in there sharing articles, sharing tools that you can use to make money without any commitment at all. I hope to see you in there .