Mentorship and coaching are essential for fitness entrepreneurs who are looking to improve their metrics, save time and avoid expensive mistakes—but the two are not the same.
Here, I’ll explain the difference, lay out the pros and cons of the four types of mentorship, and tell you how to select the style and mentor that will produce the best results for you.
Coaches—You hire a coach to address specific obstacles on a timeline. Coaching is used to remove immediate roadblocks with tactics delivered by an expert in a clearly defined niche.
Example: I work with a speaking coach to ensure my presentations at the Two-Brain Summit have the impact I want.
Mentors—You hire a mentor because that person has been where you are right now and can help you avoid mistakes and ascend faster. This is a long-term relationship that centers on strategic guidance to help you accomplish very large goals. Mentors are usually specific to a niche—Two-Brain Business is a fitness business mentorship practice—and they are experts at evaluating a big goal and laying out the exact steps to get there. Along the way, they can connect you to the specialists you need to take any specific step in the plan.
Example: I work with a one-on-one mentor who knows what my goals are for my company. My mentor helps me create a complete roadmap and then break it down into specific steps: “Chris, do this right now. Here are the tools. This is the deadline.”
The Four Models of Mentorship
1. One-on-One Mentorship
One-on-one mentorship produces the best results of any type of coaching or mentorship—a one-on-one mentor saved my gym.
In this relationship, the mentor personally accepts the challenge of making you more successful and measures progress carefully.
When you join Two-Brain, we evaluate your strengths, weaknesses and opportunities so we can pair you with the ideal mentor. That mentor helps you create a broad foundation and develop critical entrepreneurial habits you can use for life. Then the mentor drills into very specific aspects of your business. Early on, we target quick but important wins to build momentum—and your mentor provides resources and accountability.
Pros: This type of mentorship is personalized, so it’s all about you and your business. It’s ideal for long-term strategic planning, and it helps you solve specific problems very quickly.
Cons: One-on-one relationships can become too friendly if you aren’t cautious, and that slows progress. You must also have a great client-mentor match. You must work with someone who knows how to get the best from you. (With 56 mentors on our team, we’re world class when it comes to matching people up, and we’ve done it 2,500 times. We also switch mentors when a change would help a client move faster.)
Here’s what one-on-one mentorship can do: Last year we had hundreds of gym owners get to their goal income—often $100,000 a year—for the first time. That’s what happens with an A+ client-mentor match.
2. One-to-Few Mentorship
In this style, a mentor works with a small group of three to eight people at a time. These groups are usually called “masterminds” because the people in the room are pre-filtered for success. They are called “boards” in some organizations.
Pros: Peer support helps with the loneliness all entrepreneurs feel as their companies grow. You can’t really turn to your staff for support, right? You also get some varied experiences and networking—in a mastermind, I once got a great idea for a video contest from a business coach who worked with lawn-care companies.
Cons: You must have strong filters in place, and you must know if the other people in the group are at your level. If you assume everyone is doing great and don’t filter, you can get led astray by opinions from people who haven’t been where you want to go. Some aren’t even on the same path as you, yet they’ll speak as if they have experience. Masterminds are also expensive because the people running them are not playing a volume game. They want a high-value group and will charge appropriately for access—that’s part of the filtering process.
In our Tinker program for upper-level gym owners at Two-Brain, you must be making at least $100,000 a year in net owner benefit from your gym. You must qualify to get into this mastermind. But once you earn a place, you’ve got access to a peer group, brainstorming, varied experiences and networking—all from gym owners.
We use a mastermind system in our highest level program—Tinker—because we know that everyone in the room has gotten to a certain level and is speaking from experience. They’re not just firing from the hip. So that’s a powerful filter for every group member.
3. One-to-Many Group Coaching
In this type of program, one person leads a call in which they present a topic and then say, “Bring up your challenges.” In a good group-coaching setting, the coach is usually a moderator. They facilitate discussion and tease out ideas and solutions. In the best cases, they ask for proof and evidence to help screen opinions (this is rare). In the worst cases, you have someone with an opinion spewing untested advice and wasting time. In these groups, you’re basically just there to get opinions—but you can get opinions for free. This is why we don’t use a group-coaching program at Two-Brain.
Pros: In a big group, you can make connections to key people and create your own “mini-mastermind.” The main pro is that this model is scalable for the coach. People run these groups to create a lifestyle for themselves, not for the people who are in the program. It’s a coach-centric business, while one-on-one mentorship is a client-centric business.
Cons: If this model works for the coach, it’s not ideal for clients. Results aren’t measured, coaching isn’t personalized and you can sit through a lot of sessions before you find something that applies to you. Accountability is absent.
We include some “specialty group coaching” in our mentorship program at no extra charge—we call these bonus sessions Office Hours, and we bring in experts to solve problems in a group. Our clients can choose to attend or pass. These sessions don’t take the place of one-on-one mentorship. We just build them in for people who want extra support on sales, advertising and so on. The sessions are carefully moderated, and leaders focus only on tested, data-backed tactics.
I’ll be blunt: I have a bias against group-coaching programs because I’ve been in 15 of them and it’s always the same thing. It’s great for the coach but not great for the client. Clients must work hard to figure out what’s best, and they will struggle to create a sound long-term plan and take action. I prefer other options, both as a client and as a mentor.
4. Roundtables
With a roundtable system, you just show up at a cheap or free event and sit with random people. It’s an open discussion format, nobody is the expert, and people are free to share.
Pros: You can connect with people and hear a lot of differing opinions. If you’re very, very good at filtering, you might find a gem or two in the pile.
Cons: There are no filters. You have no idea who the people around you are, what they’ve experienced and how successful they are. Imagine the person running a “million-dollar gym” with $5,000 of profit. That person’s opinion might carry a ton of weight but lead others to ruin because it’s based on disastrous business practices. You must ask tough questions to filter fact from fiction, and most people don’t.
Roundtables—like the old CrossFit discussion boards—can spread harmful advice even if people are trying to help. Without data, the loudest person often carries the day.
Example: I used to ask questions on those old discussion boards, but when I asked about a topic, I would get an answer I couldn’t verify. Was it good advice or bad? I couldn’t see any proof. There was no data. Or I was mocked for even daring to ask about sound business practices, even though my gym was failing and I needed help.
I can point to many pieces of loudly given advice that hurt the gym owners who participated in these early online forums. That’s the danger with roundtables.
Choosing the Right Model
Always start with a one-on-one mentor.
But who do you pick?
The answer: Pick someone who provides mentorship full time as a profession.
It’s the same way you would select a personal trainer to help you get fit. Avoid your buddy and that gym rat with huge arms and lots of fitness books. Find a true pro who trains people for a living and can show you mountains of results with real people.
At Two-Brain, we train mentors, we certify mentors, and we have continuing-education requirements. We drill, we practice, and we produce better results faster because that’s what we’re focused on. We are professional mentors.
I think every gym owner should start one on one with an expert mentor to solve specific problems and build an individualized plan for the gym. No two gyms are the same—even if you’re in a franchise. Your needs, your market and your staff are different. You, as the CEO, are different than other CEOs. You need a personalized plan.
After you work one on one to hit minimum goals—like earning $100,000 a year—that’s when you can progress to a mastermind or even group coaching.
At that point, you’ll have a firm foundation, and you’ll have filters you can use to determine what’s actually working and who deserves your attention. You’ll know how to disregard useless fluff, make connections to the right people and screen the experts from the wannabes.
Get a Mentor—Today
Mentorship is a long-term relationship based on strategy, and it’s best when it’s niche specific. If you run a gym, you need a professional fitness business mentor.
From there, you should be able to ask your mentor at any point to lay out the five most important steps to get to where you want to go, then identify the most important step for you right now. A good mentor will be able to provide the answers.
Here’s a common mistake: Many people wait too long to get a mentor. They wait till they’re failing. They think part of the entrepreneurial journey is “figuring it out and making guesses.”
But if you learn only from your own mistakes, it’ll take you five times as long to make progress and it’ll be five times as expensive. And it will be painful.
In the worst-case scenario, progress will be so slow that you’ll go out of business—not because you don’t work hard but because you don’t make enough money fast enough.
If you don’t learn from other people’s mistakes, you try to do everything yourself, and you ask for help only when you’re desperate, you will face stiff odds, and you’ll be at risk of getting pushed out of the fitness industry. I’ve seen it happen time and again.
I’ve also seen people ask for help early and often, then ascend very fast because they avoided mistakes and did all the right things at the right time.
Get this: Timelines vary, but, on average, we can get a gym owner to the Tinker level of $100,000 annual earnings in two years, one month and nine days—regardless of starting point. Some focused owners have reached this level in fewer than 12 months.
Two-Brain mentors work with clients one on one at first because we want to produce results fast. We want to solve your problems, build a specific growth plan and hold you accountable. We want to give you the exact resources you need without overwhelming you.
When you buy mentorship, you’re not just buying advice. You’re buying true expertise and 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.
To talk more about mentorship, book a call here.
