After thirty-two years of business coaching, we have watched a dangerous myth take root in the entrepreneurial world.
The myth goes like this: all business guidance delivers roughly the same results. Whether you join a peer advisory group, hire a coach, or find a mentor, you'll get similar outcomes as long as you're getting input from successful people.
That's complete nonsense.
We have built the world's largest business coaching franchise, ActionCOACH, and we have tremendous respect for peer advisory organizations like YPO, EO, and Vistage. They provide real value. But after working with thousands of business owners, we have discovered something that makes most people uncomfortable.
Systematic coaching produces fundamentally different results from peer advisory. And the difference isn't small.
The Question That Changes Everything
The biggest challenge with peer advisory models is that they're designed to give answers to questions rather than asking the right questions.
Think about how most peer advisory sessions work. Someone presents a challenge they're facing. The group discusses what happened. People share their opinions and experiences. Everyone leaves feeling like they got valuable input.
But here's the problem: They're being reactive instead of proactive.
A great coach doesn't wait for problems to surface. They help you build the plan. They install what we call ABOS, the ActionCOACH Business Operating System. They're asking you the questions that make you think, that make you come up with the answer.
The difference is profound. Peer advisory responds to whatever came up that week. Systematic coaching follows a recipe for building a business.
One approach is like having a discussion about ingredients after you've already started cooking. The other is like following a master chef's recipe from the beginning.
The Recipe Versus The Discussion
ABOS isn't just another business framework. It's a systematic approach with more than 3,500 strategies that business owners, executives, and CEOs can implement to grow their businesses.
When you're in a peer advisory group, you get opinions from people who may or may not have a great solution to what you're looking for. They might not know the history of your business. They might not have looked into the challenges of your specific industry or profession.
But a professional coach has a vested interest in your success. You pay them to guarantee your success, to push you toward success, to focus on what you need to get done.
The ABOS system starts with analysis. Where is your business now? Where is your team? What about your systems, marketing, and sales? That analysis builds a complete picture of your current reality.
The second phase is alignment. Where do you want to be personally? Where do you want the business to be? The goal is building freedom, meaning a business you can sell or a business that can run without you.
Every business owner has an exit at some point. We want to make sure it's a planned exit with a very good cash outcome, rather than an exit in a pine box.
Then we walk people through the six steps of ABOS mastery: marketing, systems, team, scale, and ultimately the freedom level where you build what we call a commercially profitable enterprise that works without you.
That's our definition of a business at ActionCOACH. A business that runs without you.
The Real Challenge Nobody Talks About
Here's what surprised us most after thirty-two years of coaching business people and business owners.
The structure and the doing part aren't that complex or hard. We've created very clear, systematic approaches. ABOS gives business owners thousands of strategies to implement and grow their businesses.
The real challenge is personal growth. The ability to let go. The ability to trust. The ability to increase your desires and focus on your goals. What people used to call time management, we refer to as self-management.
Having a coach who has a vested interest in your success makes this personal growth possible. In a peer advisory group, people give you their perspective, but they're not invested in your long-term transformation.
A professional coach helps you grow personally. You trust your advisor. You're willing to open up. You're willing to share things about not just the business, but about yourself and your life.
Business coaching grows both the business and the business owner. Teaching someone to become a great business owner is the most important part of the process.
When Family Meets Business
Here is an example that illustrates why systematic coaching creates different outcomes than peer advisory.
One of our clients owned a clothing business. She had reached the point where it was time to allow her daughters to come in and run the business.
Obviously, she wasn't just thinking as a businessperson growing employees in the company. She was thinking as a mom with her daughters.
We had to help her through the family aspect of growing a business. Developing clear roles. Setting key performance indicators and goals. Building trust in her team, which happened to be her family, so she could step back.
It started with "Work from Home Wednesday," where she allowed the team to run the business on Wednesdays. Gradually, it moved to a point where she promoted her family members and team members until she could step back and allow them to run the business without her.
Without a coach in the picture, this would have been nearly impossible. It would have been all based on emotions about working with family.
A peer advisory group might have given her opinions about family businesses. But they wouldn't have provided the systematic approach, the emotional support, and the accountability needed to work through the complex personal and business challenges simultaneously.
Measuring What Matters
Peer advisory models and ActionCOACH operate on completely different measurement systems.
When you look at the personal growth side, we have education programs and one-to-one coaching with a very clear process. Business owners and executives go through growth using 360-degree assessments that measure where they are currently.
Whether that's a leadership 360, management assessment, training programs for high-performance teams, or employee engagement programs for senior people and entire teams, everything is designed to help with personal growth.
We can work with the most junior team member right through to the senior CEO of a large, multimillion-dollar organization.
The business side is very specific with ActionCOACH. The ABOS system gives clients a dashboard for their operations and a dashboard for their business plan, which means their metrics.
When they fully install the ABOS system and business planning programs, they get a business that works without them. A business that runs better and more effectively, sometimes even better without them, because they're able to step back and allow the team to grow.
Peer advisory groups don't provide this level of systematic measurement and accountability. They provide valuable discussion and networking, but not the infrastructure for transformation.
The Information Age Problem
Technology keeps improving, and business coaching keeps getting better because we can use the power of artificial intelligence to make coaching even more effective.
In the information age, it was all about getting information. Some businesses are still struggling with that challenge.
But most companies today and most CEOs, CMOs, and CFOs are struggling with a different problem. It's not about getting more information. It's about analyzing all the information you have.
Sometimes there's just too much information. We need to use technology to help evaluate all the information available.
A business owner or CEO today would struggle just to read all the data points of their business, whether financial data points, marketing data points, or sales data. There's so much information about their own business, let alone trying to understand the SWOT analysis of all their competitors.
Systematic coaching helps business owners cut through information overload with structured frameworks and proven processes. Peer advisory adds more information and more opinions to an already overwhelming pile.
The future belongs to those who can analyze and act, not those who can collect and discuss.
The Best Of Both Worlds
To be clear about something important. Peer advisory is wonderful because the community is important.
That's why at ActionCOACH, we build strong communities among our people. With systematic coaching, you get the best of both worlds. You get the systematic coaching, but you also get the community that allows you to have that peer group that helps you succeed and grow as a person and an owner.
The difference is that the community is built around a systematic approach to business growth, not just around shared experiences and opinions.
When peer advisory becomes your primary source of business guidance, you're essentially crowdsourcing your business strategy to people who may or may not understand your specific challenges, industry dynamics, or personal growth needs.
When systematic coaching becomes your foundation, with selective peer input as a supplement, you get the structure you need to build a business that works without you, plus the community support that makes the journey more enjoyable.
Conclusion: Beyond Good Intentions
Most peer advisory groups are filled with well-intentioned, successful business owners who genuinely want to help each other succeed.
But good intentions don't overcome structural limitations. The limitation is that peer advisory is fundamentally reactive. It waits for problems to surface, then provides opinions about how to solve them. It's problem-focused rather than system-focused.
Systematic coaching is fundamentally proactive. It builds the infrastructure that prevents most problems from occurring in the first place. When challenges do arise, there's already a framework in place to address them systematically.
The goal isn't to eliminate peer advisory from your business development strategy. The goal is to understand what each approach can and cannot deliver, then use them strategically.
Use systematic coaching to build the foundation. Use peer advisory to enhance the community experience and gain additional perspectives within that systematic framework.
The next level of success comes when you get an actual coach. Someone with a systematic approach is your coach. Someone you pay to guarantee your success, to push you toward success, to focus on what you need to get done.
After thirty-two years of building businesses and coaching business owners, we have learned that the quality of your questions determines the quality of your results.
Peer advisory groups excel at providing answers. Systematic coaching excels at asking the right questions. And the right questions change everything.
Ready to see what systematic coaching can do for your business? For two weeks, experience the difference of working with a coach who doesn’t just give advice, but helps you install the systems, strategy, and mindset that drive real results. Start with 2 weeks of free coaching here today and build a business that works without you.