Are you leaning too much on advice and not enough on action?

In this episode, I break down the five essential roles every business owner needs to supercharge their growth—and why relying on friends or familiar faces may be holding you back.

Discover how a coach, mentor, advisor, trainer, and consultant each play a pivotal part in your entrepreneurial journey, and get practical strategies to start filling these gaps today.

Here are 3 Key Takeaways:

1. Know the Difference: Understanding the unique value each role brings—advisor, trainer, consultant, mentor, and coach—can prevent you from missing out on critical support or wasting time with the wrong type of help. Most entrepreneurs over-rely on advice and under-invest in hands-on coaching and actionable training.

2. Fill Every Role—Strategically: You might not have all five roles filled at once, but identifying and approaching the right people (outside your close circle) for these positions is key to real progress. Your growth is limited when you expect friends or insiders to give the objective feedback and expertise you need.

3. Take Action, Not Just Advice: Too often, we get stuck collecting ideas but never move forward. Chart out your support team, ask the right questions, and take steps to bring in advisors, trainers, consultants, mentors, and coaches who challenge you, nurture your growth, and help you execute, not just plan.

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You are asking the wrong people for help.

Stop asking people to play roles they were never called to play.

I'm your mastery guide.

I'm helping you figure out how did you get aligned to what God is calling you to do and to build in this season?

I'm not here to give you the answer.

I'm here to guide you to the answer or to pull the answer out of you, because I know that it already exists.

You are asking the wrong people for help.

I. I'll never forget when I first started out.

I had enough sense to do some of the free resources, like SBA was around Small Business Development Council, groups like that, that offer programming, training, things like that, but it didn't quite give me the coaching and advisement that I needed.

And it was one of those things where I didn't know what I didn't know.

So I thought I'd hop on and give you the five roles that I wish I had, have had when I.

When I first started my business.

The first one is an advisor.

The second one is a trainer.

The third one is a consultant.

The fourth one is a mentor, and the fifth one is a coach.

Now, I'm gonna go into a little bit of detail on what the difference between those five roles are and why you need all of them in some form in your business.

Okay?

So, as I said before, when I first started, I didn't know what I didn't know, didn't really understand the difference between these roles, but if I had to do it over again, I would have absolute, absolutely incorporated all of these in my business in the early days.

The first one is an advisor.

A lot of the sponsor groups, the sba, sbcd, those types of groups, they offer advisement, so they'll help you set your business up.

They'll give you workshops, trainings, things like that.

They advise you on how to think about your business and how to make your business bankable, things like that.

That's advisement.

You absolutely need that.

Okay, I don't mean to minimize it and say that it's not important.

You absolute need that.

But too many of us, I think, are leaning too heavily on advisement and not enough on action and actually working on our business and not in our business.

So you're not stuck.

You're just being supported in the wrong way.

An advisor gives you wisdom.

A trainer builds the habits that you need.

Here's the difference.

I always use Giannis as an example because I love his story.

I love his.

His heart, his determination, his grit, his grind, the way that he appreciates the opportunity that he's been given.

Giannis has a head coach, okay, his head coach cannot play basketball better than Giannis.

But Giannis needs somebody who can look at his performance, give him feedback, and advise him on the ways that he can get better.

For example, when he first got drafted to the Bucks, he was a tall, skinny kid.

His coach at the time, I believe, at some point, his early developmental years, Jason Kidd comes.

And Jason Kidd is probably one of the best point guards ever to play the game, which helped Giannis because he coached him on some of those point guard skills, which makes Giannis kind of who he is today.

Coach Kidd saw that in Giannis that he could handle the ball, that he could stand out if he were to develop that part of his game.

But one of the things that Coach Kidd, you know, developed further in Giannis is set him up with a trainer, a strength trainer.

As I said, Giannis was skinny and tall and lanky and skinny.

He's no longer skinny.

Still tall, but not so skinny.

That's the difference between a coach and a trainer.

The coach identifies the blind spots that you have, and then they kind of guide you to the training that you need in order to shore those things up.

Okay, so that's the difference between an advisor, a coach, and a trainer.

Now, an advisor, coach, trainer, they kind of do similar roles, right?

But their focus and emphasis is in that.

That specialty area.

The other role is a mentor.

A mentor is somebody who has been where you're trying to go.

So they've been there, they've done that, they can write a book about it, that type of thing.

So they have experiential knowledge and wisdom about the journey that you are on.

For example, Giannis could call up, say, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, say, when you play for the Bucs, how did you navigate being in a small market in that era of the NBA?

And he could mentor him on that.

And let's say he identifies some things that.

That he thinks Giannis needs coaching or training on.

He then brings in his coach and his coach then brings in his trainer, his advisor, and anyone else who needs to be in the journey so that they can help Giannis get to the top of his game.

The last one is a consultant.

So a consultant, they're more of a hybrid between kind of all of the different roles that we talked about.

So your consultant's going to be able to give some training.

They'll be able to coach you somewhat.

But the consultant is more of a person who identifies the issue, maps out a solution.

They may even execute on some of the solution as well as advise on it.

So they kind of shade across all of the four other roles, but their focus and emphasis is on identifying and solving the problem.

A coach is more like a guide.

My style as a coach is I'm not here to give you the answer.

I'm here to guide you to the answer or to pull the answer out of you, because I know that it already exists, if that makes sense.

Mentors, very similarly, they can help you see things, but they're more of a.

Of a guide that's going to help you figure out the correct answer.

Whereas a consultant, they're going to tell you the answer.

They may draft up a solution, and they may even execute on some of the solutions.

So again, coaches challenge your excuses.

Mentors nurture your mindset.

Consultants organize chaos.

Mentors help you hear God in the middle of it.

Stop asking people to play roles they were never called to play.

Just because your friend is a coach or consultant or an advisor or somebody's mentor or somebody's trainer does not mean that they are the right fit for you.

When you're looking at these roles, make sure you pick somebody who is outside of your sphere.

Why?

Because generally speaking, when somebody is inside of your world, they're tainted isn't the right word.

They're too close to be able to give you the truth the way that you need to hear it.

Oftentimes, this isn't 100%.

Sometimes you can find a close friend that can serve in these roles, but most of the time, these need to be people who are outside of your.

Your sphere of influence because they can advise you in a way that your bestie can't.

So here's the play.

I want you to get a piece of paper and I want you to draw a circle.

I want you to write your name in the middle, and I want you to write down all of the five roles that we just talked about.

And then I want you to think about who can fill these roles for you.

Because again, you need all.

Now, you may not have all five at the same time, but you do need all five.

And if you find yourself struggling to fill these roles, I want you to start asking questions around why are you struggling to find that role?

And who you can hire to help you fill those roles.

Selfishly, I would love to coach you around this and become your head coach, so to speak, to help you find these different roles so that you can grow to the next level.

A lot of this we do in the Journey crew.

It's my private membership where I'm your mastery guide.

I'm helping you figure out how do you get aligned to what God is calling you to do and to build in this season.

And so it's pretty cool.

We're growing it out.

This is a.

A season of transition for me and my business, as well as the podcast.

And so I'm excited about everything that we're building, and I would love to have you come along that journey as well, if you haven't already.

Join the Journey feed.

The link will be in the show notes.

Until next time.

Talk to you soon.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Can I get up?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Can I get Sam.