What is the difference between coaching and mentoring?
A coach works on your thinking and your decisions to a structure, using your own numbers, and holds you to what you said you would do. A mentor shares what they did in their own business and leaves the application to you. A consultant takes a defined piece of work off your desk and delivers it, or produces the answer for you to implement.
The distinctions blur in practice. When you are buying, decide what you are paying for: a process that keeps you moving, somebody else’s experience, or a finished piece of work.
How do they compare?
A coach
Paid sessions on a fixed rhythm, with your figures on the table, actions with dates, and a review against what was supposed to move. The work stays yours, so nothing happens unless you do it. Suits an owner who knows roughly what the problem is and keeps not getting to it.
A mentor
Often informal and unpaid: somebody further down the same road who tells you what they would do and what it cost them to learn it. Useful for a specific question in a field they know, and less useful where you need obligation, measurement or somebody to notice that the same action has been rolling over for three months.
A consultant
Paid for an output, such as a pricing model, a systems review, a marketing plan or a set of processes written up. You get the deliverable and someone else’s hours, and the business may not be able to repeat the work once they have gone, which is why consultancy and coaching are often bought in sequence.
Training and therapy are different again. Training teaches a skill to a group on a syllabus. Therapy or counselling deals with mental health, which is clinical work outside coaching. Ask any coach where their boundary sits.
Which one do you need?
Start from the sentence you would use to describe the problem out loud.
“I know what I should do and I am not doing it.”
That is coaching. The gap is follow-through, and follow-through responds to rhythm, written actions and somebody who asks about them a fortnight later.
“I have never done this specific thing before.”
Examples are a first export order, a first acquisition or a first site. That is mentoring, from somebody who has done that exact thing. It often costs nothing but a favour returned later.
“This needs doing and nobody here can do it.”
That is a consultant, or a contractor, for work such as a cash flow model, a new website or a warehouse layout. Pay for the output, keep the coaching money for the decisions around it.
“Everything routes through me and nothing finishes without me.”
That is coaching again, and specifically leadership coaching. The work is in what you hand over and how you hold people to it.
“The numbers are a mystery to me.”
If you cannot read your own figures, financial coaching is the closer fit. It runs alongside Buzz Accounting, so sessions use your current figures.
Where do the lines blur?
Some coaches never give advice. If a coach has seen many owners make the same pricing mistake and watches you walk into it, we think they should say so.
In our coaching, experience is offered as evidence, and your own situation still gets examined: “here is what often happens, here is why yours might be different, what do the figures say?”
Consultancy projects can fail when the report lands on a business that has not made the underlying decisions, so make those decisions first.
Where Buzz Coaching sits.
Buzz Coaching sells coaching: one-to-one, on a fixed rhythm, across personal, leadership, business and financial work. It is run by Andy Jackson and Peter Allen, who also built and run the accountancy practice alongside it, so the sessions are held by people who carry the same kind of week you do.
Where a piece of work needs delivering rather than deciding, or the issue is legal or clinical, we refer you to whoever should do it. The five programmes differ in how much work they involve, and the discovery call works out which one fits.
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Common questions
Is a business mentor cheaper than a business coach?
Often, and mentoring is often free. Mentoring frequently comes through a trade body, a chamber of commerce, an old employer or somebody a few years further on who is happy to buy you a coffee. What you give up is structure and obligation. A mentor meets you when both diaries allow, has no particular method, and carries no responsibility for whether you act on any of it. Coaching is paid work with a fixed rhythm, an agreed set of numbers and somebody whose job is to come back to what you said you would do.
Can the same person be your coach and your mentor?
Yes. A good coach can move between the two, and the useful question is whether they know which mode they are in. A coach who has run businesses will sometimes tell you what happened when they faced the same decision, and that is mentoring inside a coaching session. It becomes a problem when the experience arrives as an instruction and your own situation never gets examined. Ask any coach how often they answer a question with an answer rather than a question, and what they do when their experience and your evidence point different ways.
Where does a non-executive director fit in?
A non-executive director sits on your board, carries legal duties as a director and is accountable to the company, usually for a day or two a month. That is a governance appointment rather than a support arrangement. A coach has no authority in the business and no statutory role; the work is with you rather than with the board. Owner-managed businesses often want a non-exec when they want challenge in the room where decisions are formally made, and coaching when the work is about how the owner leads, decides and follows through between those meetings.
Is business coaching the same as life coaching?
No. Business coaching works on the business and on how you run it, using its numbers as evidence: margins, pricing, capacity, the team, your own week. Life coaching works on personal goals across the whole of your life and generally does not touch a set of accounts. The two meet in the middle, because an owner’s energy, confidence and priorities decide what gets done. Where something needs clinical help, we say so and point you to it.