Before You Hire Assistant Coaches, Fix This First

What's going on, coach? Ben Neighbors here. Today, I'm going to answer this question that I've gotten millions of times now. So, coaches ask me all the time, "Should I only run this business by myself, or is it better to have a team of coaches that can fulfill the training?" By the end of this video, hopefully, you can have better direction on what you should personally do. At the end of the day, I'm just going to talk from my point of view, my experience, not only growing this business to the point where I had a lot of assistant coaches, but also doing it by myself for a period of time, no assistant coaches, had a lot of coaches at one point, scaled back, and everything in between. And also, I've helped hundreds of coaches at this point who have hired staff, who do have their business setups where they're they're not coaching kids at all, and they're running a training business where they are just running it, and they are not involved at all on the day-to-day coaching. So, the first thing that you need to understand is if you've asked yourself this question, if you're curious about what's going to be the best for you, then you need to first just look at the short term. And when I say short term, I'm talking about the next 12 months. And in the next 12 months, you want to try to figure out, "Well, if I'm doing everything by myself right now, I don't have assistant coaches." I want to ask I want to ask you, why do you need assistant coaches? 100% of the time when I ask coaches that I work with, "Why do you need assistant coaches?" They always tell me the same thing. "Well, I I'm getting too busy. I have too many sessions. I have too many clients." And 100% of the time when I sit down and I look at their model, I look at, "Okay, how many hours are you training? How many kids are in your groups? How many sessions do you run per day? With the group sizes, are you completely maxed out? Or, you know, do you have some groups of two, some groups of eight. We actually just pull back the curtain and we look at the fine details of their business. And 100% of the time, coaches that tell me, "Oh, I want to get assistant coaches." They have not fully optimized their business yet. And when I say optimize your business, I mean, if you're running group training and you have I'll just use this example, but if you have it set up to where you can max have groups of 10 in your sessions, you probably haven't optimized it yet to where every single one of your groups has 10 kids. Cuz most of the time, I see coaches that are running way too many sessions during the week. They have not optimized their groups. They have like two kids in groups. They have some kids There's some In some scenarios, there's one kid in a group session and it's like one-on-one training at a group rate. Doesn't make sense. What I see is it's going to be better for you to have ultimately less sessions where you then optimize the numbers. Because an example, I have probably 300 different names I could think of the top of my head when I'm about to tell you this, of coaches that run one-person multi-six-figure businesses. Like $300,000 per year completely on their own. Right? And the reason why they're able to do that is cuz they optimize their groups. They could have 100 to 200 kids in their program, which that, you know, that can sound like a lot of kids. Or they could have 50 kids in their program. Come comes down to how much they charge. You could have this set up to where you literally have five sessions a week. And if you're a clear communicator, you have a good program, and you can take on a lot of kids at once, you can fully optimize this business to where you can literally have one session per day for five days, or two sessions on Wednesday, three sessions on Thursday, be completely done, and you could service, you know, if you wanted, you could service 100 kids during that time. The model is really, really important, but 99 to I mean, 100% of the time what I see is it's not fully optimized the way it could be. The reason why I'm bringing this up is because a lot of coaches that ask me this question, "Should I get an assistant coach?" It's they're asking too soon. They think that's the right thing to do because, you know, Joe Schmo in your city also did it, but I can guarantee you their business is not optimized either the way that I'm talking about. And it sounds easier to be like, "Well, let me get another coach that can take on these sessions, so I can just grow the business." But the thing is is if you haven't optimized the business yet, if you haven't completely maxed out your groups, then you're just bringing on a coach that's going to end up taking on more groups, more sessions, and you're paying them more hourly to go do something that's not even optimized. And it's almost like we're just feeding into the problem even more. So, this is why I would be telling you, if you're watching this, you want to be able to take a step back and ask yourself, "Have I optimized my groups yet?" Yes or no. If the answer is yes, and you're like at capacity, and you are like at the level where coaching feels like it's like a strain, and I don't know what that is for you. That could be 20 hours a week, that could be 10 hours per week. Shoot, that could be 5 hours per week. I don't know what it is. Everybody's different, and, you know, I work with some coaches right now. They they still train kids 30, 40 hours per week, and they love it. That's what they like. So, you could be completely different. But if you have optimized those groups, you know, okay, the demand is great in my program. The demand is really high. Then what you can do is you can say, "Okay, it now makes sense for me to bring someone on that can take on the existing groups I have, so you can start to back away from the training, and you know it's really profitable at that point because all of the groups are capped off or there's you've you've met the demand in all the groups. And then every time you start a new group, you funnel all of the new kids to the new group. If you have it set up that way, bringing on another coach makes a lot of sense. Because you can immediately cut your schedule like into half if you bring on a new coach tomorrow and they start taking on half of the sessions that you're running. And if those sessions are all optimized, meaning there's enough kids in those groups to get to the max capacity, then you know how much you're making literally per hour because it's going to come down to how much your program is per year. All right, you divide that. I mean, you can go through the numbers on your own. But that is where you want to be at if you want to get an assistant coach. And most people that get to me are not ready to do that yet. So we have to fix their business, then after that's fixed, then we bring someone on and then it's it's a lot smoother at that point. Now, I'm going to give you my perspective of what it's actually like to manage coaches instead of just running a one-person business. I am not going to sugarcoat this >> [laughter] >> because if I try to make this sound really easy, I would be fooling you and that's not going to be good for anybody. So the first thing that you need to know is when you just run a one-person business and you're basically self-employed, right? You're you're self-employed, you have really high profit margin most of the time in this industry if you know, if you have a good amount of clients. If you probably have a you probably have a lower amount of overhead when it's just you than if you have other coaches that work for you. Um but there's going to be number one, there's going to be expenses that pop up that right now you are completely unaware of that don't affect you. So when you start bringing on coaches, there's going to be more expenses. Is that a bad thing? Well, I don't know. It's going to be up to you. Like, it all comes down to how you run your business. For some coaches that are really disorganized, that becomes an absolute nightmare cuz they're barely making money when they bring on a lot of assistant coaches because they're not optimizing their groups. They have too many different sessions. They're paying way too much per hour. Um the the roles are not clear. There's no set expectations with these coaches. The coaches are very flaky. They're not showing up to the sessions. I mean, there's a lot that can go on. But, the first thing I want to hit home with is the second you bring on another coach, your expenses go up. And it's not just the money expenses, it's your time. Your time needs to be allocated on training this person, making sure they're doing things the right way, making sure that, you know what, if you really wanted to step away and go on vacation, they can confidently run this without you being there. Otherwise, you don't have somebody that you can rely on. Okay? So, the first thing is the time and the expense of overhead. That's going to That's going to be very different when you start to hire somebody or when you bring your first person on, let alone having 10 people, right? So, that's the first thing. The second thing, and this is something that most coaches are going to be completely unaware of this until they actually do this. But, you have to think about this very critically for your business. If you've done everything by yourself, every client associates you with the business. They think, "Oh, we're training in this program. We're going to training with coach Josh." They don't want to train with somebody else. They want to train with you. It's because you're selling you. You're not selling a program. And so, the second part is you have to understand how to sell a program Because if you hire someone, you don't know how to sell a program, then you're going to be getting caught up with people that are like, "No, no, no, we want to train with you. We don't want to train with that guy." And they're associating you as the business, if you're trying to to grow and scale this with assistant coaches, it's just not going to work with you. And then you're going to have these coaches that are on your payroll that aren't even working because no one wants to work with them. And so there are subtle ways you can introduce these coaches to your clients and do all that, but it only makes sense if you know how to sell a program. Cuz when you sell a program, you are not selling yourself. You are selling a training system. You are selling a developmental program. You are not selling you. You're not selling access to you. You are selling your program that can be fulfilled by another coach. And this is something that a lot of coaches are unaware of when they start hiring cuz they think, "Oh, I'm just going to bring on this coach and they're good trainers, so they're going to do well." But most of the time, the parents are like, "No, I don't want to train with them. I want to train with you." And then you get stuck. And when you get stuck, it makes you resent the other coaches, and then you nine out of 10 times just go back and just do it yourself. So that's the second thing. And then the third thing is when you bring on coaches, you're not a coach anymore. You are a manager of people. You might think that that's what you want to do, and then when you actually get to it, you might realize, "Dude, I hate managing people. This sucks. No one's on time. No one's listening. No one's reliable. No one's accountable." It makes you really check yourself because at the end of the day, it's your business. No one's going to care nearly as much as you are, no matter who they are, cuz they don't have an they don't have an ownership in in your business. You're just paying them hourly. So this is where you have to really transition how you think. When you start managing people, you're not in the day-to-day coaching and training. You are more about, you know, getting people to do what they need to do, making sure they're listening, making sure they're showing up, making sure they're responsible. And at the end of the day, when you manage someone that works for you, it's all on your shoulders because you recruited them to work for you. And if they're a bad fit, that means you are bad at hiring. All right, I hope you caught that because if you if you hired someone who's not a good person, that is your fault. That means you did not vet them. And this is very common in this industry. A lot of coaches have high turnover with assistant coaches, and at the end of the day, they just they hired someone way too fast. They didn't take any time to train them. They didn't spend any time with them to see if they're a good person of character or high integrity, none of that. They just brought them on and threw them into a session and expected them to go thrive. That doesn't work. All right, that doesn't work. So, you have to be a good manager of people. Now, lastly, I'm going to talk about my experience when I had a lot of coaches that worked for me, and I'm going to show you the kind of the pros and cons that I had. So, I'll start with the negatives first. >> [laughter] >> So, the negatives are when you wake up in the morning, there's always going to be an issue. That's That is a for sure thing that you have to expect. There's going to be people who randomly go out of town. There's going to be people who missed their scheduled session. There's going to be clients who don't want to train with that person anymore. There's going to be people that sometimes they they try to steal clients from you and go start their own thing. I could go down a laundry list of examples of all of the negative things that can happen when you hire other coaches. But, with that said, there's going to be pros to this that you physically cannot get when you just run this by yourself. And that is you could be at home on Friday. The business is running. Kids are being trained. You are making money off of someone else's labor. You can't do that when you run your own thing purely by yourself. And when you run your own thing purely by yourself, it's all dependent on you. It's going to come down to how many clients do you have? How many sessions are you running? If you're sick, if you're if you wanted to take a vacation, if you're not able to train, like that's those are things that are those that falls all on you, on your shoulders. And if you don't have other people to rely on, then it's all on you. And maybe next week you have twice as many sessions as you did this week cuz you're sick this week. Or you want to go out of town. The other things are when you have other coaches in place, the whole dynamic of your business changes because you can run bigger camps. You can run bigger clinics. You can run bigger customer appreciation events. You can run more ads because you have more people that can train these kids that are coming in through or the parents, you know, that are signing up through these ads. You can have more people to take on any given month than you could if it's just you. The biggest thing that you're able to do when you have coaches that are reliable that work for you, that you can't do when it's just you running it, is you have the ability to scale to in my mind, I don't want to say an infinite number, but I mean, I have coaches I work with right now. They have 400, 500 customers. And that sounds like an infinite number if you're training like 20 kids right now. >> [laughter] >> Right? That sounds like an insane amount. And getting to that level is would be very, very, very difficult if it's a one-person business. I don't want to say impossible cuz I've seen some crazy stuff in this industry, but it's that's a really hard thing to be able to do in a group setting if it's just all you all by yourself unless you have groups of 50 kids and >> [laughter] >> you know, you have just the best coaching style in a group of 50 and you have the facility, you have the manpower of just you being able to pull that off day in day out. The odds of that are very, very slim. Right? Very slim to get to like 500 clients. Of course, impact more kids at a local level if you have the right coaches in place, but it's going to come down to what kind of leader are you? Do you even want to do that or not? Because you could make it really simple and just make it a one-person business and do really, really well. From my experience, this is coming from someone who had 14, 15 coaches on staff that were running private training, group training, camps, clinics, college consulting, speed agility programs. I mean, I had literally everything you could possibly think of in my training program and I had coaches that could do any of those things. What I will tell you, for me personally, if I had to go back and redo everything and I had to start a business right now from scratch and I wanted to get it to a point where I could hire assistant coaches, instead of having like 15 people, I would have like four or five people. Four or five coaches max. I would pay them way more than the industry average, way more. I I'd pay them way more than what they're making club soccer, probably two or three times as much because I know if they are doing things in a bigger group setting, I could pay them $100 an hour if I wanted. Like, you would have a lot of leverage to be able to pay them a lot more than what they would normally make in club soccer or even if they're trying to go do their own business. Like, they would make more working for you if you were able to pay them way more than the industry average and they would probably stay a lot longer. And it's better, in my mind, to have less coaches on staff that are killers versus more coaches on staff that can do a lot of different things. Because when you're dealing with more coaches on staff, that's more personalities that you have to manage, more people to manage, in my mind, is not more fun. That is harder. That is more challenging. That's more text messages, more calls, more problems that you're dealing with. So, if I had to choose, it'd be I'd have a smaller staff. That staff could sustain 300, 400 kids easy in my mind. Cuz if everything's done in a group setting, we can have each coach running a session in the same hour. I mean, we could be training 50, 60 kids per hour easy. That's groups of 10. In my mind, I'd rather do that than have a bunch of coaches, a bunch of sessions, too too many people involved. And again, I don't want to rant in this video, but I'm just trying to give you from my perspective. And the coaches that I work with right now that go the furthest, they have staff in place. They have reliable staff. They're able to pay their staff really well, way more than you than probably what you think. And then there are also people that are like, "Don't want to hire anyone. I'm clear about that. I want to optimize my one-person business and scale that thing." And you can absolutely do that, too. Cuz you got to remember, too. I mean, we're in 2026 right now. I'm just going to use a simple number here. If you're making $200,000 per year and your expenses are like, I'll just say 50 grand, marketing, website, ads, facility. I don't know what your expenses are. But that's that's profiting $150,000 before tax. You can have a very comfortable life as a coach doing this as a one-person business. Of course, you can make way more than that by yourself. you have a team of people, obviously that's where that's where things can go to a completely different level, but you have to run the numbers on your business and see if it makes sense. And the last thing that I'll tell you here before I go is I know some coaches that have gotten to me that are doing 50, 60,000 dollars per month, but they're profiting like 5, 6,000 dollars per month after all their expenses. And you know why? It's because their team is way too big, running way too many sessions, spending way too much in rent. They haven't looked at the numbers. They have not optimized their business the way that I'm talking about in this video. And that stuff is very costly. They could be making way more profit. And that's all I care about. When I work with you, I care about your profit. I don't care about the revenue. You can make $100,000 in a month, but if you're profiting $2,000, what's the point? >> [laughter] >> What's the point? So, if you're watching this, you want some of my help, go down below, book a call with me. At the end of day, this is all I do. Whether you want to optimize your one-person business or you want to grow with staff the way that I've done it in the past, the way that I've already coached other people to do it, go down below, book the call with me. Just tap the link in the description. A calendar that pops up there, you can go book a call. I'd love to chat with you. See you later.