Bradley Sugars: There Are No Billion-Dollar Companies (Here’s Why) | DSH #1712

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Digital Social Hour — Episode: "Bradley Sugars: There Are No Billion-Dollar Companies (Here’s Why)" (DSH #1712)

Host: Sean Kelly
Guest: Brad Sugars
Release Date: December 27, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode features a deep dive into entrepreneurship, business scaling, and wealth-building with Brad Sugars, an internationally renowned business coach and founder of ActionCOACH. Sugars shares provocative insights on why "there are no billion-dollar companies," challenges myths around hustle culture, explores how AI is transforming business, and distills practical wisdom on career growth, business models, and financial freedom.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Myth of Billion-Dollar Companies

• Core Idea: Companies we think of as billion-dollar entities (e.g., McDonald’s) are actually smaller, repeatable business models scaled massively.
• Sugars' Formula: “It’s X times Y. That’s the formula for a billion. It’s this done this many times is a billion dollar business.” [00:02]
  • Example: McDonald’s is “a two million dollar company done in tens of thousands of locations.” [00:02]
  • Repetition/scalability is the real secret.

Lessons from Vegas and Business Fundamentals

• Vegas Survival: Living in Las Vegas for 20+ years has shaped Sugars’ lens on chance, risk, and opportunity. He quit gambling upon moving, now focusing on building, not betting. [01:05]
• Hospitably & Business Mastery: Success is less about being great at the technical work, more about mastering sales, marketing, and systems. [01:23]
  • Memorable quote: "Hustle and grind is really the new stupid. You work so hard, you don’t notice where there’s a problem.” [01:19]
• Three Phases of Business Growth: [02:49–03:47]
  1. $0 → $1M: Founder is hands-on (“manager of a few people”).
  2. $1M → $10M: Build a management team.
  3. $10M → $100M+: Build an executive (“C-level”) team.

Value Creation and Customer Retention

• Deliver on Core Promise: Business longevity is about delivering value and keeping promises to customers. [04:14]
• Repeat Business = Profit: “If you don’t have repeat business, you ain’t got any profit... The rule of business is really simple: repeat business equals profit.” [04:53]
• Business Simplified: Get and keep customers, get and keep people (employees). “Business is all about humans.” [05:29]

Impact of AI & Automation

• 80/20 Systems: “80% of business is routine, so systematize it. 20% isn’t, so humanize it.” [06:27]
• Predicts: “80% of business will be AI.” [06:27]
• AI’s Next Step: Coaching AI that doesn’t just respond to prompts but leads the user (“A proper coaching system... it prompts you.”) [08:07]
• Boosting Productivity: With AI, business coaches and CFOs will be able to serve 2–5x more clients; data analysis becomes near-instant. [09:18, 11:21]
• Accounting/White-collar Disruption: “Accountants who learn how to use it are going to do a phenomenal thing... but 80% of jobs in a company are going to be done by computers...” [11:36]
• Rapid Economic Cycles: The speed of information and AI are accelerating business and economic cycles. [13:59]

Innovation, Disruption & Adaptability

• Cycle Survival: “If you wait for disruption, you’re going to die. If you disrupt yourself, your business is going to keep growing.” [14:45]
• Self-Innovation: Tells the story of reinventing ActionCOACH multiple times to stay ahead. [15:19]

Coaching, Leadership, and Management

• Job of a Good Manager: “Create competency and productivity in employees.” [16:16]
• Job of a Leader: “Create passion and focus. A good coach does all four.” [16:18]
• Ultimate Goal: "A business is a commercial, profitable enterprise that works without you. If you got to be there, it’s not a business, it’s a job." [17:23]

Intellectual Property (IP) & Business Models

• Disney Vacation Model: Leverage your IP in as many ways as possible — like Disney selling the same character across parks, merchandise, movies. “Take your intellectual property and sell it a thousand different ways...” [18:38]
• You Don’t Need Decades: Building IP helps, but even a single strong property (e.g., Harry Potter) can be leveraged into an empire. [18:57]

Life, Family, & Balance

• Sugars’ focus on family — retired for four years after first child (“I retired from business for four years to go and be a dad...”) [21:33]
• Today he works Tuesday–Thursday to maintain lifestyle and presence for family. [21:41]
• Reflection on parenting, “The fifth child, she gets away with murder... the eldest kid, you’re learning on.” [21:04]

The Phases of Money & Growing Wealth

• Two Phases: "There’s the phase called making it, and then there’s the phase called managing it.” [22:45]
• Leverage Knowledge: Early jobs should be about mentorship and learning, not just earning. “Early 20s should be all about, what can I learn? Not what can I earn?” [24:03]
• “Boring” Businesses Are Goldmines: “There’s more billionaires in boring ass businesses than there is in tech...” (cleaning, construction, paper, alcohol). [25:08]

Wealth, Real Estate, and Passive Income

• Multi-Phase Wealth:
  1. Your time makes money
  2. Your knowledge makes money
  3. Your people make money
  4. Your money makes money [47:32]
• Leverage: “Do the work once, get paid forever.” [52:23]
• Real Estate 101:
  • “Real estate is a 400% return no matter what.” [44:24]
  • “10 properties will set someone up for life. 20 will make you rich.” [46:37]
• Passive Income: True passivity is rare, but higher leverage is the goal. [47:18]

The X × Y Formula Revisited

• No Billion-Dollar Companies — Just Multiples:
  • “There are two million dollar companies done in a thousand locations.” [35:50]
  • “It’s X times Y, not complex. X is usually a multi-million dollar center of some sort... this done this many times is a billion dollar business.” [35:54]
• Business Model Lessons: Key to scale = repetition of a core profit center, via methods such as franchising, licensing, subscription, and more. [40:34]
• To Be a Billionaire, Employ CEOs: “Millionaire wants to be the CEO, the billionaire employs CEOs.” [28:22]

Goal Setting & Success Philosophy

• Set Massive Goals & Short Timelines:
  • “Key number one, massive success, set a massive goal. Key number two, give yourself a very short timeframe.” [37:30]
• Innovation-Focused Goals:
  • “If you don’t set massive goals, you don’t need to innovate... No innovation means no disruption, which means no massive results.” [37:30]
  • If a goal doesn't demand growth & innovation, it's just a to-do. [07:52]
• Elimination for Success: “Elimination is the fastest route to success because if you eliminate the dumb stuff, you do more of the successful stuff.” [40:23]

Social Connection & Loneliness in Modern Life

• Modern Epidemic: “We are in an epidemic of loneliness out there, especially young men...” [49:39]
• Redefining Friendship: “I've always taught my kids, friendship is reaching out and showing up.” [51:09]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “Hustle and grind is really the new stupid. Because what happens is you cover up all your mistakes. You work so hard, you don't notice where there's a problem in the business.”
  — Brad Sugars [01:19]
• “If you work more and more and more, it... decreases the amount [of value] because you’ve got to have fresh ideas.”
  — Brad Sugars [02:49]
• “Repeat business equals profit.”
  — Brad Sugars [04:53]
• “80% of business will be AI, meaning bot.”
  — Brad Sugars [06:27]
• “A proper coaching system is the opposite of that [prompting]; it doesn’t wait for you to prompt it. It prompts you.”
  — Brad Sugars [08:07]
• “If you wait for disruption, you’re going to die. If you disrupt yourself, your business is going to keep growing.”
  — Brad Sugars [14:45]
• “You’re not an entrepreneur yet... the first position, you should really think of yourself as a general manager… Second phase, build a management team... third, a C-level executive team.”
  — Brad Sugars [02:49]
• “A business is a commercial, profitable enterprise that works without you. If you got to be there, it's not a business, it's a job. And you work for an idiot.”
  — Brad Sugars [17:23]
• “There are more billionaires in boring ass businesses than there is in tech, for goodness' sake.”
  — Brad Sugars [25:08]
• “The millionaire wants to be the CEO. The billionaire employs CEOs. Big difference.”
  — Brad Sugars [28:22]
• “If the goal doesn’t require innovation, it’s not a real goal. If it doesn’t require immediate change, it’s not a real goal.”
  — Brad Sugars [38:44]
• “Do the work once, get paid forever. Your goal in life is work that pays you back forever.”
  — Brad Sugars [52:23]
• “Retirement’s not a function of age. It’s a function of income. You got money coming in whether you work or not, you’re retired.”
  — Brad Sugars [54:04]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:02] — "There are no billion-dollar companies" thesis
• [01:19] — “Hustle and grind is really the new stupid”
• [02:49] — Business scaling in three phases explained
• [04:53] — “Repeat business equals profit”
• [06:27] — AI, systems, the future of business automation (80/20 rule)
• [09:03] — AI in coaching: proactive vs. reactive
• [13:46] — Navigating cycles, politics, and recession adaptation
• [14:45] — Self-disruption and innovation lessons
• [16:16] — What makes a good manager, leader, and coach
• [18:38] — Disney and the “many ways to sell the mouse” model
• [22:45] — Two phases of wealth: making it and managing it
• [24:03] — Early-career advice: seek learning, not just earning
• [25:08] — “Boring” businesses and wealth creation
• [35:50] — X × Y formula and business model scaling
• [37:30] — Speed, goal-setting, and the power of a tight timeline
• [40:23] — Power of elimination and focus
• [47:32] — Money phases: time, knowledge, people, capital
• [52:23] — Leverage: do the work once, get paid forever
• [54:04] — “Retirement’s not a function of age... it’s a function of income”

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Conclusion

Brad Sugars challenges conventional thinking, arguing that all “billion-dollar companies” are fundamentally small, replicable businesses scaled to extreme levels, and that true business mastery lies in leverage, value creation, and focusing on learning over earning — especially for young people. He credits success to setting massive, innovation-demanding goals, continuously learning, and building systems that free up the founder. The episode is packed with practical frameworks, candid advice, and tested wisdom for entrepreneurs at any stage.

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Find more on Brad Sugars:
bradsugars.com or actioncoach.com [54:16]

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[End of Summary]

Transcript

[Brad Sugars]

There are no billion dollar companies.

[Sean Kelly]

What do you mean by that?

[Brad Sugars]

McDonald's. It's not a billion dollar company. It's a two million dollar company done in tens of thousands of locations. Most businesses are small businesses done thousands of times. And so if you look at it, you start thinking about what does it take? What is x times Y? That's the formula for a billion. It's X times Y. Not complex. It's this. Done this many times is a billion dollar business.

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

Okay guys, we got a rich uncle here today.

[Sean Kelly]

We got Brad Sugars here from, grew up in Australia, right?

[Brad Sugars]

Absolutely. Grew up Brisbane, Australia. All over Australia. Really. Moved here to the states 20 something years ago. Been here in Vegas 20 years this year.

[Sean Kelly]

That's a long time in Vegas.

[Brad Sugars]

Yeah, a lot of people would local now.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah, I would consider you a local. A lot of people, 20 years in Vegas, they couldn't make it.

[Brad Sugars]

I think, I don't. I think if you get past the first five years, I think you're pretty good. But that first year or two can really crush people in Vegas. I always want them like if you hit this city, it'll hit back.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah, I don't gamble, man.

[Brad Sugars]

No, I stopped gambling when I came here. I used to come here on guys trips. The moment I moved to Vegas, I gave up any gaming doing that. I'm on the other side now. I have a gaming license. So it's like, yeah, I'd rather be on the other side of that.

[Sean Kelly]

Gave up gambling, gave up pretty much.

[Brad Sugars]

Drinking, Gave up gambling, went to gaming.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah. That's how you do it in Vegas, right?

[Brad Sugars]

Yeah.

[Sean Kelly]

All the money here is in gaming and hospitality.

[Brad Sugars]

Well, hospitality is a really good business here. If you do it right, if you do it wrong, you're gonna lose your shirt. But that's the same in any business. You do business right, you will make money. You do business wrong. See, the key to business is becoming a great business person. Not being great at the job of the business. Anyone can be great at a job, but you've then gotta learn the sales, the marketing, how to run the business. I had to do that when I was a kid. I thought it was all about hustle and grind and I bought into that. But hustle and grind is really the new stupid. Because what happens is you cover up all your mistakes. You work so hard, you don't notice where there's a problem in the business. And by not noticing the problem, you don't fix it. So you just keep working harder and grind yourself into the ground. I think for the first two years when I ran Action Coach, I was on the road more than 200 days a year, hotel rooms, you know, all that stuff. And thank God I was single and young because I wouldn't have survived. But it, the problem was I wasn't really building a business, I was building a job and I worked for an idiot.

[Sean Kelly]

Right. So, yeah, because you have no, you have no time to reflect if you're traveling that much.

[Brad Sugars]

No. And I think, you know, you burn yourself at both ends and, and you end up crushing it. And it's not a business. It's, it's really just a crazy job. And so I had to learn the other way around of building something that ran without me. Because if, if I'm there, it depends on me.

[Sean Kelly]

Do you think there's diminishing returns when it comes to working excessive hours?

[Brad Sugars]

Definitely. If you work more and more and more, it, it decreases the amount because you've got to have fresh ideas. But here's the challenge with that. In business, when you first start out, you've got to do the, the number of hours because you are the business. To get to your first million, you got to work dang hard and be great at what your business does because your first million is really you, you are the business and you surround yourself with a group of minions sort of thing. And that's what, when anyone says, oh, I'm an entrepreneur, I say, well, what do you mean? They say, well, you know, I've got myself, I've started my own business. Well, you're not an entrepreneur yet. You, you know, you're getting there type thing. Because that first position, you should really think of yourself as a general manager. You're the manager of a few people in the sort of thing type thing. The second phase of business is going from a million to 10 million. And from a million to 10 million, it's really about you building a management team. So you're not building a C level executive team, you're just building a management team sort of thing. And then to go to the hundred million is where you build the C level exec team.

[Sean Kelly]

Right. And that's where you're at.

[Brad Sugars]

Yeah, we do hundreds of millions a year. I've done a couple of well over two and a half billion in sales. Teaching people how to build business, coaching, educating, you know, doing all that stuff. We now operate over a thousand offices in 85 countries. Just opened in Mongolia, so we now have business coaching in Mongolia.

[Sean Kelly]

That's crazy.

[Brad Sugars]

It is kind of crazy.

[Sean Kelly]

Global impact Mongolia.

[Brad Sugars]

But this is the Thing, I want to be in 120 countries. I worked out about 15 years ago that McDonald's was in 119. So I was like, all right, I want to be in 120, beat Mickey D's type thing. But yeah, we, we do a lot because we help a lot. I think that's probably the biggest thing. The success factor of any business is deliver on the core promise of your business. And our core promise is we help business people get better at their business. We help business owners build companies that can run without. And based on that core promise, we deliver so they stay with us. And therefore, you know, our business survives and our business thrives.

[Sean Kelly]

That's sort of what I realized too. People are focused on the business, but not the value. Yeah, right. Well, you should focus on the value.

[Brad Sugars]

If you give value, they stay. And the. And the rule of business is really simple. Repeat business equals profit. You don't, you don't have repeat business. You ain't got any profit. If you're consistently buying customers, acquiring new customers, you cannot really make a profit. It costs X amount. I wrote a book buying Customers because it was like if you spend a thousand bucks on an advertising campaign and you get 10 new customers, it cost you $100 to buy each one. Well, now people sort of realize that meta and all of that type of advertising shows you your cost of acquisition. But you sit down and you start thinking about what businesses need to survive. And it's really three things. Number one, how many new customers do you need per day, per week, whatever. And you can't say unlimited. That's just stupid. Right? You gotta know exactly how many you want. And the best businesses are actually businesses that create an over demand and an undersuppl. Like there's a wait list to buy a Ferrari, there's a wait list to get a Rolex type thing. So if you can do that, know how many customers you want. Number two, develop a marketing system to get those people and keep them coming back. Okay, so get and keep sort of thing. And then number three, get and keep people, your employees. So business really is get customers, keep customers, get people, keep people. If you can do those things, which interestingly enough, what does that mean? Business is all about humans. So if you focus on the value you add to your customer and the value you add to your staff, your team, then you can succeed at business.

[Sean Kelly]

And speaking of humans, how has AI impacted your businesses?

[Brad Sugars]

Sped up a lot of things, really. Yeah. So when I first started in business, Mike Bash, he was one of the founding Presidents of Federal Express. He said to me, Brad, 80% of business is routine, so systematize it. And 20% of business is not routine, so humanize it type thing, train the people. Well, I think we're going that 80% of business will be AI, meaning bot. Okay? Now if you look at the car manufacturing business, it's already 80% bought, okay? So if anyone wants to see an industry that's already gone, robotics bot, whether it's a computer or a robot, that's where we're going. Like when people said, oh, Apple will never be able to make the iPhone in America. Americans won't work for that. They're not going to. They're going to have robots build it sort of thing.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

You know, we live in an age where if we go back in time and we go, JFK changed the world by saying, let's go to the moon, right? And so what did we get from JFK saying we go to the moon? Well, we got the start of gps, we got the start of microprocessors, we got the start of so many things because he chose to go to the moon. And NASA had that learning phase type thing. Well, we live in a phase where Elon has said, I want to go to Mars and I want us to populate Mars. Well, what have we learned and what have we had built? We've built tunneling systems because Elon wants to go to Mars and they got to live underground. We've built robotic systems because they need robots to build everything up there before the humans get there. We've built rocket ships, we've built satellite communication systems, battery technology, solar technology. I mean, the guy is just innovating to the world because he set this amazingly ridiculous goal. But it demands innovation. And that brings me to a point that if you set a goal that doesn't demand growth and innovation, it's not really a goal, it's just a to do list item. And so when I look at what AI does, AI speeds up. So say my coaches, whereas historically they could work with between 12 and 20 business people at a time, we believe with AI we'll be working with between 30 and 100 at some point. So we're going to either double or four or five times the amount they can do. Because my AI system, and this is where I look at it, most AI is reactive, Sean. And this is the problem with it. So you go to chat GPT and you type in a thing and you go, what do I need to do this? And after three questions, you've run out of questions. We'll see. A proper coaching system is the opposite of that. It doesn't wait for you to prompt it. It prompts you. So that's why coaching works, because I ask you questions and make you think about things you didn't even know you needed to think about stuff.

[Sean Kelly]

So you design an AI that could be more.

[Brad Sugars]

Yeah, yeah. We'll launch our AI probably mid next year out to the marketplace that does that. Because what we do, we have a business operating system. Okay. So we install our business operating system in companies, and by installing a business operating system, it's like, you know, you run Microsoft Windows on your computer. What do you run your business on? So the Action Coach business operating system, a boss will now help. We'll have people installing that with AI assistance. So we believe we'll be able to help them run their business better than they can right now.

[Sean Kelly]

Holy crap. That's legendary.

[Brad Sugars]

Yeah. Well, you think about this. In the information age, the biggest problem was getting the information. Now in the intelligence age, the biggest problem is too much information. So how does a CFO or a CMO or a CEO actually go and look at the data? Like, let's imagine your business right here. Okay. Digital social. How many hours would it take someone to sit down and actually sift through the data?

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

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[Brad Sugars]

How many viewers? What type of viewers? When they were, what were so long? If and. And not only that, but to go to your competitors and. And analyze everything right. Well, now with AI, we can Analyze all of that in a space of an hour, basically.

[Sean Kelly]

Wow.

[Brad Sugars]

So you think of a CFO that had to read all of the business charts. Now within an hour, boom. It's connected to all your accounts, all your finances, everything. It'll tell you exactly what's going on in your business within one hour type thing.

[Sean Kelly]

I think accountants might be screwed.

[Brad Sugars]

You know what? I think accountants who learn how to use it are going to do a phenomenal thing. But this comes back to 80% of business is going to become bought. So 80% of the jobs in a company are going to be done by computers in the next X number of years, if that makes sense, you know, and whether it's three years, five years, 10 years, we don't really know. But what we know is that the car industry did it and we know that they're one of the slowest changing industries. So if they can do it, the rest of us can do it type thing. The challenge is right now it's doing rote tasks. So those really simple tasks is what it's doing. But it's learning at such a speed, it's going to be able to do. You're right, accountants are screwed because it's going to be able to do your accounting for you. We're going to be. And there's governments around the world where this is already the case, where you are already connected, your accounts are connected to the tax department, so your taxation is done. But if Trumpster gets his way, we won't have taxes, we'll just have tariffs and, you know, there'll be no taxes, only tariffs, and that'll be the way of the world sort of thing. And I think that's a good way for us to move. If he gets his way and we start pushing no income tax on people below 250, I mean, he's pushing at 150 right now. It's been stated that he wants it at 250. If you got no income tax below 250, dang, that changes the world.

[Sean Kelly]

That's huge. That's massive. Do you pay a lot of attention to politics?

[Brad Sugars]

Because I do business in 85 countries. I pay a little bit of attention to politics, but if I tried to pay attention to politics in every country I did business in, I think I would go nuts. They're all the same. Here's politics explained. For four years you're going to go left, and then for four years you're going to go right, and then for four years you're going to go left, and then for four Years you're going to go right now, it might be six or eight years and six or eight years, but that's basically politics.

[Sean Kelly]

Pendulum.

[Brad Sugars]

Business will outlast politics. So you just got to know what cycle you're in and run with that cycle at that point in time. I've been doing business through four depressions, or not depressions, but recessions sort of thing. And having done business through four recessions, you sort of sit there and you start to understand that it's just a cycle.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

And if you, if you maintain that you know the cycle, and this is the problem for young people is they've never learned the cycle. Economic cycle used to be a 7 to 10 year. It seems to be speeding up, though. So we'll. We'll see how that plays out.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah, I wonder why I've noticed that too.

[Brad Sugars]

Well, the speed of information. The speed of information is just so much greater. Like historically, you could predict a recession was coming 18 months beforehand, and then you didn't. Like, even when Covid hit my team and I met the November before and said, listen, this economy has been driving so hard for so long, there's gotta be something that tips the scale. And none of us could have called a pandemic, tipping the scale sort of thing. But that was a really interesting one because it didn't crush all businesses. A third of businesses got crushed, a third stayed about the same, and a third boomed during COVID Like, how much would you want to be in the furniture business during COVID You know, everyone read their couch. It was like an amazing thing. The landscaping business, it was phenomenal.

[Sean Kelly]

Hospitals crushed it with all the childbirths too.

[Brad Sugars]

Well, there was a lot of that sort of stuff happening too. So it, it's crazy how those cycles happen, though. And I think just being fast enough and flexible enough to change is what makes most business people successful. You see, if you wait for disruption, you're going to die. If you disrupt yourself, your business is going to keep growing. So I've been with Action Coach now, where. What are we, 32 years old as a company, we've had to disrupt ourselves probably six times. Restate the business, redo the business, change the business entirely. Because if we didn't, then our competitors could catch us and beat us type thing.

[Sean Kelly]

Right.

[Brad Sugars]

You got to innovate. And when I started the business coaching industry or profession, it didn't exist. So I've always said to our team, we're not building a business, we're building an entire profession. And so we've got to look at what is the accounting profession done before us? The legal profession, engineering, and copy those who've gone before us? I think it's really important to learn from those who've been down the road before.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah, for sure. So when you started coaching, it didn't exist, but now when you scroll on Instagram, there's a coach every two posts?

[Brad Sugars]

Yeah, it seems that way. Everyone's a coach and we. Look, I. I find that coaching really works, Sean. And if you find someone that matches your style and what you need at that in time, it's going to work. Whether they've got a massive level of experience or not, doesn't really matter. What happens with coaching is this. If someone actually is a coach, mean they ask you questions, they don't try and answer it for you type thing. Like with my kids, I could jump to the answer with my kids in about two seconds flat.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

But I asked them four or five questions to make them think it through so they actually learn it. Whereas if, if I just gave them the answer, they're not learning. So the job of a good manager in business is to create competency and productivity in their employees. Right. And for some reason in the late 90s, we said management was a bad word. And then magically we had all these books on execution because there was no execution, because there was no management. But if you create competency and productivity, you're a good manager. A good leader creates passion and focus. So a good coach does all four sort of thing. So eventually a business owner should look to be the coach of their own business. So if I was coaching your business, I would be working with you one hour a week, every week. Right. So technically, in one hour a week, I'm actually running your business. So what we train all of our owners to do is to have them become the coach of their own business. We'll build works without you, therefore you become the coach and in one hour a week, you can run your business sort of thing. So our definition of a business is a commercial, profitable enterprise that works without you. If you got to be there, it's not a business, it's a job. And you work for an independent.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah, yeah. I've delegated as much as I can. I think because of the nature of the business, I have to be on camera a lot. But pretty much everything else I've. Other than this and the research for the guests, which I enjoy doing, I've outsourced.

[Brad Sugars]

Yeah. When you, when you build a superstar business, you've then got to look at what's the Next, methodologies of scale. What are the other ways? And I like the term Disney Vacation. And you've done pretty good with Disney Vacation. I think we could do a lot more fun things with it type thing. Whereas you look at Disney, how many ways do they sell you the mouse?

[Sean Kelly]

A lot. Merch. Amusement parks.

[Brad Sugars]

They're licensing. Disney's probably the best licensing company in the world. When you look at what they do, they use some of the best business models. Licensing, definitely. They've got the rental business model, they've got the subscriber business model. They've got all of the great business models built into what they do. And that's why I love the Disney business. But the ways in which they sell you the mouse. Having five kids, like, I've lived through every dang Disney movie. When Addison was young and Frozen was the thing. And you know, every time it came on my wife, this is her sense of humor, she'd look at me and go, brad, let it go. I mean, like, come on, honey, this is. How many thousand times can we watch this thing? But you think of how many toys, dolls, dresses, bed sheets of Frozen that we had to buy at the time.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

And that's the way I think if you can take your intellectual property and sell it a thousand different ways, then you do what Disney does. And that's how Disney is so super successful. They take the same product and sell it a million different, different ways to a bunch of different audiences.

[Sean Kelly]

Would you say you would need decades of IP build up to get to that stage, though?

[Brad Sugars]

You know, you could say that. Or you could look at it and say, well, there's plenty of people who don't have decades of IP that have gone on and done it type thing. So, you know, J.K. rowling only had one book when she started doing a whole bunch of things. Now, obviously there's a whole lot.

[Sean Kelly]

Right.

[Brad Sugars]

But I think that the more IP you build, the better off it ultimately gets sort of thing.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah, yeah. JK's crushed it with Harry Potter. Oh, my God, I can't wait to watch the new one.

[Brad Sugars]

Yeah. Well, I know that my eldest daughter will lock us all in the theater and make us all watch it with her. She is a definite fan. Last. We do a vacation every year to Mexico and the first week is a digital free other than every night we all watch a movie together.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

And she got to pick. And she picked the Harry Potter series classic. And it was like an entire Harry Potter week. By the end of the week, I think I was Harry Pottered Out.

[Sean Kelly]

I just started doing digital free. I can't last days like you. But we did 10 minutes yesterday. My wife was like, let's play with the dogs for 10 minutes. No phones. And it was tough.

[Brad Sugars]

You know, it's. It. It's tough for the first day when we're on vacation, but because we're at the beach, we're in Mexico. It's kind of like you forget about it after a little while sort of thing.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah. Get used to it. It's a dopamine detox.

[Brad Sugars]

100%. 100%. Like, the. The phone is just such a thing that. And it's a great babysitter for a little while.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

And I know you want to have kids at some point. And listen, you will 100% feel guilty for giving your kids the phone and just saying, just sit there with your damn phone. I know I feel guilty for it. And then I look around, I go, yeah, but I'm also surviving these kids type thing, you know? And I'm getting through it. I love being a dad. And I know that the first kid was definitely a game changer for me, getting that identity of, holy shit, I'm a dad. You know? And now with five kids, it's like, you know, the fifth child, I always joke with my eldest, that, yeah, you were my practice kid. You taught me how to be a parent. The fifth child, she gets away with murder. It's like, what do you want? Yeah, good, you're not dying. Fantastic, go for it type thing.

[Sean Kelly]

They say that about the youngest child. They get away with everything.

[Brad Sugars]

Yeah.

[Sean Kelly]

The oldest child is the one you're most strict with. Right.

[Brad Sugars]

Most generally, the eldest child is the one that you're learning on. So you don't know what you're doing. When you have the eldest kid, your first kid, you're like. Like, I don't know what I'm doing. And you make the same mistakes your parents make. You hear yourself saying the same words your parents said to you. Because I said so. Oh, my God, I hated that when I was a kid. Let me actually try and explain that. And then fifth kid, it's like, because I said so, yeah, I'm done.

[Sean Kelly]

Did your kids have different upbringings because you started making a lot of money near the later kids?

[Brad Sugars]

Right? No, I. Look, I. When my first daughter was actually born, I retired from business for four years to go and be a dad for four years.

[Sean Kelly]

Wow.

[Brad Sugars]

So I built my company over 10 years. It ran without me. So I went. I was a dad for four years through the first Two. Two daughters. And these days, when I say I work, I work Tuesday to Thursday. I don't work seven days a week or do anything crazy. I drop the kids to school. I have the lifestyle that I want now. I tried retiring four years into being a parent. I went like. I realized that the Wiggles and Dora the Explorer were my best friends. And I knew this. I knew the words to every dang Wiggle song. I'm out. I'm out. I got to go back to work.

[Sean Kelly]

You know, four years is a long time. So that's.

[Brad Sugars]

I. Well, two years in, I started running a charity. I became chairman of the Variety Club in Queensland, where I lived, and I enjoyed being chairman of the charity sort of thing. And then I joined Fran Drescher on the board of her charity up in New York and stuff. But I really just had to get back to doing something that kept my mind active. And it's one of the big reasons I still teach today. I do 38 events a year where I go and teach, and I do it because it keeps my mind active.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah, I don't think I'll ever retire, man.

[Brad Sugars]

You know, it's. It's not something I ever want to do, be fully retired. But there's two phases to money, Sean. There's the phase called making it, and then there's the phase called managing it. You'll never get out of the phase of managing your money, but you should get out of the phase of making your money at some point.

[Sean Kelly]

Trading time for money. Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

Like, you know, you look at this business here and you talk about it as the one podcast. Well, you now have the knowledge. You could probably be running 20 or 30 podcasts based on the knowledge you have, and you could build a whole podcasting empire type thing. Yeah, but you could use the same intellectual property for any other social media, taking any business to that phase. You could. You could buy a bread business. Right. That's a good bread. It's some Bob's bread. And. And you go and find Bob's bread. You could use all the knowledge you've gained over the years to make Bob's bread blow up and be a global empire. See, a lot of people don't realize that the intellectual property is where it starts. Young people in. It crushes me that young people look at their first job and think, okay, my first job, I got to make a lot of money. No, your first job. You should find the best mentors. The first two or three jobs, your early 20s should be all about, what can I learn? Not what can I earn? If you get a great mentor in your early and work for small businesses too.

[Sean Kelly]

Really?

[Brad Sugars]

Yeah, because you get promoted much faster. A small business that grows you. You'll be the marketing manager in two dang years. Why? Because you were the only person in marketing in the place.

[Sean Kelly]

Right?

[Brad Sugars]

You know what I mean? You were the social marketing kid and then you're the marketing manager. Two years later you're in a big company. Your promotion tracks can take a long, long, long time. Okay, very long now. But this, this being said, young people really do need. I think it's, it really troubles me. And, and my, my daughter won't mind me saying this. She's doing an internship in with my business. She did an internship with Tao and she worked with Red Rock and now she's with me. And I think that, you know, and even with her, she's like, well, dad, but what about the money? I said, kid, here's the thing. If you learn enough in your 20s, you will in your 30s be the smartest person in the room. You'll build your own business and you will have everything you ever wanted. You know, everyone sees this whole, I want to get a unicorn. I want to be an influencer, I want to do this, I want to do that. There's more billionaires in boring ass businesses than there is in tech, for goodness sake, construction in this town. How many people you think? Let's look at, here we are in Vegas. You think there's a couple of people making hundreds of millions a year selling alcohol in this town? I mean, this is the thing. Boring businesses make more money than all of these other ones that are flashy, flashy and everything. You think Procter and Gamble's in the paper business for a reason? You know, paper towels and toilet paper. How much billions a year is in there in that? I just sold out, but I had a large commercial cleaning business and commercial cleaning people are like, yeah, that seems boring as. Yeah, it's boring as. But guess what? Every office needs cleaning. Every gym, every school, every hospital, they all need cleaning. And someone's got to sell the chemicals to them and someone's got to sell. Like we just, we do a lot of business in India and I'm enjoying, I'm looking forward to going there again next year. Here's the interesting thing. In India, the population that moves out of poverty into middle class every 10 years is the same as the population of the United States, right? Adult population.

[Sean Kelly]

Oh, so it's a lot of people.

[Brad Sugars]

I mean, when you got 1.6 billion people and they're moving out of poverty in the middle class. What do they need? They need doors, they need chairs, they need tables, they need all of that boring stuff. Yeah, well, someone's got to sell all that things. And so a lot of the times, I think if you can learn to be a good business person, meaning you can learn sales structures and strategies, you can learn marketing structure and strategies, some finance learn across the board. I think school is your apprenticeship to a job. Right? But your job should be an apprenticeship to your own business. Now, if you only have one apprenticeship, you can't go into business for yourself. Or if you do, you're going to struggle.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

Because to be, to be in your own business, you got to know sales, you got to know marketing, you got to know purchasing, you got to know recruiting and leading and managing. Do you know what I mean? You got to be a generalist than a specialist. You got to be a good business owner. Client of mine years ago, number one hairdresser in the country back in Australia, number one hairdresser in the country, but was trapped, had to cut hair all day, every day. And I said to him, who's running your business? He said, no one's running my business. You know, good buddy of mine here in Vegas, massive photographer all across the world, Peter Lick. And I remember going, when Lick was running his own company, and he said to me, sugars, what am I going to do? And I just asked him a question. I said, look, how many hours or days or years have you spent learning how to be the best photographer in the world? The best landscape photographer in the world by a mile, right? Top, top Picture sold for $8 million. Photographer.

[Sean Kelly]

Holy crap.

[Brad Sugars]

So you think about that and then you go, I asked him a second question. How many days, weeks, years, months have you spent learning how to be a good CEO? He said, none. I said, good employer CEO. So his CEO runs the business, Lick goes and does the photography. Sometimes you gotta be Sean Kelly, the podcast guy and let other people run the business. And sometimes you gotta be the guy that says, you know what? I'm not the CEO of my companies. See, the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is pretty simple. Now, I'm not a billionaire yet. I'm a billionaire in training, hence the title of my book. But when you look at it, the millionaire wants to be the CEO the billionaire employs. CEOs, big difference. Huge difference.

[Sean Kelly]

Huge difference. You said you're not a billionaire yet. Do you want to become a billionaire? Is that an active goal of yours?

[Brad Sugars]

You know, I'VE set a goal for my company, Action coach, to do 3 billion a year by 2030. Because I, I want more. More just for the. Yeah, I did it.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

You know, I love the game of business now. It's more about the game than anything. And I enjoy teaching more than anything that I do these days. But, you know, like a, a great sports person, a great basketball, always wants to play basketball. How come they love it? Yeah, I love playing the game of business. I love building business people. I love seeing my team get better, my staff get better. Better. I've been in business 32 years with action Coach. I've got team members in my company whose parents were with me 30 years ago. Their kids weren't even born, but those kids are now working in the company with us. Wow. Like that's, it's generational wealth being created right there. And I love seeing that stuff. That to me is more exciting than anything I can do. But yeah, I want to hit a billion in one company just to say, tick did that, you know, bucket list duck.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah, it's cool. You got global reach too. I mean. Yeah, you said 80 countries, 85 countries.

[Brad Sugars]

Now we have offices in. So. Yeah, it's one of the greatest things that I learned being Australian is that Australia's tiny.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

You know, you just, you were just there.

[Sean Kelly]

Everything's so far away there.

[Brad Sugars]

Dude, it's 80 the size of us geographically, but we've got 26 million people down there type thing. You know, if you include New Zealand, we get the 30 million people, 60 million shares, cheap.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

So the, the thing about it is, Sean, that I had to learn that with. And if anyone in America ever complains about taxes, go to Australia. Don't ever complain to me about taxes. Unless you live in California.

[Sean Kelly]

Of course, that is closer.

[Brad Sugars]

But when you sit down and you start thinking about it, I had to expand internationally. I couldn't create my goals. I, I had, at the time, I had a goal of doing like, I was wanting to be a millionaire first. And then I was like, okay, I want to do a million in a year. And then I was like, I want to do a million in a day. And then I was like, I want to do a million in one deal. And when you start hitting those things and you start going to do the goals of a hundred million and stuff, I gotta go global. I can't just do this in Australia.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

You know, we, you and I live here in Vegas and we've got 13 odd billionaires that live here. Australia had seven when I was a kid like seven in the whole country.

[Sean Kelly]

Wow.

[Brad Sugars]

So it was like, you know, here I go to the basketball. I'm sitting there and there's a billionaire sitting next to me. Hey, Mark, how you doing? You know, it's like that type of thing. It's different. One, I run a training program once a year where I select 10 of our clients to come into Vegas and I help them build a billion dollar business plan, right? Which ask me that formula in a minute, because I want to teach that formula. So when they come in, I ask them all the question, why did I bring you to Vegas? And they go, you know, because you live here. I went, no, because I want you to walk out the door and see a billion everywhere you look. Every building you look at is a billion in this town. You imagine. And this is the craziness. People set such wimpy goals. Sean, goals are just the most minute goals. The average person's biggest disease is wimpy goals, you know, and then they're scared to set massive goals. Could you imagine, though, setting this goal? Imagine how, like, if I was sitting with my buddies at the bar at midnight and one of them said, you know what, Brad? I'm going to build a sphere in Vegas. It's going to be 20 stories high. It's gonna have lights all around it. We're gonna put on shows in the sphere. In fact, I'm gonna get you two to be the opening band in there. Like, you'd be sitting there going, you're nuts. Now, the fact that he was already a billionaire, Madison Square Garden corporation, kind of made it a bit easier for him. But the people who come up with the craziest stuff are usually the ones that set those massive goals. But the disease is this. You think you have to know how to do it when you set the goal. Sixteen years of age, I met Jim Rohn. E. James Roan, City town Hall, right? 31. I got to open for Mr. Rohn in Sydney, convention, Wow. I was in the green room. I showed him my notes. He signed my notes when I was 16. And I said, Mr. Rowan, you signed these notes for me when I was 16. He said, wow, young man, please call me Jim. I said, yes, Mr. Rohn, you earn that right. There's that sort of thing. But Mr. Roan at 16 convinced me that I could do it. And I set a goal of retiring financially at age 25. Life, all right? And I told my friends and one of my buddies told his dad, and his dad had a come to Jesus meeting with us. And he sat me down, he said, listen, son, let me tell you why it can't happen, won't happen, blah, blah, blah. And of course, he was an expert with money. He worked for the city.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah, he spent that while.

[Brad Sugars]

Yeah, yeah, look, the, the worst, the most expensive advice is free advice from a poor person. No two ways about it, I love that. So, but, and on by, by rights though, then you flip that over. The cheapest advice is free advice from a rich person. So, you know, come to your rich uncle and keep getting more advice. But, so what happened was, and technically he was correct though, SEAN. Technically the 16 year old version of me could not achieve financial freedom. What he was unwilling to understand and what he wasn't willing to see in me is that I could grow into a person that could achieve that. And that's where your goals, the reason you set a goal is to define who you need to become. The reason you set a goal is to define what learning you need to do. The four formula for success is dream, goal, learn, plan, act. You got to build a big dream. And if you're scared to dream, then get out of that. If you don't know what your dreams are, write down what you most don't want and then write the opposite. That's your dream type thing. Goals have got to happen. Anything inside five years. And again, dreams, by definition, you don't know how they're going to happen, if they're going to happen, whether they can happen or not. It's a dream. Goals, if you know how they're going to happen, or you can do it right now, it's not a goal. If you knew how to do it, you would have already done it. So once you set a goal, the formula says you got to do the learning. So the moment I write a goal, I go, okay, what books do I need to read? What podcast should I be listening to? Where do I need to study? Who are the mentors I need to get? What mastermind group should I be joining type thing. You know, if you set a goal of running a marathon, people would go, oh, I know I need to train, I know I need to change, I know I need to innovate in order to run a marathon. But for some reason when it comes to money, people don't think they need to learn and grow. You got to learn money. You can't, you got to become a master of money. Otherwise money is your master. Yeah, you know, always going to be the case. But so here I was, I kept reading and learning. Jim Rohn taught Me, read a book a week for the rest of your life. So I do.

[Sean Kelly]

Still do.

[Brad Sugars]

Still do.

[Sean Kelly]

Wow.

[Brad Sugars]

Actually funny, I don't read anymore. I listen audiobooks, still counts, podcasts, you name it. I'm on them all day, every day. Every time I get in the car.

[Sean Kelly]

On 2 times speed, my kids get 2x, baby.

[Brad Sugars]

The kids are like, dad, I can't wait for audible to add 3x and 4x.

[Sean Kelly]

I think they did.

[Brad Sugars]

Come on.

[Sean Kelly]

I think they did.

[Brad Sugars]

Oh, I hope they did.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah, yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

Dang it. That's what I need.

[Sean Kelly]

I know. YouTube did.

[Brad Sugars]

Yeah, yeah. And just the hold down button to go 2x, it's like, yes, please. You know, tick tock, innovates, everyone else copies type thing. It's a wonderful thing. But I, I do love the fact that by 26 I was able to financially retire. I tried to. I played golf with my dad. He was the only other retired person I knew. I hated it and I went back to work because I just couldn't do it at that point. It wasn't until 30 when Hobie was born that I could actually had something to do do right. Take my mind off it type thing.

[Sean Kelly]

Distract yourself a little bit. Let's go back to this billion dollar formula though.

[Brad Sugars]

Billion dollar formula. There are no billion dollar companies.

[Sean Kelly]

What do you mean by that?

[Brad Sugars]

There are two million dollar companies done in a thousand locations.

[Sean Kelly]

Oh, I see what you're saying.

[Brad Sugars]

See McDonald's, it's not a billion dollar company. It's a two million dollar company done in tens of thousands of locations. Most businesses are small businesses done thousands of times. You know, and so if you look at it, you start thinking about what does it take? What is X times Y? That's the formula for a billion. It's X times Y, not complex. X is usually a multi million dollar center of some sort. A restaurant or a garage or you name it type thing or a small hotel. But it, it's this done this many times is a billion dollar business business. So once you build that million dollar framework, then what your job is is you go and find how many locations can I put this in? Or how many brands can I do this with? You think of Damon John. What did he do? Learned how to build a multinational clothing brand. Then how many times did he go do it? You know, you start thinking of it that way. If you look at Tillman Fertitta, he just worked out how many restaurants can I build and how many do I go and do with that sort of thing? And he's not a billionaire because of one shop. He's a billionaire because he put thousands and thousands of restaurants across the world. Each one of them does X dollars. It's X times Y. So Ray Kroc, McDonald's, he just found the quick service system. And the great thing about the quick Service system, the McDonald's system. McDonald brothers also sold that to Taco Bell and Burger King. Oh really? So Taco Bell, Burger King and McDonald's all built on the quick service system.

[Sean Kelly]

No way. It. What's that system?

[Brad Sugars]

Quick service system, that's what they call it. They're very innovative, the McDonald brothers.

[Sean Kelly]

So they invented fast food, basically.

[Brad Sugars]

So basically they invented it. But see, key number one, massive success, set a massive goal. Key number two to massive success, give yourself a very short time frame. If you don't set massive goals, you don't need to innovate, you don't need to learn, you don't need to grow. No innovation means no disruption, which means no massive results. Sort of thing. Like a buddy of mine in North Queensland and Australia, he bought this massive farm, like a million acres sort of thing. 300,000 hectares, right? And he knows there's gold on it. So instead of being like a normal person, let me go and dig for some gold, he gets a plane to come down that flies over and X rays the whole thing. Finds out exactly how much gold there is under the ground on his property. Wow. Guess how much gold he wants to dig up.

[Sean Kelly]

How much?

[Brad Sugars]

All of it. Average business doesn't set a goal for all of the gold. Average business sets a gold for. Well, I need this much to live 10% more than last year. They're wimpy goals or just make enough to pay the bills. That's the average person, right? So you set a massive goal. And that's why I use the term billion, because I think if you, if you go for a billion, like I would love to have been a kid growing up in Silicon Valley, because every day you hear the word billion all the time.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah, yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

It's normalized group of guys that Elon Musk. Did you remember that photo of elon Musk? There's 20 something guys in the room. 19 of them go on to become billionaires.

[Sean Kelly]

Come pretty crazy.

[Brad Sugars]

It's just natural. It's what they think of all day, every day. So you set a massive goal, then you set a crazy time frame again. Back to the marathon. If I said you had 10 years to run the marathon, guess what? You wouldn't have to do any change today, right? But if I said I've booked you in to run the marathon in March, four months from now. You got to make change immediately, right? If. If the goal doesn't require innovation, it's not a real goal. If the goal doesn't require immediate change, it's not a real goal. Third thing, to have it be a real goal, you got to cut away all of the fluff. If you set a real goal, 80% of things have to disappear and you have to be focused on the 20%. The old Pareto principle of 8020 rule. You got to get rid of stuff. Steve Jobs came back to Apple. First thing he did, got rid of 300 product lines. How come? This is what makes us money. Every year at the end of the year, I get rid of 80% of the things I did last year. Those 80% of things are not good enough to make it on my calendar for the next year. My assistant will not let them on the calendar. There was one thing got on the calendar the other day that, that I said, how did that get on my calendar? She goes, yeah, I know I made a mistake. I was like, dang it, you know, I still got to do it. I, we agreed to do it, so I had to do it sort of thing. But you've got to get rid of the fluff, the stupid stuff. Stop dealing with small customers, stop dealing with this, that. Get rid of the dumb things. Success is not about what you start. In most cases about the things you stop. If I look at someone who's not succeeded eating, the first thing I do is don't give them new things. I tell them, stop things.

[Sean Kelly]

Elimination.

[Brad Sugars]

Elimination is the fastest route to success because if you eliminate the dumb stuff, amazingly, you do more of the successful stuff. Whoa, look at that success principle.

[Sean Kelly]

It works in dieting to elimination. Diet, man.

[Brad Sugars]

So that's the third thing. And then the fourth thing is where you got to come up with the strategy. What is the strategy to go for the billion. And that's where, where I talked business models. It's X times Y. You know, franchising, licensing, it's the subscription business. The, you know, all of those business models, the commodities, the distribution, the wholesale. Those business models are the ones that get people to massive money. The affiliate model, all those things really, really work well. And so yeah.

[Sean Kelly]

Did you have a billionaire mentor when you were starting all this?

[Brad Sugars]

No, I never had a billionaire man tool. I'm lucky enough to be friends with several.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

And you know, I can call them up and stuff. But no, at the time, there were no billionaires in my space. Remember, I grew up in Brisbane, Queensland and Darwin, Australia.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

You know, dude, the. The most. In fact, I'll tell you, the richest guy we knew. Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, he was our milkman. Now, you're not old enough to remember when milk was delivered every day to your house, I'm sure, but every day it was delivered fresh to your house in glass bottles with a little. Little silver top.

[Sean Kelly]

Sounds good.

[Brad Sugars]

Well, milkman, he'd deliver it. And one day my dad became friends with him because my dad just chats to everybody. And we go to the milkman's house for a barbecue, and we pull up and it's this massive flash house. And I'm like, dad, is our milkman rich? And he goes, well, yes, honey, he's done very well for himself. And my dad was an accountant. I go, dad, how does a. How does a milkman make more than an accountant? You know, I was seven years of age. Of course, I'm blunt and very young, boyish at that point in time. And he said, well, so why don't you ask. And I asked him the question. I said, you're our milkman, right? And he said, yeah. I said, how did you get to be rich? He said, son, you don't make money selling the milk. You make money selling the milk. Rum. I went, what do you mean? I don't understand. Because he called the business the milk run, right? And this is one of the keys to wealth. It's called capitalization. If you don't sell, your equity is doing very little work for you. So, for example, why is Elon Musk the richest person in the world? Because he sold his first business. If he hadn't capitalized and raised a couple hundred million dollars, he couldn't have started those three companies that got him to the next phase and the next phase type thing. But so the milkman, you run your business one year, you make one year's profit. He was buying and selling a business every year. He'd buy a bad area, build it up, sell it at the end of the year. So at the end of the year, he was getting a 5 multiple for his business, right? Right. So he was making six years profit in one year.

[Sean Kelly]

Wow.

[Brad Sugars]

Capitalization. If you're not capitalizing, I teach it to my two oldest daughters. They're both now investing in their first homes. And I say to them, here's how you make money as a young kid, right. Do you care if you have roommates as a young kid? No, Dad, I don't care. Great. You're going to buy A house with five bedrooms. Okay? It's going to be a rundown house in a nice neighborhood. You're going to buy it over two years. You're going to put four people in to rent the other four rooms. You're going to live in one room and over two years you're going to fix that dang thing up. Two years from now, that property is going to be worth, you know, enough more money that you can get your deposit back out. In fact, remind me to teach real estate in under a minute. So they're going to do that five times over 10 years till they're 30. How much equity do you think they'll have built? They, they take one home, fix it up, move to another one, keep that one, rent it out, move to another one, do it again, keep that one rented out, do another one, do another. So they got five homes by the time they're 30. You know, that's not a hard thing to do. Just instead of paying rent, have your friends pay rent and you'll pay your mortgage. All right, so real estate in under a minute. What is real estate? Real estate is a 400% return no matter what. How easy. Let's imagine we go and buy a normal house here in Vegas. About 500 grand, right?

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

How much money you got to put into a 500 grand house?

[Sean Kelly]

100.

[Brad Sugars]

100 grand. 20%. That's the worldwide standard. Sometimes it's a little more, sometimes a little less. Less. I put in 100 grand, I put it on 20 year mortgage. Who pays the mortgage? The bank, the tenant. I put a tenant in that house over 20 years, they pay for 80% of my house.

[Sean Kelly]

Okay.

[Brad Sugars]

Pretend it doesn't go up in value. Pretend the rent didn't go up so I'm not getting extra cash flow. Nothing happens, right? Just pretend nothing happened other than they paid my mortgage for me, I put in 100 grand, it's now worth 500. What's my ROI? 400%.

[Sean Kelly]

Got it.

[Brad Sugars]

Name 400% in 20 years in any, in any strategy. Now forget the fact that in real estate you can do that much faster. You can do renovation strategies, you can do better borrowing strategies, you can redraw against it within a year or two years. If you do a good renovation, you can do pulled money out at 10 years and upgrade. And there's so many strategies in real estate, but at the very least, you're getting 400 by putting in 20%. Someone giving you 80% of it paid?

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

Now the first year or two, you might need to put in a dollar or two every month to pay the mortgage until the rent goes up enough to cover the mortgage and all expenses. But that's essentially real estate.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah. I think Dan Fleishman told me his mentor said that if you buy a house a year, you'll be like, loaded.

[Brad Sugars]

By the time you're old buddy Carlton Sheets. When I was a kid, he was the first late night infomercial real estate guy. And Carlton Sheets just said, you gotta buy 20 houses. And so I was like, okay, I gotta buy 20. And at that stage I worked out, I could make enough money to get a deposit every two and a half years. Like, my extra income I could get every two and a half years. And then I got to a point where I had enough money every year for a deposit, and then I got to a point where every six months and then every three months and then every month and then I got to a point where I got to buy bigger buildings. So, you know, but if you think of your business or your job, the purpose of your business or your job is to make enough money to get a deposit. If you get a deposit every year, you're set for life. 10 properties will set someone up for life. 20 will make you rich.

[Sean Kelly]

Dad, that's, that's pretty achievable for most people.

[Brad Sugars]

It's very achievable for most people, but most people live on 103% of their income.

[Sean Kelly]

True.

[Brad Sugars]

Yeah.

[Sean Kelly]

I think what, 80% of people can't afford a $5,000 medical expense.

[Brad Sugars]

So when I was young, Buckminster Fuller said it. He said, you define wealth by number of days forward. Wealth meaning how many days can you live at your current expense level if you stopped working? Most people, that number is negative. No way they're paying this month's credit card bill. Like the bill from last month is being paid with this month's income. So they're at a negative wealth situation.

[Sean Kelly]

That's crazy.

[Brad Sugars]

So that comes to the term passive income. Right. And people hear he hearing the term passive income. Most income can't be 100 passive. It can be maybe 80, 90 passive, but it can't be 100 passive. Like, even real estate, you still got to do a bit of work.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

Even if you got a property manager, you still got to take calls and do the math and taxes and all of that sort of stuff. Right. But if you can get your money making money. So phase one of money is making money. Firstly, it's your time making money. So phase one is your time makes money. Second phase, your knowledge makes money. Okay, so when you, when you first start out, all you get paid for is your time because you don't know anything. Right. As you learn a lot, you get paid more because you got more knowledge. Third phase is that your, your people make money for you. So it's you working, then it's your knowledge working, then you employ people. People. So you people. And then the final phase is where your money makes money. So that's what old money is really. Old money is just people that made money and let it go to work for them.

[Sean Kelly]

Right.

[Brad Sugars]

But one of my key fundamentals for success in wealth is a term called leverage. Now, leverage, the mathematical formula is divide to multiply. So if you break something down to its smallest parts and you fix each part, you multiply the end result. So think of when H.J. heinz invented the production line, right? Right. He broke the production down into small parts, multiplied the output. Henry Ford then did it with cars and made it famous. Like Henry Ford was the first person to build 40 hour work weeks. Trust my word, we're going to be at 20 hour work weeks in our lifetime.

[Sean Kelly]

Wow.

[Brad Sugars]

AI is going to replace most of it. We won't need to work 40 hours a week. When, when Henry Ford said we're not going to work 12 hours a day, six days a week, everyone thought he was nuts. Right? We're going to get the 20 hour work weeks. No two ways about that. That's, that's where we're headed. And the jobs that we're going to have, you know, well, we joke now that people, 10 years ago you would never have paid someone to walk your dog. Like, get off your fat ass and walk your own damn dog, for goodness sake. You know, now people say, Gary Vee said the other day, oh, we're gonna, there's gonna be a job of people paying people to walk with them. You already have that. They're called personal trainers. You know, I was jokingly saying to someone the other day that, you know, because we're in an. I don't know if you noticed this, but we are in an epidemic of loneliness out there, there in the world.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

Especially young men. Young men struggling because, well, there's two real problems for young men. Right. And being Australian, you'll understand why I say the second one. First big problem is virtual work. Because, see, most people make the majority of their friends through work. That's why business ownership is a real challenge because you can't be friends with the employees in your company. You, you think you can in the beginning and then ultimately you Learn that that can't happen type thing. But the second biggest problem for young men today is this anti drinking culture. Because there's no great story that started with, oh, we ate this salad. No, the great stories always start with, yeah, go do some dumb stuff, go to a bar, hang out with your buddies and do some dumb things and make great relationships out there in the world. Where do you build your best friendship sort of thing? Church. Going down the tube means people meet less people. All the organized things that are going down mean they. There's less and less connectivity and then there's digital connectivity. And so I'm really struggling with that one, buddy. I really am. I'm wondering what's going to change that part of it. Because I was joking with this group about this whole idea of loneliness. And I said, you know, the average male in America, My buddy Charles did this whole study. The average male in America has less than three friends.

[Sean Kelly]

Wow.

[Brad Sugars]

What do you think about that? That and if you define a friend as someone you can call and, and say, hey, I need help with this, can you help me? And they'll actually come and help sort of thing.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

Because I, I've always taught my kids friendship is reaching out and showing up.

[Sean Kelly]

Yep. I think that's a great definition.

[Brad Sugars]

Show up.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah. Because a lot of people say they have a bunch of friends, but will they show up to your house?

[Brad Sugars]

Yeah, dude, a lot of people have a bunch of associates. Yeah, a bunch of connections.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah. I would say I even myself, I probably only have like four real friends.

[Brad Sugars]

Yeah. I start when I first moved here to Vegas. At the time, Jimmy Kimmel did a skit called Handsome Men's Club. If you ever saw it was damn funny. So I started a group called the Handsome Men's Club. And we'd go to lunch on a Friday because in Australia, lunch on Friday is just a tradition.

[Sean Kelly]

Is it?

[Brad Sugars]

You go out to lunch and you don't go back to work. That's what you do. Lunch becomes dinner. And that's the way of the world. I mean, Australia, I'm really lucky that 200 years ago the English kicked out all the fun people to Australia. You know, us convicts definitely got the right lifestyle mentality, if that makes sense. So, yeah, I'm joking with this group that, you know, most people don't have any friends. And, and then I tell the joke about most people think their only friend is their personal trainer. And the guy's like, yeah, that is my only friend. It's like, you know, if they're paid, this is Why? A lot of women go to hairdresser every week. It's the only person who'll listen to them. A lot of guys sit at a bar, only person that'll listen to them.

[Sean Kelly]

Barber. Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

You know, this is the. The world we live in. Anyway, back to that lesson on leverage. Divide to multiply. Step one. Second way I learned it was ever more with ever less. The way I teach it is do the work once, get paid forever. So your goal in life is work that pays you back forever. Now, the problem with that work is it pays $0 an hour. When I go and buy a piece of real estate, guess what? $0 an hour. In fact, it's probably costing me money to go and buy that piece of real estate, right? And let's imagine the first piece of real estate you bought took you a to buy it because you don't know what you're doing. You got to learn, you got to study, you got to read the books and do all that stuff so you don't make a mistake, right? Well, over the rest of your life, how much money will you make out of that hundred dollars out of that hundred hours? I write books. I've written 18 books. My first book probably took me 50, 60 hours. These days I can churn out a book in maybe 15 hours, right? Because I know what I'm doing. But you sit down and you start thinking, that first book, even that one, if it took me a hundred hours to write that book, it's so sold hundreds of thousands of copies. And even though I only get like A$80 a book on royalty from my publisher, still every day, that's a check.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah.

[Brad Sugars]

You know, so that's why I. I like building businesses that run without me. Because then I do the work once, it pays me forever. Real estate buy it once, pays me forever. Writing books do it once, pays me forever. Things that pay me forever are things that mean I have old money money. Because if I do the work once and get paid forever, I can retire, right? Retirement's not a function of age. It's a function of income. You got money coming in whether you work or not. You're retired.

[Sean Kelly]

I love that. Yeah, that's a good way of thinking. Brad, I could talk to you for hours, bro.

[Brad Sugars]

Lucky I live here and I have to come back.

[Sean Kelly]

Yeah, we'll have to run it back. In the meantime, where can people find you?

[Brad Sugars]

Real tough. Bradshugars.com or actioncoach.com either one of those. All the details are on right there.

[Sean Kelly]

Cool. Comment below, guys. What you liked from this episode and we'll have to run it back. See you guys next time. Peace.

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

I hope you guys are enjoying the show. Please don't forget to like and subscribe.

[Sean Kelly]

It helps the show a lot with the algorithm.

[Brad Sugars]

Thank you.