James (4:41)

Is that a shock to people when you say three years?

Brad Sugars (4:45)

No, I think most people that have built a larger company understand that if they want to get full value for the work that they've done, it's going to take time.

James (4:54)

Your system that you've built, that builds businesses like this because you do talk about two things, fixing and building, can you do it in three years?

Brad Sugars (5:01)

Absolutely. You know, installing the ABOS system and for People the action coach business operating system. So our business operating system, our recipe for running a business. Essentially, you know, we've 31 years of running the same system and installing that in hundreds of thousands of companies. We've seen what builds a great business. It could take six months to install a boss depending upon where you're at because you might already have a lot of the things. Now there's three and a half thousand strategies within a boss. So just if you look at the base, one of the base areas of mastery in time there's 100 odd strategy cards for the time getting more productivity because productivity leads to profitability. So why do we want to start there in mastery? Well, if you look at the hundred cards, you might already have 10 of the things already done and you might only need 10 more. We want people to about 80% success rate in each of the areas. And we find that once they're at about 80% success rate in each of the ABOS areas, they start to see real progress of their business. Now when we go into a business, most of them are at about 10 to 20% in each area. So they're going to take at least three years to get to a saleable item.

James (6:22)

Let's dip into the air boss then. Let's do more than dip into it. I mean let's have a real look around this because there's six levels in air boss. Now the first three levels your system has got, management is huge part of the first three levels. What is management?

Brad Sugars (6:37)

Well, management is about creating competency and productivity. So if you break management down, it's a system of meetings and paperwork that allows you to proactively manage people. Most managers are what we call reactive. Okay. So most managers wait till there's a problem and then they solve the problem. Whereas what the a boss management system does and it takes about 12 weeks to install the management system in a company. Yeah, well, so we do it through training and facilitation and paperwork and systems. How do you do it that way? Well, we could put people through a one day training and they'll forget 80, 90% of it. If we do it over 12 weeks, we do a half hour of training and an hour of facilitation each week. And what that proves to do is implement a little bit, learn from it, make the mistakes, implement the next little bit, Implement, implement. So if you implement a small amount of it over 12 weeks, over 90 days you get that habitual shift. If you try and make people do all of it in one day, they fight back. And it like their brain is like there's too much change. I can't do too much change. Training alone doesn't work then training, I mean it works to a degree. But if you want training to work, you've actually got to have facilitation or implementation sessions to go along with it. You know, why has university always had tutoring sessions to go along with it. And you know, if you look at the studies now, young people are doing more watch videos at home and more tutoring at school because doing the, watching the videos at school and then having their parents do the tutoring doesn't quite work. As a father of five, I know that to be factual. What we found is that by doing the training on the video they get the best training and then by doing the facilitation they learn from their peers and from the facilitator.

James (8:35)

Plus accountability.

Brad Sugars (8:36)

Plus they get accountability every week like a 12 week sales program. Every week they have to report their numbers and we expect them to get a 10% increase in their conversion rate by the end of the 12 weeks. We expect that. We tell them that this is what you must do.

James (8:49)

12 weeks is pretty fast to implement a management system. I mean there must be businesses out there that have been going years without getting management in place.

Brad Sugars (8:58)

Look, the average business, when I ask them how much professional training have you put into your managers? The answer is zero. I remember as a young boy my dad came in and sat us all down and mom was there and they said, listen, dad's got to go away for 30 days, he's been promoted to manager and he's got to go to management training school. Well these days no one sends people away for 30 days for management training school. It just doesn't happen. So that's why I think our 12 week program as we install it in small businesses right through to massive companies, we see productivity increases quite dramatic and managers getting less stress because they don't have to be hard on people, they have to be hard on the system. And there's a distinct difference. If you, if you're, you know that boss that you must do this or else that doesn't work. It may have worked 50 years ago, but it doesn't work today. Whereas if you're hard on, okay, I need to see your frog sheet. And a frog sheet is the daily forms or the daily system that we do. If someone is a client of Action Coach. The ABOS system is installed on our software so they will actually do their frogs. And lions is the weekly meeting. Lions stands for Last week, issues opportunities next week. So they'll actually do that in the technology platform.

James (10:14)

Work hard on the system so you don't have to work hard on the people. Now within the base layer, of course, as management, with all first three layers of your system, it's about getting control, is that right?

Brad Sugars (10:30)

Layer one is about getting yourself into control, the mastery level. Because what happens is most business owners are out of control. The business runs them rather than they run business. The tail is wagging, the dog is essentially the way it looks and they're working longer hours for less money. What kind of hours? Oh, most, most small business owners are doing 60 plus, you know, and they don't need to be once we get them back in control of the business. Because if you look at mastery, the mastery of time is, is one of the areas. The mastery of goals is knowing their direction. These, these are very important aspects of it. The mastery of delivery, you know, the delivery of the product or service. Simple checklists that aren't in place in their business just to check that things have been done so they don't have to run around worrying about has it been done all the time?

James (11:19)

Is this an easy to do thing, easy not to do, as Jim Rohn.

Brad Sugars (11:22)

Puts it, it's definitely simple to do if you follow the system because we've Systematized it over 31 years. But it's, I guess it's, it's work like anything. What work would you rather do? Proactive work that lasts a lifetime or reactive work that you have to do again next week?

James (11:42)

Yeah, you've got, you've got me on that and you've got all of the listeners on that as well now. But let's say I own a business and it's slightly out of control. I'm stressed like, like you said. How long do you reckon it takes me to get it back under control?

Brad Sugars (11:56)

Three to six months. Three to six months. It's going to take some hard work depending upon how, how badly you've messed it up, James. I mean, if you've, if you've trained your customers to do things badly, like if you've trained your customers that it's okay to pay late. If you've trained your customers that it's okay to call you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It takes a little bit of work to retrain your customers. If you've trained your staff that turning up late is okay, you know, if, if you've trained your staff to be D grade staff and your customers to be D grade customers, Then it might take a little longer.

James (12:30)

You're making it sound like it's all my fault, Brad. I've trained the customers and well you do.

Brad Sugars (12:36)

You train your customers. McDonald's trained us very well. If you look at McDonald's, this is a prime example that everyone will relate to. They used to train us to buy the fries with that, with the simple question, would you like fries with that? Now they've trained us to buy the meal deal. Now they've trained us to order off of punching in on a TV screen rather than even talking to a human. You watch how well trained you become. Amazon has trained the world to expect two day delivery. You know, they've, they've trained the world to expect two, two button presses to buy something. You know, so Google's trained us to expect data instantaneously. Chat GPT has trained us to not even have to do the thinking for ourselves.

James (13:18)

Okay, so three to six months we can get the business under control depending on how out of control is. Look, I mean it is stress for business owners. I mean, I want to acknowledge that.

Brad Sugars (13:29)

Well, running a business is one of the hardest jobs in the world. It's also one of the loneliest jobs in the world. Who does a business owner go to talk to? And that's why a big part of what we do at Action Coach and a big part of ABOS is community. We bring business owners together, we bring executives together, we bring salespeople together to learn from and with each other. But to also know that you're not going through this alone. You know, when I sit down with business owners and I explain to them, you know, at some point you may have fallen to the level of just pay the bills where your goal is to just make wages to pay the bills. If you've fallen that level, know that you are in the same place as the vast majority of us got to. Before we made a change.

James (14:09)

Earlier on you mentioned Tom Watson. He coined the phrase on versus in. Is this part of the solution to getting control of the business?

Brad Sugars (14:18)

Well, working on your business assumes that you become a business owner, not just a technician within the business. Business.

James (14:24)

What is working on the business so.

Brad Sugars (14:26)

Well, installing AVA system is working on the business like building the systems that run the business. Because when you go to sell the business, they're going to look at the systems that you have to run the business. Is the business based on a single human? Is the business based on a single customer? The rule of one kills a lot of business sales because you've got one marketing channel or One salesperson or one main product or one main customer. You're only in one town. You know, those sorts of things are killers to the value of the sale. But when we look at building a business that works, and the reason the definition says commercial, profitable enterprise that works without you, the biggest killer of most sales is that the business is dependent upon the owner. And so what we're trying to do is remove owner dependencies. We're building a team of people, a management team, a team of employees that run the business. The owner builds the people, the people build the business, and abos the system runs the business sort of thing. So the people run the systems, the systems run the business. When Tom Watson said he went to work on IBM, not in IBM, he went to work on creating a business that he could sell. So for example, James, this microphone that I'm sitting in front of, if I'd made half of the microphone and hadn't finished it, how much could I sell it for? Not much at all. Okay. Whereas if I finish the business, and by finished I mean it runs without the owner, it's capable of running and growing without the owner. If the owner is on vacation, it's still growing. If the owner is playing golf or out with watching their kids football game, the business is still running, still growing. Most business owners trap themselves in their own business. They build something around themselves and it ends up killing them. You know, it's, I've, I'll be very blunt. You're going to have an exit from your business. The question is, is it in a pine box or is it with a lot of cash? You know, either the business will die or the owner will die. And that's the most blunt I can be to people, to wake people up, James, to the fact that you need to plan for an exit. Now, you might not want to sell right now, but you need to build something that you can sell should anything go wrong. Like for me, 10 years into building Action Coach, my daughter was born. I was just burnt out. I didn't want to run it anymore. And thank God I'd built systems and built people and built products and built reputation and built all of these things. I could hand it over to my CEO and just step back. I spent four years being a dad running a charity and was basically retired. It wasn't until after four years when my daughter started at preschool and I had some time on my hands and I realized my best friends were the Wiggles and Dora the Explorer that I thought, hang on, I gotta get back to work because this is killing me. You know, being retired was killing me as much or more than business. But I'd built it so that when I did get to a point of being burnt out, I didn't kill the business. I got out of the way of the business.

James (17:42)

You make it. You make me think two things actually, Brad. Number one, you've got to commit to finishing the business.

Brad Sugars (17:48)

You have to.

James (17:49)

And number two, options. He's gonna give you options in the future.

Brad Sugars (17:55)

Yeah, well, you don't aim for. Look, why when I introduce myself to people, they ask me, you know, what do you do? I can say I'm a business coach, I'm a business trainer. I don't. I say, you know, when people start their own business, they go into it for freedom of time, freedom of money, boss freedom. Well, two, three years in the road, down the road, when that doesn't happen, I fix that problem because I fixed the problem of not getting the freedom that they went into business for in the first place. You don't start your own business with a goal of being tied to it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You start the business with a goal of financial freedom, time freedom and boss freedom. In most cases, you want to build cash flow, but you also recognize you want to build wealth. You know, if you just wanted to build cash flow, you'd work for someone else because there's no stress and risk factors at the level, if you wanted to build your own business, then you want to build wealth as well. And so you're building an asset, not just a thing. Like when someone joins action coach James. You know, we're a partnership business. We're a franchise partnership business. They buy their territory, so that asset they own forever. The land is there. Like when you buy a house, right? You buy a house, you own the land. Even if the house burns down, you still own the land, right? So when someone buys our franchise or invests in becoming a partner with us, they own the land. The cash flow that they build gives them their roi. Now, that land will continue to go up in value. Now, if they build the business better and better, then land goes up massively in value. Like building a house sort of thing. If you build a high rise rather than a house, it's the same land. You make a lot more wealth from it. So I think going into business, freedom is what people are after. And unfortunately for most of them, they never learn how to do that. They learn how to just work harder. They were trained how to be a good employee. They're still a good Employee in their own business. We want to teach them to become a business owner. That's why the business operating system puts them in charge of the business, gives them control over the operations.

James (20:03)

Look, we, we're already moving into one aspect of this control base layer here. Mastery, as you've put it. You've also called it direction mastery, goal mastery of planning. What?

Brad Sugars (20:15)

What? Yeah.

James (20:16)

So what is this?

Brad Sugars (20:17)

So if, if you look at mastery, when we break it down into the four areas, I think we already touched on time mastery, that you've got to get control of productivity of yourself and your people. Right. Direction mastery is about where are you going that most businesses have. What? So if you look at goals, there's three layers of goal setting in the world. Okay, There's a negative goal which is don't want to go broke, don't want to work 80 hours. Then we move them to positive goal setting. I want to put three months cash flow in the bank at any one point in time. I want to be working 30 hours a week. I want to be doing four days a week and that's my work time. Like setting positive goals for the business, sales goals, repeat customer goals. It could be referral goals, but it's building the goal structure into a thing. You know, historically they called it key performance indicators. I feel that people prefer to have something to strive towards a goal rather than something they're being measured on a KPI sort of thing. So having a direction of the business is vital. Having all of the team members know the direction and be rowing in the same direction. I often refer to it as a common goal, meaning everybody wins by the goal. You know, for us at Action Coach, we see by 2030 wanting to have 300,000 AOS installations in 2030, meaning between now and then it'll be about 750,000. But it's not about the installations. It's about having a parent able to go to their kids football game. It's about having an owner more present with their family because they're not stressed anymore. We mostly serve business owners that have families or starting families or contemplating that because they want the freedom of time to be able to do the things that are important. Wealth and riches are not designed for just wealth and riches. They're designed for the freedom that they bring you. Freedom to build a local church or donate to a school in Africa or what's the freedom that comes from it. And knowing where you're going is one of the most fundamental aspects of that. But that comes down to also daily goals. Every team Member must have goals every day. We use the number of six because what happens is that if you measure one thing, then you only get performance in one area. If you measure six things, you get a fairly broad level of high performance per person, per person, per division, per company.

James (22:45)

Well, there's free the three levels there of goals that you.

Brad Sugars (22:48)

Oh yeah, I didn't touch on the third one. So a negative away from goal, a positive or towards goal. And then finally there's a legacy goal. You know, we believe that business owners should live their legacy, not, not leave a legacy. You, you need to build people. I, I feel that being a leader is a very, it's more of a calling for me than a job. I believe my job as a leader is to build great people around me, to build everyone up. I want people even who worked with me 20, 30 years ago to come back and go, working with you changed my life.

James (23:19)

Okay, so we, we've talked a lot about goals there. What role does planning have? Because when we speak to a lot of business owners, they say, yeah, I've got a plan and it shows a plan. And the plan is kind of in.

Brad Sugars (23:29)

The plan is in their head or it's a one page, three page document type thing. Look, most people don't know how to plan though, James. This is the challenge. We're expecting them to do things that they've never been taught how to do. So we start with daily planning, okay? And once we've got people good at daily planning, then we move to weekly planning. Once we've got them good at weekly, then we move to quarterly, not monthly. Because in business a monthly plan is really irrelevant. In most cases you want about a three month plan, a 90 day plan. What that brings to someone is enough longevity to get major projects done. But not too far out that we can't see it. And not too far out that market shifts and market changes will mean the plan is irrelevant sort of thing. But then once they got a quarterly, we get them good at annual, and once they get at annual, we start on a 3 to 5 strategic plan of finishing the business. You know, I still believe that. And we do this when we start with clients in their alignment of every new customer. At Action Coach, one of the big first things in ABOS is let's set two dates. Number one date, by what date do you want to finish the business? And that's generally three to seven years out sort of thing. You know that meaning the business runs without you. And the second one is by what date you want to be off. The tools. Now, whether you're an accountant doing accounting work for your customers, or whether you're a hairdresser cutting hair, or whether you're a carpenter still swinging the hammer and cutting and using the saw, we want to set a date by which you can get off the daily grind into the running of the business, working on it rather than in it, managing it, leading it sort of thing. And then second of all, we want a date by which you've actually got an asset. You've got something that should you choose to, you can sell it. Now, that being said, I personally am a great example of loving a part of my business that I want to keep doing. I love the teaching, I love it, I enjoy it. I enjoy getting on stage, I enjoy traveling the world and doing speeches and things. And that to me is exciting. I enjoy writing the books and creationary. So I built a business that runs without me, but I get to do the part I enjoy. I don't do the legals, I don't do the accounting, I don't do the CEO and the HR and the. I don't do all the bits I don't like. I just do the bit I do like. But it's also, I do the bit that I'm a, I'll say it, a bloody genius at. I'm really good at finding complex things and turning into simple algorithms. You know, in, in the days of AI, the data is the algorithm them. And so like, even for us, our AI system is so vast and so brilliant because it's proactive coaching, but also because it's got 31 years of data behind it that makes the AI algorithm very, very strong.

James (26:20)

Okay, I'm going to mention a couple of bits here. It's a bit of a blinding flash of the obvious in there. Quite empowering actually for the listeners. Might say set two days, number one, when you're going to finish it. Kind of. Everyone was predicting that, but no one was predicting that. Second date. Set the date when you're getting off the tools.

Brad Sugars (26:39)

Yeah.

James (26:39)

So if the first one is three to seven years, what do you reckon is a good sort of benchmark area for getting off the top?

Brad Sugars (26:45)

Oh, getting off the tools is a one to three year. It's, it's really dependent upon the business. You know, if it's a, if you're running a grocery store, it's probably easier to get off the tools than if you're running a dental business type thing. If you're the dentist, then you've got to then train and build and train Your customers. Like, even my dentist. I go there because he's my dentist and I trust and like him. Now if he started telling me I need to see other people in there, I'm like, well, hang on, you've trained me to trust and like you. What do you mean? I got to trust and like other people? So it depends on the industry, I think, as to which one. But I'm not saying everyone has to get off the tools. I want to be clear on this point. Just because you own the business doesn't mean you need to be the CEO. For example, let's imagine, I don't know, rough and the dull, right? Great tennis player, phenomenal at tennis, rough. And the Dal Enterprises is getting massive. He says, you know what? I need to get off the tools and go and run rough. And the Dial Enterprises. Let me employ someone to play the tennis and I'll go and do that. If you're an absolute genius at something and that's why the business is successful, then hire a CEO to run the business. Hire a professional to run the business, and you keep doing that thing that you're an artist at or a genius at, or one of the top 1% in the world. So a good buddy of mine, Peter Lick, is a photographer, and he does some of the most amazing landscape photography in the world. Brilliant. Genius. And years and years ago, I sat with him and he was CEO of the business. And I said, pete, your biggest problem is that you're the CEO. Hire a professional CEO and go take photos. Dude, you're the best at taking photos, but you're in this office all the time. No one's taking great photos. How are you building the business? So sometimes you're better off to not be the CEO if you're a genius at the thing, right? The.

James (28:39)

The listeners, they've got two questions here. Number one is what constitutes being on the tools, you know, so that they can start? What does that mean?

Brad Sugars (28:49)

Well, let's use the word leverage to define that there's three types of work in business. There's employee work, manager work, and owner work. Employee work is do the work once, get paid once. So if I'm a hairdresser and I'm cutting hair or coloring hair, do the work once, get paid once. That's employee work. Okay? Managers work is do the work once, get paid long term, hiring a new employee, training an employee, doing those sorts of longer term, bringing on a new customer who stays with us. Long term owner's work is installing the systems, installing a boss, and working on the Business, not in the business. Because our definition of leverage is do the work once, get paid forever. So the owner's work is do the work once, get paid forever. Managers, workers, do the work once, get paid long term employee workers, do the work once, get paid once. On the tools, do the work once, get paid once.

James (29:45)

Got it. Great definition. Second question, how important is it for the listeners that do actually want to get off the tools so they don't want to keep taking the photographs themselves? How important is it for them to set that date?

Brad Sugars (29:59)

It's vital. If you don't set goals, nothing changes. The moment we set a goal, our whole world shifts. Now I want to go back to another formula because you know, for me everything's formulaic methodologies. Buckminster Fuller said it, if you're going to do something, create artifacts and models. I create a lot of models, okay, artifacts like my books and training courses, but a lot of models. Everything is. So my formula for success is dream, goal, learn, plan, act. Now, I didn't have the word learn in there for the first four or five years of teaching that and then I had to add it in there because what I found was that people would set a goal and expect to know how to do the goal. Like Professor Alan Pease says it best, he said, how is the enemy of most goals? Because you set a goal and you go into the brain of well, how do I do this, how do I do this, how do I do this, how do I do this? And you kill the whole goal. The fact that you set it as a goal by definition means you don't know how to do it. The reason we set goals is to do the learning, to do the growing, to grow into the goal. So give you an example from my own life. At 16 years of age, I met Jim Rohn e James Rowan and I set a goal of financially retiring at age 25. Everyone said, can't possibly happen. People actually sat me down and told me why it can't happen and how it won't happen. And the reality of it is the 16 year old version of me couldn't do that. What they didn't acknowledge and what they didn't understand is I was willing to give myself the time and energy to learn, to study, to read, to get mentors and coaches. And so I became the person that made that goal a reality. We have to grow into our goals. So we set the goal of getting off the tools so that we then say, okay, well what have I got to learn? What systems do I have to put in place. Where do I have to study? What coaching do I need? Who do I need to get around? Because if other business owners have done it, then you can do it too. You know, in our membership programs, James, there's a reason we have solopreneurs all together. We have small business owners all together and we have mid sized business owners together and executives altogether together. We put them together because they're going through the same learning process. Solopreneurs are learning how to go from themselves to trusting an employee to growing enough to let go and let someone else do it sort of thing. They're learning that the small business owners are learning how to become managers and leaders and actually build people so that the people build the business. So all of these different aspects would you do you have to set the goal? No, you don't have to set the goal. But if you want to get your business to run without you at some point, the first thing you have to do is get off the tools or have the ability to get off the tools.

James (32:38)

Is learning the epicenter of. And that's not leading question by the way, feel free to correct it. Is it the epicenter of personal development?

Brad Sugars (32:51)

Learning is a part of personal development because learning doesn't bring wisdom. Action is the most important part of personal development, doing things. There's a lot of people that have read a lot of books and never done anything and therefore they don't have any wisdom. People say knowledge is power and I disagree. I believe that wisdom is power because wisdom is knowledge applied. You've learned how it works, how it doesn't work, sort of thing. And I've written, every one of my books I've ever written is based on what I do, not based on a theoretical ideal. It's okay. I wrote a book on marketing because that's what we're doing in marketing right now. Why do I have ownership shares in two marketing agencies? Because I want to learn all of this stuff. I want to grow. But when you talk about personal growth, the second word is the most important growth. You ever been back to a group that you went to high school or college with and they said, wow, you've changed. And you go, wow, you haven't. It's like we're supposed to grow, we're supposed to change. We have to grow into becoming a great business owner. Then we grow into an investor and then we grow into an entrepreneur. It's like our growth factors. We start out as your entrepreneurial journey, whether people realize it or not. Started out in school as a student. You started Your entrepreneurial journey. What did they teach you? They teach. A student is an apprentice employee. What is an employee? An employee is apprentice, self employed person. The challenge before most people go into their own business is that they don't do enough apprenticeships. So they haven't done a sales apprenticeship and a marketing apprenticeship and a finance apprenticeship. All they've ever done is an engineering apprenticeship or a hairdressing apprenticeship or a carpentry. Like people say, I've got 20 years business experience. Oh, really? You've done 20 different things, you know. No, no, I've done the same thing for 20 years. Well, that's 20 years experience. That's one year's experience done 20 times. So you might become a master in that one field. But a business owner is more of a generalist. A business owner knows enough about sales to be able to hire great salespeople. Like if. Let's imagine, James, I wanted to hire a marketing manager and I knew nothing about marketing. I'm not going to hire a good marketing manager. I don't even know what questions to ask. If I'm going to go and hire a recruiting agency to do my recruiting. I've got to study half a dozen books on recruiting to even know what should I ask them. This is the craziness of. I'll put it even more blunt. Your business will grow to your level of incompetence. The moment you stop learning, your business stops growing.

James (35:23)

Your dad give you that feedback?

Brad Sugars (35:25)

My dad gave me a lot of very blunt feedback over my lifetime. You know, I went to him when I was about 21 and I was complaining about can't get good people and all of that sort of stuff. But what dad said to me when I complained about can't get good people, he looked me dead in the eye and he said, brad, you get the people you deserve. You're an average manager running an average company. Highest caliber a person wants to work for you is average. And he was dead on. Right Until I became a good manager, I couldn't get good people until I became a great leader. I couldn't get great people until I built a great company with an amazing mission. Like when you look today, James, of our mission of installing abos in hundreds of thousands of businesses around the world. Saving business owners, our customers are part of the mission. They don't come and become a customer at action coach. They join the mission, they join the movement. They want to help. We've got like for instance, just a week ago, a carpenter. He joined our organization and within a week he bought 10 other business people in with him because he's like, all my buddies that I work with on job sites are all going through the same thing. He bought plumbers, he bought locksmiths, electricians. He goes, every one of us needs to do this because it's a movement. Business owners. Helping business owners is really important to me. It's at the core of what we do. Every business owner needs to have a, a peer group, a group that they're working with and helping each other and growing together. And, and that's why I think it's really vital for us to recognize that building people is what we do. I, I, yes, we install the ABOS system, but mostly what we do is build great business people.

James (37:11)

Okay, so control the time, control customer service, control the finances. Which one do you want to go with first?

Brad Sugars (37:20)

Let's do finances. That's what kills companies.

James (37:23)

Why did you choose that then? Because it kills them.

Brad Sugars (37:26)

If you're not in charge of your finances, then your business can't perform. You know, you've got to run your business on between 30 and 50% of your income. You've got to have 20% of your income going into a profit account, approximately. You know, there has to be profit. The measure of a performing business is profit. There is no other measure that matters. People talk about their mission and yes, mission is vital in business. Yes, people and employee engagement is vital. If I'm the CEO of a business, I'm in charge of four things. Firstly, numbers. And that's not just historical numbers like profit, balance sheet, they're historical numbers. James. Dave, what's happened? I've got to be in charge of the future predictive numbers like what's my lead flow, what's my conversion rate, what's my repeat business rates, what's my. And then you go to the next set of numbers, which is part of culture. That's my second job. So knowing the numbers, building the culture and culture is you've got to look at two things. You know, what is your, the number of culture is really employee engagement numbers. So knowing what level of engagement you have with your team and measuring that, then you've got your third job is customers. Okay, that as a CEO, you've got to be spending 20, 25% of your time out with customers, meeting customers, talking to customers, finding out from customers. And you can do that in online forums, you can go and visit job sites, you can go to your stores, but you've got to be at the coal face a percentage of the time to be able to do it. And then what's your score there? Net promoter score. So, you know, you've. Knowing the numbers in every area is important. And then my fourth job is recruiting as a CEO, so recruiting great team members out there in the world. I remember one of my businesses, which I've sold now, was a restaurant. And my partner in the business said to me, brad, we need a new director of wine. And so I just happened to be at a restaurant a few weeks later, and I met this young lady who was just an amazing psalm and had built this phenomenal wine program, but they just didn't have much wine. And I. And I was chatting with her about it and eventually recruited her to come and run our wine program. And she tripled our wine profitability, you know, because she's just so good at it. So, yeah, they're my four jobs as a CEO and finance, and numbers is number one. And I think a lot of people, they just trust their CFO with it. If you're the CEO, you need to sit with your CFO on a very regular basis and go through the numbers and ask the questions. I remember when I interviewed Lord Sugar, and their start of every single board meeting is going through the numbers. And I've never done anything different. Every time, start with the numbers, go through the numbers. And even if the numbers are phenomenal, okay, why did we predict we were going to do less than that? Why were the numbers different to what we predicted? Type thing? And if the numbers are worse, well, what did we miss? What did we not do? All of those sorts of things. But coaching starts with numbers. Business is the language of business is numbers.

James (40:42)

Some of the listeners might not label themselves as CEO. They might label themselves as, I don't.

Brad Sugars (40:48)

Know, owner or owner, M.D. we mean the general manager, Boss. It doesn't matter what you call it. I use the term CEO and it's interchangeable with all the others. But there's a big difference between being an owner and a CEO, James. If you're the owner and the CEO, you're probably doing a bad job at both of them. Meaning this companies I own a share of or I'm the owner of. My CEOs work harder than if I didn't own a share. Why? I'll go back to my early days, as in business. I was the CEO and the owner of the business. And I was very good at lying to myself. And most business owners are. It was like, oh, boss, how did you, you know, I would go home and report to the owner as CEO? Well, I did really great today, Mr. Owner. Yes, you did, Mr. CEO. You're phenomenal. Like I would. The advantage of a big business over a small business is a set of directors or a board of directors and shareholders who demand growth. That's why a lot of people come to us at Action Coach is for the accountability. I believe there's four reasons why people come to us, and one of them is community. Another is accountability, another is results, and another is the education. So we call that care, community, accountability, results, and education. Now, many of them think they're coming to us just for the results. But to get the results, you need a community around you that builds you up because it is lonely. You need an education structure that works and, you know, having that. But you also need accountability. And that's why, as a coach, what I do with most people when I'm coaching them is I act as their board of directors or I act as the owner, with them as the CEO sort of thing. So eventually, I want every CEO of a business to do what I do, and that is run their business in an hour a week. As a coach, I run those businesses in one hour a week. And I want to train my CEOs in all of my companies and every CEO we coach to be able to get your business to a point where in one hour a week, you can run your business. You're coaching your CEO or your MD or GM or whatever terminology it is. One hour a week, you can coach them. And part of that is knowing your numbers. You've gotta be able to read the numbers pretty dang quick in that hour a week and go through them.

James (43:07)

Now, what you said right at the start was, run your business on 30 to 50% of the income. Is that the right benchmark?

Brad Sugars (43:15)

Your cost structure should be somewhere in that basis. You should have a profitability of 20 to 30%. In a good organization, you want to be at about 30% profitability. That's where you want to get to. Now, when we start installing ABOs, a lot of the times companies are running at fours and fives and 10 percents. So what we work them on is every quarter adding a percent. If every quarter we add 1 more percent, and wow, sometimes they beat it and they get 2 more percent in profitability. And sometimes that's volume, and sometimes it's cost cutting, and sometimes it's better purchasing, and sometimes it's increasing prices. Many times it's better marketing to get better customers so that they're not haggling on price sort of thing. When we're installing ABOs into a business. And I keep. I use the word install, James, because it really is. It's an installation of a business operating system. Okay. And when you look at just the financials aspect, installing our financial management system, you'll go through and there's about 120 different strategies within that. With your coach, you'll work out which are the top, top 10 to 15 you need to install immediately and which ones can happen over time. So we get immediate installation of the real control factors so that now we can make real decisions. Without real numbers, you can't make great decisions in business.

James (44:31)

You've alluded to time a few times, a few points, you know, and you mentioned productivity. What's the key to getting control of your time?

Brad Sugars (44:41)

Make a list, start the top. Start at number one. Eat that frog. You know, every single day, every customer of ours makes a list of what they got to get done tomorrow. They prioritize the list, they time allocate the list and they put it in their calendar.

James (44:55)

You do also go talk about, you know, moving, focusing on the thing that moves the needle the most.

Brad Sugars (45:00)

And the number one thing of the day, you know, Brian Tracy wrote the book how to eat that Frog. And we tell everyone what's the most important thing. It's first on your priority list every single day. The most important thing happens at 8, 30 or 9. Whatever time you start work, you don't have any meetings scheduled. You can't schedule meetings until a little after that. You have to do that first, most important thing, first thing every day. And for most business people, that's sales. For most business people, they need to make it rain. Make it rain. Morningstead just. Or make it rain Monday. Whatever day it is, whatever time it is. But if you don't have a make it rain time allocated in your calendar, in your diary, then your business is not going to succeed. You got to make it rain. You're the owner. Your job is to bring in the.

James (45:44)

Money in your system. You also talk about org charts and the importance of an old chart now. And I'll chat in a year from now, an orchard when the business is finished. And that also helps you get your time back or focus.

Brad Sugars (45:59)

Well, who does what by when knowing which seat on the boat you're in, then which oar is yours to row is kind of important. When people don't see where they fit into the big picture, where they don't know how their role impacts other areas of the company, it doesn't work. It's why our lion meetings in management training happen On a Monday morning. It's a group session. People forget the purpose of meetings. The purpose of a meeting is communication. They think it's about reporting. And the purpose of a meeting is to communicate. So everyone has to add value to the meeting and communicate because otherwise things fall through the gaps. You know, when it comes to time though, James, it's all about productivity in the organization. That's the measure. What is our productivity measure? Making that list every day as a 30% bump in productivity in companies. And people have proven this all their life. They make a list the day before they go on vacation. They get so much more done, they leave for their vacation early. Like it's. Why not do that every single day of your life? I started doing it, though not for productivity. I started doing it because I couldn't leave work at work. I would go home and I'd be thinking about work all day. So I just started writing my list of what I needed to do the next day just to get it out of my head so that in that drive home, I could switch off and become a dad and become a husband. So when I walked in the door, you know, I saw it growing up and my dad was a different generation. But he would come home from work, he would go into the formal lounge with his newspaper and his couple of beers and he would sit in there and mum would tell us, boys, do not talk to your dad till he comes out of there. And he would come out of there from dinner, and then after dinner we'd go and play cricket or do something with dad. But he needed that shut off time. Well, I didn't want to be that dad. I wanted to walk in the door and pick up my kids and hug my wife and. And be ready. So I started doing that. And then I noticed the productivity increases and I went, holy heck, I gotta get everyone doing this. And so everyone started doing it and we all got more better performance.

James (48:04)

So pretty simple, isn't it?

Brad Sugars (48:07)

You would think it's simple, but my God, our brains are great at complicating things. James, we're very good at complicating things.

James (48:14)

Plan tomorrow. Today. Talk to me about getting control of customer experience.

Brad Sugars (48:20)

So delivery mastery and mastering the product or service delivery is. It starts basic checklists. Okay. Most companies, when if a business owner says to me, you know, I've got. My team's performance is up and down. I've got great days and bad days, or show me the checklist they have to follow and what's their answer? Well, we don't have Checklists. So like, what's the one business in the world where you want to control the customer experience perfectly? The airlines? We're sitting here at Farnborough. There's the airport right there. What do we want? We want that plane to take off and land perfectly. What percentage of the time?

James (48:58)

100.

Brad Sugars (48:58)

Correct. So what do pilots have every single flight? They have a flight plan, they have a pre flight checklist. They have a checklist. They walk around the plane, fill in the checklist. They get on the thing, they follow the checklist. The co pilot's job is to ask the pilot to run through the checklist. There's checklists to make certain that everything happens to perfection. Now when things go wrong, that's when training kicks in. Systems Mike Bash taught me this. He was one of the founding vice presidents of Federal Express. He said systematize the 80%. 80% of things are routine, 20% of things you train people for. So yes, on a flight, 80% of the time it's going to go perfectly. There's a, you know, it's a computer run. It's all of that sort of thing. 20% of the time you need a genius sitting at the wheel to be able to do that stuff. So it's 80% of tasks in business are routine, James. They're done every day, they're done every hour, they're done every week, every month. And once you get it that those things need to be systematized. And whether that's a checklist or a video or photographs, like in our restaurant, we have a photograph above the stations in the kitchen that show this is what this should look like when it's clean and this is what this should look like when it's prepped and ready for the day. It's a simple system, but it's making sure that there is consistency of delivery. We don't want because you want referrals, you better have consistency of delivery. If you give me good service one time, bad service the next, I can't refer you because I don't know if I'm going to get if my friends or colleagues are going to get the good or the bad service. Time consistency of delivery is more important than amazing delivery.

James (50:39)

What about customer feedback? What role does this play in customer experience?

Brad Sugars (50:44)

You want as much customer feedback as you can possibly get. You want all of the negative feedback you can possibly get.

James (50:49)

Is that the key to controlling complaints?

Brad Sugars (50:53)

You want as many complaints as you can get because then you fix it so you never get that complaint again.

James (50:58)

There's a Difference, though, between going and asking for them and receiving them.

Brad Sugars (51:04)

Yeah. If you're reactive with customer service, you will get complaints on online. They won't actually come to you with the problem. How many times, James, have you eaten at a restaurant? And they came to you at the end and there was four or five things went wrong and they came to you at the end and said, how was it? You said, oh, great, thanks. Especially you British, you know, they're going to definitely not tell anyone that they've done anything wrong. You know, if you came to them and said, hey, if there was one thing we could have done better tonight for you, what would that have been? All of a sudden, now you're enlisting the assistance of your customer to make your business better.

James (51:41)

It's really crucial how you ask that question. Having the question and how you ask it, though.

Brad Sugars (51:46)

Oh, yeah, You've got to have built relationship and rapport with the customer. You don't want your waiter going over to the customer and the waiter's been ignoring them all night. And then they go over and ask, if there's one thing we could have done better. Well, you could have showed up. You know, it's like people aren't going to be obvious with you if you haven't taken care of.

James (52:03)

But let's go back to the original point. Train the people for that. Dealing and engaging with people. But then the odds of the systemize, the routine, if you like, is the question that you ask.

Brad Sugars (52:16)

Yeah. I got one of my buddies who runs one of the biggest restaurant nightclub groups in the world, and they train every employee with an inch of their life. Even employees who've been waiters at restaurants or bartenders for 20 years, when they come to them, they retrain them all. Here's how we say things here. Here's how we do this here. Building consistency in the systems is one thing, but you got to build consistency in the soft systems. How do you answer the phone? How do you greet a customer? If you walk into a retail store and they ask, oh, hi, can I help you? You know, they've done no training in that retail store. They don't value their people enough to train them. They don't invest in the humans that are in their organization. One of the biggest reasons people stay in companies is how much they're learning. I have a young intern in my office in Las Vegas, and he decided to step backwards in his career to take an internship with us. For one reason, he said, I'm going to learn more here and set my career up for the rest of my life. Most if young people only understood your first job should be. Your first three jobs technically should be jobs where you have a great mentor or a great ability to learn. If you can learn in your first three jobs, then your career is set. But they go and get a job based on how much they're going to make. No, your job is about how much you can learn. Set yourself up, get great mentors.

James (53:47)

That kind of wraps up the getting control element of your system.

Brad Sugars (53:52)

Control of time, control of money, control of delivery of the service and knowing where we're going.

James (53:56)

And control your own personal development and personal growth.

Brad Sugars (54:01)

Yeah, that one comes right through the whole thing. I think that, you know, we, we teach it that there's six steps to a boss, to growing the business, to installing that system. But there's also six levels of your personal growth. And in the beginning you've got to grow from being self employed to a manager. You've got to grow from a manager to an owner, from an owner to an investor, from an investor to an entrepreneur. You've got to go through those scales. So, and a lot of them, there's emotional growth, there's knowledge growth, skills growth.

James (54:30)

The next level that you talk about is getting profitable.

Brad Sugars (54:33)

Yeah. So cash flow control then cash flow abos. Step two is money. Let's make more money. Now that we've, now that we've got a good customer experience or a consistent customer experience, now that we know we're making money, we've got control of our finances now we know we've got productivity and we know where we're going now. Let's feed the beast. Let's get the customers.

James (54:57)

Feed the beast. Now you've got a profit growth plan kind of system with five key components in there. Let's go through each one one by one.

Brad Sugars (55:05)

Leads by conversion equals customers. So there's the first two leads and conversion customers by number of transactions and average sale equals revenues or turnover. Sales. So there's your next two. And then finally sales multiplied by margins equals profitability. So your five areas and this here's. Let me take a quick step back. People come to us and they ask for help with three things. Number of customers, total sales and profitability. The problem is those things. If you look at the formula and hopefully we can put in the show notes here, this formula or a link to the actual formula. The formula says those three things are the equals. They're the end result of five things. The five most important factors in marketing are leads, conversion, number of transactions, transactions which is Repeat business, average sale and margins. Now, if you go into our system within a boss, there's more than 80 strategies you can install for leads. There's more than 80 strategies for conversion rate. There's more than 70 for repeat business, more than 60 for average sale, and more than 60 for profitability. So when someone comes to us, the first thing we do is start testing and measuring, start to know their existing numbers. From there we go and work out what do we need to install in these different areas. We would generally start with margins and average sale and conversion rate. We don't usually go to lead generation first because what's the use of getting more leads if your conversion is average? If your average sale is low and your margins are not there, is there a trap there?

James (56:40)

Because a lot of people want to go more leads.

Brad Sugars (56:42)

Oh. First thing they do when they go to marketing is they go to a marketing agency and say, I need more leads. Leads. Well, what's your conversion rate? I don't know. Okay, then let's work on your conversion rate first.

James (56:52)

That's not obvious, you know. Yeah, because if I'm. If I'm a business owner, it's easy to say we just need more leads, rather than going and looking at that number.

Brad Sugars (57:08)

Vanity metrics. Lead flow is a vanity metric. Average sale is a profitability metric. If I can get 10% more money out of every single customer that comes through that door and makes a purchase, I've just increased my revenues by 10%. If my margins, if I can start selling products or services that have a higher margin, my bottom line just went up. If I can get 10% more margin in every sale, I don't make any more sales. All I do is sell things with more margin in it than there was before, more profit in it than there was before. I change someone's mind from buying that brand to that brand because that brand, I get 10% more profitability in it. Boom. I've just added 10% to my profit. No, I haven't added 10% to my profit because if I've increased my margin by 10%, I've probably doubled or tripled my actual bottom line. Leftover money in the bank. These are the things that are very important for us to understand. That 10% increase in average sale probably doubles or triples the profit from the sale. It still cost me the same marketing to get the sale. It still cost me the same wages to get the sale. If I got a 10% boom, my bottom line increase is massive. My conversion rate, if I'm already getting 10 customers calling my business a day or 10 customers messaging me, or 10 people giving me their name and email on, on my website. Right. If I can improve my conversion rate by 10% better, my marketing costs just plummeted per customer. My cost of buying a new customer went down dramatically. Not by doing better marketing, not by anything. Just by the fact that Instead of getting 2 out of 10 to purchase, I got 3 out of 10 to purch. I just halved my marketing cost. Profits go through the roof when we fix those three. And they're the easiest. They're the easiest. Lead generation is possibly the hardest of the five.

James (59:21)

What's standing out for me is a few things. One is pay attention to this system if you like the five areas, the things to move and have a plan for it. So I mean, you said you've got 80 strategies at each one of those. I don't need to implement 80 strategies though. Sure.

Brad Sugars (59:41)

No, you'll probably implement somewhere between 5 and 10 on each one on each of the five.

James (59:46)

So somewhere between 25 and, and 50 strategies. And this is where, why you call it the profit growth plan, because there's 25 to 50 strategies that are being.

Brad Sugars (59:56)

Worked and if each one of them adds 1 or 2%, you've just done 100%.

James (60:02)

You're good at that, aren't you? About giving direction. You said each quarter 1%. You said set a goal for getting off the tools.

Brad Sugars (60:07)

People want the silver bullet, James, and the silver bullet in business is 100 ideas that add 1%. It's not one idea that does 100% growth in your business. People put their. Not like they'll go and build a new website and think, this will be the thing. This, this is it. It's going to solve all of our worries and no, it's not. Does your website have a hundred different ways for a prospect to say, I'd like to I'm interested. Does it have a hundred offers for your prospect to say, I'm, I'm raising my hand, I want some more information. You know, marketing is a love of mine, James. I absolutely love it. And how you like just converting a prospect. I'll give you a simple example, right? Someone comes to us at Action Coach and expresses interest to join our coaching or I want more information about coaching. Right. They will get an immediate email back to them. They'll probably get, they probably requested an ebook or they might have requested our two weeks start a coaching program or they might have requested a download of an infographic or, you know, we've probably got 50 ebooks for free. On actioncoach.com we've got dozens of infographics that people can print and put on their wall as a reminder of the great things they can be doing. All of the ABOS system is all there type thing for them to print and put it on the wall and reminder of this formula. In fact, they can go to the website and download the infographic of the five ways formula and stick it on their wall and remind themselves every day I've got to be doing leads conversion average. Do you know what I mean by the way?

James (61:46)

That point is massively important in internalizing the principle. When you walk around it, when you see something every day, it kind of sinks in almost on a subliminal level.

Brad Sugars (61:57)

You know, it's for goals, it's for all sorts of things. I remember before I bought my first Rolex, I had a picture of solid gold blueface Submariner. It was stuck to the side of my computer screen for three years before I got to the point where I could, where I hit the goal that allowed me to buy it.

James (62:13)

Okay, to have the money to invest, we've got to make it. So let's go back to market now. Where do we start with Martin?

Brad Sugars (62:18)

Well, so the five ways that we talked about, okay, the next area you go to is repeat business. So the reason I bought up Action Coach when someone comes to us in marketing is that once they give us their name, there is then a 31, 30 day email sequence. We've gone. Historically, marketing was a weekly thing. Well, historically it was monthly. When I first started in business, you communicated with your customers monthly. You sent a monthly newsletter. Then it went to weekly when we got email. Right. And now it's daily. So a good marketer today will communicate daily with the customer. So we have the first 30 days emails mapped out. Why you don't go to Netflix and start at season three, episode five, you go back and binge season one, episode one. Because you got to learn the backstory. Well, when I join a company, if I go into their normal newsletter, I don't know all of the basics. See, for example, I ask a business owner, how many of your customers know every product that you sell? None. So when I'm talking about repeat business here, people that don't know what you do can't bite. If your customers don't know that you offer something, they can't buy it from you. So what are your offers? What are your reasons to go back and communicate? Every day I have an email sequence where literally every single Day, a business owner will get an email from me if they're on the Action Coach database and it will talk to them about a singular problem that could they could be experiencing business and two or three solutions they can do. Now, if you're a business owner, do you want every day two or three ideas from me how to grow your business? Yes. So it's not a waste, it's not spam, it's informational. Now, at the end of it, I say, by the way, if you want more on this, please just hit reply, reach out and book a call with me or one of my team or read this thing or go to this article or do that. You know, I see that as a very big part of the repeat business. But repeat business is all about creating offers. If you're not creating new offers every month, you're not getting enough repeat business. And it could be the same products, same services, but you've got to create a new offer. A reason to call me back, a reason to ask me to do something. What's your reason to bring me to the next thing. To the next thing? To the next thing. A business that does not ask their customers to come back. Well, let's go back in. For a business that does not collect a customer's name, email and cell phone number is wasting marketing money today if you are not collecting. And let's use. I've used restaurant as an example. In my restaurant, when someone sits down at the table, we don't just want to collect the name and address of the first person that booked. We want everyone in the table to become part of our VIP program. So we go to the table with an iPad and say, hey, listen, we'd love everybody here to be a part of our VIP program. Here's the benefits of it if you want to join. Fantastic. Just name, email and phone number is all we need. Please pass this around the table so we get name, email. If someone brings a group of 12, we've got 12 people to follow up. Now, if a family comes in, they're not all the same, you know, they're brother and sister that. So we get all of the database. So that's your first thing. How are you collecting names and addresses from existing customers and prospects? You've got to have as many methodologies as you can to, as my book says, get people to raise their hand and say, I'm interested. Now. Now, from a repeat business perspective, we just need to consistently ask them to come back. What have we got? What reason do we have for them to come Back and give you an example. Buddy of mine was in the insurance business and I sat down with him and I said, what is your average policy number per customer? And he said, it's 1.18. I said, so what you're telling me is that you have. We went through it just before. He had 30 different types of insurance that someone could buy from him. Him and his average customer had 1.18 types of insurance. So let's go and do a service for all of your customers. Let's go and serve your customers better. Let's go and sit down with them and say, hey, listen, as an insurance company, we have 30 different types of insurance that you need. You don't need 30 in any way, shape or form. But just to make sure that should anything happen in your life, we want to make sure you're covered. And our. So last month you saw the fires in California, right? People lost their homes. They said, so that's one that we go to people with. We say, hey, listen, we're not sure if you have. Because you don't have your homeowner's insurance with us. We're not sure if you're covered for fire. It would it be okay if we did a survey with you to make sure. Then if there's a flood, hey, we're not sure. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's many reasons to go back to them. But just by going back and looking at, we increased his average policy count to 2.3 something. So almost more than doubling his business, quadrupling his profit just by saying, how do we get our existing customers to come back more often? And thinking it through. Now, again, when you're installing abos, we'll coach you through because the ABOS installation comes with coaching. When we're installing the systems to get repeat business, it's not just about a CRM. It's about what are you putting in there? What are you doing with that? How are you doing? And that's why the coaching is vital. Every 90 days, we bring you into plan. And every 90 days we're looking at your ABOS numbers and we're saying, okay, what is your current repeat business rate? And again, these are just measures that we look at. And final area of marketing, James, obviously lead generation. This is one where I could literally sit here with you for five days and never stop talking about marketing. I love it. I love it to death. I think it is one of the most amazing things. It is the lifeblood of a business. It's what brings oxygen to an organization. How do we generate leads? How do we convert those leads into customers? The myriad of ways of doing that is just. It's so much fun for me to watch a company learn how to actually consistently and predictably buy customers. I wrote that book, Buying Customers. It's now in version 2.0. I think I'm probably gonna have to update it again. But when you understand that if you take 20 and you put it into the market and you get a hundred back, it's pretty exciting. I learned this when I had a dog food business. Home delivered dog food. Our first sale to a new customer was 108 on average it was a six week supply of food and I could do it for under $38. So my profit on the first sale, my GP on the first sale was $38. So I had to buy customers for less than $38. My radio ads would buy them for 24.50. I had some TV ads that were buying them for $4.50 a customer. When you understand that marketing is math and it's all about measuring and also when you truly understand that 80% of marketing fails, I'll give you an example. When I do a new marketing campaign, we do what's called color block testing. So we will go to meta. I use meta and Instagram for most ad testing. I do a lot with Google but most ad testing I'll do on a meta program. So I will. And I use light blue. I don't know why. I just. When I first designed them on Canva a few years back, that was the color I started using. And so I still use it today. And I will create a dozen headlines based on different hooks. So in my book about advertising, I show people all the different types of hooks and today there's many different types of hooks out there that get people to read. And a hook is another word for a headline, you know, so I get the headline 7 reasons why this, blah blah blah, you name it, I've got all the headlines right. I'll create 12 of those. I will color block test them. I'll put $30 on them, each of those. So $360. I will test those things I'm looking for between a 2 and a half and 4% click through rate. It's it's gotta be 2 and a half. If it's above 4, then I'm doing something wrong in most cases because I'm actually getting an audience that would be non buyers. Does that make sense? It's like I've put up, I'VE just got too many people clicking and I'm looking for a purchase of about $2 a click or less for what I'm selling now. Those metrics will be different for other people. And again, when you're installing abos, your coach will go through with you what your metric should be. But here's the crazy part. We now have competitions in our marketing teams to write the 12, each of us will get to write two or three. I'm the guru, right? James? I've been doing this 30 years. I've been writing headlines forever. The last three, one of the interns beat me. Why? Because the target audience is young entrepreneurs. I'm 54. I'm not writing the exact right copy for them, if that makes sense. I've got to get my head. And so this is why I love employing young people, because they help me in marketing in ways that others never could. But we will do that testing and then once we get to the two, we'll nail it down to two of them. We'll write another six versions of each of those and do the test again. Once we've done the color block testing, we've got so we've done from 12 down to 2, we rewrite both of those slightly different versions of them, then we'll go and put a photograph behind it and we'll do 12 different photographs on the headline that we've chosen, right? So we found the one that works the best. We'll put 12 different photographs behind it, then we'll do 12 different offers, then we'll do 12 headlines underneath. And so overall, I will invest somewhere in the vicinity of 5,001 month to test an ad. And at the end of that, I can then put 100 grand, 200 grand, 500 grand or a million dollars into that ad. You know why? Because it's a self liquidating offer. That ad will make me more money than I actually put into running the ad. It's called ROAS Return on Ad Spend. So if I'm out there and I'm spending a million dollars on a campaign and making $2 million from the campaign, I've got free advertising for the rest of my life.

James (73:08)

As you were describing this profit growth plan with the five ways in it, you alluded to maths. Martin's about maths. 80% of it fails. You started. Even before that you were talking about the importance of data. Even before that you were saying there's going to be between 25 and 50 strategies that you're going to be working in here. And And I'm tying that back to something you said earlier on about the CEO's job. Number one you said was numbers. And that's the thing that's standing out on this growth plan. Know the numbers for each of those five areas.

Brad Sugars (73:41)

Well, let's even go back further, James. The first question I ask someone, you ask me, where do you start with this? The first question I ask you is how many new customers per day do you want?

James (73:54)

I love the per day.

Brad Sugars (73:55)

Per day. It has to be per day. Marketing is a daily algorithm. Marketing is not a monthly thing we measure, it's not a weekly thing we measure, it's a daily thing that we measure. We measure marketing and sales results daily. In fact, sales results you'll often measure hourly depending upon the business or the type of business that you're in. Now if you're a 90 day sales cycle, obviously we're measuring leads, daily conversion through the sales process, daily, step by step process. But where do you start? You start with answering this question, how many new customers do I want and can I handle per day consistently onboarding them perfectly and doing an amazing job that I will keep them long term. Now most people say, oh, I can have an unlimited number of new customers. I'm an online business, absolute rubbish. You can't have an unlimited number. You'd blow your, firstly, your server would blow up. You know, don't be stupid about unlimited. How many can you handle and onboard consistently, persistently in your business? Now I'm going to teach you a magic word with that. Let's imagine I'm using my business, James, the business coaching business. My average partner out there in the marketplace. So in every city that we have an operation, my action coach partner in that marketplace will tell you that they can onboard maybe one customer a day. They can't onboard 50 customers a day. It's just not possible. Now we could say, oh, we'll do it through technology, great, but we're not going to give them the level of service that we want to and keep them as long as we want to and give the results that we need with them if we do it that way. So I'm talking about a one to one coaching client, whether it's an executive coaching, CEO coaching, corporate business coaching or small business coaching, mid sized business coaching, marketing coaching, sales coaching system. We have all the different coaching genres, right? The magic word now for marketing is only we only take on one new client today. We're going to see if you meet the criteria to be that only one person. We add a day Scarcity is big in marketing.

James (76:08)

You're pretty passionate about this subject, aren't you?

Brad Sugars (76:10)

I love marketing. Marketing is possibly the most fun area of business.

James (76:16)

What would you say to someone who doesn't quite have that relationship that despises it a little bit?

Brad Sugars (76:23)

Well, I'm an accountant by training, and I think you know that. So as an accountant, we're trained that marketing's an expense. And for most companies, it is because they don't do marketing property properly. Marketing is an investment if done correctly. It's the best investment in the world. If I can take a dollar and turn it into $1.50 by the end of the day, right? If I can do marketing and for every dollar in marketing, I can make $1.50 within 30 days. Let's just do 30 days, right? So I've had a 50% ROI in 30 days. I take that money and I do it again. My ROI is amazing. I love it. From that perspective, if you are a good marketer, it's an investment. Every dollar out brings in 2, 4, 10, 20, 100 back to you.

James (77:11)

That's what you're saying. Develop the investment mindset.

Brad Sugars (77:13)

But you got to test and measure. You got to do the math. Numbers.

James (77:15)

Numbers.

Brad Sugars (77:16)

Got to do it.

James (77:17)

Numbers don't lie.

Brad Sugars (77:18)

Well, let me just give you the numbers that blow people away, James. If I get a 10% improvement in each of the five areas, right? Just 10% better, 10% more prospects, 10% better conversion. Not like from 30 to 40, but from 30 to 33. Like, just 10% minute changes that we can do. Just measuring them usually gets us a 10% improvement in this stuff. If I do that, what do you think is the improvement in a. My revenues, total sales and be my profitability. My total sales are up 46% and my profitability is up 61%. It's leverage. Divide the multiply. 10% times 10% times 10% times 10 percent times 10%, it's a 61% multiplier to the bottom line of a business. Business. So if the.

James (78:05)

If the bottom line's a million, you're on 1.61 million next year on 10%.

Brad Sugars (78:10)

10% in each of the five areas. Now imagine I broke that down even further. Imagine we went to lead generation and we looked at 10 strategies for lead generation, and we improved each of the 10 by 10%. Like referrals. I people, we install a referral system in their business, and they're like, well, we get some referrals. Yeah, but do you have a system for it? No. Oh. All right. Let's install our referral system, the ABOS referral system. Let's install it in your business. There's 24 stages to the referral system and it'll work and blah, blah. And they go from getting the odd referral here and there to getting a systematic methodology of referrals happening daily, weekly, monthly depending upon the time frame of their business.

James (78:50)

This Profit Growth 5 Ways system, is this the engine of the business? Is this.

Brad Sugars (78:56)

It is by far one of the most important engines in the business. Yes, because this is your predictive indicators. This is not like historic numbers like profit and balance sheet. Those are historic numbers. That's what happened. These numbers can tell you what's going to happen. Let's imagine you have a sales cycle that is 30 days. So say you're a construction business and from when they connect with you to when you bid and win the job is a 30 day thing, right? How many leads you get in March will tell me how many sales you're getting in April. I can tell your cash flow in May because of how many leads you're getting in March.

James (79:35)

Well, look, that whole anticipation and the ability to see around corners and the.

Brad Sugars (79:40)

Ability to think ahead, it allows me to hire more people in the right time frame. I don't have to hire them into the last minute. It allows me to buy more equipment at the right time frame. It allows me to get my leasing correct. It allows me to do all of these decision making. That is a big part and that's why marketing is so important. So we start increasing volume so you get control. Then we start increasing volume and you get the real cash flow happening. Once you've got volume, then we've got a good solid business to build upon.

James (80:08)

Look, you're even convincing me on this. You've convinced me many times. It's probably the passion. What's the take home message for this? Forgetting the profit growth strategy in people's businesses?

Brad Sugars (80:20)

Dude, there's so many. But know your numbers and set a goal for your numbers. So let me break that down for you. Let's imagine we did that first thing I said, we do, when do you want to finish the business, Right? So we answer the question of when do you want to finish the business? And you said to me, james, Brad, I want to finish it by this date. And I then asked you a few more questions. I said, well, what do you want to sell it for if you sell it, you know, I don't know. I said, well, okay, let's look at your dreams. And your life, what? Because your business is a vehicle to provide for your life, it's not your life. Right. And you said, brad, I want to sell it for 10 million quid. Fantastic. Seven years from now, 10 million quid, what do you think you've got to be doing in revenue for it to sell for 10 million quid? Now this might take a few weeks of research to go away and look at your industry and see what are the multipliers and the multiples and who's buying and what they'll pay for it. And let's imagine we come up with, well, it's gotta be doing 100 million quid in sales and it's gotta be doing 2 million quid in profitability. Cause your industry, whatever you're doing, it was a low profit industry. Fantastic. So we've got to do 100 million in sales, 2 million in bottom line profit, so we can sell this thing for 5 times EBITDA, 5 times profits. Is your model fantastic? We then go through James and say in seven years, here's what your lead flow numbers have to be, here's what your conversion rate has to be, here's what your, your repeat business rate, your average sale and your margins have to be by six years. We got to get it to these numbers by five years, by four years, by three years, by two years, by next quarter, we've got to have this growth in it. So I know what your numbers need to be for seven years out. I can plan your marketing, I can plan. What are the strategies we need to implement the abos system? How do we install these strategies to go from this conversion rate to this conversion rate? How do we install the strategies to go from this number of transactions to this number of transactions?

James (82:08)

Classic reverse engineering, but with absolute detail. It's giving you the profit.

Brad Sugars (82:14)

Well, the system and the strategies of ABOs, you gotta, the average business owners, I've tried everything, I said, well, okay, here's three and a half thousand strategy cards. Pick which ones you've tried. We've developed a toolbox within ABOS that gives the owner control back of the growth of their business. It's no longer a guessing game.

James (82:33)

Yeah. To be honest though, is even if you've tried it once, don't mean to say it wouldn't work next time because you've got another formula that says B times do equals half. Yeah. So I did this. But you, you've not only got to do it, you've got to, you've got to be.

Brad Sugars (82:46)

Well, it's like the person who says, you know, I've tried telemarketing. Great. And how many books did you read on how to do sales on telemarketing? How much training did you have on telemarketing? How much sales training did you get? How much did you test the script to be able to know exactly what works, what doesn't? And you know, I, I'm a very big test and measure guy. And when people tell me they tried something, I go back to or show me the numbers. Well, I made 10 phone calls. Then you didn't try anything. There's no testing in 10. I, I was a coach for my kids soccer team. My older daughters, they're now 22 and 23, but back when they were in under 12s, there's a young girl on the team and we were learning laces kicks. We had to call them for the kids. You know, they all kick with their toe or then they kick with the inside of their foot. So we taught them inside, outside foot. And now we're teaching them front of the foot, the big kick, you know, the booming front of the foot off the thing. And I said to all the girls, right over to the fence, 100 laces kicks. One girl comes back after five of them. She says, coach, I'm no good at these. I, Great, go do 95 more and tell me if you got better. I interviewed Darren Cahill, who's possibly the goat tennis coach of all time. You know, Leighton Hewitt, Andre Agassi, his Yannick Sinners, his current thing, five number, sorry, four number one players this guy's coached. And I said, what's, what's the goal when you go out there? Do you set the big goals? Do you, do you look at the big hairy, audacious goal? He says, you know what? We look at doing one small thing better every time we go out on the court. Just one thing, just a little bit better. You know, we don't sit down and go, we want to be number one in the world. We go, hey, we haven't yet beaten this guy this year, let's aim to beat that guy.

James (84:36)

There's two other bits that I want to talk about regarding this getting profitable section of your model. First one is sales process.

Brad Sugars (84:45)

What is a real sales process for sales is technically a scientific thing. Again, if you break it down, what, what is the information someone needs to know to be able to make a decision? Now there's multiple buying styles and whether you go with the, the disk profile, the communication of the vak, the neuro linguistic programming, the bank spin there's all different buying styles, right? But what it starts with is a flowchart. And the flowchart starts with when someone connects with us, what do they have to do? Right through to how does someone actually make their second purchase with us? The flowchart should not stop at the single purchase. A single purchase is not a customer. They're a shopper. They've made a transaction with you. In order for someone to become a customer, they need to become accustomed to doing business with you. Like the second time you go to a restaurant, you already know where the bathrooms are. You already know things. Do you know what I mean? You're accustomed to it. And we call that the ladder of loyalty. And the ladder of loyalty takes someone from a suspect, a potential customer to a prospect, meaning they've raised their hand and said, hey, I'm interested. And remember back in marketing today, and this really goes into the sales system. If I can just spend a minute on marketing. And sales today is very different to where it was pre Covid and pre 10 years ago, 20. Like, I'll go back when I first bought a car, okay, when I first bought a car, you went to 10 dealerships, you looked at all the cars on the lot and you got the brochures and you took the brochures home and then you studied it all and then you went back and test drove one or two of them sort of thing. Today, the world of buying is different. I'll give you four sets of statistics that I think are very important. Number one, it's now more than 4, 40% of buyers do not want to talk to a salesperson in the transaction. They don't want to ever deal with a human. The younger you are, the higher that percentage is. The older you are, the more chance you want to get on the phone and talk with a potential salesperson. So the role of the salespeople have changed dramatically. The role of marketing. Google gave us these statistics. So Google did an analysis they called ZMOT zero moment of truth truth which says 7114 is their essential numbers, meaning seven hours of research, 11 interactions in four different places. Now let me explain that someone today making a decent sized purchase. So let's, let's actually go back to purchasing behaviors. If I know what I want to buy, I go to Amazon or something similar. Okay, I'm already there. I open the app and I click and I might do a minute search for the item that I want or I might even search the category of item. Usually if I'm doing more research than that, I Go to Google. Google, the top searches are best this reviews of price, of problems with buying comparisons. They're the main searches, the categories of searches. Marcus Sheridan's wonderful book on that subject. They ask you answer is phenomenal about helping us learn that. So they do those searches, right? And they're now doing research. Now if I don't know what I want to buy, I go to YouTube and I type in how to do something. So YouTube is like the how do I do it? And then on the YouTube someone will go, oh, and I use this product to do it. And you go, oh shit, I know I need to buy that. So you go to Google and you research buying that and so on. Okay, so in the 7114 study, what Google found is that people will on average do 7 hours of study to make a purchase. Now, a bigger purchase is more hours. A smaller purchase is less hours, obviously. So if I go to your website and you don't have seven hours of videos, articles, audios, podcasts, ebooks, price calculators, et cetera, if you don't have all of that, that I'm going to bounce back off your site and go and find a site that gives me enough education so that I buy. People do not. And this is the next statistic. People want to be 70% of the way through the purchase before talking to a salesperson because they don't want to appear stupid. They want to have done their research and know what questions to ask when they go into talk with the salesperson. So for example, someone looking at Action coach might be watching this whole podcast in order to learn enough so that when they speak with a coach, they feel confident in asking them, hey, how do I install a boss? I really need sales right now. Do I have to do the A boss installation in the order Brad talked about it in, or can I do this part first? Because I need more conversion rate immediately. Can we focus on that immediately? Like they're going to ask educated questions. Now the 11 interactions and this part often surprises people because pre Covid we used to do a lot more business face to face. The technologies of zoom have ruined a lot of salespeople. The technologies of social media have ruined a lot of salespeople. Columbia University, this is my fourth statistic came out and shared with us that one hour of face to face time is worth five hours of zoom. So they did the whole study. So if I'm in sales today, my goal is to be first to respond and first to get face to face because they're already 70% of the way through the sale, by the time they connect with me, remember that by the time they connect to a salesperson, not a marketer, but by the time they connect to a salesperson, I'm already most probably 70% of the way through the purchase. So the speed, Jay Bear teaches us these days that the speed of response. Now there are statistics showing more than 40% of customers will buy from the first company that calls them back. It's gotten that bad out there in the marketplace. So if I am the first, if, if I don't. And this is where even AI technology, we're now using an AI technology that, that when someone calls to book in an appointment or someone fills in their detail to book an appointment, the AI will call them within five minutes. Now we've shown this, right? If we call them inside two minutes, it's too fast. They're stunned, they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, big brother, what's going on type thing. If it's five minutes in, they feel comfortable that a human has seen this and responded to them. So the AI will call you, James and say, hey James, it's Brad calling from Action Coach. We noticed you booked in for our two week coaching program to get started with us and we're very excited by that. I just wanted to book you in for your first social coffee meeting with one of the coaches and I was looking at a time in that and they're like, hang on, I just filled that in. I know we have an office here. We work 24 hours a day. Because we're a global business, we want to make sure that if you need help, we get you to help as soon as we possibly can. Can. So what's a good time for you to get into your first appointment? Now your coach doesn't have any appointments available until next week. We've got Monday and Tuesday as is allocated times and he's going to be in your area on Tuesday. How about Tuesday at 2 o'? Clock? Could we do that now? By the way, James, Coach said he'd rather you selected the coffee shop. Do you have a favorite coffee shop? If you don't, we can come back and this is AI all doing this. Now if they ask you, hey, is this a real person? It says absolutely. I'm an AI assistant and I do this for Brad and I help out with doing all this stuff. We found that the systems make us much more effective but if we're not in touch with them within that immediate time frame, we don't get the sale. So to finish the statistical thing, 7 hours, 11 interactions, could be emails, could be phone calls, could be face to face. I prefer face to face today because I think that phone calls and face to face beat text messaging and stuff. But I will add this iteration. If someone messages you on Instagram, don't call them immediately reply on Instagram. You know, ManyChat now does that for you again, AI, it'll chat back and forth on email. Email has AI now that will chat back and forth on the emails. And so you build those systems in to build that face to face or to build that book that phone call in so that a real human can be face to face all that. Now the four is four locations. That could be your YouTube channel, it could be your website, it could be your LinkedIn profile. What people don't understand about social media, James, is that it's that social media is really three things. Number one, social proof media. If I'm looking you up, I am going to check you out on social media and see all of the stuff on there. It's social proof proof. I want to see before and afters of your construction job or of your dental reconstruction. I want to see happy customer testimonials. I want all of that sort of stuff. So I'm going to your social media for social proof, your LinkedIn, who's endorsed you, who hasn't, all of those sorts of things. The second thing is that where people mistake social media, they think it's about what you say. It's not, it's about what other people are saying about you. But let's just use a very simple example of giving people an opportunity to post about you. One of my restaurants, I've sold out of it now, but when people came in, we trained all of our people. We had a photographer come in and train all of our waiters. But when we bring them the first drink, our waiters are trained to ask, by the way, whose phone should I use for the group photo? We give them an opportunity to post on social media. We take the photo. By us taking the photo, guess what, all of a sudden happens. They're now posting a photo tagging themselves at our restaurant, holding up the picture of them with these beautiful cocktails. Now, the third thing about social media is it should be social marketing, not social media. Now I know that and we can talk about media and creating content all you want, but it's got to be marketing, not just media. It's got to actually convince people to connect with you. It's got to convince people just getting a lot of likes and shares and, and that doesn't make sense. What do I want people to do? I want people to DM me. I want them to email me. Hey, instead of putting up, hey, I just wrote a blog article on this. Here's the link link I'll put up. Hey, I just wrote an ebook on this subject. If you want a copy DM me or type ebook in the in the messages. I want people to start a conversation with me. So once they start a conversation, I can then get in a conversation back with them and conversations lead to conversion. So you asked about sales. Marketing now is a big part of the sales engine. Marketing has to do 70% of the heavy lifting in sales in most cases. So that 7 11, 4 is a vitalness to get the communication. Now a reminder though that between 8 and 20% of people are ready to buy when they first connect with you through marketing channels. Now, the majority of marketing channels, what that means is that 80 to 90% of people who raise their hand and say, please give me an ebook or hey, I'd like a quote or hey, I'm interested in a brochure or a download this. 80 to 90% of those people are not ready to buy. They are ready to be nurtured. They're ready to build a relationship. They're not ready to buy. So you have to have those nurture sequences, you have to have those emails, you have to have the offers, you have to have all of those things planned. And this is why great CRMs and great funnels are massively important in this.

James (97:05)

So another super important part have making more profits is retention of customers. Now when I say retention of customers, how is that different from customer service? Customer?

Brad Sugars (97:19)

Well, today you have customer experience and customer service, customer experience is planning for them to have a great experience. So mapping out the customer journey, okay? Customer service is who takes over when something goes wrong. So used historically, we only had customer service and there was more things going wrong because we didn't plan and map map the customer experience.

James (97:39)

Do all businesses need both?

Brad Sugars (97:41)

Yes, yes, you must have both. You must plan the customer experience. Because if I want them to do as much repeat business as possible, I've got to make certain that I've planned their repeat business to the point where, I'll give you an example, a florist client, we sat down with them and we were looking at their repeat business from customers. And I said, how, how well do you know your customers? And they said, well, what do you mean? I said, well. Well, take me for example. If I Was your customer? Would you know my wife's and my anniversary date? Would you know my wife's birthday? Would you know my mother in law's birthday? Would you know my sister's birthday? Would you know? Do you know what I mean? Like James, they didn't even know these things. So how could they build a plan for the customer journey or the customer experience? What if they got to know me and they said, Brad, listen, as a service, what we do is we call you a week before all of these major events and just ask you what type of flowers or what type of arrangement or if it's still okay to send an arrangement of that sort, what price point, et cetera. Is it okay if we call you a week before Valentine's Day and a week before all of your anniversaries and things? Or Brad, would you just prefer we put it on automatic and made it happen for you every single event and it was just taken care of? Yes, that one. That one. Please do that. Okay. And then they're like, oh, and by the way, Brad, because you're married, I know that a lot of people forget to just buy flowers for their wife. What if we put you on our monthly program that any month where there wasn't something special, we would just pick a day and send flowers to your wife. Of course we'll text you to let you know that we've sent them so that you're not surprised and things plan the customer journey. Give you another example. My wife's hairdresser has my phone number. Why do you think my wife's hairdresser has my phone number To. To tell you he texts me, brad, Lauren just had her haircut and color. She doesn't color. She had her haircut today. Just want you to know before she gets home, please don't ever tell her that I've told you this. So when she gets home or when I get home, I woken, hey, did you get your head underneath? Looks amazing. What does she think about the hairdresser? Every time I get my hair cut, my husband notices and people go, oh, that's just. No, it's an amazing service that he does to help me be a better husband. If you plan the customer journey, you create raving fans as we talked about before. You get a suspect, turn them into a prospect. The prospect becomes a shopper with a singular transaction. We turn them into a customer by getting them into a repeat transaction. Your offer to a brand new customer must be, if they're a first time customer, you need to do something amazing. What's the amazing offer that you give them.

James (100:33)

Let's talk about getting the business run by systems. Is this, is this the first part of getting off the tools?

Brad Sugars (100:41)

Now the first part of getting off the tools is getting control of the base. The second part is getting enough money that you can employ people to get off the tools. Hence the marketing being second, you've got to be able to employ people to be able to get off the tours. Systemization is then the next phase of that. So that anyone can deliver or anyone that's trained well enough can deliver the program or deliver the product or deliver the service type thing. I'll give you an example. One of my friends has a sports massage business and he hires masseuses who are 10 years plus. He won't hire them unless they're 10 years plus. Okay. He then puts them through another two weeks training and systems learning so they learn his way of doing it. So the systems are a vital importance. But until you have volume of marketing, until the marketing has got you enough customers, doing systems is almost not worth it. Because systems is where we start to take paper systems and turn them into technology. Systems is where we start to get really clear on our vision for the business. I don't like people doing their vision when they first come to us because until they've started doing marketing and got some volume, they probably can't see just how amazing their business can be. They probably can't see just how big it can go.

James (101:58)

You do talk about going big as well when you speak.

Brad Sugars (102:01)

Yeah, look, my thing is exponential business growth. It's about scaling your business. It's about multiplying the profitability of the organization. You don't have to just go percentage growth. You can go multiplied growth growth. But for multiplied growth, you need scalable systems. If the systems aren't scalable, if you want to open 10 offices or 30 stores or 10 cities or 5 countries, the systems are better be dang good to be able to handle that.

James (102:29)

So we've got technology, we've got automation systems that we can put in place. We've got HR people, systems education systems. What are the kind of systems that we put?

Brad Sugars (102:39)

Well, systems doesn't start with actually putting the systems in place. System starts with directionality. So setting the vision for the organization, setting the culture document for the organization, setting the mission and those things getting really clear on where you're going. You know, for me, leadership starts with a framework. And the framework of leadership is having a direction and clear, measurable objectives and key results in the organization. It has to have a plan because there's no. You don't systematize just for the sake of systems. You systematize to achieve something, to go somewhere, to do something. So unless you know where you're going, putting the systems in play doesn't really make much sense. Having the checklists and all of those basic things. Absolutely, that's part of the foundation. But when we come to the high end systems, we want to start with understanding where we're going. Who do we need to create systems for? Like what is the organization going to look like? You mentioned org chart earlier. Building the org chart and again in the ABOS installation people build their org chart in the system side. Thanks.

James (103:49)

Yeah. I mean just to go through your nine at this level there's set and vision, there's the culture, there's the mission which are directional things as you've said. Then there's org charts, then there's roles and responsibility through position agreements.

Brad Sugars (104:03)

Yes.

James (104:03)

Then there's the KPIs, the dashboard system. Then the.

Brad Sugars (104:08)

You got to know where you're going and what you're measuring and then you can create systems to get there.

James (104:13)

You do. I mean let's, let's get them, let's get them all out here. Because you've also got your weaker means.

Brad Sugars (104:20)

Well, so that's your management system. Your management system does that. Your leadership system does that. Your high performance team systems do those things. That's part of the human side of the systemization. Like when we talk systems. James. What? I like to make it simple for people. I don't want an ISO 9000 manual. I want a video that trains me how to do something. You know, a video on a checklist is better than a 74 page manual that gets in the way. If people aren't using the systems in your business, it's probably because the systems actually make their job harder than easier. I want to reformat the client intake form so that it asks them all the right questions and that's how I systematize the client intake. Or if I do that on the digital system, they've got to put in these things and once those things are entered then we do a proper intake of a customer. Does that make sense? Don't make it so that it adds work, make it so there's part of the work and it makes everyone's life easier, not harder. Type thing system should make everyone more effective, more efficient, not less efficient and less effective. I find too many companies where they install systems that slow people down rather than increase productivity. Your System should increase the productivity of the humans.

James (105:38)

Should we just go into leadership then? Because you mentioned a couple of things, passion, focus, and I've heard you mention in the past it's about communication too.

Brad Sugars (105:48)

Yeah. So a leader's. So leadership is a framework first, meaning vision, mission plan, objectives, key results, all of that stuff. If you don't have that, where are you leading them to? Second part of leadership is the skill set that you need to have. And communication is obviously very high up on a leader's skill set. If you haven't done communication training, then you're going to come to us and do some communication training. Does that make sense? Yeah, you know, but you also got to look at, you've got to have delegation training, you've got to have, you've got to have, you know, all of those things. Because most leaders don't delegate, they abdicate. There's no system, there's no training, there's no accountability or no scorecard kept. Therefore they're not delegating, they're abdicating responsibility to another person. So if we take that and say yes, framework, then the skills, and there's a whole bunch of skills that we take people through in our 12 week leadership training. But then there's the core of who you are as a leader. Okay, so the core of who you are really comes back to your leadership style. And you want to define your leadership style because what the goal of leadership is is engaged team members. If our team are engaged, then they're getting higher performance. If our team are engaged, then our customers are engaged. If our team are engaged, they see their work as more of a calling than a job. So there's job. Career calling is essentially the order that we see people go through in many companies. There are some areas of the company where they are just jobs we would prefer to have them as a career. For example, one of my friends owns a janitorial business and so all his people do is clean hotels. Well, how do you see that as a career is really about the heart and soul of the business, not about the tasks that they do or the type of cleaning material that they use. So that's an important aspect, I think leadership for someone. If someone is in a leadership position, they've moved past accountability. See, management is about removing three behaviors really. And that is blame, excuse and denial. If we have good management systems in place and good training in place, we build competency, we build productivity. We get a person out of blame, out of excuse, out of denial to a level we call responsibility. So we Call it. The point of power below is blame, excuse, denial. Above the point of power is ownership, accountability, responsibility. Someone in a job will be doing blame, excuse, denial. Someone in a career will be doing responsibility. So their natural behavior is a level of responsibility to doing the job and doing it well. To move into management, you've got to move up to accountability. Now you can't give someone accountability, they have to take accountability. Someone that shows you initiative, that they want to be in charge.

James (108:54)

Why do you say that?

Brad Sugars (108:55)

Because you over promote people. When you over promote someone who's just good at the skill, they lose, they leave the company. Company. Someone has to want to be accountable, held to account, to move into management. Okay, now, how do we train managers? By running our management system. Our weekly meetings, Monday meetings, our Thursday meetings, the daily forms, the weekly things that they do. By using the management system, they learn to be a good manager because they've been managed well. They learn to be a good manager in the leadership side of it. You've got to learn, you've got to build the framework so everyone can be a great leader. You've then got to learn the skills of leadership, communication being obviously the priority in that one that I teach. And then you've got to know what your focus is as a leader. Your leader's job is building people to be passionate and focused. Your leader's job is to build more leaders. That's the job. You build a great manager and then you build them into a great leader. He's the who steps up to ownership. They own the business in their heart. They don't have to have shares, but in their heart, in their head, they own this thing. It's theirs. They are the core. They own it in their heart, in their soul. And that's where, when I talk about the ABOS manifesto and I share with my people about it, if my people don't get a tear in their eye when I talk through the manifesto of what we're aiming to achieve and how we're aiming to help help business people get their lives back, then I know I've done a bad job as a leader. If I haven't bought out that level of emotion in people, then I've done a bad job as a leader. And that's because I don't feel the emotion for it. If I've written it in a way that it's not bringing out emotion in me, then if it doesn't make me feel a little bit emotional, then how the heck is it going to make them feel at all emotional? And Tied to it and buy into it and love.

James (110:51)

Okay. Strong leadership is at the top of your six key framework. All right, so we've just talked about strong leadership there and finding the style. The next part is common goal.

Brad Sugars (111:01)

Yeah, yeah. The. If I go into an average company today and ask them what's the goal of the organization? They can't tell me. They can't tell me. They can't tell me the goal. And if they can tell me the goal, it's like, you know, a million bucks a quarter or, you know, it's like anandal goal it. There's no passion. There's nothing thing. So to be a common goal, three things must be present. Number one, everyone must know it. Okay. Number two, everyone must win from it. Staff, customers, suppliers, everyone's got to win from it. Okay. And number three, it's got to have some meaning greater than money. Can't just be about money. You know, if you're a business owner and you think that your staff get excited about money, you're kidding yourself. They don't get excited about that. They get excited about doing great work with great friends and great people. They get excited about achieving amazing things. Okay.

James (112:00)

In your six keys to winning team. So we've got strong leadership first. We've covered that common goal and we've got rules of the game. And there's two types of rules. Culture and some other rules. Yeah.

Brad Sugars (112:12)

So your basic rules is your employee manual. These are the rules of when you show up, when you leave, how you check in, how you do. Like, that's just your employee induction manual type thing. Your most important rules are your core values. Okay, so what are the core values of your organization? And document them. Don't just think of them, but actually document them. At Action Coach, we have our 14 points of culture that define who we are as people. Because who you are and why you do what you do is so vital in the world today. People don't want to work for companies that don't understand who they are and why they do what they do.

James (112:57)

Are points of culture the same as core values?

Brad Sugars (113:00)

Yeah. Can be. Yeah. You can use many different terminologies for it. I like the term culture because it defines who we are. I know Zappos is a phenomenal example of this when they use the term core values. But we also have public core values and our care core values of community, accountability, results, and education. So we're very clear to the market. This is who we are. These are our points of culture. If you want to join this team, these are the rules we live by, you know, if you're not willing to live by these communication methodologies, if you're not willing to apologize for upsets first and then look for a solution, then please don't join our company. You know, if you apologize, if you upset someone, first thing you gotta do is apologize. Now only after you've done an apology can you look for a solution. If you make a mistake with a customer, if you're not willing to strive for excellence, then please don't join our company. If abundance isn't something you want to live to, if you want to live in scarcity, please don't join our organization. We don't live that way. We set the culture based on what is important to us. And by doing that we can attract people who fit our culture. You see it our core values.

James (114:11)

You're saying it like if you don't want this, don't join. Like to put people off.

Brad Sugars (114:16)

Yes.

James (114:17)

Now the reality is from the reactions I've seen, people who reflect on your points of culture is they find inspiring.

Brad Sugars (114:26)

Not the opposite, but the right people find it inspiring. The right people go, that's amazing. I want to work there. I want to be a part of that team. I want to join that culture. That is me. I believe in that. I see that. And then other people go, that's the dumbest stuff I ever seen. Brilliant. Don't join us, you know, if you don't believe in what we believe in, if you don't, if you don't want to help us on our mission of world abundance through business re education. If you don't want to help us save one business at a time. If you don't want to help us create jobs, create economic impact, if you don't want to help us do that, fantastic. You want to attract the right team members, not all of them. And unless you tell me who you are and why you do what you do, I don't know enough about your company to join it. How do I become a great team member if I can't understand the culture of your company? How do I make a decision that I do want to be a part of that or don't?

James (115:26)

There's three more important aspects of your model on leadership, not leadership on team action. Plan is next.

Brad Sugars (115:34)

And we've talked a lot about that already, but it basically a team can't be a great team unless they know their position. Yeah.

James (115:42)

And in you talked about the 90 day plan earlier on the three month plan. Yeah. What about a plan for the sales team? A plan for the marketing team, a plan for the delivery team, all of.

Brad Sugars (115:56)

It'S got to be planned. And so when we do a 90 day business plan, we also do a 90 day plan for each team member. Like every team member in the company gradually has their own 90 day plan. Now in the beginning, if I'm coaching your business, Jamie, I won't bring all of your team in and start them doing 90 day plans on day one. You know, we'll gradually install the management system and gradually move them to 90 day plans. But we'll want you as the owner to do your 90 day plan. In fact, our first two weeks coaching with you, one of the things we do is start defining what does the first 90 days look like. Because in your first 90 days you're usually going to find there's three or four things that we have to fix immediately. Like three or four things that are losing you money, money costing you badly, right? And there's three or four opportunities in that first 90 days that we can take advantage of to make a lot more money, you know, so that's usually where we find it. But there we plan every 90 days. It's an action plan. It's, you know, you break it down to your 12 most important things because there's 12 weeks. But if you do that with yourself and then your team does it and then gradually through the organization, every member of the organization has their 90 day plan. And then there's a cadence of meetings to review. So at the end of month one, we review the 90 day plan. Are we on track with this? Are we moving in the right direction? What have we forgotten? What have we missed? What do we need to do? End of month two, there's another review segment of the plan and a brainstorm of what's going to come for next quarter. Those cadence of those meetings that are part of your coaching, your coach goes through this stuff with you to make sure that you are on track. You know, a business owner does an amazing job with their team when everyone knows who's doing what. Like you don't have a football team where they don't know their job. They all know their job, they know their position, they know the plan, they know what they've got to do. Give me another example of planning and how it works with people. One of my kids friends at school, his dad was a professional golfer and he played on the Nationwide Tour and he got his PGA card and he started playing. He won a few tournaments and after about 12 months he was having a slump and it was Christmas Time and he was out for some dinner and we started chatting. I said, dude, what's going on? He said, dude, I just want to make the cut. I said, what? So I just, I just need to make the cut some weekends. I said, said, can we. I asked him permission. I said, is it okay if I coach you for a few minutes? And he said, yeah, I'd love that. You know, the highest paid business coach in the world offering you a few minutes for free. Yes, yes, I will take that. I said, what's the next tournament? Told me the next one. I said, and what's the winning score for that tournament gotta be? He said, I don't know. I said, well, what's. We pulled it up the last few years. That tournament at that, that course was the Sony, it's in Hawaii. And he said, well, to win that, you're probably going to need to be 16 to 18 under the thing. So great, let's make a plan then. Which holes are the birdie holes? Which holes are the potential bogey holes? Which holes are the almost always going to be par. So how are we going to get to 18 under? We need to over four days. We need to aim for six under every day because we might not perfectly get it. Let's make this plan. So you see how we built a plan for him to no longer see. His previous plan was just pay the bills. Because if, if you, if your goal is to make the cut and you fail, you've made no money. If your goal is to pay the bills and you can't afford to pay all the bills, then you're out of business. Your goal has to be to achieve an amazing level of something. Your goal has to. And in his case, your goal has to be to win. Now, if you don't win automatically, you've made the cut, so you've at least paid the bills for the week. Does that make sense? Like you go for the massive one and the automatic result is at least that small thing. I guess paying the bills happens no matter what because you're going for a maze. But that action plan, breaking him down and just going through step by step by step. And then I said to him, I want you to plan me every hole. What clubs? I said, I want to see what club on every single hole. Break it right down for me. Because if you can't show me how you're going to do something, I don't believe it's going to happen. So that's an action plan, James.

James (120:51)

All right, let's talk about risk. What role does that play in team development?

Brad Sugars (120:56)

So point number five of the six is support risk taking. If you're asking someone to do something new, they're taking a risk. You can't have an organization where people hide their mistakes. You have to have a culture where you're open about mistakes.

James (121:12)

They common that people do hide the mistakes.

Brad Sugars (121:14)

But it's not just common in business, it's common in households. It's like your kids will hide their mistakes from you because they don't want you to be, they don't want to be yelled at sort of thing. And this is where learning good management comes into it. James, like in our management training, there's one segment, in fact there's one whole session on how to be a good manager and ask good questions. Because a bad manager asks negative questions and people get scared of taking risks. So why isn't this out to the customer? It's a negative question. It's asking what went wrong. And the only behavior capable of the person is blame, excuse or deny. If I said to my kid, you know, whose turn is it to set the dinner table? They both point at each other type thing. And whereas if I use good management questions, they move people forward. Hey James, what do we need to do to get this back out to the customer? Customer, hey kids, what do we need to do? Get dinner table set. And also we need to understand that the English language and there's some languages in the world where like, you know, in there's certain things that don't make any sense in the Chinese language because like it just, they just don't have a word for it type thing. The English language is a double negative language meaning no worries, not bad, you know, no problem, don't jump on the bed, right? So go to Google and type in don't show me a pink elephant, it's going to show you pink elephants. The human brain doesn't work on double negatives, it works on positives, it works on direction. So instead of don't jump on the bed, hey, please get down on the floor, please put your feet on the floor immediately, you know what I mean? Or please sit down on the bed immediately. And so with a management and risk taking, if we're, if we're hurting people for when they do something wrong, if the only time they hear from us is when they make a mistake, we're not supporting the risk that they are having to take to do new things. But the risk taking starts with you as the leader. You've got to be willing to put yourself out there and do new things.

James (123:28)

What does it take though, to embrace that philosophy?

Brad Sugars (123:31)

Growth. The growth philosophy. You're only going to grow if you. Growth takes pressure, right? The second law of thermonuclear dynamics teaches us that unless there is pressure perturbation, there will not be growth. Now a thing is, I'm looking out the window here and there's trees out there. They're either growing or dying. A business is either growing or dying. You cannot stand still. Status quo is impossible, possible. It's a law of nature. Like the tree is either growing or it's dying. It can't go, hey, you know what? I'm going to stop growing right now. This is exactly the type of tree I wanted to be. I'm good. It dies. Businesses do the same. Whether it's the competitors coming past you that's killing you, whether it's losing customers because you're not innovating. Ten years ago you go to a hotel, where did you get the Internet? You went on a dial up in your room, right? Nowadays if you go to a hotel and they don't have free wi fi, that's high speed Internet with no password, you're upset. The world innovates at a speed and every business innovates and every business has to grow and either be disrupted. If we look at Covid, Covid disrupted the world because it moved us seven years in advance in one year. Now the reason I use seven years is because Amazon were doing the numbers they'd predicted to do seven years later in one year. So that was sort of a good metric for me to see how fast we changed. And what happens for business is either you are innovating, you are doing new things, or you wait until the world almost crushes you and then you have to do new things. It's better to do new things when you want to do them, to innovate when you want to, than wait until you're about to die and then you have to do them. Being forced to innovate by the market is not a good position to be in.

James (125:13)

Let's talk about your last point, which is the engagement piece. 100% inclusion.

Brad Sugars (125:18)

100% inclusion and involvement. It is a responsibility of both the leader and the team to have 100% participation.

James (125:25)

Why do you say a leader on the team? Everybody.

Brad Sugars (125:27)

It's the leader has to include everybody and the team members have to involve themselves.

James (125:32)

Because.

Brad Sugars (125:36)

Imagine that we have a team of 12 people sitting around the table and one person doesn't put in any input. What do we know is going to happen. They're going to leave the room and have ideas that should have been shared, that didn't get shared and they're either going to badmouth it or they're going to do things differently. When. Let's just use a football team as an example. If you've got everyone out on the pitch and one person's not not involving themselves, the team loses. You can't win in business. Business is a team sport, right? It's, it's a team game. You need the whole team to play. If you've got two team members rowing backwards, 14 members just sitting there on the boat doing nothing, and two team members rowing forwards, you might as well fire 80% of the people.

James (126:25)

Yeah, that's true.

Brad Sugars (126:26)

And just keep the two that are rowing forward. That's such a true analogy. So if you as a leader, don't insist on them having a say, insist on their opinions.

James (126:37)

If you had to sum up the importance of leadership and team level, what's the take home message for the listeners?

Brad Sugars (126:47)

Just build people. You build people, they'll build the business. If you focus on building the business and building the customers and building the systems and building all the other things, you can forget all of the other stuff and just build people. If you build the marketing manager, guess what? They'll build the marketing. If you build the systems, people, they'll build the systems, you build the tech. You know what I mean? If you build people, they build it.

James (127:10)

So why is exponential growth your favorite part of business?

Brad Sugars (127:17)

Pretty simply put, over the years I've taught every subject. Sales, marketing, management, leadership. I've taught all of them. So in building the ABOS system, that was the thing. But what it all comes down to is exponential growth. What everything comes back to is you're building a model that you can then take and have exponential growth. The way I sort of explain that to people is you use the Ray Kroc understanding, right? Ray Kroc found The system the McDonald's brothers built, the quick service system. They sold it. Well, they sold it to Taco Bell and Burger King and, and they built the McDonald's business on it, right? Well, Ray Kroc found a model and then scaled and exponential growth, that model. So what we're doing in the first four levels is creating a model. So we're building a restaurant, we're building a plumbing business, we're building a thing. And then what we're saying is, okay, how do we now exponentially grow this thing if we've spent. Let's imagine, James, we Spent two years building a restaurant, getting the, the recipes right, the look and feel right, the cocktails right. We spent two years getting it to be so good. The marketing's working, the sales system's working, everything's good. It would be a waste of those two years to keep that restaurant in only one spot up. It just makes no sense. If you've created something that is so good, that makes money, it's a money making machine. It's a, the, it's got the mastery. It's got, it's got, it's got. The next question is how many locations should that restaurant be in? Amazing. Couple young guys do a home construction business. They're in a town called Asheville, North Carolina, right? They do 40 million a year in construction, new construction, refurbishing homes, etc. They came, their coach Bill bought them to me for the million, the billion dollar business plan. And I sat down with them and said, all right, it's X times Y. You have a forty million dollar model. How many cities can we fit that forty million dollar model in? I want you to do your research across America. How many cities are like the city you're in? They have similar buildings, similar structures, similar code, similar age range. Similar, similar, similar. They went and it, they found 82 cities. So I'm like, fantastic. So if you want to build this business properly, like digging a gold mine, you don't. With a gold mine, you don't harvest just enough gold so that you can stay alive. You find out how much gold there is and you harvest all of it. So there's 82 cities that they could possibly have, or 83, the one they're in, plus 82 more that they could have a $40 million a year business. They can go buy some and fix them and do more with them. They could start it themselves. They could. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's 82 cities for that. So we sit down and we work out. 4, 8 is 32. So your goal should be 3.2 billion a year. Are there construction companies doing 3.2 billion a year? They've sat down and said, yeah, there's tons of them doing billions a year. Great. So we know it's possible. So what have you guys got to learn in order to open in 82 cities now? What, what? This whole exponential growth thing, and this is what we're coming to, the five disciplines of exponential growth strategy is the first. And so we had to sit down and look at what business model will they use to open in 82 cities? Will they franchise? Will they license? Will they raise capital and open it themselves? Will they buy other businesses? So the strategy looks at the business model, which is four main things being leverage, scalability, marketability, and opportunity size. So we've already done opportunity. 82 cities that are big enough for them to do it. So it's a $3.2 billion worth of gold in them thar hills. How much of the 3.2 billion do you want to get? Well, so opportunity is the first thing and we gotta set the goals based on a percentage of market size, not based on our own personal needs and wants or not based on 10% more than last year. That's just weak goal setting. It takes someone doing the first four layers to be ready for this layer. If I, if someone's listening to this right now and they're going, I'm ready for that, then great. You've probably already done a lot of stuff and a lot of work beforehand, but many people at this level will be going, I'm going to do that in a few years time. So opportunity size is one, marketability is the second. You got to do your market research. How much market is there? Is there demand for this, like in their business in construction? Is there in that city? Is there demand for new buildings? Is there demand for renovation of old buildings that you have to do your marketability, okay, then you have to get to leverage and scale a bit. As I've taught you before, leverage is do the work once, get paid forever. So you want customers that keep coming back. You don't want to do, get a customer once and then never have them again sort of thing. And then finally scalability is that the next sale costs less and is easier. So if you look at that, I don't know, my rental business that I used to have, I sold that one. It's renting out electronics and stuff. Okay. So the first to rent out, the first refrigerator took a lot of work to rent out. Refrigerator number 100 was easier and cheaper than number one. Number 1000 was easier and cheaper again. Number 10,000 was much easier and much cheaper. As the business scales, it's got to get easier and it's got to get cheaper as you grow. It can't get harder and more expensive as you grow.

James (132:57)

What's the key to making that happen?

Brad Sugars (133:00)

Planning it really.

James (133:01)

No measurement of numbers, making decisions, systems.

Brad Sugars (133:04)

Technology, all of those sorts of things every week.

James (133:07)

Tinkering, tweaking.

Brad Sugars (133:09)

Build this, build the right model and then put it in as many cities as you can. So the second part if we look at all five, strategy is number one, people is number two. And we've discussed people a lot here. But when you're in a scale business, people is mostly about recruiting. When you're in a scale business, you're recruiting, let's say you're opening like those two guys, they got to open 82 new offices. So they need 82 managers, they need 82 office managers. They need, they need, they need like recruiting a scale. Recruiting at scale is very different than recruiting to replace someone you lost. We then move in from people and, and we could again spend hours on people. But it's really about having that, that great HR person whose job is to recruit, recruit, induct, train and build new offices. Like if you think about, and this is where also a lot of it in the people side could be buying companies, we could be looking at buying and then it's culture, induction and all of those sorts of things. So if Those guys with 82 cities, they could literally go to those 82 cities, make a list of all of the companies similar to theirs and work out which ones that fit and they go and make an offer to buy 82 businesses. Does that make sense? So it could be recruiting, it could be buying it, it could be, there's many ways. It could be training it. You could have to build your own training school. But again, this is that real scale stuff. I don't want to spend too long on this because it's usually much higher level than most people are needing when they first meet with me.

James (134:38)

What stage of the business journey should you recruit a HR director? Because that's, it's a senior position, whether, you know, head of hr, whatever you, you want to call it, put us, put a cheap one in front of.

Brad Sugars (134:51)

It's different for different industries. But when, when you get to the point of 20ish people, you're going to need someone in charge of recruiting because you're going to be replacing a person a month. Basically you're 20 people. Whether it's them moving away, someone got sick, growth of the business. If you get to a point where you're recruiting a person a month, you're going to need someone in charge of that.

James (135:18)

I mean, the thing that's floating around my head for the listeners is some of the listeners are thinking, all right, so what's the, what do I need to have cash flow wise and how do I finance this?

Brad Sugars (135:29)

Well, yeah, the whole financing aspect is you've got to build the business plan and learn to raise capital. You either learn to raise capital through franchising, or you learn to raise it through debt, or you learn to raise it through equity, or you learn there's many ways to raise capital. And that's another thing that people have to learn at some point.

James (135:47)

Where should someone start if they want to learn about raising capital? Because a lot of the listeners do want to do that.

Brad Sugars (135:52)

Brad, where you start is build a database and build an entrepreneur to be invested in. You won't raise capital until you are the type of person that people want to invest in. So you need a track record and a reputation that people want to invest with you. Yes, you can go read all the books and do all that sort of stuff, but that's where it starts. Build a database of potential investors. Every single person you've ever met in your life should be in a database that you keep in touch with. Because one day you're going to have a business that you need people to invest in and you're going to want to ask them to invest.

James (136:25)

Okay, so we've got strategy, we've got people. We've lent into the importance of the HR director or ahead of people. Also. Business development is part of this biz.

Brad Sugars (136:37)

Dev, your marketing manager that was brilliant when you were doing a million bucks a year will be a divisional manager. You've got to learn when you go to scale, you have to learn to demote people or move people on or sideways shuffle people. Because let's say I'm at a million bucks a year and my marketing budget is 100 grand for the year. Right. It the person running my marketing budget for 100 grand will not be any good if I've got a $50 million a year marketing budget. That makes sense. Totally different set of skills, totally different knowledge base. So what I had to learn as I scaled, and you'll even remember one of my CEOs who the business got to a point where it was just too big for him and I had to step back in and run the company and move him to the side where he became CEO of a division of the company. Yeah, you know, you've, you've got to learn that your people, you can't scale people as fast as you can scale a business. So some of them have got to step aside and allow for a higher level person to come in. If I'm a HR director in a company with 50 people and then I've got a company over here that's got a thousand people or employing a thousand new people a month, that's a different HR director. It's A different, you know, chief HR person. So that, that's a big part of the people. But when you're looking at execution and you're looking at business development, both of them at scale are different. You are on massive recruiting of execution. You're on massive purchasing of new equipment, new systems, new places, new things. Like, like imagine opening five new subways a day. How many ovens does subway then need per month? Distributed worldwide. They may as well go and buy the oven manufacturing company and do it. You look at Amazon. When Amazon moved to electric vans, they went and bought a share of Rivian to build all the vans for them. They had to capitalize the car company, the car company didn't have the capital to build enough vans for Amazon. Amazon had to buy a share and capitalize them. Apple did it when they made their phones. The companies didn't have enough money to print the screens for the phones, like making that many glass screens. Holy heck. They had to capitalize the company, they had to invest and buy in them sort of things. So it's different, execution is different at scale. And marketing, when you're opening a new market, you have to learn launch marketing at scale. So there's a big difference between acquiring customers and launching a new business when you're at scale, when you're at exponential growth, you are launching a new territory. So you've got to learn how to get into a brand new market and, and, and get a core group of people that then you build from sort of thing. So if I give you an example of that, there was a dating app in the US and they learned how to scale by starting at colleges. They went to colleges, and specifically colleges that had a Greek system, so had fraternities and sororities. They found the biggest fraternity and would sponsor a party and pay for everything. And for anyone to get in, they had to show that they had the app downloaded and their profile created. If you had the app downloaded and your profile created, you got in. So they threw a party for 2,000 people out of college and hey presto, they hit critical mass in that town. Does that make sense? So you've got to learn launch, you've got to learn critical mass marketing when you're going at scale and it's very different to the other marketing, it's not acquiring two new customers a day.

James (140:26)

And the final part of the jigsaw here is mission. You talk about vision, mission and culture earlier on in your system development, but mission here is different.

Brad Sugars (140:36)

You will not have a scale business. All of our studies, all of it shows you will not have a scale business unless your business is doing something meaningful. It's got to be adding value to the world because you won't get employees and you won't get customers. Like today a customer can go on an app and they can see your carbon footprint. They can go and see all these things. And the younger people are, the more it is important to them that a business that they are buying from and doing business with or working for is adding value to the world and doing great things out there in the world world. Less and less do people want to do business with companies that are destroying and doing bad things and not taking care of people. We see this all the time when, when remember the clothing companies that got caught with running sweatshops and stuff like that and people just boycott them instantaneously. You know, when we see people doing bad things in the world, the world very quickly responds. And so your business had better be mission driven in some way, shape or form. It better be adding value to the world. It better be adding value to your customers, to your people. I go back to the word I mentioned earlier. Love. Your people need to love working with you and your customers need to love doing business with you. There are multiple stakeholders in business and mission ads. So not only are they the team and the shareholders and the customers and the suppliers, but you've also got the community. Community has become a stakeholder in business when you get to scale. Now, if you're a small business doing a million bucks a year or a million quid a year, the community doesn't really do it. If you're doing 100 million a year, the mayor is looking at your business, the newspaper is looking at your business. There are people looking at you and making sure you're doing the right thing.

James (142:25)

And if you're not, they will call it out.

Brad Sugars (142:27)

Correct. So there's a different glass door. Your employees will tell the world what it's like to work for you. You want to be that place where you're winning the awards of best place to. Why do we see airplane companies moving to biofuels and these? Because they know that if they don't, they're going to get beat up for it. Yeah.

James (142:46)

They get judged.

Brad Sugars (142:47)

Yeah. And I'm not going to do business with you. There's a percentage of the population now that's the fast growing percentage of the population where doing good is important to them. Now the challenge with that is that that's not a global thing today. Like, I mean, let's be blunt, China, you've got still 20% of China lives in abject poverty. It's hard to convince a guy in China living in abject poverty to worry about global warming. You know, we're here in the UK right now. You guys contribute maybe 2% to the world's carbon emissions, right? And if we halved carbon emissions in the uk, it would mean zero difference to the world. So it's hard sometimes to have social responsibility on a global scale. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

James (143:45)

The sixth level on your system is entrepreneurship and freedom.

Brad Sugars (143:50)

Freedom.

James (143:52)

And a lot of people start business and they claim to be an entrepreneur. Are they an entrepreneur when they start?

Brad Sugars (143:57)

Well, in my opinion, a business owner owns one business. An entrepreneur is someone who builds multiple companies with the idea of capital value increases. Meaning you buy and sell the companies. Okay, that's, that's where I position entrepreneurialism. You can call yourself an entrepreneur one business if you want, but I see that as a business owner. Multiple is where I see you as an entrepreneur.

James (144:21)

When, when we said management earlier on you said management's about competency and productivity. When we said leadership you said it's about focus and passion, maybe communication as well. What's entrepreneurship about?

Brad Sugars (144:34)

Capital. Capital value. So buying something that is worth. So let's go backwards a step in business, the value of a business is determined by the ebitda. The profit of the business determines the value of the business. If I buy a business and I double the profit, what did I just do? I doubled the value of the business. At the very least, I doubled the value of the business. So if I put it under management, I've now increased the multiple. If I increase the business to be more than 5 million a year in EBITDA, I've moved it into a different buying range with a different set of buyers. A very small business will only be purchased by someone looking to buy themselves a job. So they will not pay much for it. A mid sized company will be purchased in most cases by an individual who's created wealth and so they'll buy another business. A large business will generally be acquired by either a capital organization or a public company. So whether the capital organization is venture capital, home office, whether it's a hedge fund, whether it's an investment group of some sort or a public company, that's where the biggest sales happen. Happen. So entrepreneurialism is about capital and really wealth is about that first ever group of capital. I didn't understand this early on, but capitalization is the key to wealth. The faster I can Capitalize, meaning build it and sell it. And then I have capital to do the next thing, whether that's in real estate or business or shares, whatever it is. But the level of freedom, James, is really about time, freedom, life, freedom, health, freedom. All of the things that you get when you have a commercial, profitable enterprise that works without you. Yeah. You know what kills most sales of businesses is the owner just doesn't want to let go of their baby. That's why when we coach people to exit their business again, we generally takes about three years to coach someone on exiting their business. A big part of the coaching is what are you going to do afterwards? We've got to help people learn to let go. The biggest breakthroughs over the years, I've interviewed a lot of our customers and asking them what was the biggest breakthrough moment in their business's growth. And they said the biggest breakthrough moment wasn't marketing, it wasn't finance, it wasn't anything. It was when I learned to let go and allow other people to do their job. So as a business owner, you learning to let go is a massive part of the success of, of the future of your business.

James (147:08)

So we started this podcast with what's a real business? One that works without you and one something that you said earlier on was Tom Watson. He kind of phrase working or not in. How important is that? Working on yourself and on the business.

Brad Sugars (147:26)

Our first, like the first 12 week program we put even the smallest of businesses through. We teach them that at the end of the 12 weeks we want them to have a 10% increase in revenues and we want them to have found four hours a week to be able to work on, not in.

James (147:40)

So he starts at four hours a week?

Brad Sugars (147:42)

Yeah, yeah, we need to find that. It takes about 12 weeks to find those four hours. Unless you've got a fairly sizable business, then you can hand off a few things and pretty quick and, and just quit the dumb things that you're doing. You know, quit the time wasters and.

James (147:57)

Commit to new stuff.

Brad Sugars (147:58)

Yeah. And that's where we put it into the calendar. We eventually get business owners to take one day off a week from being at the office. They're still going to work, but they're going to work from home or work from a different office. So they're not in the space of their business. So they're working on, not in. Once we get them to that one day a week of being out of the office or out of the shop or out of whatever, then they really start to fly. So get off the tools One day a week at home, then build it so it runs without you. But it's all about just. James, I can't harp enough that if you install the operating system, it does it for you.

James (148:35)

If there was a movie that was made on Brad Sugars, what would it be called?

Brad Sugars (148:42)

Look, ultimately, James, I want every listener to understand that there is a better way for your business. It doesn't need to be hard. It doesn't need to be tough stuff. It can actually be simple. You have to put the work in, you know. But what would you rather to do hard work and not make it a better business, or do hard work and make it a better business, have it running without you at some point? And, you know, we've got enough success stories and case studies and people on our podcasts that just tell everyone this.

James (149:19)

It does work now they've listened.

Brad Sugars (149:22)

What's the first action jump on the website? Start your first two weeks with us.

James (149:29)

What's been your favorite part of the conversation, Brad?

Brad Sugars (149:34)

Favorite part of the conversation? I think just the fact that we did the entire. A boss justice. Like, you can't do a Boss justice in 20 minutes to try and explain it to someone. And there's just too much. There's just too much in it. And to the fact that we took the time to do it, I think is probably the biggest thing.

James (149:56)

Yeah. Well, on behalf of everybody behind the scenes as well, you know, thank you very much for giving this amount of time.

Brad Sugars (150:05)

Thank you. To those who listen to me on one and a half or two times speed.

James (150:10)

Thank you very much, sir.

Brad Sugars (150:11)

Thank you, James.