A (3:13)

Yeah, you did.

B (3:14)

You know, you pat yourself on the back and you bullshit yourself. So we have to have that accountability that a board of directors gives accountability, you know, that sort of thing. I think if we looked at it from the next layer, people don't realize what they don't know. You know, to get to a million, you gotta be a genius at the job, right? To get to 10 million, you gotta build a management team that become genius at the job. And to get to 100 million, you gotta build a leadership team. Like someone. I met a guy the other day, he says, I'm the CEO of my own business and how many chief, how many other CEO C level executives you got? And he goes, what do you mean? I said, well, to be the chief executive officer, you gotta have other executives.

A (3:55)

What do you think holds people back from hiring a coach? Is it their ego? Is it scared? Is it inexperienced?

B (4:01)

Interesting. We did a study on this a while back because we get our net promoter score was coming in in the high 70s and early 80s. And I'm saying to my team, show me why then the referrals aren't coming in. We surveyed our customers and number one reason they said that they didn't want to give us referrals is they didn't want to admit they had a coach.

A (4:21)

Wow.

B (4:21)

Like it's the psychologist effect, right? And the number two reason was they didn't want to tell someone else, hey, you suck, you need a coach. So we had to spin it and help people understand that coaching is not about you're doing bad, you need a coach. Coaching is about you're doing good and you want to do great or supreme or amazing. You want to be a unicorn, you got to coach. You know, there's, if you look at all the unicorns, the investors were the coaches of the business. The VC funds provided that coaching to the owner type thing. And so I think to democratize business, we've all got to have that coach. But it's, I think first and foremost, doing something new is a challenge. Whether it's getting a coach, you know, hiring a salesperson, whatever. If you're doing something new, it's a challenge. And I think that most of the time, and this is why we give two weeks free coaching to anyone that comes to us. Because, like, we don't know if you're coachable and you don't know if it'll work. So let's just, just do two weeks for free and see if it works.

A (5:20)

I love that. I started doing one on one coaching a couple years ago for charity. It's $100,000. I raised 2.7 million because there's 27 people. And that's why I'm doing this toy drive. That's why I'm here for the toy drives. And I take that 2.7 million. They don't wire it to me. They wire it right to the charity of their choice. And it helps me bake the toy drives. And what I find is a lot of them don't even call me. Yeah, it's very fascinating. I don't really say that out loud very often, but I've got certain guys and girls that like, call me every week. We're on the phone all the time. I'll fly to them, they'll fly to me like, we're in it. And other people are kind of like paying for a gym membership. They want to say they're coached by Dan. They want to say they're coached by Brad. What do you think that mindset is?

B (5:56)

You know, Marshall Goldsmith is a good buddy of mine, and he's the number one executive coach in the world. And he said years ago, Drucker said to him, if you want to be the greatest executive, greatest coach or consultant in the world, just get the best clients. Some clients need one tweak once a quarter and they go amazing things. They don't need that. See, the bigger the business, the more the coaching is about getting their head out of their backside and challenging them sort of thing. Because once I noticed it for me during COVID I noticed that I'd gotten fat and happy financially, business wise. I wasn't challenging myself anymore. I'm gonna do a TED talk. It's called Diary of a Wimpy Goal. Because I think we live in an epidemic of wimpy goals. Okay? And because you don't set a challenging goal, there's no need to change. No need to. No need to learn, no need to do new things, no need to challenge yourself. So you set a massive goal. You disrupt your own business, you disrupt your own life type thing. And so I go back to those people that come to you. I bet the ones that are with you every single day, they're still in the weeds in their own business. They're not in strategy level in their own business. Yet those who are in strategy level, they need to talk to Dan once every quarter and get one tweak and boom, they're off to the races. I got guys who've been with me and they've sold businesses for hundreds of millions. And they keep coming back to my stuff. And they come back once a year and they go, I just need one thing. Like Mike, who was with me the other day. Mike's had multiple exits. He keeps coming back. But he brings his team now because he's realized that. Because once a year, I do a program where I invite 10 businesses and I create their multibillion dollar business plan with them. We spend five days here in Vegas. It's a multi billion dollar plan. And what I find is about three years after they've done it, they'll bring back four or five executives. Cause they're like, I get it. But my team doesn't see how a billion is possible. And the reason I do that here in Vegas is because you walk out the door, everything's a billion in this town, Right?

A (8:01)

That's a normal casino here.

B (8:03)

Yeah. Well, you look at the sphere. Could you imagine sitting with your buddies one night and one of your buddies says to you, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna build a 20 story dome in Vegas. I'm gonna cover it with lights. We're gonna put a show inside. I'm gonna have you two open it. There's gonna be single seat. Like you would think your buddy is crazy, but here's the thing about craziness, right? Crazy goals lead to amazing innovations. So you think about the programming innovations that have had to happen to make the sphere a reality, right? Like even Elon Musk is a perfect example. What has the world great. What great things have we achieved in the world? Because Elon says, I want to settle Mars. Elon, you can't settle Mars. We need better rocket ships. All right, I'll do that. Elon, you can't settle Mars. We'll have to live underground. Oh, so we need a drilling company. Yep, I'll do that. Elon, you can't live On Mars, we need better technology to communicate. Okay, do that. Elon, you can't live on Mars. We'll need robots to build things. Okay, we'll do that. We need self driving cars. We need, we need, we need. So he just invents all of this stuff. You know, you go back to where did computers start? Well, microcomputers came because JFK said we choose to go to the moon. You know, you start thinking about the beginnings of so many things is because someone had a crazy idea. And I think most business people don't challenge themselves. And if I grabbed a kid off the street in Silicon Valley and a kid that went to business and then put them in business school, the same kid went to business school. And where I grew up, Brisbane, Australia, which kid's going to write me a billion dollar plan? The one that thinks a billion is normal. See, most people don't think a billion is normal, whereas today a billion is normal. You can write a billion dollar business plan in the same time it takes to write a million dollar business plan.

A (9:46)

What do you think holds people back from making more money?

B (9:52)

Dang, I could. There's so many things that hold people back. The first answer is the easiest answer themselves. You know, most dreams die on the how table. How is the enemy of goals? So when I was 16, I met Jim Rohn, E. James Roan. And after the event, I got him to sign my notes. And Mr. Rohn, I asked him, you know, what's the one thing I can do? He said, read a book a week for the rest of your life. Well, I declared at 16 that I was going to financially retire at 25, took me to 26. Now here's the thing. When I told everyone I was going to do that, they're like, you can't do it. Not possible, not going to happen. To the point where a buddy of mine, his dad sat us down and told us how that can't happen. Now he was an engineer for the city, so of course he was an expert on money. Most expensive advice, free advice from a poor person. Technically, he was correct. The 16 year old version of me could not achieve that goal. So what kills most people's goals is they're not willing to grow into the person that can achieve that goal. They're not willing to do the learning, the growing. Now if I said you have to run a marathon, you know, you gotta train, you gotta practice, you gotta change your diet, you gotta do all those things. But when people set a monetary goal, they don't understand how much they gotta do the learning. My formula for success is dream, goal, learn, plan, act, have the dream, turn dreams into goals. The goals determine what you need to learn rather than how. See, people go, they set a goal and they go, how do I do that? How do I do that? How do I do that? And they go, I don't know how to do it. I can't have it as a goal. The point of a goal, by definition, you should not know how to do it. If you know how to do it, it's not a goal, it's a to do list item. And if you knew how to do it, you would have already done it. So by setting it as a goal, by definition, you have to grow into it. You have to learn how, you have to practice, study, get a mentor, get advice groups, join books, you name it.

A (11:48)

So there's this famous theory about goals where basically you get to that goal and then the goal post moves. Yeah, once I get to a million sales, once I make 200 grand a year, once I get to 10 million sales, and then a lot of people realize, well, once you get to 10 million, it's just a Wednesday, and you got to scale. You get your third Lamborghini, you're like, well, it's just another car in my garage that's getting dusty. You become numb to it. What are your thoughts about the goalpost always moving?

B (12:13)

I'll give you an answer in three different ways. Number one, it takes a while for you to fill your own bucket, and to a point where you realize it's not about a bigger bucket. And then we get to the third phase. So it's learn, earn, return, right? But when you're in the, urn, when you bought your first Rolex, you want the second Rolex. It's a drug. It really feels good and it rewards yourself. But eventually, at some point in time, you realize that the only thing that really makes you feel good is giving back. So that's where I always say you start with negative goals. Get out of poverty, don't be overweight, get out of debt. Like, it's the don't want goals. You move to positive goals. I want this, I choose this. I'm going to have this. Work less. Finally, you get to legacy goals. At some point in your life, you get to a point of, let's just say less is more. You know, it's like, yeah, I don't want all of that shit. Like, I don't want another freaking holiday home. Why? Because it's just a pain in my ass. So I think that that's the first way to answer that question. The second is that the second law of thermonuclear dynamics actually tells us you're either growing or dying. A tree is either growing or dying. A tree can't stand still. A human being is the same. If there is no purpose, if there is no growth for you, then you actually start dying. That's why insurance companies, when people retire, they know three years dead, because there's no purpose. There's nothing for them to go for. And I think it's really important that we understand that you can grow without having to grow your business, without having to add a new car. You can be buying schools for people. You can be. Do you know what I mean? Like, I've run charities forever. And like my foundation, we educate young people that want to go into business for themselves. Because when I was 16, everyone said, you got to be good, do as you told, get a job, go to college, become like, I became an accountant not because I wanted to, but because that's what the process told me I was supposed to do at 16. If I had have understood, I would have just gone into business myself, because that's what. And so that's what my foundation does. It takes young people who think I want to be an entrepreneur, let me do that. So I think that's the second way to answer the question. Ultimately, though, the world we live in today has changed. Like, I'm 32 years running companies, I've been through four downturns in economies. I've watched the whole thing of. And I've had all the cars. I have the 30,000 square foot home. I do all of the things right, and I love all of that stuff. But what I've seen today is the pressure on younger people to look good rather than it's the old looking good, going nowhere thing. You know, they would rather look rich than be rich. And that pressure is gaining momentum now, interestingly enough, because I have five kids, I've got like this whole spectrum of perspective on it. But if you look at when the world hit, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, once we all got shelter and food taken care of, Gen Y, it should have been spelled W H Y the millennial generation, right? Because the world had hit that. Then it became about, why are we doing things? And so today I think that as a parent, I find my job, and as my daughter says, dad, you realize that you're my friend's rich uncle. You know, it's like the whole idea of it is to help your kids Go into. In the beginning, your kids are worried about what do you think of them. The middle phase of a kid is what are their friends think of them. And then the final phase of life is where you determine what do you think of you. Okay. Most people never get to what do I think of me? They're stuck in the what do other people think of me? And so that external validation is really important in that phase. Getting to the point where you are, where you feel about you, how you determine you're feeling about you, that's, I think, a big part of it. So, yeah, multiple ways to answer that one.

A (16:25)

So on the investing side, someone's gotten to that point where they are making good money. They've hired the coach, they've scaled the business, got more employees, hired a CEO to run their company. Now they're just overseeing the business. But they want to invest. They're getting bombarded. Their DMs, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, holiday dinners. Everyone's hitting them up left and right because they know they have some money and they're getting pitched non stop.

B (16:49)

Yeah.

A (16:49)

How do you determine what you're open to investing into? Let's go with private equity first. Like angel investments.

B (16:56)

Well, let's go back two steps from that because first of all, what's your goal?

A (17:01)

Sure.

B (17:02)

Because sometimes if you've got the capital, there's no need to invest at that point. You don't need to. You can literally just put your money into a low cost index fund and you're good for the rest of your life. Okay. So let's understand that the answer to every question should be what's your goal? You know, it's the old Mad Hatter type thing. Now if I am getting bombarded with all of those things, I first of all want to determine what are my rules for investing. Most people come to me, ask, well, what should I invest in? I ask, well, what are your rules? And you're not an investor unless you have a written, documented set of rules. So then I go back to, well, show me your wealth plan. And most people again go, I don't have a wealth plan. I said, all right, let's spend a year then. So my answer to your first question is the first thing you should invest in is knowledge. Get that in. You've learned business. You spent 10, 20 years learning business. Mastering business. Let's learn investing. So three categories of investment, if you ask me, okay, number one, companies, number two, real estate, and number three, stocks of some sort. Right. So if you define them in those three Categories. Because to me, an investment must have two things, Capital growth and cash flow. It's got to have those two things. If it doesn't have those two things, it's not an investment. People say crypto. I said crypto is a wonderful currency play, okay? But it's a currency play. It's not an investment. You're not getting rental income or, you know, you're not getting passive cash flow from it unless you've got some of the options, strategies and those sorts of things. But so if you've spent 20 years learning business, you know what? I'd be investing in businesses. Because that's what you know, invest where you're an expert, Invest where you're dang good. So I teach my clients. I was on the phone with a young man this morning. He buys accounting firms, okay? And so he's bought three accounting firms. And what would I invest in if I was him? More accounting firms. Why? He's damn good at it. He knows it. He knows how to make money on it. He knows all the numbers. Fantastic. Stick with what good. If you've built. Imagine this, right? And this is where most business people go wrong in business. If you ask me, they spend their whole life building a company, getting the systems, the marketing, the branding, everything. Correct. And they do it in one location. Why? Why build a whole restaurant to do it in one spot? The formula for a billion dollar company is x times y. McDonald's is not a billion dollar company. McDonald's is a 2 million dollar company done in tens of thousands of locations, right? So X times Y means find a multimillion dollar business, one location, and do it.

A (19:51)

Scale it.

B (19:51)

However many times, when you look at Daymond John, he worked out how to build a clothing brand. Did it multiple times. You look at Fethitta, worked out how to do a food business multiple times. Ray Kroc. All he did is he found the McDonald brothers system and said this system should be on every street corner and boom, put McDonald's on every street corner type thing. So my first thing is invest where you're an expert. Don't try and invest in stuff. I spent a weekend with one of my buddies learning NFTs when they first came out. You know what I learned after two days of him teaching me NFTs?

A (20:23)

You didn't want to do it?

B (20:24)

I don't know enough to invest in NFTs. I would have to spend six months of my life to become an expert in investing in that and know what the heck I'm doing. And so I think People, they're not investors, they're gamblers. I hear Kenny Rogers song kicking in the background for most of the time, know when to hold them because return of investment is far more important than return on investment. And so second, I would say real estate is a far better investment because it's slower moving. If you're gonna learn to invest and you move into fast moving stuff straight away, then it's fast up, fast down. So if you can get into slower moving, I mean, people don't understand that real estate is a guaranteed 400% ROI. They don't understand that. Right. If I buy a million dollar piece of real estate, how much money have I gotta come up with? 200 grand, 20% on average. Right. Some parts of the world it's 30%, some 5%, but on average I gotta put in 200 grand, 20 year mortgage. I don't pay the mortgage, I put a tenant in, they pay for 80% of it for me. Now maybe the first couple of years, I gotta put a few dollars in each month till the rent get covers the mortgage type thing. But 80% of my asset is paid for by someone else. So over 20 years I get a 400% ROI. If it didn't go up. Right now with ChatGPT, I can go into ChatGPT and say, where should I invest that's getting a 10% capital growth in my area and if it says nowhere, getting that, okay, where else can I invest type thing, we can do the research. What took me 20 years to learn as a kid investing in real estate, I can learn in 10 minutes on ChatGPT right now. So I think that, yeah, it's a challenge for a lot of people in that they go into investing without preparing themselves, spend a year learning.

A (22:14)

So the reason I initially started the podcast was to try to change the narrative that it's rude to talk about money. Yeah, we all grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. Don't talk about money at the table, can't talk about salary. We need to have these discussions. What are your feelings and thoughts about it?

B (22:32)

All the things you shouldn't. So again, five kids, right? All the things you should not talk about, apparently. Religion, politics, sex, money. All those things you should not talk about. If I don't talk about it with my kids, where are they getting their opinions from?

A (22:47)

Right.

B (22:48)

So I would 100% rather my kids got my opinions on money than their buddy from school or college. I would rather they had my opinions on politics and helped and that I could ask them the Questions sort of thing. I think that not talking about money is dumb. You know, you need to talk about money, you need to be open about it. And as men, we need to talk about the things that men don't talk about. The emotional stuff, all of those sorts of things. When I moved to Vegas, I started a group called Handsome Men's Club because Jimmy Kimmel had this skit called Handsome Men's Club. But it's getting a group of guys together to just talk about this stuff, you know, and we have dinners and like this Friday we're having a dinner and there's 20 of us gonna be there. And you know what we're gonna talk about? Money, politics, finances. We're gonna talk this stuff. Because if you go, you remember that famous photo of Elon Musk with all of his buddies back in college, and there's like 20 of them in the room and 19 or so of them went to become billionaires. Who you surround yourself with and what you talk with. We live in one of the loneliest periods of the world. You know, more connected, but more lonely than ever. The average American male has guess how many friends. Less than three. And the younger you get, the less that number is. The older you get, the higher the number is sort of thing. Because relationships seem to have been a thing that people forget, you know, I believe, buddy, I'm with you. Let's talk money. Let's share this podcast. If you don't like, you should sit and listen to this with your friends and stop it and talk about stuff and what are you doing? Where's your wealth plan? Do you have an entity for your wealth? Have you set up a trust or a company for your wealth? Do you have a separate bank account that's just for your wealth money? If you don't have a separate bank account, grab your buddies and all go to the bank and all open a separate account called the wealth account and be co signers on each other's one so that you can. My dad was my co signer on my wealth account and I told him, dad, these are the rules. If it doesn't meet these rules, you can't sign a check for me to invest in it.

A (24:46)

I love it.

B (24:47)

And so, so I would go to him and I'd go, dad, I want the money for this, this and this. And he'd go, let's go through the rules. Two times I broke the rules, two times I lost money, dammit. Broke my own rules. Dumb.

A (25:01)

Alright, so the third topic is about charity, how to give money away. Why do you think it's important for some form of charity for your employees, clients, vendors, customers to see?

B (25:12)

Well, I think philosophically, first and foremost, you have to have a mindset of I'm making way more than I need to. You won't do charity if you have a mindset of I'm just making enough. One of the worst goals in the world of the wimpy goals is the make enough to get by goal. Okay? So we got to get out of that. In today's world, we did a study and in this book, Pulling Profits out of a Hat, we did a study of the five core disciplines of exponential growth companies. And one of them is that they have a mission. Mission because from Gen Y onwards, as I talked about, why you do things is just as or more important today than what you do, who you are, the company culture, document the company core values, who you are and why you do what you do are central to business today. The mission of what you're aiming to achieve. When I started Action Coach, I wrote our vision of world abundance through business re education 32 years ago. Our goal is not to create better coaches or to live better lives. Our goal is to create world abundance. When I'm coaching in Lithuania and we're putting our charity into a thousand schools in Lithuania next year, right? That's about creating world abundance. Now, do we get rewarded really well for creating abundance for every client of ours? Of course we get rewarded well for that. If you don't tell the world the great things you're doing, the only people they'll hear from are the people that are complaining about what you're doing. So, A, internally you feel better about life and your team feels better about life. When you're doing something that gives back to the world, it just is. B, marketing wise, doing good things is important, but you got to tell people you're doing it, okay? I see too many people where they do good for the world and they don't be public about it. Now, I want you to be public about it for three reasons. Number one, so the world knows you're doing it, okay? Because otherwise they only hear from the negative people. Number two, reason is because it then challenges other people to step up to the plate, okay? When you see the billionaires and they put together that whole group, that said, all right, we challenge every billionaire to donate their wealth sort of thing, it challenges people to step up. But the third reason that I want to see you giving is the feeling you will get. It will drive you more when you give and when you see like the young kids that we put through the training that come out of it going, oh my God, I'm not weird. I can actually start my own business. I don't need to leave school and get a job. I can leave school, build my own business, and give other people jobs. That, damn, that's a winner.

A (27:53)

I actually look at my investing in the companies as a form of charity because I go invest in this company, I invest in Everbowl restaurant. They go from 13 locations to 104 locations. That means they went from 40 employees to 900 employees. We're creating jobs. It's almost a form of charity. And so part of my investing is.

B (28:09)

That I find it interesting that as business owners, we risk all of our capital helping other people provide for their family, giving people jobs. But if you're a good business owner, you don't just give them a job, you give them an education. Sure. You give them a knowledge base. A lot of young people, Dan, you would see this. They come out of school, college, and they want to get a job where they make the most. I think that's dumb. I think once you get out of school, you should be looking for a job where you get the best mentor, you get the best learning, the best knowledge. Do they have a good training program? Do they invest in their people? Do they build their people? I know for me, the only way I build my companies is if I build my people. Build my people, they build the company. If I don't build my people, they can't build my company. So I think that's really important. But the idea of learn, earn, return has been a long sort idea that you've got to at some point understand that our job, if we've provided too much for ourselves, is fantastic. It's now your turn to give back. Now, sometimes you give back financially, sometimes you give back with knowledge, sometimes you give back with time. I notice for me, I'm time poor in giving back because I want to give to my kids first. My daughter's seven. I would rather pour into her. So I pour my knowledge into the charity that we do, pour the foundation in, pour the money into the foundation that we do sort of thing. So. But eventually you will fill your bucket to a point where it doesn't satisfy you anymore. I got the jet. What if I get a bigger jet? It's still just a jet, dude. You know, I got this car. What if I get this car? Still just a car, dude. In the end, you know, it's like someone jokingly said to me, one Time. You know, I'm driving in my Lamborghini and they say, you know, aren't you worried about people dinging into it? If I was worried about someone dinging into it, I shouldn't know, you know? But look, money is a great subject to talk about, to study, to learn. I think it should be in schools. I know my good friend Sharon Lechter got it in schools in Arizona, and I think we should get it into all schools learning how to. You know, someone said to me, should kids learn how to pay taxes in school? No, they should learn how to not pay taxes in school. I think we're getting to a point, though, where we will have a different tax system, where it won't be paying for employees. I think we'll have a different tax system in the next five to ten years.

A (30:41)

Yeah. Okay. There's only one question I ask on every single episode for the last two and a half years, and I've never gotten the same answer before, and I'm for sure not going to get the same answer today. I'm 100% positive. 100 years from now, many, many years from now, and it's time for Brad Sugars to finally pass away, and you built up another billions and billions and billions and billions, tens of billions of dollars of all this value, of all these companies. What percentage of your net worth do you leave to those five kids?

B (31:12)

Hopefully zero. Three reasons. Number one, my wife's a lot younger than me, so I'm pretty sure it all goes straight to her anyway, and she has to worry about that decision. Number two reason, they should have made their own wealth by that point in time. They shouldn't need me. I'm a firm believer in I give my kids a kickstart, not a finish. Give them the knowledge and the money to get going. Give them the investment capital like I'm a partner. If I'm investing in real estate with you, dude, I'm a partner in that.

A (31:43)

Sure.

B (31:45)

And the third reason is I believe that if they're thinking they're gonna get that, they won't push themselves as hard. But luckily enough, my wife's a lot younger than me, so I won't have to worry about that decision. Every time we ever do anything with wills, I'm like, honey, that's your problem, not mine.

A (32:04)

I'm gone. Where can people find you? Find the books. Find Action coach. Tell us everything.

B (32:09)

Actioncoach. Com. Bradshugars. Com. Every social media, even Pinterest. You know, I don't dance on TikTok, but I'M definitely on there.

A (32:17)

Alright guys, you're listening to the Money Mondays. I appreciate you guys. As you know, I don't have any sponsors or ads here. I do work with the guys over at Fan Basis and obviously I work with some of these major companies that I talk about on some of the episodes but never gonna hear me reading affiliate codes or comp codes. I always talk about GoHighLevel because I actually use GoHighLevel. So when you hear about the brands, it's because I live and breathe them for my actual business. You're never gonna hear me read about a pill or a medicine or wix.com type ads. I'm only talking about the companies I actually work with. But the reason the podcast is doing so well is because of you liking commenting, subscribing, sharing, reposting. As Brad mentioned. Like listening to it with your friends, forwarding it to your friends. All those things matter for the algorithms for us to stay high up in the rankings. And if we do that, then obviously we get more people to listen and talk about money. And we tragically and desperately need around our country and around the world for people to have discussions about money with their friends, family and followers. I appreciate you guys. Check out Brad Sugar's an action coach across social media. We'll see you guys next Monday here@themoney Mondays.com.