Stop Debugging Work. Start Building the OS. 

Neale 00:07

So, our guest today has probably given us more sound bites than any other guest that we’ve had on the show. He’s back today with us, welcome Brad Sugars, how are you doing?

Brad 00:18

Good day, very well, good to be here in Wales.

Neale 00:22

Excellent! When we cut up clips for the episodes to use on socials and shorts, I think how much RAM did you have to replace on your computer to get through Brad’s clips?

Mark 00:31

36 clips.

Neale 00:32

36 clips? Yes, yes. In the space of a short interview, so it’s great. There’s going to be loads of advice and loads of tips, so stick around and watch it.  So you’re here in Wales, tell us why. What’s going on?

Brad 00:43

Down at the ICC, 1,000 of our clients in a room and a dozen or so speakers, all teaching about business and success and motivation.  And you need in your life, especially if you’re an entrepreneur or a business person, you need that oomph, that boost. And it’s like you can read a book and not quite get it the way you do when you’re in the room with someone teaching. It’s like going to a concert versus listening to the record on your iPod sort of thing.

Neale 01:17

Yeah, so business, so you’ve got business people similar to Action Coach, they go, there’s seminars, lectures, what’s involved?

Brad 01:26

Yeah, so we started 30 almost 33 years ago now coaching business people. And we originally only coached business owners, but now we coach salespeople and marketing people and all across and we do training programs for them all for businesses, you know, if they want to install management systems, we’ll go in and do that sort of thing. And so, because what we found was that the average business person is so busy running their business every day, that upskilling themselves and upskilling their team, you can’t take two days out or five days out in most cases. So

Neale 02:02

It’d be lovely if you could.

Brad 02:04

Yeah, look, it would be. And that’s what we get them to, though. You know, our goal is to get businesses on the front foot. And I think, you know, right now here in the UK, we see a lot of businesses putting themselves on the back foot. You look at the changes in the economy, and you can either see that as an opportunity, or you can see that as a negative. And unfortunately, a lot of business people are prone to go straight to the negative of it, you know, rather than the opportunity, we sit in a time where, you know, where almost 40% of UK businesses are baby-boomer owned, those that have employees, and they’re looking to either sell or retire in the next five to ten years. So there’s massive opportunity right now. And this change in the market is bringing more massive opportunity. But, you know, that’s the challenge of getting yourself ‘Okay, where is the opportunity right now?’

Neale 03:00

You’re right. As we’re recording, there’s conflict in the Middle East, petrol prices are rising, fuel prices are rising. We’re talking about things like CO2 becoming scarce, there might be food rises down. It’s a tough time.  Hopefully it’ll pass, you know at the minute there’s no certainty there. Things are tough as you’ve just said.

Brad 03:19

If I want to give you a little bit of brightness of the future just for a second, you got to remember that, and we all know that this all goes back to the Trumpster, the crazy orange head man. As of July, you’ve got the World Cup in the US and he’s got elections in November. I’m guessing by July, you’ll have all of the craziness wrapped up because he’ll want the positive press of World Cup, all of that sort of stuff. That’s my guess.

Neale 03:44

Yes, you’d assume he’d want that.

Brad 03:47

Well, you would have to assume. But see, you look back at COVID, right? When COVID happened, we all had to shift our businesses. And because it was a disease, we didn’t have anyone to blame. So we just changed and people took responsibility.  Now, because there’s someone to point the finger at or something to point the finger at.

Neale 04:09

It’s easier to use as an excuse and go, oh, I have no control over this. When chips are down, you say business owners, because we’ve got the heads down.  What would you say? What’s the most… Things get cut, don’t they go, oh, we need to cut this and I’ll stop doing this. Is consistency important? Should people carry on? What would your advice be?

Brad 04:30

Look most of the businesses that I see right now need to make change. What happens in a negative economy is it highlights the changes that you’ve needed to make for a while and have been putting off. Unfortunately, most people are reactive in change rather than proactive in change.  So if you get proactive and actually sit down and say, okay, we probably should have changed this before, now we have to. I would hazard a guess because COVID moved us seven years in advance virtualization of the world. So we got to a point in AI right now, people saying, well, I’m not really sure where I’m at. Like 80% of businesses are saying we’re using AI, but only 1% to 3% are saying we’re using it really. And if we look at the world, when I first started in business, I met a guy who was founding Vice President of Federal Express. His name was Mike Basch. And Mike said, Brad, 80% of business is routine. So you actually have to systematize 80% of business. 20% is going to change it up. So you’ve got to humanize the 20%. So train your people to handle that and build your systems to handle that. Well, where we’re going is 80% of business will be bots, robot, computer bot, et cetera.

Neale 05:48

AI agents reaching out on your behalf.

Brad 05:48

Correct. We’re already at 40 to 50% of business is computer bot related, right? We’ve reduced, like you think of accounting, 20 years ago, you had 20 people in the accounting department. Now you’ve got one and a piece of software sort of thing, you know? So we’ve seen that shift. If you look at the car industry, you know, again, 40 years ago, you had to have 10,000 people making the cars. Today, you’ve got five people and a bunch of robots, you know, you turn the lights off and they still do the work type thing. So we’re moving in that direction.  And I think that if someone has now gone, OK, the economy is changing. We’ve got a shift. You should be looking to outsourcing more to a computer or more to that sort of thing. And that’s where efficiencies, all of the efficiencies that can come from it. And it’s going to take a little bit of time to learn it, obviously. But it took time for us to learn the Internet. And, you know, some people still can’t update their Instagram today. So it’s not too far ahead of ourselves.

Neale 06:50

My Instagram is very up to date.

Brad 06:53

It’s the rock band. We’ve got to have it updated. But this is the time when you’ve got to sit down and be what is the goal? Because that’s where a lot of businesses, unfortunately, fall back to last year plus 10 percent, or I need to make this much to live so the business should do this or.

Neale 07:15

We talked about that last time didn’t we? If you’re aiming for 10%, you’re never going to reach that.

Brad 07:18

You’re never going to innovate, you’re not forcing yourself to learn and grow by having a wimpy goal. So right now, the market is forcing you to learn and forcing you to grow and forcing you into change.  I would obviously prefer you’re on the front foot and doing that out of planning and goal setting. And so if this is going to make a time where you’re going to have to plan and have to goal set, then so be it, you know, and I know that sounds tough for a lot of people, but sometimes the problem for a business is that the owner is also the CEO. And I don’t know, maybe I’ll go back to when I was younger and I was both the owner and CEO of my business. And let’s just say my initials of BS came in handy of how I had conversations with myself. You know, oh, you did great today. Yes, Mr. CEO. Thank you. And the reality of it was that I didn’t push myself as hard because I was the owner and CEO. And as long as I was paying the bills and doing okay, then things were fine. And what happens is you get fat and happy basically and you fall behind and you know, the tree is either growing or dying. We know that to be a reality and your business is either growing or dying. And unfortunately, a lot of people get to status quo and gradually the business declines.  And it’s not because the business is declining because the market is moving around you, which means you’re falling back sort of thing.

Neale 08:46

If you’re a business leader and you’re taking this advice on board, you want to push, you want to innovate, you want to implement new systems, take AI, you’re a typical Action Coach business owner, you want to push this forward. That change is difficult.  How would you advise you bring teams along with you? Because you have to, you know, you can shout until you’re blue in the face, but if you haven’t got the people on board, it’s never going to, it’s never going to happen. How do you bring the rest of the organisation with you?

Brad 09:16

Yeah, look, there’s there’s probably four areas to answer that question. First is management. Management is about creating competency and productivity in your people. And unfortunately, management became a dirty word somewhere in the late 90s, early 2000s, and you don’t want to be a manager, you want to be a leader. No, no, you have to manage because you have to train, you have to mentor, coach and build competency and productivity into your people. If you’re not building their competency and productivity, then you’re not managing them properly.  Second is leadership and leadership is about passion and focus. No goals. There’s nothing to be focused on. There’s nothing to be passionate about type things. So a great leader brings the passion and focus out of their team. Then we have to take a look at recruiting and how we’re doing that, because if we’re recruiting lazily, we’re not building an A team.

Neale 10:09

What would you classify as a lazy recruitment?

Brad 10:10

Oh, let’s compare sports with the average way a person hires people, you know, putting a ‘Help wanted’ ad up online in the window, whatever – lazy recruiting. Sports teams, they go out and look for the best of the best. They go and recruit them and hire them in. See, the problem today with getting good people is that the people you really want to employ already have a job and they already work for someone else. So if you want to get the best of the best people, you’ve got to do great marketing of your job. So that’s probably the easiest distinction.

Neale 10:47

And if they’re good people they’re probably going to have golden handcuffs on i.e. they’re going to be paid well they’re going to you know have perks they’re not going to

Brad 10:56

It’s not gonna be easy to get them to come across. So you’ve got to, I remember as a kid, my dad made me understand the fact that if you want great people to work for you, you’ve got to build a great company and become a great leader and manager, sort of thing.  And then the fourth thing that you’ve got to think about with bringing the team along with you is that you’ve got to create champions in change. So who are the team members that are passionate, most passionate about this project or this implementation? Because what we know is that if you go and do massive change in an organization, and all the studies show this, if you try and lead with the system or the technology or the thing, it’s gonna fail about 80% of the time. If you lead with the people and get the people excited about the change and wanting the change, I’ll give you an example. This is our new logo, right? And that’s why I’ve got to be on brand all the time.

Neale 11:49

Looks great.

Brad 11:49

When we did that process, we involved our people over the year and we took a year and a half to do it rather than the three to six months to do it. And by the time we got it out there, my people were like, can we just have it, please? And so getting them to want it rather than pushing it down their throats was a big thing. And the more you involve people in the process, the more it’s theirs, they own it, they want to do it, all of those sorts of things.

Neale 12:15

More carrot – less stick, get people excited, get people involved. Yeah.

Brad 12:19

And it takes longer. That’s the challenge.

Neale 12:22

But it’s better long term, right, longer staff retention, happier employees, they’re engaged, they felt the part of the process.

Brad 12:28

You know, if you ever had a manager that was the superhero manager where something went wrong they’d dive in and fix it for you and you’d be standing there watching them fix it and they’re like, ta-da, and they’re like feeling like a superhero, but guess what happens next time?

Neale 12:42

You need them back to fix it.

Brad 12:43

They’re the bottleneck all of a sudden for the organisation. It takes longer to teach your kids to tie their shoelaces, but eventually they can do it themselves and you don’t have to do it for them sort of thing.  And that’s what we’ve got to do as…

Neale 12:56

They contribute more to business, more productive yeah

Brad 12:57

All that stuff yeah.

Neale 12:57

Cool so we’ve got a few gifts for you we’ve brought a lot so I know you’re a fan of Greggs and a sausage roll. Have you tried the chicken roll?

Brad 13:11

No. I have not tried the chicken roll from Greggs yet.

Neale 13:14

Are you happy to try a bite on screen and see

Brad 13:15

Let’s give the chicken. Let’s give the Greggs chicken. I’m gonna break it in half, so I go from the middle 

Neale 13:29

Yeah, so Mark was like

Brad 13:29

I’m gonna try it. We gotta try it

Neale 13:29

 This is the content people want to see.

Brad 13:35

Mm-hmm. Now… I’m gonna say two things, not as good as a sausage roll, not as good. However, Greggs does give, do good pastry.

Neale 13:47

They do. There’s your good pastry on there. It’s not bad. It’s kind of a peppery

Brad 13:49

People tell me though why do you eat at Greggs when you go to the UK I’m like because they’re on every bloody street corner that’s why.

Neale 13:57

And we give one of those out to every guest we have on the show.

Brad 14:02

Because last time we did it virtual, I didn’t get all the gifts.

Brad 14:05

I’m now an official Bright Spark, see, there you go.

Neale 14:09

And I’m pretty sure we’ve probably forgotten one or two past guests. So if you haven’t had your mug, make sure you get in touch and let us know.  Fantastic. Okay, so a lot of the people that we work with are very excited about their products. So we work with a lot of innovators and they get really excited about making sure the design is robust. It’s manufacturable. They can get it to market. It’s not going to fail because if you create something that goes to market, it’s not designed right. It’s going to fall on its arse. Damage reputation, damage investment, all that stuff. While being passionate about the design, the product’s really important. What are people missing out when they focus on the product? Are they, you know, they’re fixing on that, but there’s a bigger picture around that, isn’t there? There’s what’s happening in the background, what’s happening in the marketplace.

Brad 15:00

Let’s remember that business is both demand and supply. So most businesses are supply side centric, build the right product, train the team to be able to deliver fantastically. The greatest businesses in the world are demand side focused. If you look at Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs was a genius at demand side. I’ll give you an example. Now, some of the people watching won’t be old enough to remember this because it’s 20 years ago now. When the iPhone first came out, do you remember the people lined up for 48 hours at the, you did that yet, see?

Neale 15:39

Yeah, of course you did that Mr. Apple.

Brad 15:42

But you got to understand that was his genius and his ability to get you to want the product before you needed it.  Now, people are like, oh, he’s a genius. He invented an amazing product. Not really. Look, the iPhone, fantastic product. Let’s go back to the iPod. Sony invented the MP3 player and their marketing genius has called it an MP3 player. So well done, Sony. Like, come on guys, you’ve got to create it as something that people want type thing. When he put up a billboard that says a thousand songs in your pocket, genius type thing. And so when you look at demand side business creation, you start to see IBM created the ThinkPad, right? Apple didn’t invent the iPad. They copied what they had and they went, hey, they did it for work. We’re going to make this for fun. You can play games on it. You can watch movies on it. You can do all of these things. It’s demand side business.  And so when you look at a lot of tech and product based companies, their marketing division is just non-existent. And it’s like, hang on a sec. Who’s going to take this to market type thing? And so when we go into businesses in that nature and we start working with them, then obviously we start looking at, well, how do we recruit a marketing team or a marketing person? And in these days you can basically outsource and find an agency and all of that sort of stuff. But, and then you’re gonna have to test and measure and see what the market likes and what they don’t sort of thing. But I think a big focus on demand creation is the thing. Let’s be blunt. A good product is the minimum you need today to get into the market and survive. You’re not gonna go massive just cause you’ve got a good product. There are a million good products right now.

Neale 17:35

And it has to be a good product because the people have got the ability to criticize and leave opinions. And if your product’s not even up to scratch, you don’t have a chance.

Brad 17:43

You know look 20 years ago you’d buy something and it had a label made in China and you know it was not, it was inferior quality. Today, you’ve been in a BYD car?  Apple taught the Chinese how to manufacture because they made the iPhones for them. They taught them manufacturing perfection. You get in their cars today, they’re manufacturing perfection. So we don’t have the luxury of creating an average product anymore. You just don’t have that luxury in business.

Neale 18:11

It’s interesting about the Chinese manufacturers and I worked for an art and crafts company and we used to source from China and we would go over and we’d have a product of mine like pastels and the Chinese could manufacture really good quality but you’d go over and there’d be different grades like yes you can have your these are as good as the European ones these are as good as the American ones these are but it’s a lot I think a lot of made in China was a lot of you know ‘Oh, it’s cheap and Chinese’. But that’s what we wanted from them but they’ve invested you were talking about business owners sort of there’s a lot of change coming and you need to where have we gone wrong look back at China sounds like a pro-Chinese tyrant now, but you’ve got they invested in solar early on, they invested in green, they put the hard work in.

Brad 19:01

Well they they had to because they don’t have have the, I mean, this is, if you look at the world stage politics right now, why is there a oil blockade? Well, I reckon that’s probably a negotiation strategy with China because they don’t have energy independence.  But look, I think that businesses that go for short term, end up in trouble, whether it’s short term with your people short term with your product short term with your branding and marketing sort of thing. You know, you look at the best marketers in the world, and it’s definitely the Italians and the French, you know, you look at their brands of the Louis Vuitton’s and the Gucci’s and the Ferrari’s they, they build a brand that people want. You don’t see them having to run ads every day, there’s it’s an aspirational product that people still want to buy. And, you know, we saw 20 years ago, retail’s gonna die, the internet’s gonna kill it. AI is gonna kill off everything in business. No, it’s not, it’s just gonna change business. Yeah. And it’s gonna change a lot slower than most of us think. You know, just because we I mean, AI has been around ever since Google’s first algorithm, let’s be blunt. Google’s algorithm was AI.

Neale 20:13

Yeah, it’s a referencing tool.

Brad 20:14

You know, so I think that we as business people do need to plan and think a bit longer term than we do in most cases. And we need to set much bigger goals than we do in most cases, goals that make us grow, goals that make us change, so that we’re not waiting for the market to push us to change, we’re changing. Yeah.

Neale 20:33

I think that’s important, isn’t it? These are tools, AI especially is a tool.  I think people are already pushing back on what we call AI slop. Rubbish videos that don’t look quite real, image creation, people know it, they recognize it, people are pretty clever. People using AI lazily, it’s not going to work, but you can use it cleverly.

Brad 20:57

So I was chatting with someone yesterday and they were talking about, you know, creating videos. Look, you and me who, like, it’s not my career to create videos, right?  But if I find a guy or a gal who spent 20 years making videos and they get an AI tool, now they’re going to make amazing videos because that’s their thing. But I go out there and I try and make one, yeah, it’s going to be sloppy because I don’t really know how to make videos and having an AI tool is not going to make me a genius at it overnight. I think that it’s going to improve our productivity, though, and that’s really what you should be looking at with AI is how do we improve productivity with it of our existing people.

Neale 21:39

It’s interesting as it is, you always have got craftsmen and good craftsmen will adapt to tools. What happens, I mean, you’ve been in business for a while you’ve been working in lots of different businesses. What’s going to happen when the craftsmen retire or, you know, eventually pass on, we lose those skills and you’ve got people are coming through now.  So we’ve been looking at engineers recently and they talk the talk, but once you sort of crack through the veneer, they don’t know the nuts and bolts of coding and engineering, they just know. So how would you train up without losing that skill set?

Brad 22:14

It’s an interesting one because, you know, we go back in history and you had the apprentice master-apprentice relationship sort of thing and we’ve lost a little bit of that but Let’s let’s look at every generation is different type thing You know the baby boomer generation knew how to fix things because they had to. My generation I’m 54 now. So born in 71 My generation was the first generation to not fix things We were the last generation to have shop class in school Are you thinking when they stopped doing woodwork and stopped doing home economics and you know, I at school I learned how to sew I learned how to make a chair and yeah, you know all of that basic stuff Well, I also learned to stop darning my socks Because we didn’t need to it was cheap enough to just throw them out and buy a new pair of socks Like we didn’t we didn’t fix our jeans.  We actually wanted bloody holes in our jeans. That’s how cool we were very cool but and so you start looking at the generational way of working that’s different and So I look at my kids who are digital generation like they’ve had the digital they’ve grown up with that whole thing They’re growing up with AI They’re gonna solve problems at a rate faster than you and I ever could Because the way they will approach it is entirely different The way a baby boomer would approach a problem is with their hands to fix it You know, I started in computers when I was very young.  I joke with my kids Yes, I had a numbered email address and they’re like, what do you mean a numbered email address? Well when you first got them you had a number.

Neale 23:52

Were you 1@gmail.com?

Brad 23:57

It was slightly before Gmail, let’s just say that. But you start thinking about the way work gets done today. So will we actually need that level of depth throughout the entire organization? Not really, we’ll need 80-20.  20% will need to have the genius and 80% will need to have the other. I mean, if you look at say Elon Musk, in all of his organizations, his genius level engineering skills is what pushes everyone in the organization because he knows they can’t tell him a story. No, that’s not the way it is. Like when he bought Twitter, the joke of a story of he went in and said to the engineers, why do we have this many places? No, we don’t need that. Well, we need it for redundancy. No, we don’t. And he literally flew to Sacramento and cut it with his own blooming knife and took one offline and he went, see, we didn’t need that one. So you will still need the genius and the genius will still be the 10,000 hours. The 20 year overnight success thing is still a reality. You do need, like I’ve probably forgotten more about marketing than most young marketers will know. Yesterday, we had Drayton Bird over at the conference and like there’s a guy who’s forgotten more about, he’s forgotten more than he’s forgotten about marketing than I’ll ever know in my lifetime type thing.

Brad 25:23

So you still need the genius, but you won’t need as many of the genius in organizations going forward.

Neale 25:31

So what’s coming up next for you and Action Coach?

Brad 25:34

Next for us really, we, so over 33 years now, we built a recipe for building businesses and we’ve taken that recipe now and turned it into software so that it’s called ABOS, the Action Coach Business Operating System. So we help companies install the operating system for their business.  Like how do you run a business? And so by installing the software now, it’s giving them a dashboard, they can see every day how well they’re running their business. So the business is both working on the business and working in the business. And so I guess for me, a lot of what we’re doing now is learning the software game, learning how that plays and all of the things that are a part of that. And yeah, going through product iterations and all that fun stuff. I do love challenging myself in business and in life. I found that like even a few months back, I said to my wife, I said, I need a new fitness goal. So why is that? Because I’ve always been a runner all my life. And so there was always another half, she ran marathons, I did half marathons. There was always another race to get to. My knees decided a few years back that running was probably not my game anymore. So it was like, all right, well, what’s next? So I’ve turned to hiking and I’m doing the half Everest, which is 22 miles uphill in one day. So the crazy ones do the full Everest in one day. You got 17 hours to do 42 miles uphill. I’m doing 22 miles uphill in one day. So it’s a ski slope. You go 2.2 miles up, ride the gondola, 2.2, I got to do that 10 times while the sun’s up, up in the mountains in Colorado. So it’s at altitude plus hiking uphill. So thank God I found good doctors. Now they’ve injected my knees. I’ve got new knees again. They didn’t even have to operate.

Neale 27:28

Well, anyone with dodgy knees I’ve got a little bit it’s a little bit of a knee. It’s not the going up That’s the problem is it’s it’s the coming down.

Brad 27:37

Well, that’s why I’m riding the gondola down that’ll be perfect. But it’s interesting, I’ve just invested in longevity centers in Vegas. And because I think that, you know, we went from the information age, we’re now in the intelligence age, and AI is going to reduce the amount of work the average human needs to do. So when Henry Ford is literally 100 years ago, 1926, Henry Ford took us to the 40 hour workweek, I believe we’re going to get to the 20 hour workweek in our lifetime, okay, because AI will make us more effective.  So people are going to get more into health, more into lifestyle, more into fitness, more into longevity. And if you look at medicine and the speed with which AI can increase the knowledge, like, if it was possible for AI to get all of the research in the world around cancer, like from every college, every pharmaceutical company, like it would solve cancer in five hours type thing, you know, maybe five days, depending on the computing technology. But I see longevity being a big part of our future, I think, as we get more and more, because once Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was met, meaning you’ve got shelter, you’ve got safety, you’ve got food, like the Western world, that stuff was done. And that’s why Gen Y, also known as the millennials became Gen WHY. Well, why are we doing this? Because they didn’t need to worry about food and shelter. That was taken care of my generation, your generation, we still had that as a concern for average citizens for a period of time. So yeah, I think that the very near future for me, still as a father of five, most of my life is running kids around and doing that sort of thing. You know, my son’s hockey and football, between those I’m up early and, and getting him to practice and I get all my emails done while he’s at practice in the morning. So.

Neale 29:25

Yeah. Well, it’s putting good habits in place as well, isn’t it? I mean, that’s the key. Healthy mind, healthy body, and you’re going to take that into work.  I don’t want to sort of end this on a negative, but what sort of toxic traits do you see with sort of people who come to you, the stress, the wound up, what sort of builds in there, and what can business owners do to sort of…

Brad 29:49

That’s an interesting question because I was I just wrote a blog article on this that CEOs who are having trouble with their business the first thing I asked them to do is fix their fitness and health. And they’re like ‘What do you mean?’ So someone comes to me and they say ‘Well, these are my problems with the business – this is this and this and this’ and I asked well tell me about your exercise and they go ‘What do you mean?’  I said ‘Well, tell me what are you doing for exercise?’

Neale 30:12

There don’t have time to exercise, too worried about the business.

Brad 30:12

Correct and so I say ‘Great, the first thing I want you to do to fix your business is I want you up at 5 a.m. every morning walk the dog for an hour you know and have you got a dog no go go and buy a bloody dog you know adopt the dog from the shelter and go and do that’ Because here’s the reality of our brain and our bodies your brain cannot operate on peak condition if you’re unhealthy and unfit it just can’t you’re not gonna get the best ideas you know your gut health determines your happiness levels let’s this is just body right so I like making certain that they are doing the right things for themselves and at home I asked them when’s date night for you and they go we don’t do date night I said great pick a night that’s date night and live by it religiously and they’re like why are you helping me fix outside of work I said because until I get your mind at work focused on work because if I I started 20 something years ago every day before I left the office I would write down what I need to do the next day now I started doing it not for a productivity increase even though that is what happened I started doing it because I wanted to be able to leave work at work I really struggled with that when I was in what early as a dad I was you know I would come home and not be present type thing

Neale 31:38

Which is terrible because you won’t get that time back.

Brad 31:41

Yeah, but that was the crazy thing. When I’m at work, I’m thinking about home. When I’m home, I’m thinking about work. And it was like, okay, how do I be home when I’m home and at work when I’m at work? So that was the start of the process for me of really understanding how to be more present and how to be there.  And when I’m with my kids, because kids spell love T-I-M-E. They don’t spell love new Xbox, even though, you know, that’s a great thing. That’s a sub-love. They want you to play the Xbox with them, not give them the Xbox sort of thing. And so, as a father of five, I had to very clearly delineate my life, what was important, because I think that it’s easy. And if you look at it, it’s easy for business to become your life. It is. And the reason I see that for a lot of people is that they only have goals in their business. They have financial goals and business goals, but they don’t have relationship goals or family goals or vacation goals or that sort of thing. And when you look at most of their goals, most people, unfortunately, their goals are negative, meaning to not be fat, to not be broke, to not be in a bad relationship, to not work so many hours. I then teach people to turn their goals positive. Okay, well, you don’t want to work 80 hours, great. How many hours do you want to work? Oh, I don’t really know. I haven’t thought about that. I said, well, okay, do you want to work five days a week as a business owner? No, actually, I don’t. I’d like to have Fridays off, fantastic.

Neale 33:14

Then you can work towards that.

Brad 33:14

So now we’re setting the goal. How many hours a day do you want to be at work? Like for me, I love working three days a week, Tuesday through Thursday, and I love dropping my kids to school, working out and then starting work. So I don’t want to start work until nine o’clock. And I want to pick my kids up or be there when they’re done. So I want to finish at three o’clock. And on those three days a week, I’m happy to work those hours sort of thing. But Mondays and Fridays, I like to have time with my wife and go for lunch with my buddies on a Friday.

Neale 33:44

Watching them run an extra distance that you can’t do.

Brad 33:49

Going to do the craziness, yes. But you’ve got to decide what it is and so when you think about having business take over your life you’ve let it you know you’ve allowed that and I know some people say well I’m doing this for my family and I won’t name this person but I had a chat with a business owner a few weeks back and I said you’re doing this for your family right yeah how often you see them and he looked me dead in the eye and I said dude name your kid’s best friend and he couldn’t I said so I want you to understand something I’m not picking on him by that.

Neale 34:29

No of course not.

Brad 34:29

But he’s saying he’s doing it for the family but doing it for a family that you don’t know and don’t recognize anymore is an entirely different thing. Life is different today we are all we are expected as parents to be better parents than our parents were to us, we’re expected to be better spouses than than before. Standards keep raising in life, that’s

Neale 34:56

That’s true, and I think as well with Covid, sort of reset a lot of things to where we set things in the workplace, it reset expectations of you can spend more time at home, more time with families, people looked at their gardens were like, oh, I do this, I’ve started cooking more, I’m spending more time with my kids. My relationships are more important.  I think our life expectations have increased.

Brad 35:19

I do believe so, you know, if I go back in history a little, do you remember when like even getting a dial-up internet in a hotel was like, wow, we got dial-up internet here and they provided a cable. Nowadays, if you don’t get free 5G internet with no password, you’re like, what’s wrong with this hotel?

Neale 35:40

Yeah, yeah, I’m leaving. Terrible!

Brad 35:42

So our expectations have shifted.  And I think that people used to think that you had to be this or this, you had to choose wealth or family, you had to choose that or that. I think what we’re learning is that we can integrate and have a more harmonious life and have that and that. You can be rich and happy, you can be successful and have a good relationship, you can be that and that. Now it’s going to take learning though, you know, when I had, when I remember specifically the moment, you know, when I first had kids, I started reading books, how to have kids because I had daughters and it was like, I only had brothers. I got no idea how to raise a girl, so I better read the books. And then when my wife told me we were having twins, I was, we were sitting at a hotel in California.

Neale 36:26

I need more books!

Brad 36:27

I instantly pulled out the bloody phone, got on Amazon, had to raise twins, and I bought three books instantly because it was like, oh my God, what am I going to do?

Brad 36:40

And I think that unfortunately, we don’t put as much time into planning our marriage, planning our life, planning those sorts of things. People spend more time planning their wedding than they do their marriage.  People spend more time planning their weekend than they do their wealth. Sitting down and actually doing a life plan, sitting with your spouse and planning, what do you want out of life?

Neale 37:05

Where do you want to be the next 10 years? Where do you want to be the next five years?

Brad 37:06

You know, one of my counsellors one time joked with me, Brad, in a marriage, you can either have a thousand fights or a thousand hard discussions you choose, because there’s going to be a thousand of them. And you either discuss the hard things and talk about it, or you’re going to have a fight about it. You’re going to resolve it one way or the other. So yeah, look, I really love it when a CEO comes to me and I can help them in a way that allows them to take back control of what they want and get on the front foot in their business and in their life. Because I think if you, if business is stressing you out, then you’re taking that home. And if home is stressing you out, then you’re bringing that to the business.  And if we can balance you up or bring a more harmonious life to you, because I don’t think there really is much balance in the world anymore. I think that there’s a harmony. And like these few days, I’m over here for work. It’s 100% work for 24 hours a day while I’m here. But then I’ll go home and I’ll have a few days and build that balance somehow.

Neale 38:14

I love that advice. Turn your goals from negative goals into positive ones. I think that’s brilliant.

Brad 38:19

Love it.

Neale 38:19

Brilliant. Brad, thanks for coming out.

Brad 38:22

Cheers mate, thanks for the Greggs.

Neale 38:23

You’re welcome.