Neale 00:00
My guest today has helped more businesses earn more revenue than probably anyone else in the entire history of the world. So if you want that for your business, you’re going to want to watch this right to the end. Our guest today is Brad Sugars.
Brad 00:21
Well g’day and fun to be here, I’m really looking forward to this.
Neale 00:26
Excellent. Good stuff. So Brad, you’ve got a thousand offices in over over a thousand offices in over 80 countries.
Brad 00:35
Yeah, we just hit 1100 offices and we opened in Mongolia making us that’s our 85th country. So there you go.
Neale 00:43
Fantastic. So here’s a question for you. What makes you so special? Why is Action Coach successful? Why do people come to you?
Brad 00:51
I think Action Coach is successful for three reasons. Number one, recruiting and training the best people. I’ve always had a firm belief that if you build the people, they’ll build the business. So I invest a lot of time in recruiting. So my coaches, my senior team, my master franchise partners, I think it’s really important to recruit the best. I remember as a young man, I went to my dad one time. I think I was 21. And I said, dad, I just can’t get good people because I was already in my own business. And he looked me dead in the eye. And you can tell my dad’s a very motivational type of person by his speech. He says, son, you get the people you deserve. And I was like.
Neale 01:32
Thanks, dad.
Brad 01:34
It’s like stick the knife in. How about twisting it again, dad? And he said, you know, you’re an average manager running an average company. Highest caliber person wants to work for you is average. So he said, you’ve got to become a good manager, a good leader, and run a great company if you want great people to work for you. So I went to work on me. I went and learned management, learned leadership, and learned how to run a great business. So I could do it. Second reason we’re successful is we built a system that works. So the Action Coach business operating system. So when someone joins Action Coach, we install our operating system in their business. So you know how like for you in the tech business, you have a system, right? The tech is a system. It’s the same for us on business. We have a business system, and it’s an operational system for a business.
Neale 02:22
It’s a proven formula.
Brad 02:24
Yeah, and the third reason is marketing. I believe that we make sure that we get the message out there. And the message for us is really our customers. We tell the stories of our customers and how they’ve succeeded, and that message becomes a thing. But the message has had to change over the years, mate. In the early days, I could market based on, look how, well, I’ve succeeded, and you can succeed too. And then you could market on, well, you want to have more money in your business. Like greed was a bit of a thing because I’ve been doing this 32 years. You’ve got to remember. And COVID changed all marketing messaging for us. You can no longer really message based on greed, but that’s also generational. I think when we hit Gen Y, the millennials, which should have been Gen WHY, because we hit that Maslow’s hierarchy, buddy. And it became a roof over your head sort of was a normal thing. Food on the table was a normal thing. And we had to get back to, well, why are we doing it? So I think today’s marketing messages have to shift too.
Neale 03:28
Yeah, it’s a really interesting point, I mean, so I’m the Head of Marketing here at Ignys and I’ve been doing it slightly less, just over 20 years and when I got into marketing it was very much about brand, you know, we made the catalogue, we weren’t quite in the digital world yet. Marketing, as I’ve said, it’s really important to your business, to your business. What are people getting wrong in your opinion? When people come to you, what are they missing in marketing? What are they not doing?
Brad 03:57
Oh, dude, how long have we got on this podcast? So let me do the top two mistakes that I see out there. Number one, marketing used to be 20% of the sale, and sales did the heavy lifting, the 80%. In today’s world, I’ll give you four statistics that have changed dramatically. Number one, 40% of customers, or more than 40% of customers now, do not want to talk to a salesperson. Number two, the average customer wants to be between 60% and 80% of the way through their sales decision-making before talking to a salesperson. So number three, statistic, Google did the study, or 10 years ago, they did the ZMOT study, and then Daniel Priestly numbered it into the 7-11-4. People want to do seven hours of research, 11 connections on average, and four different places, like your YouTube, or face-to-face, or in your office, or whatever. So we’ve got that. And then we’ve got this latest one, which came out of Cambridge, where they’re saying that face-to-face now is worth five times more than Zoom or any form of virtual connection. So where it used to be, 20% marketing, meaning marketing got the name, and email, and phone number.
Neale 05:12
Sales did the rest of the work traditionally.
Brad 05:14
And sales did all the heavy lifting, the 80%. Now it’s the other way round, and most companies aren’t the other way round. Like if I can’t go to your website and do seven hours of research on your product or service, and that means seven hours on the subjects that interest me. So you’ve got to have 20, 30 hours of books, e-books, downloads, white papers, videos, all this stuff we’re doing so that people can do it. And that’s why things like reviews and testimonials and all of that stuff today are worth 10 times what they used to be because of, yeah, social proof. That’s what social media, the fourth part of social media is social proof. So you look at it from those aspects. The second mistake I would say people are making is they’re not treating marketing formulaeically. I teach the five ways formula, which is leads by conversion equals customers, then customers times number of transactions and average sale equals revenues or turnover for the UK folks, and then turnover times margins equals profits. So you’ve got leads, conversion, transactions, average sale and profitability or margins. They’re the five areas that you have to work on. They’re the five parts of marketing. And most people think marketing is purely lead generation and it’s not. Marketing is all five areas and each one of them can have the same dramatic impact.
Neale 06:42
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I suppose when, you know, I’ve heard this before, I’ve been in the business and they’ve said, look, we’re getting two leads in a day that needs to be five leads a day. That seems like a huge number. But if you focus incremental increases in those areas, if you can just increase 10% compound, that’s got to improve dramatically, hasn’t it?
Brad 07:04
Yeah, look at the compounding I in my book or if anyone wants that I do a full explainer of that on YouTube if anyone wants it, but
Neale 07:11
I’ll put a link in the description.
Brad 07:12
When you there when you look at leads conversion like conversion is usually an easier thing and people think that sales now it’s actually marketing because who’s writing the emails who’s doing the follow up because that that nurture sequence now is more important than ever because people will reach out to you studies are showing us that only 8% of people are ready to purchase at the time of connecting with a company. So that means that 92% of people or nine out of 10 have to be nurtured. So I look at the person’s nurture sequence and most people’s nurture sequences are awful. It’s like you go to Netflix, right? You don’t start on a TV show. It’s season five episode three. You you you want to go back to season one episode one and learn the plot lines and the characters. Well, your nurture sequence, you can’t just throw people on your newsletter. You’ve got to actually give them an initial nurture sequence. So they learn like in an average company. If you ask someone hey, have you ever had anyone say I didn’t know you sold those or I didn’t know you did that and I go, yeah, we get that all the time. This is because you didn’t go back to season one episode one in your nurture sequence with your prospects or new customers and even that you know, nurturing today has gone down to daily. You know, most people think nurturing use. I mean, when I first started in business, nurturing was monthly. You’d send a direct mail piece once a month and that was your nurturing. So it was sort of thing. Then it got to email. So people went weekly and now the newsletter is dead. The three three paragraph email is basically what we’re doing today and it can’t have things like click unsubscribe. You know, if the word click is in there, it’s a negative. If the word unsubscribe is in there as a negative, you know, so you’ve got to have just plain text emails. Now, you still need to give them an unsubscribe, but you you can say things like use this link. Should you want to change your email preferences? You know, at the bottom. Some sort of thing, those sorts of things change it because email filters are getting stronger and stronger. But yeah, the daily email our stats show us weekly email 30+ plus percent open rate, daily email around 20% open rate, but it’s a different 20% every day based on the subject line. So.
Neale 09:25
That’s marketing covered off, so you get a lot of people coming to you and they say they want coaching. What’s the hardest mindset in your experience that people need to let go of when they begin coaching?
Brad 09:39
Oh, dang. No, no short answer questions you can ask me today.
Neale 09:45
We’ll get on to Greggs at the end, I promise. I do promise.
Brad 09:50
Listen, when people come to us for coaching, they’re at different stages, though, mate. That’s sort of a big thing, is what stage are they at? So let’s break business down into three stages. So there’s the growing to a million stage. In the growing to a million stage, you are the genius, and you’re surrounded by several minions, right? And I don’t mean that in a negative way.
Neale 10:11
No, no, but you’re the driving force, yeah.
Brad 10:13
Yeah, so I always think that the way you get to a million is you be great at what you do, and you be the rock star, and you work 10 times harder than the next person sort of thing. That’s how you get to a million. But what got you here won’t get you there. So getting to a million, what made you succeed to a million is actually what’s gonna stop you getting to 10 million. So you being the rock star, so I always think as a, going to a million, you should refer to yourself as a general manager, not a business owner, not an entrepreneur. You’re, because you don’t own a business, you’ve got to be there all day, every day. And if you’ve got to be there, you don’t own a business, you own a job, and you work for a lunatic. That’s the simplest way I can put it.
Neale 10:57
That’s the thought.
Brad 10:59
Yeah, buddy, I remember as a young man thinking, I bought into the whole hustle and grind mentality, and yeah, you’ve got to work hard, but you’ve got to work hard building a business that works so you don’t have to, not building a business that is just you. So going to 10 million, the distinction there is that you have to build a management team. So you become the MD, right? The managing director. You’re directing the managers of the company. Again, then you’ve got to build the systems and once you build the management team, you can get to 10. Now what got you to 10 won’t get you to 100. If you’re going for 100 million or more, then you’ve got to build a leadership team and you become the CEO. You can’t, like I met a guy the other day, he has two employees, he says, well, I’m the CEO of my own business. Dude, you can’t be the chief executive if there’s no other executives. So let’s be honest, you’re the GM. And I think that if you look at the mindset shift, there’s that first person, their biggest mindset shift is setting a date to get off the tools. So setting a date by which you will no longer be the plumber or no longer be the hairdresser or that sort of thing, and you’ll start managing the business. Then the second mindset shift is setting a date by which the company will actually run without you. So it’s no longer like the leadership team can run the company, you can actually take a vacation, you can actually go off. Because whether we like it or not, every business owner is going to have an exit from their business. Like it or lump it, you’re going to have an exit. Now the question is, is it a negative exit or a positive exit? Negative meaning pine box or shut the business down, which is the vast majority. Especially today, because you look at the number of baby boomers today that want to get out of their business and just don’t have an exit plan.
Brad 12:52
The positive exits are where it runs without you and makes you money whether you show up or not, or you sell it for a good price.
Neale 13:00
You said that you know a lot of people are trying to get out of it now. They haven’t got a strategy in place That’s got to be so common. I mean in your experience like what a nine out of ten founders getting wrong apart from the extra strategy. What are they just what they walk around? What could they do overnight to improve?
Brad 13:20
Ah, get a coach, I’ll be very, very blunt about that. Look, let’s be, let’s be honest, whoever taught someone how to be a business owner. You went, I went to accounting school right I went to become an accountant, no one taught me how to run a business all they told me how to do is count other people’s money. You ask a doctor, how many classes in university were there on how to run your medical practice. None. Ask a ask a plumber, like a good buddy of mine. He’s a very famous photographic artist, and he came to me many years ago and he said Brad I just don’t know and he was doing 10s of millions at the time. And he said, it’s just like I’m just, and the frustration he I could feel it in him. And I said, How many years did you spend learning to be the greatest photographer in the world he spent, he said, I’ve all my life that’s all I’ve studied. I said how many years did you study how to be a CEO of your own company said I’ve never studied it. I said well why don’t we hire you a professional CEO, you go and be the amazing photographer you are and hire a professional to run the business. So, you think about it you get one or two choices, either hire a professional to run the business or you become that professional that runs the business and I think learning to be a business owner, not an operator, because like you spend years learning to be an engineer learning to be a whatever the business is, and you’re learning to become an operator learning to become an operator is only step one. We’ve got to learn management leadership we got to learn marketing and sales like even like you and I know marketing on the back of our hand, but the average CEO needs to know enough about marketing to ask the right questions to hire the right person to do.
Neale 15:06
Absolutely.
Brad 15:07
Average CEO doesn’t even know what to ask. So, you know, I think that but I would say the other mistake I see is trying to do it all yourself, not building the people you build the people they build the business your job as the CEO or the leader or the founder is to build the people build the systems build the products and let it go and run itself and gradually become free see, I think for me as a coach. If I’m coaching you I’m working with you one hour a week right. Technically I’m running the business in one hour a week. I want all of my owners or founders to be able to do the same I want them to replicate what I do put someone in place to run the business and coach them one hour a week, you know, I read that book the four hour workweek and I thought that’s a lot.
Neale 15:56
Does it work? It’s great advice, isn’t it? You haven’t got the skill set to run a business. You’re a wonderful photographer, you’re a great engineer, you’re a great salesperson, you’re not a business leader. Is the friction there, because technically it’s your business, you brought someone in to run it, you’ve got a managing director. Is the conflict there? You think you’ll know best, you’re going to have opinions on your own business. How do you make that relationship work?
Brad 16:24
Well, you want that conflict. Let me tell you why. When I was the CEO and owner of my business, I would lie to myself all day, every day. Like I would come home and go, Mr. Owner, I did a wonderful job. Yes, you did, Mr. CEO, you’re the best. Oh, thank you, Mr. Owner.
Neale 16:43
Did you pat yourself on the back as well?
Brad 16:46
Oh, 100%, you know, it’s like because you’re the CEO and the owner, you don’t push yourself. For me, I like being the chairman of the business where my CEO’s, I’m demanding growth and demanding profit. It’s a big advantage. Big businesses have an advantage over small businesses in that they have a board of directors and shareholders who are demanding growth and demanding profitability. So for me, I like that friction, buddy, where there is that, you know, and that’s why I love the friction between marketing and sales. Sales wants more from marketing and marketing tells sales to do their work and finance. Like that’s a healthy friction in a company to have each team pushing the other, as long as they’re not pushing each other in a negative sense, you know, as long as they’re demanding more in a nice, you know, team building way.
Neale 17:37
Yeah, we had a we had a we had a chap here called Roy Newey who was he’s a non-exec direct sits on lots of boards. He’s a really really great fellow really interesting chap and he was the same It’s like you’ve got to be able to go in there have it out, but be able to sort of shake hands It’s got to be a safe space where you can have those difficult conversations and walk away and work together and build.
Brad 17:58
Oh, if you don’t have the difficult conversations, I always joke with my team, listen, if you guys always agree with me, one of us is useless and I own the joint, so I’ll still be here. You know, you better disagree with me on things, you better tell me where it’s not. But also, when you become CEO, you need to say less. As you build your people, so I go back, let’s go back to management and leadership for a minute. Management is about building competent, productive people. A good manager builds competency and builds productivity in their people. When someone say to me, oh, you don’t want to be a manager, I’m like, on what planet? You know, if we don’t build competency, because you’ve got to micromanage new employees. If you don’t micromanage new employees, they’re going to die. You know, it’s like, that’s just the way it is. Not literally, no, but think of employees like your kids, you want to raise them so they can do it on their own. Your job as a manager is to get them to be better than you at the job that they’re doing. So you’ve got to recruit really well and then induct them really well and build them into phenomenal people. So your job is, and I had a gentleman do this the other day, I said, all right, list your top direct reports. And he had eight direct reports. I said, fantastic. Give each one of them a score of competency out of 10. And he was going through, going four, five, six, three, five, like he was not giving them great numbers. And I said, give each one of them a score out of 10 on productivity. And he goes through again, six, three, fives, not giving them great numbers. He said, oh, that’s great, Brad. I now know what, I now know their scores. I said, buddy, they’re not their scores. They’re your scores. They’re your scores as a manager. As a manager, you’re not creating competency and you’re not creating productivity. Therefore, you got to get better at management. Like we install our management systems into a company. It takes 12 weeks to do it. But what happens is they finally go from reactive management, putting out fires, my door is always open, superheroitis, fixing the problems for everyone, you know, to proactive management sort of thing. And then you got leadership. Yeah, leadership on the other hand though is also two things and that’s passion and focus. See, I’m a very simple person. I hate reading the books that, you know, the 37 laws of leadership. Dude, I can’t process 37. Can you give me two? Like I can handle two.
Neale 20:23
That’s it, max.
Brad 20:24
And that’s what I say. Yeah, leadership is passion and focus. If you give your team a score of what’s their passion level and what’s their focus level, you can tell your leadership score at that point in time. So it’s really important for people to do that I think.
Neale 20:38
I mean, you talk about passion. I’ve watched a number of your videos now and you’re very passionate about enabling people to do better and be more successful. You told an anecdote earlier about your dad saying you hire the people you deserve and so you have to go away and learn it for yourself. Is that where this passion came from? Was that the genesis of Brad Sugar’s getting into coaching? Where did you start off?
Brad 21:04
You know, I got into coaching purely by accident. I was running photocopy shops and most of our customers were small business owners. And I remember one of them stopped coming in and I was like, I wonder what happened. So I called, I said, did we annoy you? Did we, you know, why did we lose you as a customer? And he was like, Brad, we shut the company down. We went under. I was like, huh. And not long after that, guy who became very famous now, Robert Kiyosaki, who Rich Dad, Poor Dad fame, Robert asked me to go and speak on a stage in Hawaii about marketing and about what we do, because I was helping some of his team in Australia with his marketing. And I fell in love with teaching. I just fell in love with the idea that when I finished teaching people something, they could go and do something. Hence why I called the company Action Coach, because it’s not about theory or, I don’t want people to walk off stage going, gee, that was a great presentation. I want them to walk off going, hey, I’m gonna do this and this and this and this and this. I like people doing things based on what I teach. So empowering business people to be better. I always say our job at Action Coach is to build great business people. If we build great business people, whether it’s a great marketer or a great salesperson or a great CEO or a great founder, whatever it is, our job’s to build great business people. It’s like when you find, you know, there’s job career calling. You’ve got your job. In the start of life, you do a job. And unfortunately, most people never get out of that. You know, then there’s 20 to 30% of us who find a career and we make a career out of what we do in our work. And then there’s a few of us that are lucky enough that our work becomes a calling. And I think leadership is a calling. I love the fact that I run into people every now and again, who I met 20 and 30 years ago, who said, Brad, because of this, this is, you know, because I worked for you and I learned all these things. I love that scene in Ted Lasso, where he says to Trent Crim from The Independent, he says, you know, my job is to make them better people, both on and off the pitch. If I do that, then we’ll win, you know? And that’s my theory on people.
Neale 23:15
Okay, well there’s a question for you then. So you found your calling, how could people find theirs? Is this something that they stumble across? Is it, do you follow your passion, would that lead to it?
Brad 23:28
I think it’s a mix of a few things. Usually, it’s finding what you’re good at is one of the first fundamentals of finding your calling. What are you good at? What is it something that you can do better than 99% of the people sort of thing? And I know for me, it’s simplifying business theories. So when I’ve learned something, I can put it into a book in a formula, like the five-ways formula I just taught you leads conversion. So when I see something, I can do that. I think the second thing is, what do you enjoy? Finding a way to take your skill and what you enjoy. And then the third part is, what can you monetize? I think you’ve got to have some sort of way of being rewarded for that skill and doing it. But it takes guts to go and do that. But sometimes, you’ll never know your purpose. The bumblebee never knows its true purpose. It thinks its purpose is to make honeycomb, support the queen. Whereas it’s real purpose in life is to keep all of us alive by pollinating every dang thing. Sometimes you’ll never know your purpose, but you’re doing it anyway. I think there’s too much leaning on, oh, I’ve got to find my purpose. Who says you haven’t already?
Neale 24:47
It’s a lot of pressure as well you can put on yourself to sort of go, I’m not achieving, there’s definitely something there to find confidence and comfort and reward in what you do certainly.
Brad 24:58
Yeah, a buddy of mine made me sort of get a little humble around this stuff. His son was born very high on the spectrum, non-verbal, and he said, Brad, you know, I was lucky. I was given my calling in life. I was given my purpose. And I’m like, damn good way to look at it. Damn good way to look at it, you know? But you know, I just think if I was to define people’s purpose in one sentence, it’s to be the best version of yourself possible. Like not an average version of you, the best version of you possible, like would the best version of you possible have great relationships? Yes, the best version of me would have great relationships. Would the best version of you also be fit and healthy? Yeah, the best version. So if you just keep focusing on being the best version of you and keep working on you, one of my mentors early in life said work harder on yourself than you do on your job.
Neale 25:52
It’s pretty good advice.
Brad 25:53
Yeah, because if you get better, life, if you get better, life gets easy. If you get better at sales, sales becomes easy. If you get better at marketing, marketing becomes easier. It’s simple that way.
Neale 26:01
It’s simple that way, absolutely. So at the start of this episode, I said people need to stay tuned if they want to be more successful in business. If a business leader, founder is watching this right now and they want to double their revenue in 12 months, what steps do they need to take?
Brad 26:19
I would say don’t set a goal to double your revenue, set a goal to 10 times your revenue. Here’s why. If you set a goal to do 50% more or double what you’re doing, your brain actually fights against that goal because the goal doesn’t require innovation. It just requires more work. I like to challenge people to set massive goals that require innovation, that require working on new things. Like when JFK set the goal of going to the moon, no one knew how to go to the moon, right? Here’s the problem with most people’s goal setting. How? They how themselves out of most goals. Well, Brad said we should 10 times our revenue. How do we do that? How do we do that? How do we do that? I don’t know how you do it. And nor should you when you set the goal. By definition, when you set a goal, you should not know how to do it. And so when you look at people wanting 50% more, they know how to do it. It’s just worked a bit harder, a bit more, a bit of this, a bit of that, a bit of, and so you’re already working 40, 50, 60 hours a week. Your brain will fight against going a bit more because it’s like, I don’t wanna do a bit more. I’m already doing too much.
Neale 27:37
It’s what you were saying before, working hard as opposed to working clever.
Brad 27:41
So when I say to you, you’ve got to do 10 times what you’re doing, or one of my training programs is called 30x It’s called that because it’s 30 minutes a day for 30 days I make people have lunch with me for 30 days and learn business. And so when I look at that When I challenge someone I say, okay, what would you have to do to go 30 times? And they’re like, well, we couldn’t do it the same way we’re doing it. Great. You’d have to innovate. See when JFK made them go to the moon, like you’ve got GPS on your phone. How come? Because when they went to the moon they had to invent GPS. Your kids are fed baby formula. How come? Because when they went to the moon they had to invent enriched foods. You know what I mean? Like Elon Musk is the crazy man of the, he is the JFK of today, He wants to you know live on Mars and people like well, you can’t do that Elon. Why not? Well, you’d have to live under. Yeah, you’d have to live underground. Oh, okay. So we need a tunnelling company Yeah, you can’t populate Mars Elon. You can’t burn things there in the atmosphere. You’d have to have solar power. Oh, we’d need solar and we’d need batteries. Okay, I’ll invent one of those and I’ll invent one of them. But you can’t, Elon, we need rockets to get there. Okay, I’ll invent reusable rockets. You can’t, Elon, we’d need people to no one can go up there and build it until we get there Oh, so I need robots to build it. I’ll invent those. Like think of all the things that we’ve got now on the planet because Elon was crazy enough, and whether you agree or disagree with him, the the guy has Invented so many things because he’s crazy enough to think that we can do that and that’s where I think business owners need to get a little crazier and start thinking of amazing goals that demand you grow that demand you learn that demand you innovate and Create and demand because that’s what disruption. It’s like setting a massive goal is disrupting yourself. Not waiting to be disrupted, disrupt by innovating and doing it yourself. I think that’s the the the real thing that most business people should take and do. And you’re gonna need help to do it, buddy, you know that I mean, that’s it’s why we have Action Coach that people need that extra oomph and that extra boost
Neale 29:50
I love that tie-in at the end as well, that was a great answer with a great end in there.
Brad 29:56
I’m in marketing and sales for a reason.
Neale 29:59
You’re pretty good at it, Brad. You’re pretty good at it. You’re a really respected leader. Obviously, you’re very successful. It can’t have all been smooth sailing. I’m really interested in what would have been the big failures, what have you learned from them, and what what’s going on?
Brad 30:14
See, I don’t see anything as a failure. I see a lot of mistakes I’ve made, but those mistakes gave me more learning opportunity than the successes. You know, it’s amazing when you lose a game, if you play sport and you lose a game, you do a lot more analysis than when you win the game. And I think that’s sort of an interesting side. But I think for us as business people, we need to take lessons from everything we do. And so I see it as winning and learning, not winning and losing or failing. And I guess if I look at some of the biggest challenges, I’ll even use what I just was teaching. A few years ago, I decided to move Action Coach. Instead of doing hundreds of millions, I decided we would go for billions. And I told a friend of mine, Jeffrey Gitomer, who’s a sales author and excuse Jeffrey’s French, but well, actually, it’s Australian. If we want to be honest, he turns to me and goes, Oh, well, you don’t need good to great anymore. You now need the book. Okay. And Mark, you can beap that out later. But you think about it. He was right. See, all of the systems we have that were great for 100 million are not going to be good enough for a billion. All the marketing, the branding that we had for that level are not going to be great. So I’ve found that the hardest times in my life is when I’ve disrupted myself and set crazy goals for myself and my team. If your team believe that you can achieve the goal when you tell them the first time around, it’s not big enough. If the goal doesn’t scare you, it’s not big enough. But yeah, look, I’ve had all of the same challenges. Everyone else has had, you know, staff that took money and thought they needed my money more than I did. But that, that came back to me and it was like, well, I didn’t have the right processes in place to protect that. Even last week, we lost our two, my Action Coach and Brad Sugar’s YouTube channels. We, someone hacked our systems and got them last week. So yeah, I go through the same stuff. Everyone else does, mate. I just, I’m lucky enough that now I’ve built a strong team that handle 90% of the challenges for me. They come to me for advice, but I find that my job today is to speak less and ask more. Yeah. See, if I ask them the question, I mean, a great manager is one who asks great questions in most cases. So for example, if someone says to me, boss, should we go left or right? And I ask them, well, what are the advantages of left? What are the advantages of right? What are the disadvantages of left, disadvantages of right? See, when, whenever you hear, you know, answer a question with a question. I think that’s incorrect. You’ve got to answer a question with a series of questions. You might be able to leap to the answer in one question, but they can’t yet. So by asking them a series of questions and getting them thinking in the right direction. Now, obviously my response to their answers can lean them in the right direction. Oh, that’s a great event. Oh yeah.
Brad 33:11
That’s a really important one. I like that, left. Yeah. Well, that might be okay. You know, I’m telling them by my answers that right is definitely the direction I would head, but it’s getting them thinking, you know, make your people think and they’ll get there.
Neale 33:25
I mean, you could call it, I mean, Action Therapy or Business Therapy, couldn’t you, really, in a way? You’re
Brad 33:32
Coaching is coaching is definitely a form of therapy my friend and you would be surprised at how many business owners, it’s more therapy than it is coaching. You know a business owner’s hardest problem is letting go, right? That’s their hardest problem, and especially in the area of the company where you think you’re the genius. Like I’m you know I’ve had someone point out to me one time, they said usually the weakest area in a company is the one where the CEO thinks they’ve got the most skill. Because the CEO won’t hire someone better than them to run it sort of thing. You know and at the time it was pointed out to me I was running the marketing of one of my companies and I looked at the results. I went, probably should hire a full-time CMO because I’m pretending to be CMO in my two hours a week of chatting with someone. You know what I mean? Yeah, I’ve noticed that if if you have problems in a business area It’s because you either have the wrong person in the chair or you have no one in the chair.
Neale 34:31
I wanted to chip on imposter syndrome. People have imposter syndrome, and certainly when I started doing this, I did. Is that something that’s ever impacted you, and what did you do about it?
Brad 34:42
Yeah, it’s funny that we gave a name to feeling inadequate. I’m waiting for there to be a drug company come out with the drug for imposter syndrome. Usually we don’t give something a name unless we have a drug for it or something. You know, that’s, that’s usually what happens. But I think imposter syndrome’s, I’ll use my initials, BS, I think imposter syndrome is a natural thing. It just means you got to learn more. You know, if you don’t have imposter syndrome, it means you don’t have big enough goals. If you’ve got big goals, you’re going to have a gap. And this brings up an interesting theory of are you a gap person or a gain person? Like if you look back when you said you’ve got imposter syndrome, if you look back at everything you’ve achieved, you’d go wow, look how far I’ve come. Instead of wow, look how far I’ve got to go. And I think that’s where a lot of coaching kicks in and works because you know what a coach about a third of why coaching works is because I’m sitting there going, yeah, you can do this. Yeah, you got this. Look at what you’ve done. You’ve done amazing things. You’ll do this perfectly. Go for it. Yeah. And just being the coach telling you you can do it like every kid in sport would have achieved far less if they didn’t have a coach who told them they could do it. You know, and I think that’s that’s a big thing. I don’t know why we gave imposter syndrome a name. Because it just means you got to learn and grow. It just that’s all it is. And that’s life. Like a friend of mine went to a his school reunion. It was his 30th school reunion. And he said, it was amazing how many of them just, they’re just the same. And it’s like the old joke, if you go to a reunion, people go, wow, you’ve changed. And you say, wow, you haven’t.
Neale 36:25
And that’s important, right? I mean it was David Bowie who said, what you need to do in terms of developing yourself and doing more is think about walking out in a swimming pool and just when your feet stop touching the ground that getting out of that comfort zone that’s where you want to be to sort of grow and develop, right?
Brad 36:46
We as people are designed to grow. I think it was Carol Dweck who wrote the book around growth mindset versus fixed mindset. And a lot of people have a fixed mindset of like, well, this is who I am, this is all there is, this is the way it is. And then there’s those of us with a growth mindset who go, oh, okay, well, I can’t do that yet, but I can learn how to do it. I remember as a kid, I met Jim Rohn, my first mentor really. And I set the goal of financial retirement by age of 25. Because retirement’s not a function of age, it’s a function of money. No, absolutely not. And so most people said, can’t do it, not possible, won’t happen, you can’t do it, especially you, you won’t be able to do that. And it’s all those sorts of comments. And technically they were correct. 16 year old version of me could not do that. But guess what? By the time I was 25, I’d learned how to do it. And I had enough money coming in, whether I worked or not, to be able to stop working. I tried to stop working and I failed at retirement dismally. I played golf. I took up golf and I played with my dad because he was the only retired person I knew, you know? And playing golf with 60 and 70 year old men all week, like sometimes, like, yeah, no, anyway, it’s like someone didn’t show up. How come? He’s in a funeral.
Neale 38:02
It’s his. I mean you should have thrown your coming back at your dad, it’s like your golfing buddies, you only get the right company that you deserve on the golf course. Oh, brilliant.
Brad 38:14
No, I’d learnt. I’d learnt earlier in life not to throw comments back at your parents. My mum, as a kid, probably every mum said this to their kids, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I remember 20-21 is when I quit my job and went into business for myself. And mum was all worried. She’s like, you were making more than 100,000 a year. Why would you quit? Why would you? I said, mum, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. She didn’t talk to me for months.
Neale 38:34
Well, at least you know who you stood.
Brad 38:34
Yeah, look, I think a lot of people want to be in business for themselves and they just don’t go and learn how to do it. I mean, if you go and learn how to build your own business, you can start your own business. Everyone can succeed in business. Everyone can succeed with money and business in the world if they learn how. And I think that’s just the biggest thing. You’ve got to learn before you earn. It’s not that hard.
Neale 39:02
It’s great advice. I’m conscious of time and I want to wrap up with sort of look into the future sort of questions. So there’s a lot going on in in the world at the minute. Where are the opportunities for SMEs, larger organizations? What’s the next five years going to look like? You’ve got a lot of experience, you’re connected to a lot of businesses. Where are the opportunities for people? What should we be looking at?
Brad 39:26
I mean, obviously, AI is moving at a rapid rate or not. When I started in business, Mike Bash, who was one of the founding vice presidents of Federal Express, said to me, Brad, 80% of business is routine. You’ve got to systematize it. 20% of business, you need to humanize, so train your people really well. Now, I see where we’re going to. 80% of business will be bots, robots, computer bots. 80% of the work will be done by bots in the next 5 to 10 years. And 20% will be done by humans. So there’s where the opportunity shift is going to be. There will be jobs that do not exist today. Like 20 years ago, you would never have paid someone to walk your dog. You would have, if you got a dog, you got it because you were fat and lazy and you needed to do some exercise. Today, people pay. We’re going to have people being paid to walk you in 10 years’ time sort of thing. Actually, technically, we already do. They’re called personal trainers, people. It’s the challenge right now is trust. AI is bringing about a massive decrease in trust because you don’t know, did that person even write it? Is it really a person? Am I texting with a human or am I getting a bot texting me back? I had someone on my Instagram the other day that spent six hours talking to my bot, even though the bot kept saying, you know this really isn’t Brad. This is actually his AI version. I think it was a therapy session for that lady overnight. But you sit down, you start thinking. So that’s going to be where the opportunities are created. When we created the dishwashing machine, it put dishwashers out of work, but we retrained them to go and do other jobs. We now have masseuses. A lot more hospitality stuff is going to be happening because I believe we’re going to see a reduction in the workweek. When Henry Ford took us to a 40-hour workweek, people thought he was crazy. I believe in our lifetime, it’ll be a 20-hour workweek because you will be able to do four and five times as much in less time.
Neale 41:19
With technology, sure.
Brad 41:20
So I think that’s a big part of it. But the biggest opportunity right now is acquiring businesses. Lots of baby boomers that are retiring, wanting to sell their business, and they don’t have a method to hop out. So if you learn how to buy their businesses and buy them with what’s called vendor finance or owner financing, there’s massive opportunity for that right now because about 40% of businesses that are employer-based businesses, they have employees, are owned by baby boomers who are looking to either hand them on or retire or do that. And they’re either going to have to do that or shut them down. So I think that’s a massive wealth shift in the next five years.
Neale 42:00
And as you say, owners don’t really want that, do they? You don’t want to let your baby go. You don’t want to let them die. No, of course they don’t. And they feel responsibility over the, yeah, they’ve got responsibility. Every leader that I’ve known feels a responsibility for their staff. They’ve got mortgages to pay, you know, that’s, and they don’t want to let, they want to see a legacy die either, will they? Yeah.
Brad 42:18
Yeah, jokingly, interestingly enough, jokingly, I was talking to some people the other day about the future. And I said, you know, somewhere in the world, you know, one of your grandkids is going to marry a computer bot, you know that, right? And everyone laughed at me. And then two days ago, I see in Korea, some girl just married a computer bot, she divorced her husband and married the computer because he’d understood her. You know, the world, the world’s going crazier, but also more sane in the same time sort of thing. There’s, there’s a lot of that we’re learning to shift as a planet, we’re learning all of that stuff. And there’s some craziness going on. But there’s also some very sane things happening. And I think business owners lead the way. In a lot of things in the world, business owners are the biggest change agents in the world and make those shifts. So yeah, keep on keeping on keep up the good fight. Business ownership is often the loneliest and hardest job in the world. And that’s why I love seeing business owners come together in communities that, you know, get them moving. And we here at Action Coach love that community. We have an online community Action Nation, where business people go and support each other.
Neale 43:24
Fantastic. Brad, it’s been such a pleasure to have you on the Another Bright Spark. Yeah, you’ve been great. Thank you so much.
Brad 43:32
Cheers mate, wonderful to be here and thanks for the wonderful questions and conversation.