Now his focus is more on sharing his business knowledge with other entrepreneurs, as he tells Nick Martindale
When I speak to Brad Sugars, he's in a car heading north towards Sheffield, for the final event of the UK Raise Your Hand, Raise Your Profits tour, which he did alongside fellow business author Marcus Sheridan in November last year. It's partly to support the launch of his most recent - and 18th - book, Raise Your Hand Marketing, but it's also a chance to reconnect with people he has helped along the way as an author, speaker and business coach.
"I've been coming to the UK and doing these events for 20 years now, and I get people who have been coming all that time," he says. "There's a great joy in seeing the evolution of my students and members, and even my franchise partners. Some of them joined me in their early 20s and now they're in their 30s and 40s. They've got families and have built wealth for themselves because of what we've taught. That's pretty exciting."
Public speaking has been a cornerstone of Sugars' career, providing him with the platform that would lead to the creation of the business for which he is best known: the ActionCoach franchise. "If I look at early career signs, I think every student report card I ever had said I talked too much, which got me into debate class," he recalls. "From that, I ended up winning something called the Rotary Youth Leadership Awards, which meant I got sent away for a week to train on leadership and how to be successful."
It was the catalyst that sparked a lifelong interest in learning, with a young Sugars - who has largely retained his native Australian accent despite living in the US for the past two decades - familiarising himself with business leaders such as the US entrepreneur Jim Rohn, and igniting a desire to run his own business. "All of them talked about business and financial freedom, and a lot of it seemed to indicate being in business for yourself," he recalls. "As a young person, you go to school and you're taught to get a career. I went through university and qualified to be an accountant, but I always wanted to be in business for myself."
In demand
He would go on to work alongside Australian businessman Paul Dunn, who encouraged his appetite for learning, and eventually came to the attention of US entrepreneur Robert Kiyosaki. "He asked me to come and speak in Hawaii," recalls Sugars. "I was 20 or 21, and it sounded like fun. I fell in love with speaking and that led to people asking if I could help them.
"My response was that I was already running my speaking business but once 50 or so people had asked me, I thought maybe I should do this as a business. A lot of us go into business selling what we love. I was lucky enough to go into business selling what customers loved." Back in 1993, business coaching was an entirely new concept, so Sugars was effectively starting an entire profession.
Initially, he grew the business by targeting partners such as newspapers, persuading them to let him run seminars for advertisers on customer service. "I realised that if I ‘gave' first I ‘got' second, so I would teach people how to grow their business for free, and some of them would become customers," he says.
Before long, though, it became overwhelming. "I was making a lot of money, but I didn't have any time or freedom," he says. "I bought into the idea that in business the owner was the one who was supposed to work the hardest, so I almost wore it as a badge of honour. But I just realised that this was not sustainable."
The answer lay in franchising, encouraging others to buy into the business and expanding the brand internationally. "I literally gave away my first few franchises to members of my team because I didn't know if it would work or not," he says. "When we started there were no white-collar franchises. Franchising was cleaning and cooking." Today, the business has over 1,000 offices, across 80 countries.
Sugars himself relocated to the US in 2003, partly due to practicalities such as operating an international business in the Australian timezone, but also due to ‘tall poppy syndrome'. "Australians like to cut people down when they're successful," he says. "Americans, when you're achieving success, like to ask you how you did it." The business moved to California before relocating to Las Vegas. "I moved my family there permanently in 2005 and married a girl from Boston," he explains. "I guess I'm an Australian-American these days."
By the time his first child was born, Sugars realised his passion for the business had waned. "I'd set it up to run without me," he says. "Sometimes the best thing you can do as an owner is sack yourself as CEO and put someone else in charge. I spent four years being a full-time dad, and I loved every minute of it.
"But eventually I got my passion back and got back on-stage. I made the decision that from then on I was never going to do the parts of the business I didn't enjoy. One of the fallacies of business ownership is that you have to be the CEO. If you're a genius engineer, hire someone to be CEO and stay the genius engineer that made your company great. Do the thing that you love that makes the company great."
Words of wisdom
Having built an entire industry around business coaching, Sugars is a wealth of advice for entrepreneurs. But he believes people need to be open to changing the way they have always operated. "Whenever an owner comes to me and they're struggling, I let them understand that the fish rots from the head down and that until you're willing to learn and grow your business can't learn and grow," he says.
"A lot of businesspeople think that if they just work harder, it'll get better. But it's not about that; it's about building a business that works so you don't have to." Key to this is a business being saleable, he adds, meaning it must be able to survive should the owner depart.
Getting the right people in place is a theme that comes up regularly. "My job as a CEO, and now as a chairman of my companies, is to build people," he says. "I build great CEOs; they build great teams. I remember complaining to my dad that I just couldn't find good people. He looked me dead in the eye and said ‘you get the people you deserve'. If you're an average manager running an average business, the highest calibre of employee you're going to get is average. You've got to become a great leader, a great manager and run a great company if you want great people to work for you.
"Building great people who build my company is really the only secret sauce I have," he adds. "We put a big focus on keeping our customers too. I teach all my people you have two jobs in business: get customers and keep customers, and if you have to choose one of them, it's keep customers."
Winning new customers is the topic behind his latest book, which focuses on marketing. "My philosophy is that during Covid marketers were going too hard and too far," he says. "With their websites or with their advertising, they were asking for the sale immediately without building the ‘know, like and trust' factor.
"We're teaching people how to use social media, emails and websites to just ask prospects to raise their hands, to self-identify as a prospect. If you can generate a conversation with a prospect, and build ‘know, like and trust', then people are far more willing in this virtual viral world to do business with you. We offer many different ways for them to say ‘I'm interested'; it could be to join a webinar, book a call, download an e-book, or request a voucher or viewing of a video. Then we can have conversations and, from conversations, we eventually get conversions."
Business growth
Sugars is also well positioned to advise on turning a business into a franchise, having led the way in the white-collar space. "You have to learn that franchising is an entirely different business," he says. "If you're in the coffee shop business and you go into franchising, then you have to learn franchising.
"To create a franchisable model, you need to create something that is sustainable. The biggest mistake for most franchisors is that they don't build a marketing programme for the local franchisee to make sure they have new business all the time." Developing close relationships with franchisees - and encouraging franchisees to do the same with each other - is also vital.
As for his own career, Sugars says his biggest mistake was not to raise capital early enough. "The businesses that grow the biggest and the fastest are the ones that raise capital, and not learning how to raise capital costs a lot of businesspeople a lot of years of heartache," he says. "But if you go out with a business plan to raise capital, you'd better take the feedback of the people that you go to.
"When they say no, they're not saying no 100%. They are saying no to the current format and what you're doing. Most investors that I know are investing in the people more than the idea, because the idea is going to change and evolve as the market changes." It's also important not to position yourself as the cheapest in any market, he adds.
Investing in other companies is now the main focus for Sugars, with ActionCoach run by an established team. In recent years he's invested in companies including the Australian commercial cleaning franchise Urban Clean, which recently spread into the US and will do so in the UK later this year.
Other interests include the executive coaching firm AddingZEROs, digital marketing franchise Luv4 Marketing, Bucket List Coach and employee engagement company Engage & Grow Global. "I just love finding amazing young entrepreneurs that have a great scalable programme, or even if they don't then educating them and creating a scalable business," he says. "That's one of the favourite things I get to do these days, to teach amazing young businesspeople to be great CEOs, and mentor them and help them build a great company."
Family first
Sugars now works just two days a week, with his team or franchises partners often taking on the speaking slots he once did all over the world. "Being a dad and a husband takes up most of my time," he says. "That's what I want life to be about. Ultimately, my philosophy is that a business is a vehicle that serves you, not the other way around.
"I am lucky enough to have grown up in Australia, where lifestyle is more important than work. From a business perspective, most of my time is coaching business partners that I have and the CEOs of the companies that I've invested in." Away from work, the family - Sugars has five children, with three still living at home - does a lot of travelling, as well as watching sports and going to concerts, and Sugars laughs that the ‘dad taxi' is alive and well.
The plan for the next few years is to continue investing in other companies and writing books, and the ambition for ActionCoach is to have a presence in 120 countries. "We set that goal in 2008, based on that being one more country than McDonald's," he says. "But the aim is just to continue seeing the growth of our organisation. I'd like to take it to a multibillion-dollar enterprise worldwide by 2030."
Sugars is understandably proud of the way in which his career has panned out, but he's also keen to stress the need to create your own luck. "I give kudos to my team," he says. "I'm the dreamer and the visionary, and maybe I'm a great thought-leader, but my team has done the job. But it's interesting; I did dream we would do this. I dreamt that we would one day be helping businesspeople all across the world and that I would have partners all across the world. And I was lucky enough to be taught how to dream as a young man.
"My theory of success is simple," he adds. "Build those massive dreams - things that are 10 and 20 years out - and dream big. Turn your dreams into goals. Anything inside five years needs to be a goal and needs to have a written date of when you want to do it by. Once you set a goal it's all about what you need to learn in order to achieve that. From the learning you write the plan, and from the plan, you get to work. That formula has helped a lot of people, and a lot of young people have learned that. Hopefully they'll keep dreaming big."
Timeline
How Brad Sugars turned business coaching into a global enterprise
1990: Worked as a business development manager after leaving university
1993: Started Action International - now ActionCoach - after realising there was a demand for business coaching. The business quickly became an international franchise
2003: Relocated from Australia to the US before stepping back from ActionCoach
2004: Became chairman of the Variety Club charity
2005: After initially moving to California, he moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he remains to this day
2006: Rejoined the company as CEO
2009: Became company chairman and president, freeing up more time to focus on other interests
2010: Invested in digital marketing franchise Luv4 Marketing
2012: Invested in employee engagement firm Engage & Grow Global
2017: Invested in Australian cleaning franchise Urban Clean
2018: Invested in Bucket List Coach and executive coaching firm AddingZEROS
2022: Undertakes the Raise Your Hand, Raise Your Profits tour in the UK to promote his latest book, Raise Your Hand Marketing
