5 Steps on Succeeding in Marketing, Sales, Management, and Systems w/ #1 Business Coach Brad Sugars

0:00I don't see there is such a thing as failure. There's winning and there's learning. My buddy of mine, Jeffrey Gittimer, said, you know, there should be a prequel to Good to Great, and it's called **** to OK. Money is a magnifier of who you are as a person. My formula for success is dream, goal, learn, plan, action. Jim Rohn said, never wish your life were easier, wish that you were better. Work harder on yourself than you do on your job, and read a book a week for the rest of your life. The boom is not actually as hard as most people make it out to be. It's X times Y. So Brad, my first question is, how do you define success?

0:36What's your definition of the word success? Well, hey Brad, thanks for having me on the show. You know, my definition of success really comes back to the word fulfillment. You know, ultimately success is not one area or two areas. It's not just financial. It's not just relational. It's fulfillment in all areas. I've often said that money is a magnifier or even success or fame is a magnifier of who you are as a person. If you're a great person, you get a lot of money, you become an amazing person. If you're a jerk and you get a lot of fame, you become an amazing jerk type thing. But ultimately success to me is about me being the best version of me possible.

1:20How do I become become the best Brad there is. If I become the best version of me, that is the fittest version of me, the best relationship version of me, the best friend version of me, the best business person that I can be, if I build me to be the best version of me, that to me is success. I think it's too easy to try and define success as being successful in one area. If you're successful full as something that doesn't make you a success as a person and uh i i look at having financial success and i think how important it is that there's no use having a suite at a concert and no friends to go with you sort of thing there's no use going to a football game by yourself i mean you can but i'd still prefer to go with friends and family type thing and so that fulfillment and being the best version of me possible is really how I would define success.

2:22So take me back then. When did you choose success? What time in your life did that happen? You know, I'm pretty clear on when I chose success. Thanks, Brad, for asking. About 13 years of age. Well, not about. It was 13. And what happened was my family, we moved from Darwin in Australia to Adelaide in Australia. you and uh i'm gonna age myself a little bit the the cool thing at the time was levi's 501 jeans and uh my mom didn't believe in cool she believed in what we could afford and what we could afford was corduroy jeans from kmart there was three of us boys so that's what we got blue corduroys and i don't know if you've ever worn corduroy pants but when you're walking they make a funny sound when your legs rub together and of course 13 year old boy i'm a lanky kid new kid to school I end up getting picked on by some kid we end up having a fight I beat the snot out of the kid and end up in the principal's office and of course mom gets called in and the principal yells at me mom yells at me anyway long story short we get home and it's a you know wait till your father gets home type thing and I remember cutting up those corduroy jeans I found mom shears from her sewing cabinet and cut them up and thought to myself at the time, I will always, always, I will never not have enough money to buy what I want.

3:51And I remember that's when I chose to be successful around the wealth and money. I think as a younger boy, I chose success around school. And that might be just because of the way I fit in with my family. My older brother was always the one who was good with his hands he was that my parents always said that he could fix anything and and it was like brad's the good at school one and it's kind of like i guess that gave me some definition around it type thing i did learn later on though jim roan i went and met with jim roan i was 16 years of age i just won the rotary youth leadership award in my area i gave a speech at the Rotary Club and I was on the debate team.

4:34So I was pretty good at speaking. And the Rotary Club then gave me an award, the Ryla Award. Me and my best buddy, Glenn, both won from our district. And we got sent away for a week-long training on leadership and success. And when it comes to being 16 and being taught leadership and success, that was a big thing. So I got to reading and studying and learning. And Jim Rohn was coming to Brisbane. I was 16. I bought tickets to the Brisbane city town hall. I went and watched Mr. Rohn and he said three things to me that stood out. And I think that was where I, I really started to change. I think at 13, I chose to not be a failure if that makes sense, but at 16, I chose to be a success.

5:23Jim Rohn said, never wish your life were easier. Wish that you were better. He said, work harder on yourself than you do on your job. And he said to me, when I went down to him at the end of the event to get my notes signed, he said to me, son, because I asked him, so what's one thing I can do to be successful in life? He said, simple, read a book a week for the rest of your life. Now, he'd already said that in the seminar, but it was more concrete to me because he said it to me face to face. And so I started doing that. I started reading and I read a book a week and I I continue to now with Audible.

5:58I have books read to me every week on my kids and my team wonder how I can listen because I'd listen on two times speed. But ultimately, that led me to change my goals to think about instead of negative goals, like getting out of a negative, not ever having enough money to having positive goals of wanting to achieve something rather than wanting to not achieve it. So, Brad, take me through your formula then. What is your formula for success? Oh, my formula for success. I teach this in my 30X life, but ultimately my formula for success is dream, goal, learn, plan, action. You got to start with dreams, big dreams, the bigger, the better.

6:45When I first started dreaming, I guess it was again, Again, back when I met Mr. Rowan, I started dreaming and I wrote down one goal of, I built in my mind a whole set of dreams, but one of them was to retire financially early. Because Mr. Rowan said it, he said, retirement's not a function of age, it's a function of income. And if you've got money that comes in, whether you get out of bed or not, you can be retired. You don't have to be old to retire. You just have to have enough finances to retire. and so I set that goal at age 25. Now, the interesting thing was my buddy's dad told me how it couldn't happen and technically he was right.

7:28The 16-year-old version of me could not make that happen. I had to grow into my goal. When you set a goal, you have to grow into it and hence the dream goal, then learn, then plan, then act. there's no use um setting a goal and thinking you can achieve it with current knowledge the fact that you've had to set it as a goal means you don't have the knowledge to achieve it so i had to go about learning and growing and growing into my goals and becoming the type of person that could achieve those goals rather than uh thinking that i could achieve them just because I set them. I see too many people learning this thing of, yeah, just set your goals and just think big.

8:15No, it's dream, think big, goal, get clear on what the goal is, set it with specifics, smart test it, specific, measurable, achievable, results oriented with a timeframe, then turn it into learning. If I set the goal of doubling my wealth, I've got to read a bunch of books on well. If I set the goal of being a millionaire, then I've got to read a bunch of books on being a millionaire. If I set a goal of running a marathon, I've got to read books, watch podcasts, listen to, you name it, I've got to do that. I've got to train, I've got to get a coach, I've got to join a club maybe, I've got to change my diet, I've got to change the way I think.

8:59You want new goals, you've got to do those things. And a marathon is just, I guess, a good way of using an illustration of the formula for success. Dream, goal, learn, and then write the plan. If I'm going to run a marathon, I want an eating plan. I want a training plan. I want to, you know what I mean? You can't double your income without doing a plan. You can't double your marketing results without doing a plan of some sort. So it's really important we do that. And then we take action. Too many people skip a step or skip two or three steps in the formula and wonder why it doesn't work. But I guess I would add to that formula another formula called B times do equals have.

9:41B do have. You know, your dreams and goals are what you want to have. Your learning plan and action is what you got to do. But there's still who you've got to become. You know, do you need to become and I use be because it's like the b words behaviors become beliefs all these b words that are describe you as a human being okay so maybe you need to become a better leader or become more confident or become a stronger speaker or become you know who do you need to be in order to do in order to have those things. So yeah, dream, goal, learn, plan, act, be, do, have, probably the two formulas for success.

10:28Well, what's the relationship then between failure and success? Can failure teach success? Oh, failure and success. You know, Brad, thanks for asking. Failure, I'm not sure I believe there is such a thing as failure. I believe there's such a thing as learning, okay? And there's test and measure. Something that didn't work was just a test and we measured it and it didn't get the result. Now, I guess there is such a thing as failure in certain areas in life, but the failure isn't final unless it's death, I guess. Failure is just a stepping stone, a mistake. I'd rather use the word mistake or error or, you know, we measured and it didn't work.

11:17It was an experiment. We tried things. We played with stuff. It's like AI right now. I'm not an expert in AI, but I'm playing with a lot of platforms. There's a lot of platforms I'm getting very, very good at. I'm not good enough to teach it, but I'm very good at using it type thing. So I guess there's that balancing act of that. But when you come to a big decision, you're going to have two emotions. You're going to have fear and excitement. If you keep thinking of failure, you're going to let fear win all the time. If you keep thinking of experiment, test, measure, try something else, you're going to get excited about it.

11:58Hey, there's another thing to try, another thing to test, another thing for us to give a shot. You know, that's ultimately what we're looking at in most cases of that. You're on the Big Success Podcast with Brad Sugars. We'll be back in a moment. We're going to talk about business, marketing, and wealth. Getting rich is a lot simpler than most people realize. Billionaire in Training by Brad Sugars puts you on the fast track to wealth creation through buying, building, and selling businesses, and doing it at a faster pace than you ever thought possible. Pick up your copy of Billionaire in Training today.

12:28And we're back on the Big Success Podcast. We've got the amazing guest, Brad Sugars. He's here to talk to you about business success and wealth. So Brad, what is the key to success in business? Yeah, so success in business for me is always got to be about profitability. Ultimately, it's not about sales. It's not about number of customers. It's about the bottom line profit. A business that doesn't have profit, a business that doesn't have money in the bank cannot go on. So let's first of all, make sure we understand what business success is. Now to succeed in business, there's really two things you got to do, get customers and keep customers.

13:04You got to get them, you got to keep them. Now, building a great team is part of getting them and keeping them. Doing great marketing is part of getting them and keeping them. Building great sales team, part of getting them and keeping them. But really what business success is about today is get customers, keep customers. You know, business is the process of buying profitable lifetime customers. How do you get them to keep coming back over and over again? The model of your business is a part of that. And that's why I wrote pulling profits out of a hat. I want to look at the modeling of a business and the strategy and the leverage in that business.

13:44And if I come back to success in business, I guess leverage is a big part of it. do the work once, get paid forever. How do you get a customer once that keeps coming back? Is it a membership or a subscription-based business where the repeat purchase rate is extraordinarily high? Getting a new customer costs a lot of money. Keeping them is a lot cheaper than getting new ones sort of thing. So yeah, that's probably how I'd succeed in business. So then sales, how do you succeed at sales? Sales is really a process of, I define selling as professionally helping people to buy, answering people's questions.

14:25Now, a lot of sales used to be the salesperson had to have all the knowledge and give all the knowledge to the customer. In this day and age, I believe a customer, well, there's two statistics. One is about 40 % of customers don't want to talk to a salesperson before they make a purchase, right? And the second is about people want to be about 70 % sold before they connect to a company. So they're going to do their research online. They're going to look up, they're going to read, watch videos and all of that sort of stuff. Google put out a thing about the, you know, 4-7-11 that people want to actually learn about.

15:06I can do a whole other video on that subject. But people want to learn and binge watch or binge read enough information to be prepared before they talk to a salesperson. So one of the keys to success at sales today is to let videos, e-books, blog articles do a lot of the selling for you. Even if they've already connected with you, allowing them to watch more videos or read more ebooks or do that sort of stuff helps the person make their buying decision. Remember, we're not selling, we're professionally helping them to buy. People love buying, they hate being sold type thing. And so a lot of professional selling today is about build rapport, understand the customer's needs, make the sale as a very small part of it, and follow up is a very big part of professionally selling today.

15:59But I don't think sales has changed in a lot of ways in that it is a lot of questioning. Questions are a massive part of sales. If you're doing all the talking, you're not selling. If you're questioning and listening to them, you're professionally helping them to make a purchase decision. They're talking it through. As you question them, they're thinking through what they want to buy, what they don't want to buy, and how they want to buy it, and all of those sorts of things. And Brad, when we look at marketing then, And how do you define marketing or how do we succeed at marketing? Yeah, marketing is an interesting subject.

16:36See, marketing is, and I touched on it earlier, marketing by my definition is the buying of profitable lifetime customers, okay? So how do we buy customers? Again, that's why I wrote the book called Buying Customers. But in essence, if I put out$1 ,000 in a marketing campaign and I get 10 new customers, It cost me$100 to buy each of the new customers type thing. So that's in essence what we're aiming to do is to buy customers at a price that is then profitable. Because if we spend$10 to get a customer and we get$20 back in profit, it's really not a spend. It's an invest. We're investing in marketing.

17:20Another thing in marketing, this book, Raise Your Hand Marketing. I wrote that book because marketing today is a lot about farming. It's about getting people to raise their hand by, you know, download this ebook or connect with this or get this free video or do something so they'll connect on the newsletter. But giving people an opportunity to raise their hand and say, hey, yes, I'm interested. You know, they'll attend a webinar. They'll subscribe to my YouTube channel. They'll do something. They'll book a call. They'll fill in a questionnaire. all of these things lead to people raising their hand and starting a conversation now of course we want to get their phone number because we want to be able to call them okay we want them to book in for a phone call so we're gonna be able to speak to them and do because marketing doesn't work without sales and sales doesn't work without marketing they they have to go hand in hand they're like twins marketing has to find them get them to raise their hand and sales then has to convert them and bring them on to paying customers type thing.

18:21Well, Brad, what about management? How do you succeed in management in business? Management to me is two things. And my action coach team actually do a full management training programs for companies, leadership training, all that stuff. But management is about competency and productivity. If you have an employee, you need to build competency in them. You need to build productivity into those people. And that's why you got to mentor them, coach them, educate them, train them. And that's what people say to me, you know, I don't want to be a micromanager. That's not true. There are times when micromanagement is necessary.

18:59A brand new employee needs micromanagement. They need people looking over their shoulder to build competency. But the second thing you got to build as a manager is productivity. If there's a lack of productivity, there's a lack of management or or just poor management in many cases. If we want productivity, the people have got to know what is their job. There's got to be measures put in place. There's got to be planning done, goals and planning and knowledge and training. I see people, they say they're delegating, but really they're abdicating. For delegation to happen, there's got to be a system, there's got to be training, and there's got to be a measure in place.

19:35So the reporting has to happen as well. I think that's a really important aspect of management. competency and productivity is what management has to build. And I know somewhere along the line, management became a dirty word, but really I think management is probably one of the most important aspects of execution out there in growing a great business. So Brad, leadership, what are the keys to success in leadership for business people? Yeah, thanks, Brad. Leadership. Leadership to me is where management's about competency and productivity, leadership is about passion and focus. A great leader brings passion out of their people.

20:13A great leader brings excitement out of their people. They hire, they recruit for passion and excitement as a big part of what they're looking for. And also they bring focus. There's goals set, there's clear delineation, there's a vision. This is where we're going. This is what we're aiming to achieve. No one can kick a goal if they don't know where the goalposts are. So the leader's job is to keep people focused on where we're going, focused on what we need to achieve, focused on our growth, focused on the future, and also passionate about all of those things. So great leaders are great communicators, great leaders are great congratulators.

20:51They say, thank you. They say, well done. Those are the things that make a great leadership. To succeed in leadership today, I think is no different than it's ever been before. Passion and focus. Now that's a bit different when you look at different generations. I know for me as a Gen Xer, if you're leading a baby boomer, you've almost just got to say, hey, go do this, and they work it all out. If I'm leading a Gen X or even a Gen Y, the millennials, well, millennials should be known as Gen Y, W-H-Y. They want to know why we're doing it. There has to be meaning in things. There has to be a heart.

21:30That's why I talk about mission in scalable businesses where there's a love for the work they do or a love by the customers of the business they're doing business with type thing. But yeah, leadership, definitely about passion, definitely about focus. So Brad, success in systematizing a business. You always talk about systemization. How do we make that a success? Systemization seems to be what's a lot easier than most people make it out to be. I like understanding that systems are really two main things, videos and checklists. Now there's supporting documentation that goes with it, but a great checklist is a great system.

22:13Okay. I wrote the book that takes you through the nine steps to systemization, my instant systems. But I think it's really important to understand that if you've got great checklists and you've got great video, people can copy that type thing. They can learn from it, follow it, and do that. And really, that's what we're trying to do with a system. As you know, a system stands for save yourself time, energy, and money. But we're trying to make things so that they work, okay, so that they are consistency in the business. And that's what checklists and videos bring about a lot of that stuff. What about team building then?

22:50What are the keys to being successful at building a great team? Team building. To me, team building is actually not as complex, again, as most people make it out to be. In my book, I talk about the six keys to a winning team, or you can do it in my 30X business. But really, team building is about bringing people together. In my business, Engage and Grow, where we deal with employee engagement, we're very clear on the fact that heart-centered leadership is needed. We're very clear on the fact that how we bring people together, how we engage people is a big part of what team building is. And it's hard to build team if people don't know each other.

23:33If people don't get to know each other, it's hard for them to be a team. And so a lot of that is human interaction. But also it's just having them spend time together outside of just doing the work environment, having them break bread, having them sit with each other, doing those things. is a very important aspect to it as well. Well, Brad, what about wealth? Is there a secret to success or is there a strategy for success in wealth? Oh, wealth, that's a whole big subject. I've written a bunch of books on this, my 30X Wealth program. I think wealth is, if we boil wealth down, the best definition I ever got of wealth is the ability to live a number of days forward.

24:15And that means at your current lifestyle, how many days can you live into the future if you stopped working today? Like with passive income, how many days forward can you live? Now, the key to wealth is no more complex than make it, invest it, live off of the returns. Don't buy toys out of what you make, buy toys out of the returns of your investments. I think that's possibly a thing. But also, if you want to be a master of money, you got to study money. You can't expect to build wealth without understanding wealth, without knowing what wealth is. You got to invest in businesses. You got to invest in real estate.

24:58You got to invest in the stock market. They're the three main core investment categories. And if you invest in those three, then you're doing well out of life type thing. But again, knowledge is a big part of it. If I was to say, what's the first thing you should invest in, it would be more knowledge. I find that wealth building is about two things. It's about having a niche and having a set of rules. If I know what niche I'm investing in, meaning I only invest in two bedroom apartments that I can turn into three bedroom apartments, or I only invest in four bed, three bath homes on large lots that eventually I can knock down and put up a set of apartments on, knowing your niche.

25:41The second is a set of rules. I will buy it if it meets these criteria. If these are the things, then I'm not buying it. If these things are present, then I will buy it type thing. And people say, well, what should my rules be? I put it in all my books, but I also say very clearly that if you don't know enough to write your own set of rules as to what you will invest in and what you won't invest in, then you don't know enough to be invest in your life savings. So Brad, what about life success? What is your formula? What's the method for success in life? How do we succeed at life? I go back to those two core formulas, dream, goal, learn, plan, act, and be, do, have.

26:23I think succeeding at life is about relationships though. How many friends you got? How well do you get along with people? I think a big part of it is that but being an all-rounder um you don't have to be a brilliant sports person but you have to do exercise you don't have to be an amazing dietician but you have to eat well uh you have to get some sun you have to you don't have to go to everything but you have to enjoy go to enjoyable events um yeah i guess building relationships is probably the key to success at life you're on the big success podcast we're going to be back in a moment with our guest brad sugars and we're going to talk about growing your business massive how do we scale up how do we level up in 30 minutes a day for 30 days 30x business will take you through the exact hard one business principles that brad sugars has personally developed over the past 30 years as an entrepreneur investor and business advisor join brad and his team and 100 other entrepreneurs who want to start building a successful business today and we're back the big success podcast brad sugars i have to ask you this question how does someone level up okay so leveling up uh it's it's really interesting i uh you all know the you probably know the book good to great right well my buddy of mine jeffrey gittimer said you know there should be a a prequel to good to great and it's called shit to okay and i always thought you know if you get into a certain situation sometimes you got to go, you just got to get to okay.

27:53Then you got to get from okay to good. Now, if we're going to talk leveling up, shit to okay is leveling up, okay? I'll deal with the level called good to great. Let's assume you've already got to good. How do you get to go to great? I think allowing yourself to dream is the biggest part of it. There's someone who is at good. you've heard the statement good is the enemy of great well being a good can often hold you back because it's like you know what i'm comfortable and i sort of talk about it as being fat and happy i see a lot of people get fat and happy you know not physically fat but you know they've got enough they don't want to push any further you know brad this is good i'm okay i think those who level up are those who challenge themselves to be a world champion or challenge themselves to be number one in their industry or challenge themselves to go for it.

28:50And it doesn't take much more than challenging yourself. I think too many people get scared or fear the failure type thing. And as we discussed earlier, I don't see there is such a thing as failure. There's winning and there's learning. You either win or you learn. And so I think that's a big part of the success factor in in life so brad what's the difference then in scaling a business versus growing a business oh so in business scaling versus growing that's why i wrote in fact if i can just pull it up here i got one over here um i wrote this book pulling profits out of a hat with monty what what we looked at is the difference between a business that grows and a business that scales And we found five core disciplines in the two.

29:40The discipline of strategy, of people, of execution, of mission, and of business development. They're the five core disciplines. So read the book and go through it in detail or watch any of my other videos on the subject. But in essence, what happens is that there is a consistent growth factor. They're called disciplines for a reason. It's not something that you do once and it's done. We've got to keep growing, keep changing, keep adding, keep getting better, keep getting better. But I think that a business that grows has a percentage-based mindset, and a business that scales has a multiplied mindset type thing.