How to Build a Business That Works Without You | The $100M Entrepreneur Mindset

0:00If you are the business, basically you don't have one. Let me state that again. If you are the business, you don't have a business. You have a job. You work for a crazy person. Yes, I'm calling you a crazy person if you have to be there every day. Ever more with ever less. You create more results with less input. My way of teaching it to you, leverage is do the work once, get paid forever. How to build a business that works without you. In this episode, you'll discover how to escape the owner's trap and build a commercial profitable enterprise that runs without you at the center. that you can build a business that works without you in fact my definition of a business is a commercial profitable enterprise that works without you if you have to be there it's not a business it's not something you can sell it's dependent upon you dependent upon your time and I always say that if I have to be in my business I work for a crazy person type thing it's hard to be the CEO and the owner it's hard to do both of those and that's why business coaching such a big thing If you are the business, basically you don't have one.

1:04Let me state that again. If you are the business, you don't have a business. You have a job, you work for a crazy person. Yes, I'm calling you a crazy person if you have to be there every day. Now, it takes time to do this. I'm not saying on day one, a business should run without you. I'm saying over a period of time, sometimes that takes a year, three, seven years, maybe even 10 years. I remember the first time I got Action Coach to run without me was about 10 years into the business. My daughter, Kobe, was born and I was like, you know what? I want to be a dad. And I appointed my chief sales officer as CEO.

1:35He was phenomenal. He ran the business while I was off being a dad. And I had a great time. But here's the factors that make that happen, especially if we're going for 100 million. Okay. Okay, so the key pillars are really three things, okay? Systems, so you got to document, you got to automate, you got to delegate. And if you don't build training and measures and systems, it's not delegation, it's abdication, okay? You got to build in training, measures, systems so that it is proper delegation type thing. When people install our management systems, I help them understand that you need both management and leadership.

2:12Management is about competency and productivity. Leadership is about passion and focus. So there's two different things you got to look at to build that. And so the delegation happens when you've got management and leadership happening in the organization. The second thing that brings us to is team. How do we recruit the right people? How do we train the right people? How do we empower them to do great work in the company? So the pillars to getting it to run without you, great systems, great team. And the third is obviously cash, okay? cash flow, marketing, predictable lead flow, predictable sales, predictable repeat business.

2:47Those are some of the things. It's not just revenues. It's got to be that obvious bottom line profitability of the organization. Now, how do we get there is what we're going to look at. So there's four levels of work, all right? So when we start thinking about the four levels of work, we've got to understand this principle called leverage, right? And what does that mean? Well, leverage is by, well, let's do the mathematical formula for it first. Divide to multiply. So if you want to learn my five ways formula, just on YouTube or anywhere, type in Brad Sugar's five ways formula. It'll take you through leads conversion.

3:21It's an example of me breaking something down. In other words, dividing it up, fix each part, and you multiply the end result. Well, that's how I learned leverage mathematically. But then I had to learn it differently. And so I was first taught it as ever more with ever less. So, you know, you create more results with less input sort of thing. And ultimately, I had to work out how I was going to teach it. And my way of teaching it to you, leverage is do the work once, get paid forever. Okay, I'll say that again. Do the work once, get paid forever. So, for example, I write books, okay, 18 books on business, sales, you name it.

3:56Those books, I work once, I get paid forever type thing. Really important. Real estate investing, building a business. I build a business that works so I don't have to. I build it one time, I get paid forever. Ultimately, that's what we're looking for. So how do the four levels of work come into that? Well, employee work is do the work once, get paid once, okay? Do the work one time, get paid one time. So if you're a hairdresser, you cut hair, you get paid one time for cutting one lot of hair type thing. That's employee work. If you're still doing employee work, that's okay, but you've got to get out of it at some point in time or at least be at very high paid employee work.

4:34I'm not going to tell LeBron James, don't do employee work because he's a superstar basketball player. He's getting paid so much money to do the work. It makes sense to do the work at that point. Second level of work is manager work. And that's where it's do the work once, get paid long term. So what are manager's jobs? Planning, hiring, training, all the management jobs in a company where it's you work one time and you get paid long term type thing. Systemization. These are parts of managers' jobs. The third level of work is owner's work, where we do the work once, get paid forever. Okay, do the work once, get paid forever.

5:14You build a business that works and get paid forever. So you're working on your business, not in your business. When Tom Watson said, I went to work on IBM, not in IBM, it changed my thinking dramatically. He said, I built a vision for what IBM was, and I went to work on creating. That's why I propose work from home Wednesday. I believe as an owner of a business or a CEO, you've got to go and work from home one day a week. And the faster you can get to that, the faster you can start working on, not in the business type thing. Get out of the day-to-day and work on the strategic and the long-term and the growth aspects of what you're doing.

5:50And then that fourth level of work is called investor. Now, in the first three, it's do the work once, get paid once, do the work once, get paid long-term, do the work once, get paid forever. Well, the investor is where you put your money to work so it works for you. So there's you working, people working for you, and then finally your money working for you is that final phase of doing the four levels. So if I look at some of my clients over the years who've stepped out of the day-to-day operations, I remember when I first meet people, oftentimes they're on the tools. They're doing the job. They're building the work that the client comes in for.

6:29They're doing the job. And I always talk to them about it. And I remember one particular client of mine in the hairdressing business. Now, he was hairdresser of the year several times. He was phenomenal at what he did, had a team of more than 20 people, one of the biggest salons in the country, phenomenal result. And yet I said to him, at some stage, you got to stop cutting hair. And he's like, well, how do I stop that? Now, magically, he went away for the weekend and he came home from a ski weekend with a broken arm. Yes, he'd put a sling on it, pretending it was broken. One of his buddies was a doctor and gave him the cast thing.

7:04So he couldn't cut hair. He ultimately had to stop. And for him, it was hand off his customers to other people for the six weeks he had his broken arm. And all of a sudden, at the end of that six weeks, he could come back to work. And he could go back at only one day a week. He tripled his prices. so about a quarter of his customers stayed with him and the rest stayed with the other salon team members so he had handed off his customers. Now, I don't think you have to be that drastic to step back from the work but you got to start building a plan now where you can hand over. I remember making the mistake early in my business where I'd say to customers things like, you know, I'm the owner, I'm always here, call anytime and guess what they did?

7:45They called any damn time and you know, that was me, that was my fault. I trained my customers the wrong way. I trained my customers to need me. I trained my staff to need me. Only I had to train my customers differently. I had to train my staff differently so that they didn't need me in that scenario. It was a really important aspect of it. So how do you do this? The way you do it is you start with one area of the business. So start looking at your time matrix, okay? Start recording, okay, where am I getting most of my time chewed up? And if you're still a reactive manager, meaning you're putting out fires, you're jumping in, fixing things for people, we got to move you to proactive, okay?

8:25So get in touch with your local action coach and ask about installing our management systems or installing the whole of the action coach business operating system. But when we get to that proactive stage of being a real manager, a real leader in the organization, then what we're starting to understand is a different way of doing business. The way I want you to start is by thinking, okay, what's one area where I can build the systems, I can build the measures, I can train the people, and it can run without me. Just fix one area. Get one area of the company that's demanding too much of your time right now.

9:00Get that area running without you. Now, I want to advise on one thing. Oftentimes, if you're not getting great results in a business, it's because you've either got the wrong person in the seat or you've got no person in the seat. Chatting with someone the other day and they're complaining to me about their marketing results And I said, well, tell me about your marketing person. Who's your marketing manager? Who's the person running all that sort of stuff? And they went, well, Brad, really, it's kind of me. I don't really have a marketing manager. I have a few people that do marketing and I'm the marketing manager.

9:28I said, well, if you're the marketing manager, show me your marketing plan. And he said, well, I don't have a written marketing plan. I said, if you don't have a written plan, you don't actually have a plan. So we had to look at it and say, okay, what would fit a great marketing manager for your business? What would that look like? And once we built a great plan for, here's what a great marketing manager would look like. This is the experience they would have had. This is how I know they'll be successful type thing. I'm going to measure them in these ways. Once we built that ideal outcome, we went out, recruited the marketing manager for them.

9:58And hey, presto, once there's a marketing manager in place that they can hold accountable, all of a sudden, marketing results start kicking in for the business, for the person. Building a$100 million company is about building great people who build great companies, okay? That's what you've got to do at some point in time. But the definition of a commercial profitable enterprise that works without you means we have to do what Tom Watson taught us all that time ago in IBM. You've got to work on the business, not just in the business. You've got to build a business that works so you don't have to.

10:29And that starts with you becoming a$100 million entrepreneur. Thanks for joining me on the$100 million podcast. If you've got value from today's episode, make sure you've subscribed and share this with all of your friends. Never miss a strategy that could change your business and your life. And remember, the fastest way to scale is to learn from those who've done it. That's what this show is all about. See you on the next episode.