The Real Reason Business Coaching Works (And Why Most People Avoid It) 🤝 E154

0:05Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Monday's podcast where we cover three core topics, how to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. Normally, I film this podcast inside of an RV motorhome that travels around the country, but I decided I'm coming to Brad Sugar's office. Why not knock out back-to-back podcasts with him in studio at his big offices here in Las Vegas, Nevada. Now, as you guys know, this podcast will be under 40 minutes because the average workout is 45 minutes. The average commute to work is 45 minutes. This episode will be between 35 and 38 minutes for your listening pleasure.

0:37Without Without further ado, Brad Sugars, there's so much to cover. Give us the quick two-minute bio so we get straight to the money. Dang, two minutes. All right, Australian, five kids, married, Vegas home, built multiple companies. The most well-known is Action Coach because now we coach in 85 countries. We just opened in Mongolia, so of all places. A couple of billion in total revenue over the years. We do hundreds of millions every year. My partners are amazing. We operate on a partnership model around the world, so having just topped 1 ,100 offices around the world. 18 books on business and investing.

1:17Several of them international bestsellers. Mostly what I do today is teach. I teach about 40 days a year. I'm a full-time dad most of the time, actually, which welcome to those ranks. Thank you. And I think the biggest thing that I love doing is helping people understand money. Understand, because I think that too many people don't study money. And that's why I love your podcast, because if you study it, you can master it. If you don't study it, it masters you. It's pretty simple. Okay. On the coaching side, why does a business owner, entrepreneur need a coach? Same as a sports team needs a coach.

1:56Same as a famous singer needs a coach, because you can't see from the outside. There's three reasons business coaching actually works, and the stats prove it. It's a six to seven times investment return is what the statistics show. Number one reason is that the coach looks from the outside in. When you're in your business, you can't see stuff on a daily basis, but from the outside in. Number two reason is the knowledge they bring. Our action coach business operating system, we've been doing it for 32 years now coaching, so we're not your fly-by-nighters. We've started the whole profession and have built this profession.

2:30But we have over 3 ,000 documented strategies that will take someone through. So when they start to install the operating system, and I think that's a big thing, people don't seem to realize there is a recipe for business success. And so if you want to make money, then the number one way to make money is your own business. And to do that, you've got to learn to be a business owner, not just an operator. Too many great operators never learn how to be an owner, and therefore they're still doing$20 an hour tasks rather than employing people to do all those tasks. And the third reason coaching works is accountability.

3:04If you're the owner and the CEO, you suck at both jobs. There's no two ways you can be good as the owner and the CEO. You lie to yourself, basically. Hey, boss, I did a great job. Yeah, you did. You pat yourself on the back and you bullshit yourself. So we have to have that accountability that a board of directors gives accountability, you know, that sort of thing. I think if we looked at it from the next layer, people don't realize what they don't know. You know, to get to a million you got to be a genius at the job, right? To get to 10 million you got to build a management team that become geniuses of the job and to get to a hundred million you got to build a leadership team.

3:42Like someone, I met a guy the other day, he says, I'm the CEO of my own business and how many how many other C-level executives you got? And he goes, what do you mean? I said, well, to be the chief executive officer, you gotta have other executives. What do you think holds people back from hiring a coach? Is it their ego? Is it scared? Is it experienced? Interesting, we did a study on this a while back, because we get, our Met Promoter Score was coming in in the high 70s and early 80s, and I'm saying to my team, show me why then the referrals aren't coming in. We surveyed our customers, And number one reason they said that they didn't want to give us referrals is they didn't want to admit they had a coach.

4:21Wow. Like it's the psychologist effect, right? And the number two reason was they didn't want to tell someone else, hey, you suck, you need a coach. So we had to spin it and help people understand that coaching is not about you're doing bad, you need a coach. Coaching is about you're doing good and you want to do great or supreme or amazing. You want to be a unicorn, you got to coach. You know, if you look at all the unicorns, the investors were the coaches of the business. The VC funds provided that coaching to the owner type thing. And so I think to democratize business, we've all got to have that coach.

4:56But it's I think first and foremost, doing something new is a challenge, whether it's getting a coach, you know, hiring a salesperson, whatever. If you're doing something new, it's a challenge. And I think that most of the time and this is why we give two weeks free coaching to anyone that comes to us Because like we don't know if you're coachable and you don't know if it'll work So let's just do two weeks for free and see if it works. I love that I started doing one-on-one coaching a couple years ago for charity. Mm-hmm. It's a hundred thousand dollars I raised 2.7 million because there's 27 people and that's why I'm doing this toy drive That's why I'm here for the toy drives and I take that 2.7 million.

5:33They're wired to me They were right to the charity of their choice and helps me bake the toy drives and what I find is a lot of them don't even call me yeah it's very fascinating I don't really say that out loud perhaps but like I've got certain guys and girls that like call me every week we're on the phone all the time I'll fly to them they'll fly to me like we're in it and other people are kind of like paying for a gym membership they want to say they're coached by Dan they want to say they're coached by Brad what do you think that mindset is you know uh Marshall Goldsmith's a good buddy of mine and he's the number one executive coach in the world and he said uh years ago Drucker said to him, if you want to be the greatest executive, greatest coach or consultant in the world, just get the best clients.

6:10Some clients need one tweak once a quarter and they go amazing things. They don't need that. See, the bigger the business, the more the coaching is about getting their head out of their backside and challenging them sort of thing. Because once, I noticed it for me during COVID, I noticed that I'd gotten fat and happy financially, business-wise, I wasn't challenging myself anymore. I'm going to do a TED Talk. It's called Diary of a Wimpy Goal, because I think we live in an epidemic of wimpy goals, okay? And because we don't set a challenging goal, there's no need to change, no need to grow, no need to learn, no need to do new things, no need to challenge yourself.

6:51So you set a massive goal. You disrupt your own business. You disrupt your own life type thing. And so I go back to those people that come to you, I bet the ones that are with you every single day, they're still in the weeds in their own business. They're not in strategy level in their own business yet. Those who are in strategy level, they need to talk to Dan once every quarter and get one tweak and boom, they're off to the races. I got guys who've been with me and they've sold businesses for hundreds of millions and they keep coming back to my stuff and they come back once a year and they go, I just need one thing.

7:27like Mike who was with me the other day Mike's had multiple exits he keeps coming back but he brings his team now because he's realized that because once a year I do a program where I invite 10 businesses and I create their multi-billion dollar business plan with them we spend five days here in Vegas it's a multi-billion dollar plan and what I find is about three years after they've done it they'll bring back four or five executives because they're like I get it but my team doesn't see how a billion is possible. And the reason I do that here in Vegas is because you walk out the door, everything's a billion in this town.

8:01Right. That's a normal casino here. Yeah. Well, you look at the sphere. Could you imagine sitting with your buddies one night and one of your buddies says, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to build a 20 story dome in Vegas. I'm going to cover it with lights. We're going to put a show inside. I'm going to have you two open it. There's going to be a speaker in every single seat. You would think your buddy is crazy. But here's the thing about craziness, right? Crazy goals lead to amazing innovations. So you think about the programming innovations that have had to happen to make the sphere a reality, right?

8:33Like even Elon Musk is a perfect example. What has the world great, what great things have we achieved in the world? Because Elon says, I want to settle Mars. Elon, you can't settle Mars. We need better rocket ships. All right, I'll do that. Elon, you can't settle Mars. We'll have to live underground. Oh, so we need a drilling company? Yep, I'll do that. Elon, you can't live on Mars. We need better technology to communicate. Okay, do that. Elon, you can't live on Mars. We'll need robots to build things. Okay, we'll do that. We need Wi-Fi. We need self-driving cars. We need, we need, we need. So he just invents all of this stuff.

9:05You know, you go back to where did computers start? Well, microcomputers came because JFK said we choose to go to the moon. You know, you start thinking about the beginnings of so many things is because someone had a crazy idea. And I think most business people don't challenge themselves. And if I grabbed a kid off the street in Silicon Valley and a kid that went to business and then put them in business school, the same kid went to business school and where I grew up, Brisbane, Australia, which kid's going to write me a billion dollar plan? The one that thinks a billion is normal. See, most people don't think a billion is normal.

9:37Whereas today, a billion is normal. You can write a billion dollar business plan in the same time it takes to write a million dollar business plan. What do you think holds people back from making more money?

9:52Dang, I could. There's so many things that hold people back. The first answer is the easiest answer, themselves. You know, most dreams die on the how table. How is the enemy of goals? So when I was 16, I met Jim Rohn, E. James Rohn. And after the event, I got him to sign my notes. And Mr. Rohn, I asked him, you know, what's the one thing I can do? He said, read a book a week for the rest of your life. Well, I declared at 16 that I was going to financially retire at 25. Took me to 26. Now, here's the thing. When I told everyone I was going to do that, they're like, you can't do it. Not possible.

10:25Not going to happen to the point where a buddy of mine, his dad sat us down and told us how that can't happen. Now, he was an engineer for the city. So, of course, he was an expert on money. Most expensive advice, free advice from a poor person. technically he was correct the 16 year old version of me could not achieve that goal so what kills most people's goals is they're not willing to grow into the person that can achieve that goal they're not willing to do the learning the growing now if I said you have to run a marathon you know you gotta you gotta train you gotta practice you gotta change your diet you gotta do all those things but when people set a monetary goal they don't understand how much they got to do the learning.

11:07My formula for success is dream, goal, learn, plan, act. Have the dream, turn dreams into goals. The goals determine what you need to learn rather than how. See, people go, they set a goal and they go, how do I do that? How do I do that? How do I do that? And they go, I don't know how to do it. I can't have it as a goal. The point of a goal, by definition, you should not know how to do it. If you know how to do it, it's not a goal. It's a to-do list item. And if you knew how to do it, you would have already done it. So by setting it as a goal by definition you have to grow into it you have to learn how you have to practice study get a mentor get advice groups join books you name it So there's this famous theory about goals where basically you get to that goal and then the goalpost moves Yeah Once I get to a million sales once I make 200 grand a year once I get to 10 million sales And then a lot of people realize well once you get to 10 million.

12:02It's just a Wednesday Yeah, you got a scale you get your third Lamborghini like well It's just another car in my garage that's getting dust and you become numb to it. What are your thoughts about the goalposts always moving? I'll give it I'll give you an answer in three different ways number one it takes a while for you to fill your own bucket and to a point where you realize it's not about a bigger bucket and Then we get to the third phase. So it's learn earn return, right? But when you're in the urn when you bought your first Rolex you want the second Rolex it's a drug it really feels good and it rewards yourself but it eventually at some point in time you realize that the only thing that really makes you feel good is giving back right so that's where I always say you start with negative goals get out of poverty don't be on the way get out of debt like it's the don't want goals you move to positive goals I want this I choose this I'm gonna have this you know work less finally you get to legacy goals at some point in your life you get to a point of let's just say less is more you know it's like yeah i don't want all of that shit like i don't want another freaking holiday home why because it's just a pain in my ass so i think that that's the first way to answer that question the second is that the second law of thermonuclear dynamics actually tells us you're either growing or dying.

13:25A tree is either growing or dying. A tree can't stand still. A human being is the same. If there is no purpose, if there is no growth for you, then you actually start dying. That's why insurance companies, when people retire, they know three years dead, right? Because there's no purpose. There's nothing for them to go for. And I think it's really important that we understand that you can grow without having to grow your business, without having to add a new car. You can be buying schools for people. You can be, do you know what I mean? Like I've run charities forever. And like my foundation, we educate young people that want to go into business for themselves.

14:01Because when I was 16, everyone said, you got to be good, do as you're told, get a job, go to college, become, like I became an accountant. Not because I wanted to, but because that's what the process told me I was supposed to do. At 16, if I had have understood, I would have just gone into business myself. No, because that's what, and so that's what my foundation does. It takes young people who think I want to be an entrepreneur. Let me do that. So I think that's the second way to answer the question. Ultimately, though, the world we live in today has changed. Like I'm 32 years running companies.

14:38I've been through four downturns in economies. I've watched the whole thing of and I've had all the cars. I have the 30 ,000 square foot home. I do all of the things. Right. And I love all of that stuff. But what I've seen today is the pressure on younger people to look good rather than, it's the old looking good going nowhere thing. You know, they would rather look rich than be rich. And that pressure is gaining momentum. Now, interestingly enough, because I have five kids, I've got like this whole spectrum of perspective on it. But if you look at when the world hit Maslow's hierarchy of needs, once we all got shelter and food taken care of, Gen Y, it should have been spelled W-H-Y, the millennial generation, right?

15:30Because the world had hit that. Then it became about why are we doing things? And so today, I think that as a parent, I find my job. And as my daughter says, Dad, you realize that you're my friend's rich uncle? You know, it's like the whole idea of it is to help your kids go into in the beginning. Your kids are worried about what do you think of them? The middle phase of a kid is what are their friends think of them? And then the final phase of life is where you determine what do you think of you? Okay. Most people never get to what do I think of me? They're stuck in the what do other people think of me?

16:07And so that external validation is really important in that phase. getting to the point where you are, where you feel about you, how you determine you'll feel about you, you know, that's, that's, I think a big part of it. So yeah, multiple ways to answer that one. So on the investing side, someone's gotten to that point where they are making good money. They've hired the coach. They've scaled the business, got more employees, hired a CEO to run their company. Now they're just overseeing the business, but they want to invest. They're getting bombarded. Their DMs, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, holiday dinners, everyone's hitting them up left and right because they know they have some money and they're getting pitched nonstop.

16:49How do you determine what you're open to investing into? Let's go with private equity first, like angel investments. Well, let's go back two steps from that. Because first of all, what's your goal? Sure. Because sometimes if you've got the capital, there's no need to invest at that point. You don't need to. You can literally just put your money into a low cost index fund and you're good for the rest of your life. Okay. So let's understand that the answer to every question should be, what's your goal? You know, it's the old Mad Hatter type thing. Now, if I am getting bombarded with all of those things, I first of all want to determine what are my rules for investing?

17:31Most people come to me, ask, well, what should I invest in? I ask, well, what are your rules? and you're not an investor unless you have a written documented set of rules so then I go back to well show me your wealth plan and most people again go I don't have a wealth plan I said all right let's spend a year then so my answer to your first question is the first thing you should invest in is knowledge get that in you've learned business right you spent 10 20 years learning business mastering business let's learn investing so three categories of investment if you ask me okay number one companies number two real estate and number three stocks of some sort right so if you define them in those three categories because to me an investment must have two things capital growth and cash flow it's got to have those two things if it doesn't have those two things it's not an investment like people say crypto i said crypto is a wonderful currency play okay but it's a currency play it's not an investment you're not getting rental income or you know you're not getting passive cash flow from it unless you've got some of the option strategies and those sorts of things but so if you've spent 20 years learning business you know I'd be invested in businesses because that's what you know right invest where you're an expert invest where you're dang good so I teach my clients as on the phone with a young man this morning he buys accounting firms okay and so he's bought three accounting firms and what would I invest in if I was him more accounting firms why he's damn good at it he knows it he knows how to make money out he knows all the numbers fantastic stick with what good if you've built imagine this right and this is where most business people go wrong in business if you ask me they spend their whole life building a company getting the systems the marketing the branding everything correct and they do it in one location why?

19:25why build a whole restaurant to do it in one spot the formula for a billion dollar company is x times y McDonald's is not a billion dollar company McDonald's is a two million dollar company done in tens of thousands of locations right so x times y means find a multi-million dollar business one location and do it however many times. I mean, you look at Damon John. He worked out how to build a clothing brand, did it multiple times. You look at Tillman Fetita, worked out how to do a food business, multiple times. Ray Kroc, all he did is he found the McDonald Brothers system and said, this system should be on every street corner and boom, put McDonald's on every street corner type thing.

20:12So my first thing is invest where you're an expert. Don't try and invest in stuff. I spent a weekend with one of my buddies learning NFTs when they first came out. You know what I learned after two days of him teaching me NFTs? I don't know enough to invest in NFTs. I would have to spend six months of my life to become an expert in investing in that and know what the heck I'm doing. And so I think people, they're not investors, they're gamblers. I hear Kenny Rogers' song kicking in the background for most of the time. Know when to hold them because return of investment is far more important than return on investment.

20:49And so second, I would say real estate is a far better investment because it's slower moving. If you're going to learn to invest and you move into fast moving stuff straight away, then it's fast up, fast down. So if you can get into a slower moving, I mean, people don't understand that real estate is a guaranteed 400 % ROI. They don't understand that, right? If I buy a million dollar piece of real estate, how much money have I got to come up with? 200 grand 20 on average right some parts of the world it's 30 some 5 but on average i gotta put in 20 200 grand 20 year mortgage i don't pay the mortgage i put a tenant in they pay for 80 percent of it for me now maybe the first couple of years i gotta put a few dollars in each month till the rent gets up and covers the mortgage type thing but 80 of my asset is paid for by someone else So over 20 years, I get a 400 percent ROI if it didn't go up.

21:41Right. Now with ChatGPT, I can go into ChatGPT and say, where should I invest that's getting a 10 percent capital growth in my area? And if it says nowhere is getting that. OK, where else can I invest type thing? We can do the research. What took me 20 years to learn as a kid investing in real estate, I can learn in 10 minutes on ChatGPT right now. so I think that yeah it's it's a challenge for a lot of people in that they go into investing without preparing themselves spend a year learning so the reason I initially started the podcast was to try to change the narrative that it's rude to talk about money yeah we all think it's rude to talk about money don't talk about money at the table can't talk about salary like we need to have these discussions what are your feelings and thoughts about it All the things you shouldn't, so again, five kids, right?

22:35All the things you should not talk about, apparently, religion, politics, sex, money, all those things you should not talk about. If I don't talk about it with my kids, where are they getting their opinions from? Right. So I would 100 % rather my kids got my opinions on money and finance than their buddy from school or college. Right. I would rather they had my opinions on politics and that I could ask them the questions sort of thing. I think that not talking about money is dumb. You know, you need to talk about money. You need to be open about it. And as men, we need to talk about the things that men don't talk about, the emotional stuff, all of those sorts of things.

23:17When I moved to Vegas, I started a group called Handsome Men's Club because Jimmy Kimmel had this skit called Handsome Men's Club. But it's getting a group of guys together to just talk about this stuff. you know, and we have dinners and like this Friday we're having a dinner and there's 20 of us going to be there. And you know what we're going to talk about? Money, politics, finances. We're going to talk this stuff because if you go, you remember that famous photo of Elon Musk with all of his buddies back in college and there's like 20 of them in the room and 19 or so of them went to become billionaires.

23:44Who you surround yourself with and what you talk with. We live in one of the loneliest periods of the world, you know, more connected, but more lonely than ever. The average American male has guess how many friends less than three whoa and the younger you get the less that number is the older you get the higher the number is sort of thing because relationships seem to have been a thing that people forget you know I believe buddy I'm with you let's talk money let's share this podcast if you if you don't like you should sit and listen to this with your friends right and stop it and talk about stuff and what are you doing where's your wealth plan do you have an entity for your wealth?

24:23Have you set up a trust or a company for your wealth? Do you have a separate bank account that's just for your wealth money? If you don't have a separate bank account, grab your buddies and all go to the bank and all open a separate account called the wealth account and be co-signers on each other's one so that you can't. My dad was my co-signer on my wealth account. And I told him, dad, these are the rules. If it doesn't meet these rules, you can't sign a check for me to invest in it. And so I would go to him and I'd go, dad, I want the money for this, this and this you know let's go through the rules two times I broke the rules two times I lost money mmm broke my own rules dumb all right so the third topic is about charity how to give money away why do you think it's important for some form of charity for your employees clients vendors customers to see well I think philosophically first and foremost you have to have a mindset if I'm making way more than I need you won't do charity if you have a mindset of I'm just making enough one of the worst goals in the world of the wimpy goals is the make enough to get by goal okay so we got to get out of that in today's world we did a study and in this book pulling profits out of a hat we did a study of the five core disciplines of exponential growth companies and one of them is that they have a mission mission because from Gen Y onwards as I talked about why you do things is just as or more important today than what you do who you are the company culture document the company core values who you are and why you do what you do are central to business today the mission of what you're aiming to achieve when I started Action Coach I wrote our vision of world abundance through business re-education 32 years ago our goal is not to create better coaches or to live better lives our goal is to create world abundance when i'm coaching in lithuania and we're putting our charity into a thousand schools in lithuania next year right that's about creating world abundance now do we get rewarded really well for creating abundance for every client of ours of course we get rewarded well for that if you don't tell the world the great things you're doing the only people they'll hear from are the people that are complaining about what you're doing.

26:40So, A, internally, you feel better about life and your team feels better about life when you're doing something that gives back to the world. It just is. B, marketing-wise, doing good things is important, but you got to tell people you're doing it. Okay? I see too many people where they do good for the world and they don't be public about it. Now, I want you to be public about it for three reasons number one so the world knows you're doing it okay because otherwise they only hear from the negative people number two reason is because it then challenges other people to step up to the point okay when you when you see the billionaires and they put together that whole group that said all right we challenge every billionaire to donate their wealth sort of thing it challenges people to step up but the third reason that I want to see you giving is the feeling you will get.

27:32It will drive you more when you give and when you see like the young kids that we put through the training that come out of it going, oh my God, I'm not weird. I can actually start my own business. I don't need to leave school and get a job. I can leave school, build my own business and give other people jobs. That, damn, that's a winner. I actually look at my investing in the companies as a form of charity because I would go invest in this company. I invest in Everbowl restaurant. They go from 13 locations to 104 locations. That means they went from 40 employees to 900 employees. We're creating jobs.

28:07It's almost a form of charity. And so part of my investing is that. I find it interesting that as business owners, we risk all of our capital helping other people provide for their family, giving people jobs. But if you're a good business owner, you don't just give them a job. You give them an education. Sure. You give them a knowledge base. A lot of young people, Dan, you would see this. they come out of school, college, and they want to get a job where they make the most money. I think that's dumb. I think once you get out of school, you should be looking for a job where you get the best mentor, you get the best learning, the best knowledge.

28:39Do they have a good training program? Do they invest in their people? Do they build their people? I know for me, the only way I build my companies is if I build my people. Build my people, they build the company. If I don't build my people, they can't build my company. So I think that's really important. But the idea of learn earn return has been a long sought idea that you know you've got to at some point understand that our job if we've provided too much for ourselves is fantastic you know you've given it's now your turn to give back now sometimes you give back financially sometimes you get back with knowledge sometimes you get back with time um i notice for me i i'm not i'm time poor in giving back because I want to give to my kids first.