Brad Sugars Spills: How to Get Out of Your Own Way and Scale to Millions

Jennie Wright [00:00:03]:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Acquire podcast where we’re talking about launches and list builds and lead generation, exit strategies. I just added that this year, but it’s fun to talk about and everything in between. I love doing this podcast and if you’re enjoying it, please make sure you are following just so you don’t miss anything because you’re not going to want to miss today. Today, I’ve probably got one of the biggest guests I’ve ever had on this podcast and trust me, this was a big get and I’m excited. So I’m gonna I’m gonna like sort of tease this a little bit before telling you who it is because buckle up, we have got a powerhouse. This person has been building an empire teaching entrepreneurs how to make their businesses work without them. He’s the man behind a globally recognized brand called ActionCOACH.

Jennie Wright [00:00:47]:
You may know who it is now. He’s got well, he’s a best selling author, keynote speaker, self proclaimed business nerd, which is what I like. We can nerd and talk all day. But don’t let these accolades fool you because my guest Brad Sugar’s approach is so completely down to earth and I’m excited. So Brad, I’m so glad you’re here.

Brad Sugars [00:01:06]:
Well, good day. Good to be here.

Jennie Wright [00:01:08]:
Yeah. I’m excited. It’s fantastic. Okay. I, you know, I I was on your podcast a couple of months ago, and I’ve been waiting into anticipation to have you back on mine or to come on to this podcast, which is great. And the couple things that I’ve wanted to talk to you about, which kind of were sparked from our conversation way back when I was on yours, was scaling strategies.

Brad Sugars [00:01:28]:
Yeah.

Jennie Wright [00:01:28]:
Right? So you’ve scaled multiple businesses to incredible heights, like 7 figure. What was the biggest mindset shift that you had to go through from running a small business to a multi or managing a multimillion dollar business?

Brad Sugars [00:01:43]:
Oh, look. You know, these days we do 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars, and I think the biggest thing is, remind yourself that it is all just one small thing done multiple times.

Jennie Wright [00:01:56]:
Right.

Brad Sugars [00:01:57]:
You know, you don’t build a solar farm by building a solar farm. You build a 1 inch square solar panel, and you click it together with another one, and then you click it together with another one, and that sort of thing. Scaling in my books is like x times y. First of all, create x. What is x? At McDonald’s, x was the McDonald’s restaurant. For me at ActionCOACH, it is the coaching business that is run locally. And so I look at, you know, how many ways can we do that? So we build the coaching business. We build a $1,000,000 business, and then we put it in a 1,000 locations.

Brad Sugars [00:02:31]:
So you do a a $1,000,000,000 sort of thing, if that makes sense. I was coaching one of my clients the other day. They have a $20,000,000 a year, home remodeling building business, and we did the research. There’s 82 cities in America that are similar to the city that they’re in. So we get a $20,000,000 business. We put it in 82 cities. Hey, presto. It it’s not hard to do the math sort of thing.

Brad Sugars [00:02:55]:
But I think the biggest thing for most people when it comes to scale where they fall down is they build the business too much about themselves in the beginning. And I made that mistake in the beginning. You know, I was like, I would say to people the stupid thing of, you know, look, I’m the owner. I’m always here. Call anytime. And they did. And unless I was there, they didn’t do business. But I trained my customers the wrong way.

Brad Sugars [00:03:18]:
What you gotta do is train your customers to do business with the business, not train your customers to just do business with 1 person. Second thing, in order to scale, you’ve gotta have a repeat product, repeat service. Preferably subscription membership, monthly fee, but paid annually preferably. You know, if it’s monthly, then they stay they quit monthly. If it’s annual, then the only time they quit is once a year. People saying, well, what happens if they quit at the end of the year? Well, you had them for 12 months, not 9 or, you know, that sort of thing. But you should have also added more value so they don’t quit, is probably the big thing. And then finally, it’s about the people.

Brad Sugars [00:03:54]:
If you wanna build a scaled business, you know, I had a wonderful CFO who was really great when we were doing $10,000,000 a year. At the moment, we started doing $100,000,000 a year. He’s not a great CFO anymore. Sometimes you got to demote people or over promote or bring in someone at a higher level, that that has done that before sort of thing. Even for me as CEO of my own company, it, you know, I was I love marketing and I’m, you know but I would make the mistake of trying to be the CMO rather than hiring a CMO of someone that’s been the CMO of a couple of $100,000,000 business. So even if you’re a million, hire people that have been doing 25,000,000 rather than hiring someone that’s only done $500,000 and training them up sort of thing. You know, hire people who are overqualified so they can grow the business for you.

Jennie Wright [00:04:43]:
I love that. And then I was actually, funny that you’re talking about CMO because I’m working in a couple of different companies now as their CMO. And it’s fantastic because I’m coming in, like you’re saying, like, qualified to help build and grow the business, which I think is super fun. And I just love the marketing side. I can just geek out there all day. I’m sure you could too. But I, one of the things that you said was really fascinating is I love. When people sort of break down and say, you know what? I put myself too much in front of the business.

Jennie Wright [00:05:14]:
If you are the brand, it’s really hard to scale. And I think most coaches do that in the beginning. And it’s, you know, it’s the bread sugar show, right? Or it’s the Jenny Wright show, and it’s not necessarily action coach show. And that’s part of the problem because then you have to be front and center all the time. You have to do all the calls or whatever, and you are the front and center person versus when you’re when you’re kind of getting into more into that CEO mindset. Now, it’s not necessarily about you. It’s about the process that you build and the thing that you can repeat, like you said, which I think is great. Do you remember your first hire? Do you remember who that was?

Brad Sugars [00:05:49]:
Oh, I remember my first hire. It was my best friend from college. And, it it was it was great, but it was just it was it didn’t you know, there’s so many things you have to learn to be a business owner. Right? Not just good at the product or the service of the business, but you gotta learn how to be a business owner. And learning how to recruit, hire, train, all of those sorts of things. And even, I I was coaching a business person the other day and he’s hiring a new, IT chief IT officer. And I said, listen, do you know enough to ask the right questions? Like, you don’t need to know their job, but you need to know enough to ask the right questions. And even like hiring a marketing agency, I was chatting with someone the other day, I own 2 marketing agencies and I said to them, well, what are you going to ask? And they didn’t know enough to ask.

Brad Sugars [00:06:35]:
I said, well, at least jump on chat gpt and say what are the 10 questions I should ask a marketing agency before hiring this sort of thing? You know, at least learn enough to be able to ask the right questions of of potential hires and that sort of thing. But, oh, look, it’s I remember my first hires because I didn’t know what I was doing, and I just knew I needed hands. It was, you know, it was the it was the warm bodies hiring philosophy, you know. Look, there’s a chair. It’s full. It must be okay.

Jennie Wright [00:07:09]:
Yeah.

Brad Sugars [00:07:10]:
Whereas today, you know, we’re very very clear. My my hiring ads all start with, if you’re the rock star CMO, where after you will be. And my whole ad just says you will be this, you’ll have done this, you’ll love this, you will this. It’s all the word you which is central to all great marketing, that’s ever been done, the word you. Mhmm. And and so by the end of reading it, someone will say, that’s me. You know? And so you but you’ve got to do a lot of work to be able to write that ad. You can’t recruit people unless you know what is their exact job, how will you measure them, and what’s the type of person you’re after? Like, what’s their profile? Whether it’s DISC profile or Working Genius profile, you gotta know.

Brad Sugars [00:07:59]:
Okay. You’ve gotta be this type of person.

Jennie Wright [00:08:02]:
Especially to fit in with the culture that you’ve already built. Right?

Brad Sugars [00:08:05]:
Yeah. Exactly. And that’s where documenting your culture. We do a 12 week leadership training, and the first thing we teach all leaders is you can’t be a leader without framework. So where is your vision, mission, culture? Where’s your objectives, key results, and business plan? If you don’t have those, you can’t lead. You know, it’s like, you know, I’m gonna steer a ship. Show me the ship. We don’t have a ship.

Brad Sugars [00:08:23]:
Okay? Then we can’t steer the ship. You know? And and so a lot of businesses don’t have a ship, and they’re trying to steer it. And it’s like, no, no, no. Framework first. Where are you going? What are you aiming to achieve? What’s the meaning behind this business? What is its purpose, etcetera?

Jennie Wright [00:08:37]:
Do you agree with me that a lot of people who are building businesses from scratch, who are right now maybe multi 6 or heading towards that 7 figure, that they’re not thinking of their business and running it like a company. They’re still having that small business mindset. They’re still thinking little potatoes. Do you find that a lot?

Brad Sugars [00:08:57]:
It’s easy to get stuck in that, Jenny. It really is because the day to day stuff comes up up every single day.

Jennie Wright [00:09:02]:
Yeah.

Brad Sugars [00:09:03]:
I have an advantage in in all of my 9 companies. I don’t go to the office. I don’t go in. So I can be chairman. I don’t like, there’s a difference between being a CEO and being the chairman. CEO of your own business, you’re probably, like, if you’re the owner and the CEO, you’re lying to yourself both ways. You know? Oh, yes, mister owner. I did a great job.

Brad Sugars [00:09:23]:
You’re brilliant, Brad. We love you. Thank you for doing such a great job. No. You you you know, if Yeah. When I’m the chairman of the company, the CEO has worked 10 times harder than if I was the CEO of the company sort of thing. Yeah. But I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of day to day, week to week.

Brad Sugars [00:09:42]:
The hard thing to do and, you know, when I sit with people and say, okay, let’s do your 3 to 5 year visioning. Let’s where are we gonna go? What’s our objective in 3 to 5 years? It’s hard sometimes for people to do that, you know. People haven’t been taught to dream big. They’ve been taught to think 10% more, you know. Let’s get 10% better than last year sort of thing. And most people set their business goals, Jenny, based around their own needs and wants rather than around the size of the market. I’ll give you an example. If we’re mining for gold, we find a hill, there’s gold in that hill.

Brad Sugars [00:10:18]:
We do all of the surveys. We find out there’s a $1,000,000,000 worth of gold. We can get to $800,000,000 worth of it economically viable. Yeah. But, Brad, I only need a 100,000 a year to live, so I’m just going to mine just a 100,000 a year out of it Yeah. And not worry about the 800,000,000 out of it. And that’s what most people do. If if the market size is a 1,000,000,000 and you’re only going for a couple of 100,000, that doesn’t make any sense.

Brad Sugars [00:10:43]:
If there’s 4 competitors and there’s a 1,000,000,000 a year, well, you should be aiming for at least 2.50. Right?

Jennie Wright [00:10:49]:
Exactly.

Brad Sugars [00:10:50]:
You know? And so set your goals based on the market size and the market needs and the market wants and desires rather than on your own personal needs, wants and desires, and rather than on your past performance. Goals should never be driven by past performance, and that’s why we start with dreams. My formula for success is dream, goal, learn, plan, act. Dream first of what could be and then work backwards from there. They didn’t say, oh, can we get you know, JFK said we choose to go to the moon not because it’s the easiest of things because it’s the hardest things. They didn’t say, well, let’s get a rocket 10% further than we got it last week.

Jennie Wright [00:11:25]:
Yeah. Exactly. I love working from the end goal and working backwards. I always do that. It’s the it’s the way to actually make it happen because if not, you’re gonna throw up barriers in your way, I think, and you’re not gonna get there.

Brad Sugars [00:11:37]:
NASA invented PERT program evaluation review technique based on getting a man back from the moon. I mean, that’s that’s what they did and that’s always worked backwards from the end result and it’s it’s a great little book, Dan Sullivan and and the 10 x is easy than 2 x. If I say double your business, people go, I’ve got to double my workload. If I said 10 times your business, people think I got to do it entirely differently. And most people to get scale have to do something entirely differently to what they’re doing today. Yeah. The systems you have today like, I I reset a goal for one of our companies to go from 100 of 1,000,000 to 1,000,000,000, and a good friend of mine, Jeffrey Gitomer, turned to me and in his typical style said, well, you know, Brad, you’re no longer good to great. You now, bleep to okay.

Brad Sugars [00:12:23]:
And it was like, really Jeffrey? You have to point that out. He said, yeah. All the systems that are great for a 100,000,000 a year are gonna fail for 1,000,000,000. And that’s the same for any size business. All your systems that are great for 10 customers will fail when you’ve got a 100 customers.

Jennie Wright [00:12:37]:
Completely.

Brad Sugars [00:12:38]:
So you’ve gotta break your systems and rebuild them as often as you possibly can.

Jennie Wright [00:12:43]:
That happened to me. This that happened to me in the end of 2024. I broke my systems.

Brad Sugars [00:12:47]:
Yep. You have to. If you’re if you’re not breaking your systems and you’re not making mistakes and you’re not growing.

Jennie Wright [00:12:53]:
Yeah. Exactly. One thing I’ve really desperately wanted to talk to you about is like lead generation and launches. Right? You’ve done countless within the different companies, but I wanna kind of have you think back to when you were really trying to get ActionCOACH off the ground and grow. What when it was coming to lead gen, what was the most effective technique that you were using?

Brad Sugars [00:13:15]:
Most effective technique is get other people to fill the room. Don’t do it yourself, you know. Go to people that have databases and give them a purpose and a reason to promote you. I did it like, when I first launched ActionCOACH, I partnered with the local newspaper group and, that was across Australia. And then across New Zealand, I partnered with a new with a, radio station, More FM. And so the newspaper group across Australia, they put 200 between the two groups, they put 288,000 people in free seminars for me. You know? And that I would never have been able to afford the marketing for 288,000 people. But all of them, their databases in each city, they had 30 to 50000 people on their databases database that were business owners that were advertisers.

Brad Sugars [00:14:04]:
I was like, who wants my product in front of the world more than me? You know? And so the newspaper they had all these people running ads that didn’t know how to answer the phone, didn’t know how to convert the ads. I said and I sat with the marketing manager in newspaper. I said, hey. If we ran seminars to teach them how to answer the the the phone calls and do better work and get more business out of the ads, would that help? He said that would help immeasurably. I said, well, great. I love advertising, and I love teaching people to advertise. What if I got in front of all of your advertisers and told them they should do more advertising, and here’s how they should do it, and here’s how they should answer the phones? And he said, well, that’d be a wonderful thing. And he said, how much you gonna charge me for that? I said, absolutely nothing.

Brad Sugars [00:14:43]:
All you have to do is send this letter, and I gave him the letter and these free tickets and print it out. You have to print these letters and send them to all your customer database, and you have to run these ads in your newspaper every single week. And he said, fantastic. We’ll do that. I said, I’ll pay for all the venues. I’ll pay for everything else. You just put them in the room and hey, presto. Well, the first one we did was a complete flop.

Brad Sugars [00:15:03]:
We had a room for a 150 people. We had 7 people show up, and I think one of them was a drunk from the bar outside. And, but 12 months later, we had 1700 people in the Brisbane City Town Hall and, you know, the rest is history.

Jennie Wright [00:15:19]:
That’s amazing. I love partnerships. When I think of connecting and, and, and, and partnering with people, you do have to dream big in that space. Like for you to go and talk to the newspaper, you had to, you basically had to say, if they say no, they say no. But if I don’t ask, I’m never, I’m never gonna know. Right?

Brad Sugars [00:15:36]:
Yeah. Most people try and get one customer at a time. I think that’s the problem with most marketers. They’re trying to get one at a time and that’s not marketing. That’s sales. You’ve, you’ve got to go and get 1,000 at a time is the goal. And unless you’re trying to get 100 or 1000 at a time, it’s not marketing. It’s just sales.

Brad Sugars [00:15:52]:
What do you

Jennie Wright [00:15:53]:
think of SLOs, self liquidating offers?

Brad Sugars [00:15:57]:
Look, the they are the unicorn of marketing. Let’s put it that way. If I can have a self liquidating offer that generates a database for me, and and does that, in most cases, what you’ll find is your acquisition cost needs to be 30, 60, 90 days before you recoup.

Jennie Wright [00:16:20]:
Yeah.

Brad Sugars [00:16:20]:
So, you know, that that upfront offer, the $7, the $27, the $39, the $99 offer, they’re beautiful offers. I personally prefer to go with free and then convert. You know, like even for a seminar, and and I was we still use them massively around the world right now. If I go into a city and I do a a seminar and I charge people $99 to come to a 3 hour event. Alright? Yeah. It gets me a more qualified audience, but it also means that that one guy or that one gal who needed the help and needed to grow didn’t come to the event because they couldn’t afford the $99. And it means 12 months later, I don’t have them as a customer.

Jennie Wright [00:17:08]:
True. True.

Brad Sugars [00:17:09]:
The free offer in my book removes all barrier to entry, and it gets everyone in my door. And then my emails have to be good enough to quali to to get them to take action sort of thing. I would rather have a higher volume MQL of lower quality because 2 years from now that low quality MQL is probably going to be a high quality MQL.

Jennie Wright [00:17:31]:
Yep. Exactly. Just even through the process of attrition, having them leave your audience, like self selecting out because it’s not a fit or whatnot, and you end up with, you know, with that good core audience

Brad Sugars [00:17:42]:
for sure.

Jennie Wright [00:17:42]:
I think a lot

Brad Sugars [00:17:43]:
of people’s email marketing is just way too weak, and they’re too wimpy on their email marketing, like they don’t, they say, oh, I’ll send 1 a week. Look, statistics are showing us right now, 1 a week, you’re between 15 30% open rate. Right? And and people saying, oh, no, I get 80% open rate. No, you don’t. We got 80% open rate when email first started. No one gets that today. But also people are silly about their their emails, Jenny. They put the wrong words in there.

Brad Sugars [00:18:10]:
They put the word free, which gets them a ding. Like, you get 3 or 4 points depending upon which, email system you’re following. You you get 3 or 4 negative points and you’re in spam instantaneously. You know, people put the word unsubscribe in their email. You can’t do that. Put click here in their email, put dear someone or other, put happy new you, put merry Christmas. You put all these things in your newsletter in in your email or you call it a newsletter, and it just gets dinged and you’re in spam ville straight away. But let’s just go back to basic stats, pretend you’re doing the right things.

Brad Sugars [00:18:44]:
Okay? About 30% will open if you’re doing a good job. If you send every day, it’ll go down to about half of what your weekly open rate will be, but it’s not the same people every every day. It’s a different group of people. So by sending every day, and that takes a lot of work, it’s gonna move it up to 35, 40% of your database is gonna see an email from you every week rather than just that 20 or 30 that that opens on that one day a week. So I I think you’ve got to be much better at email marketing today and nurturing today. COVID changed the way marketing happens. You know, people people are unwilling, and the stats are showing me very clearly again. 40% of the market does not want to speak to a salesperson before they buy right now.

Brad Sugars [00:19:30]:
No. Majority of the market wants to be 60 to 80% of the way through the sales process before talking to a human being, before connecting with a company. So they wanna do all the research. Most companies don’t have enough video. They don’t have enough audio. They don’t have enough downloads on their website for someone to get enough education to be able to learn all of the things. Google 7114 was such a their ZMOT study was such an amazing thing to validate what we were saying about you must have a lot more video, a lot more audio, a lot more podcasts, a lot more things to build a relationship with your customer before they even want to talk to a human being in your organization.

Jennie Wright [00:20:08]:
I agree. And I think there’s a tipping point too of the amount of content that you build. And then all of a sudden, you’re now you’re starting to see those results, and it takes time. And people some people just don’t have the patience for that build up. But I think it’s really, really necessary and you have to be able to say, like, if you’re launching a new business or if you’re launching a new product or something, it’s, you’ve got to give the time for the numbers to work in your favor

Brad Sugars [00:20:34]:
Mhmm.

Jennie Wright [00:20:35]:
Versus you going, like, 3 months, you know, 3 like, 60 days or whatever and it doesn’t work, I’m I’m gonna abandon it.

Brad Sugars [00:20:41]:
Yeah. I had a debate with someone yesterday around podcasts. They’re like, well, you know, they said once you get 50, it’ll be this and then and if you build it, they will come. I said, yeah. But you’ve got to run ads to your podcast. If you’re not spending money advertising each podcast I remember I interviewed Darren Cahill, who who’s Janek Sinner’s tennis coach and, was Andre Agassi’s and late he’s had 4 number 1 tennis players. We put money behind that and advertised it specifically to tennis people, people who wanted success in tennis, and that brought us a whole new audience. And then, you know, yours, we put money behind it and put it to people that wanted to build events.

Brad Sugars [00:21:16]:
And and so, you know, people there there’s a difference between build it and they will come and build it and actually tell the world you built it. Yeah. Telling the world you built it is kind of important.

Jennie Wright [00:21:27]:
A little bit. Just a tad.

Brad Sugars [00:21:30]:
But you go back to SEO. I mean, one of my agencies that that works for us doing our SEO, we sit down and we look at, like, I I could look at anyone’s website, and I could tell you that there’s probably 200, 300, 400 toxic backlinks. And unless you go in and disavow them, Google’s not gonna send you traffic, you know. And just simple things like that where people aren’t willing to dive in to Semrush, hrevs, whatever technology is needed to be able to know what they’re doing. I I think that marketing is moving so fast, Jenny, and we do this personally. We have a simple policy. If it’s a strategy that stays the same, we’ll do it in house. If it’s strategy that needs updating every week or every month, we’ll use an agency.

Brad Sugars [00:22:12]:
So, like, our advertising, we use agencies. We can’t keep up with meta. We can’t keep up with Google and YouTube. Can’t do it. Just can’t do it.

Jennie Wright [00:22:21]:
Daily changes.

Brad Sugars [00:22:22]:
You know, but an agency that their whole life is doing that, they see it, they do it. But if it’s referrals, we’ll do that in house. Referrals is easy. We got that one covered, you know, we can do that system.

Jennie Wright [00:22:34]:
Absolutely. In between everything that you’re building, I’m sure you’ve got tons of people, especially with your daily emails. That’s what I, I love about that connection process. And if you send a daily email, you’re going to get people going, oh, you’re looking for a such and such. I get these emails from this guy, this company, this whatever, and, you know, it becomes front of mind because you’re staying front of mind.

Brad Sugars [00:22:54]:
You don’t know what day of the week that person’s gonna get annoyed with their current provider?

Jennie Wright [00:22:59]:
No. And you don’t know which day of week they’re checking their emails, if they’re checking their emails at all.

Brad Sugars [00:23:04]:
Yeah. Sunday night. Sunday night’s the best one to reach high level business people. I know that. Like, one of my companies is a commercial cleaning company. So we door knock everywhere that we open a new every territory we open, we door knock every business, and we just offer them a simple quote or or Mhmm. Action plan to take over. And we just put them on a database, and we continually drip them.

Brad Sugars [00:23:27]:
And you don’t know the day when they walk in and go, oh my god. These cleaners are awful. What’s that company that keeps emailing us? What’s that company that send us that thing every, you know

Jennie Wright [00:23:36]:
Exactly. Exactly. And that’s why and I wanted to get your opinion on this. Do you believe in having a, you know, unsubscribe, sequence basically? Like, if somebody doesn’t action off your emails after 6 months, do you unsubscribe them?

Brad Sugars [00:23:52]:
No. Never. Right? Spend all that work getting them on there. Come on. Unless they tell me to go away, I’m I’m not going away.

Jennie Wright [00:24:00]:
Exactly. Exactly. Because as soon as you do that, I have people who have sat on my list for 2, 3, 4, or 5 years

Brad Sugars [00:24:07]:
Mhmm.

Jennie Wright [00:24:08]:
Before they then create an action of booking a call, buying a service, whatever it is. And I’ll ask them like, hey, just as a, you know, just how did we connect? Oh, I saw you on a summit 5 years ago, or I saw you speak last year in Orlando. And you’ve been sitting on my list quietly ever since. And that is so cool.

Brad Sugars [00:24:28]:
And it costs I mean, it costs you nothing to keep them on your list. Let’s be honest. Back in the day when I had to do it with direct mail, I was like, you know, this person hasn’t bought anything in a year and a half, and we’re spending, you know, every month we’re sending a direct mail piece to them. What should we do? And even then it was like, come on dude, you know, all you’re spending $12 a year to communicate with people a dollar a month. Don’t be stupid to get them off your database for a dollar a month sort of thing and

Jennie Wright [00:24:53]:
Exactly.

Brad Sugars [00:24:54]:
But your database is the number one most important asset of your business. And so that’s why, you know, that’s why my marketing book’s called Raise Your Hand Marketing because your job is to get people to raise their hand twice. Number 1, raise your hand, say I’m interested. Number 2, raise your hand, say I’m ready.

Jennie Wright [00:25:09]:
Exactly.

Brad Sugars [00:25:10]:
So if if you’re not getting to raise their hand to say I’m interested, it’s probably because you don’t have enough offers to get them to say they’re interested. Like, what’s your ebook offers? What’s your webinar offers? What are the things that people can say, hey, I’m interested? The, you know, the the handbook of how to buy business coaching. Like, it’s not hard. We we use price lists because every country we operate in the world has a different pricing point. So if you wanna get the price list, you can go in and say, hey, I’m Jenny, I’m from the United States, I’m in this state, here’s my email and phone number, please send me the price list. Like, it’s not hard to think of things that people want, and you just say, hey, give us your details, we’ll email it to you.

Jennie Wright [00:25:50]:
What’s getting in people’s way then?

Brad Sugars [00:25:55]:
People wanna get married. Let me let me put that,

Jennie Wright [00:25:59]:
Please explain.

Brad Sugars [00:26:01]:
Yeah. Yeah. You don’t go out on a date or you don’t like, if I if the first time I met my wife, I went, yeah. I think I’m gonna marry this person. And I had asked her on that first date, then scared off, run away, the whole thing. You’ve gotta you gotta court them sort of thing. Mhmm. Most websites you go to, it’s like, buy my stuff.

Brad Sugars [00:26:21]:
Not, hey, can we get a coffee? Exactly. More, hey, can we get a coffee offers less, hey, buy my stuff. It’s like, you know, the I’m sure it happens to you all the time. I have someone now run my LinkedIn because I just couldn’t be bothered dealing with all of this stuff, but you get those person that reaches out, they connect with you on LinkedIn, and then the first email is like, hey, buy my stuff.

Jennie Wright [00:26:44]:
Literally had that this morning.

Brad Sugars [00:26:46]:
My my first email to everyone, if they become a subscriber, a follower, whatever is, hey. Here’s a gift. Mhmm. Here’s a training course we did, and and I’m not sure if you’re interested in business, wealth, or life coaching, but here’s a training course we did that’ll give you an idea. So at the end of this, though, you’ll know where we can help you best, but this will give you a great year. It’ll help you build a plan for the year.

Jennie Wright [00:27:09]:
Yes. Yeah. Oh, dear. During the pandemic, I was trying to grow. I live in a condo and I was trying to grow like, tomatoes indoors. And there was a webinar that was being run by this guy who had like a greenhouse thing and he was teaching people how to grow vegetables very cheaply inside and, during the pandemic. And I signed up for his newsletter. I went to his webinar and the first email that I got not only had a gift, but then it told me what to expect.

Jennie Wright [00:27:41]:
And it said the next email I’m going to send you is going to have this subject line. So look out for it. And it’s going to have the next thing that I want to give you completely. Like, I just want you to have it. It’s a gift for you. And then they follow through. And then that email said, I’m going to send you another email. I just thought of something else.

Jennie Wright [00:27:55]:
I think you could like, here’s an, you know, watch out for this subject line, make sure it’s not in your spam folder, Blah blah blah. And it was it was good. It was like treasure hunt. I was like, okay. Now when is this email gonna come in?

Brad Sugars [00:28:05]:
Yeah. Yeah. You’ve gotta build you know, it’s it’s it’s even simple things like, you know, if you’ve got a 9 email nurture sequence, you actually tell people that there’s, you know, tip 1 of 9 type thing. That should be your thing. Say it’s it’s simple. It’s like this first tip is coming today, you know, or step 1 of 6. Like, we do a nurture sequence, which is our 6 steps to grow a business. And so we actually send it as 7 because we say, okay, the first one is gonna be overall, and then I’m gonna break down each of the next 6 areas for you.

Brad Sugars [00:28:38]:
So step 1 of 7, this is email 1 of 7. Keep yeah. You’ve got to do those things, but, you know, people love learning how to buy what you sell. And and you’ve got to be clear on making it easy, making it simple, but giving them education. Marketing today is a lot more education than it’s ever been in past.

Jennie Wright [00:28:58]:
Yep. People are more savvy. You gotta And

Brad Sugars [00:29:00]:
you’ve gotta teach them how to buy it too. Like, you know, if, what’s something? I I oh, I a certain valet here in Vegas decided to park my Lamborghini and scrape the the rim on the thing, and it was like, oh, I gotta get that fixed. And I hit this website of this guy, it’s called the Wheel King, and it said, here’s the 4 things you gotta look for when you’re buying someone to fix the rims on your exotic car. And he took me through, and he took me through, and he took me through, and he took me through. And he said, if someone meets these 4 things, then you should buy from them. And I’m like, well, obviously, you meet those four things. So because I just go back to the eye and say, you know, you’ve gotta educate people more and more today than you’ve ever done before.

Jennie Wright [00:29:45]:
I agree. And make it I call it making it stupid simple.

Brad Sugars [00:29:48]:
Well, you here’s the thing. You’ve been doing it so long, whatever it is you sell or whatever it is you do, you’ve been doing it so long, you’ve forgotten all of the micro parts to it. So you it’s rare that you can actually think in the customer’s mindset because you skip over 4 or 5 steps that the customer needs to go through. And so that’s why it’s good to have outsiders look at it and see, does this go into enough detail sort of thing?

Jennie Wright [00:30:15]:
Agreed. I love it. Brad, we can keep geeking out all day, and I would like to geek out. It was just so much, so much fun to talk about this stuff. I just just before we wrap, I just wanted to ask you if, you know, what mistake or lesson would you give somebody who’s been listening to this and going, all right, I’m really screwing up and I need to get my, you know what in order. What would you tell them?

Brad Sugars [00:30:42]:
Paul, look, first of all, get outside help. I think that, you know, business is a team sport. And, it’s not something where you have to do it all on your own and where you have to learn it all on your own. You know, it’s it’s like you know, I went and we just rebuilt our website for action coach.com. And, you know, people say, oh, it’s 100 of 1,000 of dollars. And you imagine how much it would have cost me though to not build it, you know, to try and do it myself, to try and do all those things. I think we just gotta understand the fact that you can recruit people, you can have virtual people, like a virtual CMO today as you do. You know, people need to get the help, I I think is the first thing.

Brad Sugars [00:31:24]:
The the other is stop. The things you should stop doing are more important than the things you should stop doing.

Jennie Wright [00:31:33]:
There’s a longer list of the things that you should

Brad Sugars [00:31:36]:
stop doing. You know, in most cases, yeah. And I when I sit down and coach people, the first thing I do is is that, okay, what are the things we’ve got to get you to stop doing? Mhmm. K. What are the sabotage things you’re doing? All that sort of stuff. And if we can get past that, then we can get the things to do on your list because we’ve got the time. Look,

Jennie Wright [00:31:56]:
I keep saying to people, stop playing in Canva, please. Like, you charge people $500 an hour and you’re playing in Canva. I I have a virtual assistant for that. Right?

Brad Sugars [00:32:05]:
Yeah. I remember as a young man, I set myself a price limit. If I could pay someone less than $25 an hour to do it, I would never do it. And of course, that price has gone up over the years. But, you know, if if you’re a business person and you find yourself washing the dishes when you get home or doing your laundry or mowing the lawn, and you make $300 an hour over there and you’re doing something, you could pay someone $12 an hour over there. That’s just silly.

Jennie Wright [00:32:33]:
Yes. You know,

Brad Sugars [00:32:34]:
don’t don’t time is the valuable resource. Even if you pay them just so you can spend more time with your kids or stuff like that, but you’ve gotta know where you’re going. You gotta have a plan to get where you’re going, where you are, plan to go from there to there, and that’s really just all you can do to just keep going. But the biggest advice I give anyone in in any business scenario, anywhere in life, is you’ve just got to keep growing. You. You know, I remember as a 16 year old boy, I met Jim Rohn and, E. James Rohn. Mister Rohn sort of inspired me with so many things and he said, never wish life were easier.

Brad Sugars [00:33:09]:
Wish that you were better. And I realized that my job is to build the best version of me possible. You know, if you are if you stop growing, your business will stop growing. If you stop learning, the business will stop growing. And, the learning you do, the person you become, the business owner you become is the the biggest success you’ll have in your life. But until you become great, you want do we have time for a 60 second story? Go for it. My dad my dad, I was 20 or 21 years of age and I went to my dad and he’d run big companies and I said, Dad, you know what, I just can’t get good people. And he looked me dead in the eye and he said, Brad, you get the people you deserve.

Brad Sugars [00:33:53]:
I said, What? He said, Brad, you’re an average manager running an average company. Only type of person who wants to work for you is average or below. You want great people? You gotta become a great leader, a great manager, run a great company, then great people wanna join your team.

Jennie Wright [00:34:08]:
Okay. Thank you, mister Sugars. That’s

Brad Sugars [00:34:11]:
freaking awesome.

Jennie Wright [00:34:13]:
I love blind. Honestly, I do. I think I do not like to sugarcoat, and and have all the fluff. Just tell me as it is, and then I can go take action. I I don’t need somebody to pat me on the back while they’re doing it either. Just give me the the direction.

Brad Sugars [00:34:28]:
Yeah.

Jennie Wright [00:34:29]:
How can people find you? Where do you wanna send people who are listening to this? Because if you’ve listened this far, then you probably like what Brad’s gotta say and you probably wanna check them out.

Brad Sugars [00:34:37]:
Amazon for the books, bradsugars.com for the training programs. Action coach.com. If you want to go and grab one of my coaches, we’re in 83 countries. So wherever you are, I’m pretty sure we got someone or if you want to become a coach, come join us.

Jennie Wright [00:34:50]:
There you go. Amazing. We’ll put all that in the show notes as well. And if you’re listening to this point, thank you. I love doing this podcast, but if you want to help me out, please go and make sure you do subscribe to the channel, that this is on wherever it is that you’re listening to it, YouTube or Apple or whatnot. And then of course I have my own stuff. I have my own companies that I’m working on, but I’d love you to go check out jennywright.com. See if there’s something there that’s helpful.

Jennie Wright [00:35:15]:
I’ve got a lot of free resources for you there. And if you’re looking to grow your business, look at joining Many Bundles as a contributor or somebody who wants to grab all of the different gifts that we have on Many Bundles and just go to manybundles.com and check that out. Thanks so much, Brad. Appreciate you being here. All right, everybody. Take care. We’ll talk to you soon.