How to Build a Successful Brand, with Brad Sugars

The Unnoticed Entrepreneur podcast is sponsored by Prowly, the all-in-one tool for PR experts.

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today we're not taking any gambles. We're going to go and talk to Brad Sugars, who's in Las Vegas, Nevada. Brad Sugars, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jim. Lovely to be here and great to join you.

Look, it's wonderful to have you because obviously you are voted as one of the world's top coaches. You've authored over 16 books. You've got 1,100 offices for the Action Coach business franchise, and you're also a father of 5. So it's an impressive portfolio. And we're going to talk today about how you've built an amazing franchise business. We're also going to talk about how you've managed to keep sort of not just one, but 2 brands going with your Brad Sugars brand and Action Coach and multiple other businesses and whatever else comes up. I'm sure it's going to be inspirational before we ask you your tip of the day. So Brad, tell us, how have you built the Action Coach brand and got that noticed?

You know, I think there's 3 major things to building the brand. Number one is I always recruited the best of the best. I would never try and recruit people to my team that I didn't think would add value to the team in a massive way. I love the word recruit because I don't just hire, I recruit. I go out and hunt for the right people type thing. I think the second is I've never shied away from a stage, Jim. You know, in the early days I did more than 200 events in a year, so I was on stage everywhere. And I think the third is partnering with the right people. And again, I go back to the early days. I partnered with newspaper groups, magazines, radio station groups, chambers of commerce. And I gave my services for free to put me in front of massive audiences. And in those first 2 years, just the newspaper group in Australia put me in front of 288,000 business owners. If you want to be out there, you got to be out there. There's no other way to put it. You know, you want to get noticed, you got to do something noticeable. And I was giving free events back when free events didn't count. Now, in today's world with YouTube and Google and everything, it's very hard to make the free events work because everything's free online at this point in time. But you've got to do things to get noticed. My latest book is called Raise Your Hand Marketing because what I want people to do when I do something, I ask them to raise their hand. Hey, let me know if you want a copy of this. Type the word webinar below if you want to get the link. You know, I want to get them to acknowledge and put their hand up and say, hey, I'm ready to be a part of what you do. I think the biggest thing though is if you're going to be out there, be out there. The brand Great people, always be out there and always have the greatest partners. Business is a team sport.

Yeah. Fantastic. I love the way that you ask people to take action and I've watched you on stage as well. You're very challenging as a kind of presenter-cum-coach, which is wonderful, right? You do challenge the audience a lot as well. When did you start ActionCOACH? Just to give us a bit of history.

1993, August. I kicked off ActionCOACH. Today will be our 30th birthday this August.

Congratulations. Yeah. Just give us some sort of historical context. So now you've got some 1,100 coaches around the world. So first of all, I'd like you to just explain when you went to those newspapers, presumably people like Fairfax or Macquarie in Australia. First of all, what did you offer them? Because it's easy you saying, well, I just went to the newspapers and we did it. But for those of us that haven't done that, you know, it'd be great for you just to explain, you know, do you just turn up, you make a phone call, help us to understand how you did that.

You mentioned earlier, you know, you got with your Vodafone, you got the subscription to see Brad Sugars, but partnering with any company is looking at it. What is their need, want, and desire? So for example, we work with a lot of accountants around the world and we go to the accountants and people say, oh yeah, I'd love the accountants to introduce me to their customer base. No accountant wants to introduce you to their customer base. They don't care about that. What does the accountant care about? More billings, more hourly rates, et cetera, et cetera. They want to make more money. So if I go to an accountant and say, listen, I'd like to show you how you can get twice as many hours of work per client that you have right now. I'd like to show you how to do that because if we go in and help them grow their business, then of course they need more accounting type thing. And so you've got to put it in their best interest. Now you've got to get in the door. Getting in the door is one of my specialties. I like using lumpy mail, Jim. You talk about getting noticed. My first ever lumpy mail strategy was I bought the right arm off a bunch of mannequins. My brother did it for me. We've got a big piece of wood. And we mounted them on it and we'd had a thing engraved that was a brass plate, which was my business card. And we'd send this in a box to you and it said, I'd give my right arm for an hour of your time. And so I do things like that, Jim, that get me noticed and get me in front of people. I've done everything from sending, like I had one marketing campaign where I stuck a Band-Aid to the outside of the envelope, an actual Band-Aid. Like we opened them up, we stuck it on there. But the headline on there was in handwriting, you know, stop the bandaid solutions to your business. You know, this was back when direct mail was big. Direct mail's come back, by the way, because everyone's sick of email. Their mailbox is empty. So direct mail and lumpy mail as I like it. I've sent invitations to people on a silver platter. Like I actually put a silver platter in the envelope with the invitation on it stuck to the silver platter. So yeah, getting those sorts of things and getting in the door is step one. People are so lazy trying to get in the door, Jim. They try and send a note or they send me a LinkedIn message. Like, really? If you want to get to see me, do something. Learn my favorite thing. I'm a rum drinker. And if anyone finds me a great bottle of rum from around the world and sends that and says, hey, Brad, bought you this bottle of rum. I'd just like 20 minutes of your time just to chat about what we do in business. There's no way in the world you're turning that down.

Yeah. Hey, look, I love that idea of getting your foot in the door. There's an old story, isn't there, of someone sending one trainer and saying, you know, now I've got my foot in the door. I'd love to come in. And they walked into the job interview with just one shoe on and said, can I have my trainer back?

He used to send bars of soap with the old saying, if you don't know me from a bar of soap, we'd send a piece of wood with a hole in it. You don't know me from a hole in the wall. I actually had one of our companies where we had the guys doing door knocking and we got their business card made and it was like an A3 size. So it's that, you know, about this big. And you'd walk into the receptionist and you'd say, would you mind giving my business card to the boss? And they're like, what do you mean? Well, could you take my card out to the boss right now? I'd like to have a quick chat with them. They walk it out and pay. That's my commercial cleaning business. So we do it that way.

So, Brad, that's wonderful. And I think the idea of doing something different, right? It's not just email or as you say, LinkedIn, which we're all getting inundated with, or just a video. But now you've got, you know, this amazing business. So you've moved from Australia up to America to Vegas. Tell us the next part of the business has been acquiring or attracting, I should say, all these franchisees. So I'd love to hear how you've done that because getting people to buy into a franchise where they're putting money down, especially into a service business, takes some skill. So how have you done that? You've got the franchise noticed and then to be perceived to being valuable. How do you do that?

I think there's 3 main keys to that. Number one, people don't buy a franchise, they join a team. So they're joining a movement, they're joining something. Our vision of world abundance through business reeducation, our 14 points of culture, who we are, who you are and why you do what you do are more important than what you do. If you're building a team, if you recruit based on who and why, and recruiting franchisees is no different to recruiting team members, no different to recruiting customers. It's all about recruiting, you know, and it's about being proactive and having people join a team. They join a leader, they join someone. Now, when someone's buying a franchise or investing, I like the word invest in a franchise because its ROI is more important than anything. You've got to look at what are their dreams and goals, and your business has to help their dreams and goals become a reality. Now, most of the people who join my team have an absolute passion for helping people. We give them a methodology to take their 10 or 20 or 30 years business experience and give back. Yes, they're going to make a lot of good money by running the business, but they get to give back, Jim. They get to do that thing there. The second part of it is marketing. Obviously, you know, you've got to do great marketing. You've got to be everywhere. You've got to do everything. I know in the UK, we just launched Business Unusual, our TV show on Amazon Prime. You've got to do all of those things and invest in it. Marketing is an investment if you do it right. When I wrote my book, Buying Customers, Or probably 12 years ago, people were like, what do you mean buying customers? Well, if you invest $1,000 and you get 10, it costs you $100 to buy each one. So how many customers do you need to buy? What amount of money are you allocating to buy them? And does that add up? No, you want 100 customers. You're only investing $1,000. It costs you $100 to buy each one. You're not going to get the number of customers that you're trying to buy. And I think the third thing then in franchising is obviously the success of the actual product, the franchise. The franchisees have to succeed. You know, in the UK where you are, we've been now, I think it's 12 years. I think US might be 12 years. UK is 10 years running in the franchise. Our franchisees satisfaction survey done by an outside firm shows us to be in the top 50 for franchisee satisfaction worldwide. We're in the Hall of Fame for that. So your franchise partners, and that's how we always refer to them, they're our partners in business, must love the business and love you. And I think because we're a business coaching business, the way we support them, coach them, train them, we believe franchisees and our customers come to us for 4 things: community, accountability, results, and education. So if we give them the community and we build that community, they might join for the business opportunity, but they'll stay for the community and the camaraderie of their The accountability they get, because most business owners, I hate to say it, Jim, but their goal in life is to pay the bills, make wages. You know, that's their goal. What we aim to do is give them accountability to their dreams and goals. Education, because if you bring them the best education that they can't get in other places, then obviously it changes the way they respond to you. And finally, the results come from those 3 other things.

Well, that's a really comprehensive package, Brad. And having met the ActionCOACH people here in the UK at one of the events arranged down here in the southwest of England, I could feel the energy and the commitment. And as you say, really everyone working towards a higher purpose, which is, you know, really what actually keeps the longevity of a business, isn't it? But I do want to touch on something, Brad.

Yeah. Just always a reminder to people, repeat business equals profit.

And you know that better than anybody, because I mean, you've been here. It says on your website, you've got Forbes, Franchise Times, Entrepreneur Magazine Awards. So Brad Sugars, now I do want to ask you, you have sort of been running counter to this kind of theory that the riches are in the niches because Action Coach in a funny way is not just doing a particular kind of coaching for a particular sector. How can you break that rule or are other people wrong about the riches are in the niches?

Or are we breaking the rule?

And that's the question.

Yeah. What is a niche? Is small business the niche that we go after? Because all of the big consulting companies go for the 50+ employees or the 500+ employees. Who's going for the person with no employees? Who's going for the people with less than 50 employees, less than $5 million in revenue a year? Who's going after them? Nobody on a worldwide scale, Jim. So maybe it is a niche, but then again, Maybe I break the rule again by saying our marketing is done by niching, Jim. Our marketing to tradespeople is very different to our marketing to doctors. And they're very different again to our marketing to accountants and attorneys and professions. So maybe we don't break the rule. Maybe we just are the rule, but we're doing it a different way. If I look at a different business of mine, we have a marketing services firm based out of London. And in that we only work with accountants, lawyers, and business coaching firms. I bought it because they were getting great, or I bought half of the company because they were doing great results without. And we are very clear on who we work with in that business. So yeah, maybe we're breaking the rule, but maybe we're using the rule to our advantage. I'm not sure it is a rule though, Jim, and that's something we could spend a whole show debating just that topic. But I do love from a marketing perspective being very niche-oriented. But location is also a niche, Jim. Like our franchisees operate in a territory of around about 10,000 businesses. So that locality is also a niche, you know, that the niche is that is their town, that is their home base. So a lot, lot to be said to niching out there. I'm not sure I would disagree with it yet, but I might challenge it. Yeah.

What you've shown as well is that as an entrepreneur, you can be a little bit more open-minded and see a niche by a profile demographic or by geography rather than some slavish adherence to a formula, which is, you know, almost Antithetical to being an entrepreneur in the first place, isn't it? We're not very good at following formulas, although you've built one with your business.

I build a lot of formulas because I find teaching is a lot easier when you have formulas, but I'm also a believer in the Disneyfication of businesses, Jim. I like to think of, you know, I have a set of intellectual property. How many ways can I sell that? I can sell it with a hat. I can sell it with a water bottle. You've got your mug right there. You know, you do it the same. You have your podcast, your blogs, your books. Like there's a lot of ways to sell the same thing to different niches. You know, some people love podcasts, some people love books. So there's different ways to hit different target audiences.

Now, there are different ways as well for people to consume Brad Sugars. Now we've got Brad Sugars, the brand and the website, and we've got a number of businesses, including Action Coach. I'd love for you to just talk about how you've managed to Have this sort of multi-brand approach. Can you talk to that, Brad? How have you done that?

Originally there was no logic to it, Jim, because I was doing seminars just as Brad Sugars and I didn't even have Action Coach at the time. And then when we started Action Coach about 4 years in, I sort of started to shell the Brad Sugars brand and just go under the Action Coach brand. What I've noticed though over the years is that as the Action Coach brand grew with the sort of Gen X and boomers, the millennials didn't really relate to that brand as well. And so we could choose, do we go and fully rebrand and start to move into that millennial and Gen Z, or do we stay with the strong brand that really hits the target audience that we have, or do we go the other way? And so I reinvigorated the Brad Sugars brand. The other thing is, as an entrepreneur, I can say things that I can't as CEO of the company. As CEO of the company, I have to represent the company in a certain way and do certain things for our value. Our stakeholders want a certain way of doing things. The Brad Sugars brand can go and do things other way. If you look at someone, I'm nowhere near as famous, but an Elon Musk, the Tesla brand is here. The SpaceX brand is here. The Elon Musk brand is here. He doesn't monetize the Elon Musk brand, but he probably could and should if he ever wanted to. I think if you're good at building your brand promise and the brand promise of ActionCOACH is different to the brand promise of Brad Sugars brand, you know, Brad Sugars is in business, wealth, and life skills, whereas ActionCOACH is a business brand. And it had to be different to say that. So yeah, we had to invest time, energy, and effort to build a different brand.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And do you think there's a particular time for an entrepreneur when they can hold, if you like, those multiple Brands, because some entrepreneurs have got a business that isn't yet ready to sustain this duality of brands. Brad, what was your view on that?

You know, I go back to my definition of a business and that is a commercial profitable enterprise that works without me. If I'm still needed on a day-to-day basis to run that business, then no, you can't move to that second brand or even a second business for that matter. It's interesting though, Jim, I built a lot of other brands. Our commercial cleaning business, our restaurants, all of those other things, our catering companies. I built those brands separate and distinct from me. I do love the idea though, Jim, that all businesses should have a figurehead. I do think that a voice, be it an employed CEO or, you know, when I sit down and look at Apple, yeah, absolutely. Tim Cook is nowhere near as exciting as Steve Jobs was on stage, but he's still the figurehead. He's still the go-to person. Now we're seeing Microsoft's figurehead is beating Apple's figurehead vehemently in the press and in the ways that he is running the business. And just even today, I saw how he fired people and he got praised for firing 10,000 people. Like, there's no way Tim Cook's getting praised for firing 10,000 people ever. You know, so I think that as you learn to build other brands, having your own brand at some point is necessary. And I I've always believed that as an entrepreneur, one of the things that allows me to buy companies and all of the venture capital companies I talk with, they got to pay more for companies because the companies don't see the value they're going to add. I don't have to pay as much for companies I buy because the companies I'm buying into see me and go, that guy is going to add so much value to our organization. We want you as a partner more than we want your money. They still want my money, of course, but—

But exactly. I can see it because the Brad Sugars brand brings all the assets in terms of capital growth and market penetration and all those other wonderful things that you've got from your courses and your books and your speaking. Brad, you know, this show could talk with you for hours and I would love that, but we only have 20 minutes. So if there was one tip that you'd like to give to I'm going to say my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs, because you've now transcended that category. I've seen the picture with you and Richard Branson. So for the rest of us mere mortals, what would you say as a tip on how to get noticed?

Buddy, I'm definitely still a mere mortal. That speaking gig, I was in Dublin and Michelle Mullen spoke before me. Then it was me. Then it was Sir Richard. It was the lady, the convict, and the sir, you know, so definitely still a mere mortal. Look, I think go back to something I said earlier and then top it off. Ask people to raise their hand all the time. Never do any marketing where you're looking for likes or follows and stuff. Ask people to say, hey, I'm interested. You know, for example, Jim, when this podcast is released, I'll put a picture up and say, you won't believe the second question Jim asked me. Phenomenal. The answer I gave was stuff that I've never really taught in business or in seminars. If you'd like a copy of the podcast, type the word podcast below. And so I will then get into a conversation. I believe that conversations precede conversions. And if in today's world you generate more conversations, you will do better. It's no more complex than that. But the other thing that I always say is that your business cannot outgrow you. The more you learn, the more you earn. And as the owner of a business, if you stop learning, then your business is going to stop growing. So subscribe to Jim's podcast. Keep listening.

Yeah. Do like Brad says, subscribe to the podcast. I'm going to put it down. I can't believe the answer he gave to the 3rd question either. You must click subscribe. Brad Sugars, we could chat all day. Thank you so much for joining me and talking about being an entrepreneur, building a big brand, and some also personal things as well. Brad Sugars, thank you so much for joining me from the wonderful gambling city of Las Vegas, Nevada. Thank you. And taking all the risk really out of our own business with all your amazing Action Coaching. Thank you so much, Brad.

Hey mate, wonderful to be here. Thank you for taking the time to interview me and look forward to release date.

So you've been listening to Brad Sugars, the founder and CEO of Action Coach, and me here, Jim James. And I will put his details, of course. If you still can't find Brad Sugars, then that's another matter. But I will of course put Brad's details in the show notes. Thank you for joining me, Jim James. And if you've enjoyed this, do please share it with a fellow entrepreneur. If you've got a chance to rate it, that would be really fantastic on your player. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating. Now I'd just like to mention our sponsor for this show. The Unnoticed Entrepreneur Podcast is sponsored by a company called Prowly. Prowly is an all-in-one software for leveraging your public relations activities. You can boost the media relations game for your business, find media contacts, send out press releases, and get more coverage while saving time and money on everyday tasks. Check it out, prowly.com.