More than two decades ago in order to get advice for their businesses various organizations started approaching a young entrepreneur who was still in his early twenties. Despite demand for his expertise, he realized that just consulting was not an answer. He wanted the business owners to implement the strategies he suggested – but time restraints meant that he could not service the demand. It was then the young entrepreneur realized that the missing component between knowledge and implementation – was coaching, and his company ActionCOACH® was born.
Brad Sugars, CEO and Founder of ActionCOACH is the cover feature of our exclusive edition. In an Interview with Insights Success he outlines and explains his journey of creating ActionCOACH.
Below are the highlights of the interview between Brad Sugars and Insights Success:
How do you diversify your organization’s solutions that appeal to your target audience?
ActionCOACH has a lot of offerings designed to appeal to a wide swath of our target audiences including: executive coaching, group coaching, one-to-one coaching, workshops, webinars, and seminars. We also offer our Product Ladder, which includes our ActionCLUB, Assessments Online, SeminarCLUB, Business Valuation, BusinessRICH, GrowthCLUB, BookCLUB, and ProfitCLUB. Each of these offering provides levels of investments designed to meet any organization at its current financial needs and works them up as they meet the goals and objectives. It is not a one size fits all program approach.
What is your approach towards the latest technological innovations? How is it changing your role?
In the future every successful professional will have a business coach. Because even now we see a tidal wave of people who understand it is necessary. Like a marketing plan, you need a business coach to be successful in business. It’s a little-known fact that approximately 40% of Fortune 500 companies make use of business coaching to train and develop their executives. Small and medium-sized businesses know the value of coach. Coaching is something that all business owners and executives can benefit from. That being said, the era of exclusive in-person coaching has died. You can host meetings online, have weekly calls. There are tons of strategies that can be employed to make physical distance a nonissue. Webinars, online training, and digital coaching are becoming the norm, and we utilize all of those tools in our tool kit. We live in an age of unprecedented accessibility. Technology offers us the ability to coach clients in real time. We can access them from their phones, tablets and using CRM and databases we can capture information and analyze it to make better decisions.
Describe some of the vital attributes that every CEO should possess.
Leadership is key, and that’s really about two things: passion and focus. I believe in staying grounded and focused, and allowing your passion for the work to become contagious. These are philosophies that have shaped our organization. And they are important attributes that every CEO should possess. I consider it is essential to be able to hire the best team possible and surround yourself with experts that will support and help you execute your vision.
What are the experiences and lessons that you’ve learned across your journey?
There have been many. But I think the most vital has just reaffirmed what I have always known: this business is about people. They are at the core of everything that we do, and building relationships is important.
According to you which are the technological innovations that will play the important role in shaping businesses in coming times?
As I said before, I believe that a great portion of how business is done will be taken into online formats. I think social media has and is changing things, and business owners need to embrace it or suffer. Additionally, the ability to coach remotely and in a virtual environment provides coaches with limitless opportunities, and erases the physical boundaries based upon a client’s location.
Explain how your coaching strategies are helping business owners to bridge the gap between knowledge and implementation.
It’s about implementing systems that work, and not straying from those systems. Our coaches provide that knowledge and strategize with the business owner and the best means for implementation. If you stick to the system, you’ll find unprecedented success. It’s that simple.
Where does ActionCOACH see itself in the near future and how do you plan to sustain its competency?
ActionCOACH has served thousands of businesses and their owners around the world and in every industry imaginable since 1993, and specializes in showing business owners how to find more time, create better teams within their companies and add more money on their bottom-line. Our approach utilizes fundamental business principles that can be applied to any business in any industry. Because our approach works with every industry, ActionCOACH has been able to expand into more than +70 countries, and we’re proud to say that we have coached more clients, won more awards, gained more recognition and produced more profits than any other coaching company in the world. Expansion is one of our key objectives over the next few years. We plan to be in over 200 countries by 2020.
At ActionCOACH , we are passionate about what we do, and while coaching does improve the bottom line, we know that it also changes lives and communities, one business at a time. We are real people who get real results. These are standards and qualities which every member of our team embodies, and we are proud of the culture we’ve been able to create. When our coaches go out into the world to work with business owners, we know they take these mantras for life and success with them, and that is a large part of what makes us—and them—stand out in the jungles of the business world.
What advice would you like to give to the young minds?
I think young people need to understand the importance of learning before you earn. You have to constantly be working on yourself, personally and professionally. Read. Find mentors. Absorb all that you can.
About the Leader
Brad Sugars, Founder & CEO of ActionCOACH started the organization in Brisbane, Australia in 1993. He came from humble beginnings but has built a life and a business that many would cite as the very definition of success. Sugars, a self-made multi-millionaire, is the founder of the global business coaching franchise ActionCOACH , an international business speaker, author, and entrepreneur. Brad has always been entrepreneurial. Even from a very young age, he was an entrepreneur. He displayed a natural curiosity for how to work smarter and get measurable results. When still at university, Brad Sugars ran several small businesses. Perhaps due in part to his talents which were developed at a relatively young age, Brad’s ability to make companies from every conceivable industry flourish lead him to be known as “The Turnaround Kid”. Brad hired and trained business coaches to leverage his time and to help as many businesses as possible which gave way to the largest business coaching franchise in the world. Brad Sugars was soon asked to speak to business owners and executives – sharing his tips and advice on marketing, sales, systemization and team building. Audiences were wowed. Brad’s “pull no punches” approach was a refreshing change from other speakers at the time. The content of his events were filled with simple and easy ways to grow businesses. Brad Sugars’ seminars quickly grew in reputation as the business building event to see.
His ActionCOACH team works with tens of thousands of business owners in more than 70 countries with his simple yet powerful business growth techniques every day. Brad started his business coaching company in Brisbane, Australia and now headquartered his global enterprise in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Sugars has written 14 business books, the “Instant Success” series, which were originally self-published. In 2006, when McGraw Hill bought the international publishing rights to the series, it was the largest multi–business book deal involving a single author. Sugars recently published The Wealth Coach and Buying Customers 2.0. and in April, his new book Pulling Profits Out of the Hatwill debut and will be available on Amazon and bookstores nationwide.
