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

In this transformative episode of the $100 Million Podcast, Brad Sugars issues a blunt reality check: if you're the business, you don't have a business, you have a demanding job working for a crazy person, namely yourself. He redefines a true business as a commercial, profitable enterprise that thrives without the owner’s constant presence, introducing his golden rule of leverage: do the work once, get paid forever. Drawing from his own life, Brad recounts how, after 10 years building Action Coach, he appointed a CEO to run the company so he could step away and be a present dad when his daughter was born. He also shares the clever story of a multi-award-winning hairdresser who faked a broken arm to force a handoff of clients, ultimately tripling his prices, working one day a week, and keeping the salon thriving.

 Brad lays out the three foundational pillars, robust systems (document, automate, delegate with training and measures), an empowered team (recruited, trained, and trusted), and strong cash flow (through predictable leads, sales, and repeat business) and maps the four levels of work that elevate you from employee (paid once) to manager (paid long-term), owner (paid forever), and finally investor (money works for you). 

This episode is your roadmap to escaping the owner’s trap, systemizing your way to freedom, and building a scalable enterprise that doesn’t collapse without you.

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About Brad Sugars
Internationally known as one of the most influential entrepreneurs, Brad Sugars is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, and the #1 business coach in the world. Over the course of his 30-year career as an entrepreneur, Brad has become the CEO of 9+ companies and is the owner of the multimillion-dollar franchise ActionCOACH®. As a husband and father of five, Brad is equally as passionate about his family as he is about business. That’s why, Brad is a strong advocate for building a business that works without you – so you can spend more time doing what really matters to you. Over the years of starting, scaling and selling many businesses, Brad has earned his fair share of scars. Being an entrepreneur is not an easy road. But if you can learn from those who have gone before you, it becomes a lot easier than going at it alone.

Please click here to learn more about Brad Sugars: https://bradsugars.com/

Build a Business That Gives You More Time, Money & Life:
Get The $100M Playbook: https://go.bradsugars.com/100m-playbook-ebook

Transcript

If You Are The Business

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you are the business, basically you don't have one. Let me state that again. If you are the business, you don't have a business. You have a job, you work for a crazy person. Yes, I'm calling you a crazy person if you have to be there every day. Ever more with ever less. You create more results with less input. My way of teaching it to you leverages do the work once, get paid forever.

Defining A Real Business

SPEAKER_00 0:21

How to build a business that works without you. In this episode, you'll discover how to escape the owner's trap and build a commercial, profitable enterprise that runs without you at the center. You can build a business that works without you. In fact, my definition of a business is a commercial, profitable enterprise that works without you. If you have to be there, it's not a business. It's not something you can sell. It's dependent upon you, dependent upon your time. And I always say that if I have to be in my business, I work for a crazy person type thing. It's hard to be the CEO and the owner. It's hard to do both of those, and that's why business coaching is such a big thing. If you are the business, basically you don't have one. Let me state that again. If you are the business, you don't have a business. You have a job, you work for a crazy person. Yes, I'm calling you a crazy person if you have to be there every day. Now it takes time to do this. I'm not saying on day one a business should run without you. I'm saying over a period of time. Sometimes that takes a year, three, seven years, maybe even ten years. I remember the first time I got action coach to run without me was about 10 years into the business. My daughter Kobe was born, and I was like, you know what? I want to be a dad. And uh I appointed my chief sales officer as CEO. He was phenomenal. He ran the business while I was off being a dad. And uh I had a great time. But here's the factors that make that happen, especially if we're going for

The Owner’s Trap And Timeline

SPEAKER_00 1:45

a hundred million, okay? So the key pillars are really three things, okay? Systems. So you got to document, you gotta automate, you gotta delegate. And if you don't build training and measures and systems, it's not delegation, it's abdication, okay? You got to build in training, measures, systems so that it is proper delegation type thing. Um, when people install our management systems, uh I help them understand that you need both management and leadership. Management is about competency and productivity, leadership is about passion and focus. So there's two different things you got to look at to build that. And so the delegation happens when you've got management and leadership happening in the organization. The second thing that brings us to is team. How do we recruit the right people? How do we train the right people? How do we empower them to do great work in the company? So the pillars to getting it to run without you great systems, great team. And the third is obviously cash, okay? Cash

Three Pillars: Systems, Team, Cash

SPEAKER_00 2:41

flow, marketing, predictable lead flow, predictable sales, uh, predictable repeat business. Those are some of the things. It's not just revenues, it's got to be that obvious bottom line profitability of the organization. Now, how do we get there is what we're gonna look at. So there's four levels of work, all right? So when we start thinking about the four levels of work, we got to understand this principle called leverage, right? And what does that mean? Well, leverage is by, well, let's do the mathematical formula for it first. Divide to multiply. So if you want to learn my five ways formula, just on YouTube or anywhere, type in Brad Sugar's five ways formula, it'll take you through Leeds conversion. It's an example of me breaking something down, in other words, dividing it up, fix each part, and you multiply the end result. Well, that's how I learned leverage mathematically, but then I had to learn it differently. And so I was first taught it as ever more with ever

Leverage And The Four Levels Of Work

SPEAKER_00 3:36

less. So, you know, you create more results with less input, sort of thing. And ultimately I had to work out how I was gonna teach it. And my way of teaching it to you, leverage is do the work once, get paid forever. Okay, I'll say that again. Do the work once, get paid forever. So, for example, I write books, okay? 18 books on business, sales, you name it. Those books, I work once, I get paid forever type thing. Really important. Real estate investing, building a business. I build a business that works, so I don't have to. I build it one time, I get paid forever. Ultimately, that's what we're looking for. So, how do the four levels of work come into that? Well, employee work is do the work once, get paid once. Okay. Do the work one time, get paid one time. So uh if you're a hairdresser, you cut hair, you get paid one time for cutting one lot of hair type thing. That's employee work. If you're still doing employee work, that's okay, but you got to get out of it at some point in time, or at least be at very high-paid employee work. I'm not gonna tell LeBron James, don't do employee work because he's a superstar basketball player, he's getting paid so much money to do the work. It makes sense to do the work at that point. Second level of work is manager work, and that's where it's do the work once, get paid long term. So, what are managers' jobs? Planning, hiring, training, all the management jobs in a company where it's you work one time and you get paid long term type thing. Systemization. These are parts of managers' jobs. The third level of work is owner's work, where we do the work once, get paid forever. Okay, do the work once, get paid forever. You build a business that works and get paid forever. So you're working on your business, not in your business. When Tom Watson said I went to work on IBM, not in IBM, it changed my thinking dramatically. He said, I built a vision for what IBM was, and I went to work on creating. That's why I propose work from home Wednesday. I believe as an owner of a business or a CEO, you've got to go and work from home one day a week. And the faster you can get to that, the faster you can start working on, not in the business type thing. Get out of the day-to-day and work on the strategic and the long term and the growth aspects of what you're doing. And then that fourth level of work is called investor. Now, in the first three, it's do the work once, get paid once, do the work once, get paid long term, do the work once, get paid forever. Well, the investor is where put your money to work so it works for you. So there's you working, people working for you, and then finally your money working for you is that final phase of doing the four levels. So if I look at some of my clients over the years who've stepped out of the day-to-day operations, I remember uh when I first meet people, oftentimes they're on the tools, they're doing the job, they're building the work that the client comes in for. They're doing the

Case Study: The Hairdresser Steps Back

SPEAKER_00 6:31

job. And I always talk to them about it. And I remember one particular client of mine in the hairdressing business. Now, he was hairdresser of the year several times. He was phenomenal at what he did, had a team of more than 20 people, one of the biggest salons in the country. Phenomenal result. And yet I said to him, at some stage, you got to stop cutting hair. And he's like, Well, how do I stop that? Now, magically, he went away for the weekend and he came home from a ski weekend with a broken arm. Yes, he'd put a sling on it, pretending it was broken. One of his buddies was a uh uh doctor and gave him the cast thing. So he couldn't cut hair. He ultimately had to stop, and for him, it was hand off his customers to other people for the six weeks he had his broken arm, and all of a sudden, at the end of that six weeks, he could come back to work and he could go back at only one day a week. He tripled his prices, so about a quarter of his customers stayed with him, and the rest stayed with the other salon team members. So he had handed off his customers. Now, I don't think you have to be that drastic to step back from the work, but you got to start building a plan now where you

Retraining Customers And Staff

SPEAKER_00 7:37

can hand over. I remember making the mistake early in my business where I'd say to customers things like, you know, I'm the owner, I'm always here, call any time. And guess what they did? They called any damn time. And, you know, that was me. That was my fault. I trained my customers the wrong way. I trained my customers to need me. I trained my staff to need me. Ultimately, I had to train my customers differently, I had to train my staff differently so that they didn't need me in that scenario is a really important aspect of it. So, how do you do

Start With One Area And Go Proactive

SPEAKER_00 8:07

this? The way you do it is you start with one area of the business. So start looking at your time matrix, okay? Start recording, okay, where am I getting most of my time chewed up? And if you're still a reactive manager, meaning you're putting out fires, you're jumping in, fixing things for people, we got to move you to proactive, okay? So get in touch with your local action coach and ask about installing our management systems or installing the whole of the action coach business operating systems. But when we get to that proactive stage of being a real manager, a real leader in the organization, then what we're starting to understand is a different way of doing business. The way I want you to start is by thinking, okay, what's one area where I can build it, I can build the systems, I can build the measures, I can train the people, and it can run without me. Just fix one area. Get one area of the company that's demanding too much of your time right now. Get that area running without you. Now, I want to advise on one thing. Oftentimes, if you're not getting great results in a business, it's

The Right Seat Problem And Hiring

SPEAKER_00 9:07

because you've either got the wrong person in the seat or you've got no person in the seat. Chatting with someone the other day and they're complaining to me about their marketing results. And I said, Well, tell me about your marketing person. Who's your marketing manager? Who's the person running all that sort of stuff? And they went, Well, Brad, really, it's kind of me. I don't really have a marketing manager. I have a few people that do marketing and I'm the marketing manager. I said, Well, if you're the marketing manager, show me your marketing plan. And he said, Well, I don't have a written marketing plan. I said, if you don't have a written plan, you don't actually have a plan. So we had to look at it and say, okay, what would fit a great marketing manager for your business? What would that look like? And once we built a great plan for here's what a great marketing manager would look like. This is the experience they would have had. This is how I know they'll be successful type thing. I'm going to measure them in these ways. Once we built that ideal outcome, we went out and recruited the marketing manager for them. And hey, Presto, once there's a marketing manager in place that they can hold accountable, all of a sudden, marketing results start kicking in for the business, for

Work On The Business And Scale

SPEAKER_00 10:07

the person. Building a hundred million dollar company build is about building great people who build great companies, okay? That's what you've got to do at some point in time. But the definition of a commercial, profitable enterprise that works without you means we have to do what Tom Watson taught us all that time ago in IBM. You've got to work on the business, not just in the business. You've got to build a business that works so you don't have to. And that starts with you becoming a hundred million dollar entrepreneur. Thanks for joining me on the $100 million podcast. If you've got value from today's episode, make sure you've subscribed and share this with all of your friends. Never miss a strategy that could change your business and your life. And remember, the fastest way to scale is to learn from those who've done it. That's what this show is all about. See you on the next episode.