From Operator to Owner: The CEO Blueprint for Freedom and Scale

What does it take to run a business in just one hour a week? In this episode, Brad Sugars reveals the mindset and methods behind evolving from operator to owner and becoming the kind of CEO who builds businesses that run without you. Most entrepreneurs stay stuck in the business; Brad shows how to step out by mastering the four hats of a CEO: Visionary, Builder, Leader, and Investor.

You’ll learn how to delegate with confidence, structure your time for maximum impact (customers, team, numbers, and future), and build systems, culture, and capital that compound. From coaching your CEO to knowing what to say no to, Brad breaks down the real work of scaling to $100M and how to design your business so it grows whether you’re in the room or not.

Subscribe now to The $100M Entrepreneur Podcast and start thinking like a CEO who leads with leverage, not labor.

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/

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Transcript

One Hour A Week Mindset

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How do I run a business on one hour a week? I put a CEO in place or I find a great partner who is the CEO or the operating entity of the business and I coach them. You gotta do that 80-20 thing. Get rid of 80% of the stuff you're doing every year. Hand it off and boy someone do something so that you're more effective as a CEO in your organization. Remember, being a$100 million CEO, a lot of it is about what you say no to. For you to be a$100 million entrepreneur, I'm gonna break it down two different ways. The first. From operator to owner, the CEO's real job when you're building a hundred million dollar business. Learn how to shift from doing the leading and embracing the foreheads of a CEO, visionary, builder, leader, investor. You'll get it on today's episode. So what's the CEO's real job when you're building a$100 million company? If you're becoming that$100 million entrepreneur, what do you need to do? Well, first of all, let's understand that most operators stay stuck as operators. Okay, they're not really entrepreneurs, they're not even just business owners at this point. Business owners own one business, an operator works in one business, entrepreneurs build capital value assets and ultimately build multiple companies. I jokingly said to someone one time, listen, I don't want to be the CEO, I want to employ CEOs. You know, there's a big difference in the mindset of having CEOs run my business. How do I run a business on one hour a week? Really simple. I put a CEO in place or I find a great partner who is the CEO of the operating entity of the business, and I coach them. Ultimately, what you want to do is be the coach of the CEO of your company, the GM, the MD, whatever title you want to give that person running the business, one day you want to be able to one hour a week have a conversation with them and coach them on the success of the business. Read the numbers one hour a week. Now, the roles of a CEO when we're building a$100 million business, for you to be a$100 million entrepreneur. I'm gonna break it down two different ways. The first, okay, visionary, you got to set the direction. You got to be the one who comes up with the vision and sells the vision and communicates the vision, and you got to do that day in, day out, week in, week out. I run town halls, I do weekly training sessions with my people, all of this now. Obviously, technology makes this easy to do all over the world. Given that Action Coach, we now have offices in 84 countries at the time of this filming, it's really important for me to stay in communication with everybody, and technology allows me to build that vision. The second thing, I gotta be a builder, okay? I got to scale the systems. I got to look at what systems need growing, where do I need to, how do I build, what do I build, all those sorts of things. Bring in the right people to be able to make that happen, whether it's technology systems or day-to-day or even soft systems like scripting and and uh, even if it's systems like what I'm doing here with you today, creating knowledge base for you, creating a knowledge base for my team, for our customers at Action Coach, creating a knowledge base for the world on how you build a$100 million business. You know, here's me having done two and a half billion in sales,$100 million a year, we do easily these days. I sit back and say, as a$100 million entrepreneur, visionary is number one, builder is number two, leader is number three. I gotta develop my people. My job is as a leader is to continuously keep developing my people. And uh mostly that's my executives, but as I travel the world, uh we just got back from Rio, where I had my top hundred business coaches in the world, and I spend a week building my team, building them up, teaching, educating, growing, challenging them. The coaches need coaching sometimes, is a big part of it. And fourth is that investor. How do I allocate capital? Raise capital, allocate capital, that's a big part of it. Because when we're building a hundred million dollar operation, we're gonna need capital and we're gonna need to work out who do we raise it from, where do we raise it from, how do we do all that stuff so that we can keep growing and keep building the business. If you're growing at scale, it's very hard to bootstrap at scale. You're gonna need capital to grow at that level. And so learning how to build capital is another aspect of something that we do. I'll make sure I do an episode on that at some stage here. So keep keep coming back so that I keep teaching you more and more things. So, what should you never delegate as a CEO? Vision, culture, key people, key hiring decisions. You as a CEO want to be a part of those sorts of things. Setting the goals, setting the vision, the strategic planning, those are a big part of it. Defining the culture. Yes, you can get input from everybody, but ultimately it's down to you to make the call. Ultimately, it's down to you to hold everyone accountable for living the culture of the organization. So, really big part of it. If I look at the this is the second way I want to break down the job of a CEO in time, okay? How do I break it down in time? I believe as a CEO, I need to spend 25% of my time with my customers. So be out with the customers. I had a client of mine who's in the construction business and he never went to job sites. Big, big construction company. I'm like, dude, when do you go to a construction site? And I said, you've got to start going. So he started on a uh, it was basically every Tuesday, and then it became every Tuesday and Thursday. On the way to his office, he would go to a construction site and start seeing what's going on. And amazingly enough, what did he learn? Some of the dumb things that were happening and some of the great things that were happening out there in his company helped him become a much better leader. 25% of your time needs to be with the customers, whether it's new customers, making sales, existing customers, focus groups, whatever it needs to be, but you need to get in touch with the real consumer of your product or service and hear what they're saying, what they're thinking, what they're feeling, their experience of your business. The second way I allocate my time is team. I want 25% of my time to be with my team, okay? When you think about training them, working with them, coaching them, asking them for feedback, because it's not just a one-way street with your customers, it's not a one-way street with your team members, it's a two-way street. When I'm with my team, I'm learning as much as they are. You know, I'm learning from them, I'm listening to them. When they ask me questions, just the other day I had a Zoom call with my master coaches from around the world asking them some questions about what's going on, where's this at, where's that at? And when I had those 30 people in the room, I was getting more knowledge than they were because I'm learning from them. They're on the ground every day. They're teaching me what's going on in the company, but I'm learning and helping educate them at the same time. Third area is numbers. I want to be in the finance, in the marketing. I want to be in those things, knowing the numbers. I want to get drilled deep. Where is the profit? Where did we hit this? Where did we not hit this? Why is this there? What's that? I got to spend a quarter of my time in the numbers. And that's not just finance, that's marketing as well. But it's also employee engagement scores. It's also net promoter scores. The numbers are where you will find a lot of the answers. And today's world, dang, it's so fast to throw your numbers into an algorithm or a GPT of some sort and say, okay, help me understand what's going on here. And boom, it shoots out to you what's going on in the organization. The fourth area is the future. So I allocate 25% of my time to the future. Doing this is part of the future. Uh hiring people, recruiting people, being out there recruiting great coaches to join my team is part of my 25% of my time. Visioning, planning, strategic partnering, these are future direction things that are a big part of what I have to do as a CEO. Remember, being a$100 million CEO, a lot of it is about what you say no to. Yes, you got to learn how to work with the board, they're part of your team. You got to learn how to work with your senior people, your investors, your strategic partners. You're gonna learn all of that stuff. But how much you say no to is a massive part of your success as a CEO. In fact, I'll give you a hint great executive assistant or personal assistant, or both, if you're uh in that level of business, that's gonna save you a lot because once you define to them where does my time get allocated, they allocate it strictly. You know, I always have the perfect week defined. And my team, my assistant, she knows that's what gets in. None of the other stuff gets in. In fact, it gets to a point where at the end of the year, we literally sit down and define what 20% of the tasks last year or make it into next year type thing. 80% of the stuff I do every year cannot be done by me again the next year. It has to be either delegated, moved off, moved to someone else. But you got to do that 80-20 thing. Get rid of 80% of the stuff you're doing every year, cycle it out to someone else, teach it to someone else, hand it off, employ someone, do something so that you're more effective as a CEO in your organization. So signs that so if you don't ever delegate the vision, the culture, the key people decisions, those sorts of things, uh, invest allocation of capital, those sorts of things where you've got to get your nose in there. The signs that you're still operating the business rather than owning the business, or that you're you're still that day-to-day person rather than if you're experiencing any burnout, any micromanagement, if your family is saying, hey, we don't ever get to see you anymore, you know that you're not doing this right. Okay, you know you're still operating. If you're working 80-hour weeks, then there's a problem. Okay. I remember Lee Akoker, of all the things he said, there's one that I really take value out of, and that was that if you're not at home at six o'clock at night for dinner with your family, then you're probably not running the business properly. That's paraphrasing, of course. But ultimately, if you're still in the if I don't do it, it won't get done, you've got to shift your mindset. You've got to build people so they build it. Now, I know there's a cash thing, and you've got to balance that up. You've got to build more revenue so you can afford more people, or you've got to raise more capital so you can afford more people. Either way, you've got to start building that mindset of eventually it's got to be not you running that aspect of it. So when I first transitioned, and and the first time I retired, sort of thing, and allowed a CEO to run the business, I was lucky because I had just had my first daughter. She was just uh, you know, and it took my time, it gave me something to do, it kept me away from the business type thing. In fact, I tried to do it when I was 26. I went and started playing golf and realized, no, this is not me. I'm a driven person, I have goals, I want to achieve things. And so um, having a business that could run without me didn't mean I could uh, let's just say, emotionally let go of the business. And eventually I had to learn how to let go and trust and allow my team to do it. So the second time I did it, it was much easier because I'd built the systems, delegated, trained the people type thing, and I had the measures in place. Ultimately, you've got to build a business that works without you. You've got to become that person that can do that. So, big thing I want you to do today. Let's start a stop doing list. What are the things you've got to stop doing as the CEO so that you can go on to become 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.