From Vision To $100M: A Practical Strategy Playbook

In this episode of The $100M Entrepreneur Podcast, Brad shows you how to build a strategic plan that can actually take your business to one hundred million. He explains why most owners fail before they even start. Their goals are too small, too safe, and not nearly bold enough to create real change. Brad shares how setting crazy goals early in his life pushed him to learn faster, think bigger, and take action long before he felt ready.

He then breaks down the core planning elements you need. A three to five year target that creates urgency, 90 day sprints that keep everyone accountable, and leading indicators that show whether you are on track long before profit appears. Brad also covers OKRs, planning rhythm, and why your systems and leadership must evolve as you scale.

If you are ready to stop playing small and build a plan that forces growth, this episode gives you the clarity and structure to start your journey to one hundred million.

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

Set The $100M Vision

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you're gonna go for a hundred million and you're gonna go for it, then start thinking about your core plan elements. What is it that you want three to five years from now? Now remember my formula for success. Dream goal learn plan act equals success. Set a real goal, a vision, a dream for your business. So the dream is that vision. And it's gotta be massive, it's gotta be crazy. We gotta make change now. Your strategic plan for scaling to a hundred million. Hope is not a strategy. In this episode, I'm gonna walk you through how to build and execute a plan that turns vision into scalable results. All right, let's take a look at your strategic plan. How are you gonna scale to 100 million? What is the strategy? What is the methodology to do it? And yes, the old saying hope is not a strategy is still real in this day and age. When I look at um, I go back to when I read that book, Measure What Matters, and you start thinking about, okay, what really does matter in my business? How do I put in place the objectives and key results? And yes, you should read that book. But when you start thinking about your core plan elements, what is it that you want three to five years from now? Because that's really what the time frame we're gonna look at. If you're going for 100 million, we want somewhere between three to five year time frame. Now, let me state this very clearly. I believe that most people set wimpy goals. I believe that most people set goals that they know they can achieve. If you know you can achieve it, it's not a goal. If you know it's possible, it's a to-do list item, it's not a goal. When you set a real goal, a vision, a dream for your business, by definition, you should not know how to achieve it. If you know how, it's not a goal, okay? When you set a real goal, now remember my formula for success dream time goal times dreams, times goals, times learning, times plans, times action equals success. Dream, goal, learn, plan, act, right? So the dream is that vision. And it's gotta be massive. It's gotta be crazy. You've got to think, I there's no possible way I can achieve this. I have no idea how to do this. I don't even think I can do this. I remember 16 years of age, I met Mr. Jim Rohn, E. James Roan. I went to a Jim Rohn seminar. 31, I actually got to open up for Mr. Roan in Sydney, Australia. And uh there was like five, six thousand people in the audience, and I was the opening act. I showed Mr. Roan my notes from when I was 16. And uh, because the Brisbane City Town Hall is where I met Mr. Roan the first time, had him sign my notes. And uh at 31, when I it was the opening act for him, he said, Yes, please call me Jim. I said, Yes, Mr. Roan. But when he and when he convinced me to set a crazy goal, age 16, I set a goal of financial retirement at age 25. Now, what do you think everybody said to me? Can't happen, won't happen, cannot happen. Well, how would you possibly ever imagine that's gonna happen for you? You know, now technically they were correct. The 16-year-old version of Brad could not make that a reality. 16-year-old me couldn't do that. What they didn't think about though is that I was willing to learn, study, grow. I was on every audio tape, yes, tapes, every then CDs, DVDs, you name it. I did everything, went to every seminar, read every book. Jim Rohn said, read a book a week. So I kept reading. Now here's the thing setting crazy goals made me do crazy things. Setting crazy goals, setting a goal to be amazing, set a goal for a billion, set a goal for a hundred million. I remember in Action Coach about three years ago, I changed the goal of the company from hundreds of millions. So I said, we're gonna go for three billion. And my good buddy Jeffrey Gittimer, if you haven't read Gittimer's books, greatest sales books, greatest salesman, um, Gittimer turned to me and he says, Brad, in typical Gitter language, he says, Brad, you know you're no longer gonna need the book Good to Great, right? You're gonna need a new book. It's called Shit to OK. Well, what do you mean, Jeffrey? We're really good. We're the best business coaching company in the world. What are you talking about? He said, Well, all your systems that are great for a hundred million are no longer gonna be good enough for a billion. All your systems, all your people, all your branding, all your everything that you think is great for you at 100 million is not gonna cut it when you go for billions. I went, dang, he's right. We had to break apart everything. You know, setting that massive goal meant I disrupted everything in my own company. But if you're gonna go for a hundred million and you're gonna go for it, then the craziness of it means you do crazy things. Now, the second thing, and this is why I say the three to five year goal, if you give yourself 10 years to do it, there's no immediate action needed. There's no, oh, we gotta dive right in right now, we gotta change this, change that, cut this, stop doing that, move this, jump on this. No. There's no urgency if you give yourself 10 years to do it. If you give yourself two years or three years or four years to do it, then there's urgency. We gotta make change now. And that's a big part of the strategy sort of thing, making sure that you focus in on that. What are the priorities to do in the next 90 days? Things that we have to get done immediately. Now, the cadence of planning shifts. Once you move to that three to five year plan, you've got to start changing up. You've got to start understanding that 90-day planning is necessary. You've got to review every quarter. So review it. Quarterly sprint, review, quarterly sprint. You got to have weekly and daily accountability built into your management systems, built into your leadership tracks and your leadership functions of the organization. That annual reset, the two days annual reset, where are we at? What worked, what didn't work, what happened, how did we do this? What do we got done there? Really evaluate the previous year. And then really brainstorm what else can we add into the next year? What can we do? What's changed in the market? How does the market shift? AI is shifting the world real fast, technology's moving it real fast. So quarterly reviews, quarterly sprints, that's the way we got to make sure that we build that cadence in to getting our business running so that we're gonna hit those numbers type thing. But set a crazy goal in a crazy time frame so that there is immediate necessary action for you to get to work on this thing. Now, metrics do matter. That's why I bought up a measure what matters. I think it's a phenomenal book. Here's the thing: lagging indicators might have worked to get to a million or three million or 10 million even, you know, like profit, cash flow, all of those past numbers. But leading indicators is what's gonna get you to 100 million. Things like, you know, if if let's say you got, like for us, we have about a 77-day sales cycle uh for our franchise business. We have about an 18-day sales cycle for our coaching business, because we give away our first two weeks free. Yes, we give away the first two weeks free, and people think we're crazy. But you gotta work out if coaching suits you, and we gotta work out if you suit us, you know. Picking great clients is what makes us great at what we do. We want to work with the best of the best, and hopefully that's you. So, leading indicators, uh, lead generation numbers type thing. What's our social media interactivity? What's our open rate on our emails? Those things are leading indicators. A lot of marketing-oriented things are leading indicators. Then you've got economic leading indicators. You know, when you're building a million-dollar business, you don't really have to take economic and larger uh things into account. When you're building a 100 million or a billion-dollar company, you got to take all of that societal numbers into account. Does inflation impact? Yes. I do business in 84 countries, and I can tell you, when the economy changes in a country, it affects our business. So we got to make sure we're focused on that sort of stuff as well. Leading indicators not lagging. Now, accountability. As you move, you're gonna need not just, yes, you need a coach, okay? 100% you need someone that helps you install the systems. And for us, that's ABOS, the Action Coach Business Operating System. When we install that with you, when you take you through the six steps during that process, in fact, I have a podcast which is uh about two and a half hours long where I explain the whole of ABOS. Make sure if you haven't already, you watch that podcast, all right? And interestingly enough, when we install, because we have three and a half thousand strategy cards. I forget what it was at last count, it's like three thousand six hundred and something strategy cards. So if you're looking at time management, there's 70 or 80 strategy cards that you can use to install into your business so you get all the time management operating. Now you won't want 70 or 80, you might pick six of them that are perfect for your situation, but that's what we do. So you need a coach. Next, you're gonna need peer groups, okay? And that's why at Action Coach we run peer groups. Community is a big part of it. If you haven't joined Action Nation, make sure you jump on and join Action Nation on Facebook or LinkedIn. It's where we get all of you together and you help each other grow. Can you know, business ownership can be a dang lonely road? And I don't want it to be lonely for you. I want you to be part of a community. That's what Action Nation is. Talk to your local Action Coach and get together with local community, local business owners who do phenomenal things and uh you can be a part of it. So, coach, peer group, next, you are gonna need a board of directors at some point, okay? Now, if you're bringing on investors or having investors work with you, you're gonna need, they're gonna want board members and board seats for you. So you're gonna have to learn how to work with a board, okay? How do you do that CEO thing of uh working with the board and having them help you, okay? You don't report to the board, the board helps you grow the business, and you've got to learn the distinction between a reactive board who sits there and asks you dumb questions and a proactive board that helps you and helps your executive team build the organization and helps work that way. Learning to work with a board will become a part of it. So as you build your strategic plan, remember where that board kicks in at some point in time. So, what's the challenge? To build your plan. So, building your plan, if you're great at it, fantastic, do it on your own. Rarely do I find business people who can do it on their own. Normally you need to bring in a facilitator or a coach, or if you want to, action coach, we have it all digitized. You can come work with your coach, they can take you through it over 12 weeks, build your business plan and install the action coach systems into your business. We teach you over 12 weeks how to build that plan. You enter it in our system, it's a live plan. It literally has your numbers, you can change them, all of that sort of stuff. But build an amazing plan. That's the thing. If you need help with the strategizing of it, come join me. I teach this stuff every year. I love teaching it, but I want to see you 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.