How Scaling Through Partnerships Helps You Reach $100M

Scaling to $100 million requires more than hard work and great execution. It requires leverage.

In this episode of The $100M Entrepreneur Podcast, Brad explains why partnerships are one of the fastest and most effective ways to scale a business into new markets. He breaks down the different partnership models that high-growth companies use, including strategic alliances, joint ventures, affiliates, licensing, and franchising, and how each one helps you grow beyond a single team, location, or customer base.

Brad walks through the partnership models that help businesses expand faster, reduce risk, and enter new markets with leverage. Using real examples from ActionCOACH® and established brands like McDonald’s and Disney, Brad shows how borrowing trust, leveraging existing audiences, and sharing resources can speed up growth while lowering costs and risk. He also outlines the factors that make partnerships work, from aligned values and clear expectations to complementary strengths and clear agreements.

If you are looking for practical ways to expand your reach, enter new markets, and scale beyond yourself, this episode gives you a clear framework to start building the right partnerships.

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

Why Partnerships Beat Solo Scaling

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Alright, so think about this. What's one partnership you could look at right now? Where's a way you could go and find a partnership that would help grow your business into a new marketplace? I love it when we're entering new markets, okay? Most of what I do as an entrepreneur is I find a company that's brilliant in one location. Kind of like what Ray Croc did with McDonald. No one scales to 100 million on their own. Partnerships, affiliates, and franchises scaling beyond yourself. You know, no one scales alone. In this episode, I'm going to share with you about alliances, affiliates, joint ventures, licensing, franchising, ways you can multiply your reach and growth. No one scales to 100 million on their own. Sometime in this whole thing, you're going to need to build maybe partnerships, affiliates, maybe you're going to need strategic partners, franchises, licenses. These are some of the things that are going to be the strategies that get deployed when you're going to build massive business, okay? Scaling beyond yourself and just your one-person team or your one team, one location team. In fact, if I look at what I do today, most of what I do as an entrepreneur is I find a company that's brilliant in one location. Kind of like what Ray Kroc did with McDonald's. You know, in that movie The Founder, they show it that he he wasn't the founder of McDonald's. He found McDonald's, right? But when you see a business that's that good and you think, huh, how many street corners can I have this business on? How many cities should this business be in? And you go do the research, and of course, it used to take a lot of time to do the research. Today, you can jump on ChatGPT or Claude or Grok, whichever one you use, and you can have it do a SWOT analysis of your business in under 10 minutes. You know, it's amazing what you can do. If you've never done that, by the way, jump on AI right now, ask it to do a full SWOT analysis of your business, comparing your business with several of your competitors, blah, blah, blah. Give it a decent bit of information to run on. But if you do that on a deep research, it's going to share with you amazing things. Then you can ask it, hey, what should I do about this? If you really want it, jump on my AI system, the AI boss, Brad Sugar's AI, and ask me. I'll teach you exactly how to build a great business for your business. Now, that being said, let's get back to this. Generally, the fastest path to scale is partnerships. Okay, now what format of partnership is what you've got to work out? What type of partnership? Is it affiliates? Is it joint ventures? Is it uh strategic partners? How do we grow the business when we're looking for partnership? Now, why do partnerships matter? Well, your borrowing reach, if that makes sense. You're someone else has built a relationship, they've gone out there, they've built trust, they've got the resources to grow your business in a new area type thing. So I'll give you two examples from my business at Action Coach. So, for example, when we expand to a new territory, we'll generally bring in a franchise partner, okay? So our partner will open that new territory with us. Oftentimes that partner is an accountant or a financial planner or someone that's already got a customer base of business owners. They might have been a PR company, they might have been a legal firm, they might, you know, all that. And they want to add coaching to their thing. So they've already got the relationships, they've already got the customers, they've got the brand, the no like and trust factor in their marketplace. And when they bring our product to the marketplace, hey, presto, they start selling a whole bunch more type thing. Now flip that over. Not only do we want them as partners, sometimes it's easier and cheaper for me to go and buy, say, an accounting firm. Let's imagine I go into a city, I want to open up Action Coach, do business coaching, and it's I'm gonna have to do the marketing. Let's say it costs me$1,000 to buy a customer. What do I mean by that? So I spend$10,000 marketing, I get 10 new customers. It costs me$1,000 to buy each customer. Does that make sense? Right? Read my book, buying customers. It's pretty simple. Then if I go, huh, I can go and buy this accounting firm, I buy this accounting firm that has$5,000 customers for a million dollars, let's just say. Huh, I'm buying 5,000 customers for a million dollars. That's cheaper than doing the marketing to get the customers, if that makes sense. So sometimes I want to bring them on as partners, other times I can just buy them out and therefore expand my business into that new geography type thing. And maybe I buy another business coaching firm, maybe I buy something aligned with what we do. But in general, partnerships, licensing, franchising, something like that is gonna be needed for you to scale across geographies across the world, into foreign language markets, all the different ways that you want to build your thing. Okay, now, so let's break each one down. Strategic partners, strategic alliances, okay. What is that? It's really where you've got a shared audience. So if I go and look at a company that has a similar target audience to us, very similar in most cases, but they're non-competitive to us, right? So if I was in the restaurant business, I might and say I had a health food restaurant, I might go and partner up with a local gymnasium type thing. They've got people that want to be healthy, I've got healthy food, I can send them customers, they can send me customers, we become strategic partners and help promote each other's business type thing. That can also be called a host beneficiary, a piggyback. There's many ways to term that, but I always think of it as strategic partnerships. Joint ventures. Now, this is where you'll come together. Maybe it's to launch something, maybe it's uh a campaign, but oftentimes joint ventures can be short term, but there are joint ventures that are long-term where you join up, create a new company in a new marketplace, and open that marketplace together with someone that's already got a customer base similar to yours and doing that. I know when we expanded Action Coach across the world, there were certain markets where we would sell a master franchise, other markets where we went in and we saw someone that had an amazing customer base already and said, why don't we build this as a joint venture? They'll bring their customer base to it, we'll bring our intellectual property to it, and hey presto, we open in that new marketplace. Affiliates, I love affiliates because technology has made having affiliates so, so powerful. If you ever want to become an affiliate for me, Brad Sugars, or for Action Coach, make sure you click on the affiliate link on the website and come join us. Because here's the thing: if you've got one person doing the selling for you, you, or five people that work for you doing the sales, versus having 10,000 affiliates across the world selling for you, promoting you, pushing you out there to the marketplace, which one wins? Of course, the thousands of affiliates wins time after time after time. And affiliates are generally going to cost you no more than a salesperson and their commissions would. If you're paying a base salary in commissions and you look at that and go, okay, what percentage of the sale is that? How do I put that into an affiliate program? Hey Presto, off you go, build that sort of thing. If you need help with their stuff, reach out to your action coach. Now, licensing. Uh, the the geniuses of licensing is obviously a Disney corporation. You know, Disney is just, I love studying their business model. I think they've done a phenomenal bunch of business strategies and stuff like that. You think of how many ways they bring out a new movie. How many ways are they gonna sell that movie to you type thing? First there's the movie, then there's the soundtrack, then there's the karaoke of the soundtrack, then there's the the bedding and the sh and the clothing, and then there's the dolls, and then there's you name it, Disney finds a hundred or a thousand ways. I call that the Disnification. How many ways can you sell what you sell in a different format? Like now you can even go on Disney cruises, stay at Disney hotels, you can uh go and buy land at Disney World and build a house on Disneyland. You know what? It's crazy the way they do it. I love their licensing model. But learning licensing is important. Franchising, the ultimate in duplication models, you look at the number of franchises out there. There's the food business. I mean, when I went into franchising with Action Coach, it was definitely a there weren't very many white-collar franchises. Today, there's a bunch of white-collar franchises. Everything that you can look at, but this is the way you build partnerships out there in the world. These are some of the strategic ways that you do that. Now you can go right down to um network marketing, you can go right down to uh referrals and that sort of stuff, being also a way of building partnerships. But ultimately, we want to focus on these big numbers, the ones that can get us a lot of customers at the same time. I remember when I first started Action Coach, what really boosted me off was the newspaper group and the radio stations. In New Zealand, it was more FM. Uh Dougie Gold and his team, they did an amazing job of promoting me to every business owner that was one of their customers. Uh News Suburban Network, uh, News Limited Company, they did an amazing job of promoting me across Australia to all of their advertisers and to their own customers in the newspapers. Love it. So keys to success with this stuff, uh, alignment of values, make sure you got good value matches with the partners that you're wanting to work with. Um, clear, clear goals, clear delineation of who's doing what by when. If there is clear agreements, there's long-term trust built in, everything works better. Uh, and make sure there's complementary strengths. You know, if they don't have great marketing, then bring your marketing team in and so forth. Make sure it works uh both of those ways. Whew. How does it accelerate growth? Number one, new markets. I love it when we're entering new markets, okay? I think that that's possibly one of the best reasons to look for partnerships as you expand geographically and move it. Credibility transfer is another reason it works. They've got the relationships, the no like and trust factor. And um, it also reduces cost because you share the cost sort of thing. It makes it a very different way. Why would it not work? Um not getting clear expectations up front. Misaligned expectations makes partnerships not work in many cases. Weak contracts, um, one of you having to do the majority of the work is is gonna be a uh a reason why it often doesn't work as well. And and the final one I've noticed is a cultural mismatch. Uh, you gotta make sure that that there is that cultural alignment, and and I think that's important to it.

unknown 10:05

Whew.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

All right, so think about this. What's one partnership you could look at right now? Where's a way you could go and find a partnership that would help grow your business into a new marketplace? Even if it's just a strategic partnership where someone will promote you to their customer base, or vice versa. What's a part, what's a strategic partner that you can promote their stuff to your database, to your customer base, where you get a commission or an affiliate commission or something along those lines. Building partnerships. Learn it, study it, understand it, get together with one of the coaches, because our goal is to make sure 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.