The Power of Leverage: Work Once, Get Paid Forever

Most businesses struggle to scale because they confuse effort with leverage.

In this episode of The $100M Entrepreneur Podcast, Brad explains why one hundred million dollar companies are not built by working harder. They are built by structuring businesses so the work is done once and the value keeps paying back over time.

He breaks down the four types of leverage every scalable business must master: people, systems, marketing, and finance. You will learn why repeat customers, subscription models, durable systems, and long-running marketing campaigns create exponential growth, while effort-based businesses eventually stall. If your business depends on you showing up every day to make money, you do not have leverage yet.

Using real examples from decades of building and coaching companies, Brad shows how leverage replaces grind with structure and turns one-time work into long-term income. From books that still sell decades later to businesses that shifted from single transactions to predictable recurring revenue, the lesson is clear: effort alone will not get you there.

Listen now and learn how to do the work once and get paid for it long term.

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 Leverage Beats Effort

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Systems, processes, automations, checklists, technology, these things help you scale with less effort. Ultimately, the mathematical formula says divide to multiply. Get a customer once and they keep coming back forever. You know, you don't want to work harder, you want to work smarter. My first book I ever wrote, Instant Cash Flow. That thing still sells today, still makes me money today. Marketing to me is the ultimate investment. The power of leverage. Work once, paid forever. From people to systems to money, in this episode, I'm going to explain the four types of leverage that create exponential scale for you and your business. Do the work once get paid forever? Yes, that is the definition of leverage. Now it's mathematical formulas different. I'll explain that in just a moment. But my ideal understanding of how you become a$100 million entrepreneur, how you do that, is through leverage. How do you do things that you do the work one time and they keep paying you back 10 years, 20 years, 30 years down the road? I still look at it and you start thinking about work that I did. My first book I ever wrote, Instant Cash Flow, that thing still sells today, still makes me money today. Now, I didn't get paid a dime to write the book. My pay per hour for writing the book was zero dollars an hour, right? However, over the 20-something years that that book has been out there, hundreds of thousands of dollars have come in from that sales. Does that make sense? Our job as a business person is to do the work once, get paid forever. Okay, now let's break that back down. Why is leverage the ultimate multiplier? You hear the statement of, you know, you don't want to work harder, you want to work smarter. Well, in the beginning, you got to do both. You got to work harder and smarter right in the beginning. Ultimately, you want to be just working harder, uh, just working smarter, should I say. So there's a good Freudian slip, isn't it? And here we go down that road.$100 million companies, let me state that correctly, are not built on effort alone. They're built on leverage. So, what are the formats of leverage? You can leverage through systems, you can leverage through marketing, you can leverage through finance, you can leverage through people. Getting leverage is what we've got to look at. So if you want to score yourself, what's your leverage through people? What's your leverage through marketing? What's your leverage through finance? What's your leverage through systems in your business right now? Ultimately, the mathematical formula says divide to multiply. So if you've studied my five-ways formula or you've studied the ABOS system, ABOS, we break building a business down into three and a half thousand strategies. Now you won't need all three and a half thousand. When you install the Action Coach Business Operating System, you might use 200 of the strategies over a period of a year or two to install that and build a business that runs so you don't have to. But ultimately, what we're aiming to do, the difference between a non-leverage business and a leverage business is yes, it's gonna grow massive. Why? Because simple things. You get a customer once and they keep coming back forever. If you've got a business where you get a customer, you make a sale, and to make the next amount of money, you got to get another customer. There's no leverage in that. I want to have membership subscription. I want repeat business coming into my business. So let's go back through those four types of leverage and just explain each one of them. Leverage through people. You got to build teams, you got to build networks, you got to build partners, affiliates, you name it, you've got to build it. Networks who multiply your output type thing. If you build that, then you're multiplying the output of you and your business. Systems, processes, automations, checklists, technology, these things help you scale with less effort. Okay. So putting the systems in place will allow you to leverage far better in the organization. Marketing leverage, everything from content that you build, everything from the brand that you build, the campaigns that keep working once you've created them. Like if you create a campaign that works and that campaign runs for six, 12, 2, 12 months, two years, that campaign has been a phenomenal thing. You built it once, it makes you money long term or forever. That's what we got to be looking at. How do we create leverage through marketing? Marketing to me is the ultimate investment. I learned this back when I had a dog food business, right? Our average customer, yeah, we home delivered dog food and uh we delivered every six weeks. It was made fresh so that it was never more than six weeks old, sort of thing, as you're feeding it to your dog. And we would do a 17-point health check on your animal when we were there. Our delivery drivers were veterinary nurses who could help administer your dogs of flea and tick and pills and you name it, sort of thing, every time they did the delivery. Well, here's the amazing thing. When we had a van-based business, you know, it's a delivery-based, each van has to have this many customers per week. I had to learn out how to buy that exact number of customers per week. And so I sat down and went, hey, hang on, I gotta buy this many customers. If I bought too many customers, and for each van it was 60, right? 60 was the ideal number of new customers per week with a van on the road. If I bought 120, that meant 60 of them didn't get great service. They had to wait two weeks before they got seen for the first time. So I didn't want to buy that many. If I only bought 20, we didn't have a good financial, the finances on the on the van were not great. So I had to buy 60 customers each and every week. And so I had to work out the numbers. Now, in that business, we made, if I remember the numbers exactly, it was$108 was the first sale on average out of that,$38 was GP, right? Gross profit to us. So my marketing expense had to be less than$38. Now, here's the simple thing. Um, my radio ads were$24.50. So for every$24.50 I spent in radio, I got a new customer. So if I if you don't know these numbers, by the way, these are great numbers to get to learn for your business. How much does it cost you to buy a customer? And this is why I say marketing leverage is amazing leverage. For me,$24.50 went out and$38 in profit came back in in gross profit. Now, if bank, if you went to the bank and gave them$24.50 and they gave you$38 back, would you keep giving them$24.50? Of course you would. That's what marketing should be when you're testing and measuring. If you haven't studied marketing with me, my two-day course, all my books, my 30x business, do all of those things. Financial leverage, uh using other people's money, credit, being paid in advance. These are some of the things to fuel your exponential growth. So when you think about leverage, it's I've taught it to you as do the work once, get paid forever. Let's break that down just a little more. Uh, employee work is do the work once, get paid once. So if you say in the I don't know, the plumbing business, actually cutting pipe, doing the piping, employee work, do the work once, get paid once. Manager's work, do the work once, get paid long term. Meaning uh training people, hiring people, systems, planning. These are managers' jobs where you do the work one time and it pays you back over a period of time, not forever, but a period of time. Owner's work, do the work once, get paid forever. Right? You as an owner of the business have to at some point set a limit and say, okay, if I can pay someone below this hourly rate to do it, I'll never do that job again. You know, I remember as a young man saying, okay, if I can pay someone less than$20 an hour, I'm never gonna do it again. You know, so it's uh I it meant I stopped doing things like mowing the lawn and doing any housework and doing any of that sort of stuff. Because if I paid someone to do that, I could be doing, A, I could have family time, or B, I could be focused on the things that make a lot more than that per hour. Let me give you another example of leverage. When you think about the movie business, okay? You make a movie once, how long do you sell it for? Forever. Think of long tail really as a great way of thinking of leverage. How do I do something now that pays back forever? I'll give you an example of one of our clients in the UK. Uh their coach, phenomenal coach, came in, they're in the dairy business, right? They had cattle, big farm, and they sold their milk to the co-op. Well, what he taught them over a period of time is how to move from just selling the milk to adding value to it to eventually running a program that had get customers once they stay forever. He taught them how to go from being in the milk business to being in the cheese business to being in the cheese of the month club. Now they buy the milk from all of their local other farmers to build their cheeses to be in their cheese of the month club. They went from selling a product that they could only sell at one time to now getting customers that keep coming back forever and ever and ever. That's leverage, my friends. That's a way of changing up a business so that it moves from doing one thing. Give you another example. Jerry, his phenomenal example. He was in the construction business, building high-end home, multi-million dollar homes in the UK. And uh part of his business was he would buy the land and hold the land. And the way he did that is he would buy shipping containers and put storage facilities on the property. Well, what Jerry ended up working out was that there was a lot more leverage and scalability built into that shipping container business. And so all of a sudden he says, okay, I'm gonna sell the construction company and focus on this thing that is leverageable, scalable. And now he's building hundreds of these things around the world with, you know, puts up the right fence and the right security system and has the app built and you know, much less employees, much more profitability type thing. Very, very powerful stuff when you start looking at real examples of people doing that stuff. I even, you know, for me, a simple example. When we have ABOS, which is our Action Coach Business Operating System, and we coach to that. Now with AI, creating that in an AI platform where we go, holy heck, it's the same material, but now we can sell it in a way that democratizes coaching. It means every single person in every single company can have a coach. Not just business owners and CEOs and executives, but every employee across the entire company can have a coach. Just phenomenal what we can do with that sort of stuff. So think about this in your business. Where are you getting leverage? Where are you doing the work once, getting paid forever, doing the work once, getting paid long term? How can you shift more of your time into those tasks and less and less of your time in the doing the work once, getting paid once stuff? How do you keep getting paid forever rather than one at a time? Because we want you to become a hundred million dollar entrepreneur. Thanks for joining me on the hundred million dollar 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.