The Freedom Pivot: The Operator → Owner → Investor Shift

Built a successful business… but don’t feel free?

In this episode of The $100M Entrepreneur Podcast, Brad breaks down the “Freedom Pivot” — the shift from operator to owner to investor. He explains why what got you to $1M won’t get you to $10M, how growth can quietly trap you, and why real freedom isn’t just about money — it’s about time, choice, and control. 

You’ll learn the three stages of business evolution, how to eliminate bottlenecks, and why systems × leadership create freedom, along with practical strategies for auditing your calendar, redesigning decision flow, and building an asset that’s scalable, saleable, and built for long-term wealth.

If you don’t want to own a job — you want to own an asset — this episode will show you how to make the shift.

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

Success Without Freedom Problem

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What got you to a million won't get you to 10 million and further. You might push to three, but then you end up being trapped because you become the center of it. Today is about making sure that we're not just about success, we're also about freedom. Ultimately, you've got to build a business that you own rather than a business that owns you. You didn't start a business to be busy, okay? You started a business to be free. Well, hey and welcome to the Hundred Million Dollar Entrepreneur Podcast. Today we're going to look at the freedom pivot. What does that mean? You know, most entrepreneurs when they start hitting a level of success don't feel free. They actually feel more trapped by the business. Now, in business, we all know you're going to have an exit, okay? The question is, is it a negative exit, meaning you kill it or it kills you? Uh, is it a passive exit, meaning that the business runs without you? Or is it a financial exit, meaning you sell the business for a great deal of money to set yourself up for the future rest of your life? So that's really what we're meaning by freedom. You know, the business should buy back your life, not uh uh the other way around. So if you've built success but not freedom, today is about fixing that. Today is about making sure that we're not just about success, we're also about freedom from it. So growth can quietly trap you, okay? So there's an illusion of success is that more will just create more. And that as you grow the business, once you've hit millions and once you go further and you hit maybe 10 million sort of thing, that you think that just doing more will set the freedom up. Well, there's three stages of evolution: there's the operator, the owner, and the investor, okay? And the mindset required for each of these is different. So if you could imagine the operator is when you're doing the work, okay? You are the business essentially. You are the cornerstone of what happens, you're the cornerstone of everything. Decisions come through you. Now, that also means you're the bottleneck. So what got you to a million basically won't get you to 10 million and further. You might push to three, but then you end up being trapped because you become the center of it. Well, the operator has to learn to become the owner. And if you look at our previous editions, we've covered that subject. From the owner, though, we need to move on to becoming the investor. What does that mean? Well, we transition from cash flow and profitability into a capital value of the asset. We transition from building something that is just about more profit, more revenues, to something that is scalable and saleable, meaning that you can actually sell it as an asset. So you become more of an investor in the business, looking at an ROI. You move from taking a salary, taking drawings, to really taking quarterly profit distributions from the business, building an asset-based business. You know, usually when people come to me and looking to sell their business, I tell them it's going to take generally three years. Two years of clean financials, two years of setting it up, systemic, getting it running without you, and then finally a year to make the sale happen where you go through the due diligence with multiple potential buyers and so on. Now, the reason I say that, most entrepreneurs stop at the owner level, meaning they get to a point where the business can work, they've got a level of freedom, the business is making money, uh, they don't have to work 40, 60 hour weeks anymore. They've got a business with systemic operations, good people, good leadership in the company. But to evolve to an investor, we've got to think of it in a different light. See, when you get to the investor level, you're usually thinking about things like uh should we buy through acquisitions and grow through acquisitions? Should we be buying customers by buying other businesses? Should we be buying team members by buying other companies, opening a new geographies by buying other companies? So you turn from that operator growing through uh normal organic growth to the investor who looks to be growing through acquisition. Okay. So if we look at, I mean, let's go back to that whole freedom thing, because freedom is not just money. Freedom is about time, it's about choice, it's about control. So to build a business that gives you freedom, we go back to my definition of a business, a commercial, profitable enterprise that works without you, then we develop the freedom. Now, freedom with passive or freedom with a financial exit, two different levels of freedom, and it's really up to you which one you want. But it could also be up to market cycles and market timing and who's buying and what multiples are they paying at this point in time. Sometimes when we get to this stage, more becomes the enemy of better. Uh, what do I mean by that? Well, when you start thinking about building a better mousetrap, when you start thinking about it's not just about volume, it's also about getting more profitability. It's also about getting better systems, better team members, better technology, better branding, all of those sorts of things. Because one of the challenges that hits the old mindset of what got you here won't get you there. What got us to three million, what got us to a million, what got us to ten million, these things won't get us to that next phase. The same as sometimes we think more people. Well, no, sometimes we need better people. It's more marketing, no, sometimes we need better marketing. Uh sometimes it's you know in many ways we have to think of the fact that to create the freedom, we need a quality of person, a quality of system, a quality of team that actually runs it without you. So if you look at the freedom equation, okay, systems times leadership, and then the wealth strategy that comes with it. So let's break that down. Systems. Obviously, the business has to be systemic so that 80% of what happens every single day operates by systems. Now that could be technology systems, AI systems, human-run systems, but 80% has to be systemic of the business. 20% is if you build great people so that they handle the 20% that is humanized that needs to be handled by a person. Leadership is where that 20% really kicks in, building great leaders. You know, to get to a million, you were the manager and you managed the team. To get to 10 million, you had to build a team of managers and you had to step up to be a leader. To get to 100 million, you need to build a team of leaders and you step up to be the leader of leaders. That's where a real CEO kicks in because now you have C-level executives around you. If you've got a team of C-level executives, so it's systems times leadership, and then there needs to be a wealth strategy. So that wealth strategy can come in when you're looking at am I going to build it to sell? Am I going to build it to run without me and invest my money elsewhere? That's where the freedom kicks in because when you have the systems and the leadership and a strategy for the finances of the business, whether it be uh investing the money back in the company, buying other territories, other businesses, other markets, opening other things, bringing in other products, services, buying a technology platform, whatever it is, you can be reinvesting in the business or you can be reinvesting external to the business. Now, my as a coach, I often refer people to the fact that you don't want to have all your eggs in one basket. You ultimately do want to build wealth outside of the business. And so learning how to invest in things like real estate stocks, other areas of the market, working with financial services companies, financial planners to be able to get yourself to that freedom level. So one of the key factors in getting to freedom is identifying your bottleneck. Now, obviously, I've referred to in different circumstances where you might have become the bottleneck. Maybe someone on your team has become the bottleneck. I know just recently I'd have a chat with one of my team and say, listen, you're bringing everything through you. You've it's it's gone from me being the bottleneck to now you being the bottleneck. So in that particular company, um, you know, many years ago I gave up the decision-making criteria being me and handed it to the C-level executives. But when one of those executives starts to become the bottleneck for the others, it's like, hang on, whoa, whoa, we need to step this back a little bit. Maybe your business model is the bottleneck. You know, I've sat with a lot of people and they've gone on a business model uh evolution, meaning that they've gone from a single office to multiple offices, or they've gone to a licensing model, or they've added a franchise or a rental business model, or they've said, you know what, we're selling one at a time, let's move to a subscription or a membership type uh model. You know, all of these different ways of moving it. I had one client who was direct to customer, and I said, Well, have you ever thought of uh opening a wholesale division of the business? And he never had, but by moving to a wholesale division, it meant he could spread worldwide, not just local to where he was. And that changed the model of the business, which changed the bottleneck strategy of the business. So I think one of the biggest things we have to do in order to move from um building a business to freedom is to first of all look at our calendar. I think that one of the most effective strategies I do every single year is sit down and say, okay, what am I going to drop off from last year? And we want to get rid of about 80% of last year's tasks. Now, not because we want to get rid of all 80%, but because we want to free up time to do the new things that need to be done to grow to that next level. You know, if you're still doing the same activities this year as you did last year, then it's going to be a real struggle for you to grow to that next level. So if you look at your calendar at the end of the year, or maybe do it now if you didn't do it at the end of the year, and say, what were the tasks on my calendar last year that I need to move off my calendar? I need to either delegate them, which to delegate something we all know, you got to build a system, you got to build training, and you got to build a measure. So those three things need to be in place in order for you to delegate something. Otherwise, it's just pure abdication. So once we delegate or get off of our calendar 80% of the things we did last year, and sometimes you don't even have to delegate it. Sometimes you just have to say, no, that does not need doing anymore. We're just going to do these things that move the needle. So what we try and do with every client we coach is help them build a perfect calendar. Meaning, in an ideal week, Monday, I would do these things at these times. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, like you build the personal, the perfect calendar. We call it a default diary. In a default world, these are the things I do in those times. And so your high priority tasks, obviously, at the start of every single day. You know, you get those things and build that calendar. So second thing we got to look at is decision flow. Uh, oftentimes bottlenecks are not obvious until you examine decision flow. The moment you get into the decision flow, you realize hang on a second, now I see that because decisions all have to go through this methodology, uh, I'm seeing where we're actually getting the negative results, if that makes sense. So use the decision flow and start examining decision flow around finances, around marketing, around hiring, around growth, uh, around customers. Look at all of the decision flow and see where it is. Third, we look at where you find yourself firefighting. Wherever you find yourself putting out fires, fixing problems, diving in, having to help and solve things, that's generally where we're going to find freedom is being sucked away from us. So it's really that freedom pivot. You know, when if I look at for me, building freedom, the first time I decided to retire, uh, I was very lucky in that I had a great uh chief sales officer who came to me one day and said, Brad, I think you're done. And and we were at a conference, and I thought he was saying to me, I think you're done for the day here at the conference. Because yeah, I was getting a bit annoyed and abrupt with people, and and I said, Yeah, you're probably right, I should go and take a break. He said, No, no. Uh, I think it's time for you to take a step back and let us run the company. And uh at the time it didn't feel great, not being wanted or not being needed was sort of that first negative feeling. But when I recognized that he was giving me an opportunity to take true freedom in my business, I think it was a very important step for me to step back and do that. Now, I did step back in to run the company after many years uh because I think I was ready to again. I had my passion back, I had my excitement back and uh really got to that point. You know, ultimately, uh here's the thing: you've got to build a business that you own rather than a business that owns you. Okay, so how do you get to be the owner and then the investor, that freedom level? Start planning for it now, start thinking about it now, because ultimately you didn't start a business to be busy. Okay, you started a business to be free. So let's build the time, freedom, choice freedom, all of those things. I'll see you back here next week on the entrepreneur podcast because building you to be a hundred million dollar entrepreneur is what we're all about. 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.