The Mindset Shift: Why Doing Less Can Grow Your Business Faster

Built a business… but still stuck running it?

In this episode of The $100M Entrepreneur Podcast, Brad breaks down the shift from operator to owner to investor — and why your ego can quietly hold you back from stepping out of the day-to-day. He introduces the Owner Operating System and the six disciplines that redefine your role as you scale.

You’ll learn what leadership looks like when you’re no longer the one in charge, how to measure your impact as a chairperson, and why shifting your focus from one business to multiple assets is the key to real freedom.

If you want a business that runs without you — not because of you — this episode shows you how to make that move.

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

The Mindset Shift To Owner

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My ego got a little bruised that someone else was able to run the company as good, and in this particular case, better than I did. So as you get yourself into a position, this is the biggest mindset shift I want you to have. You need to become the coach of your business. Your personal focus needs to shift away from a singular asset, the business, to multiple assets, your investments. What does leadership look like when you're not actually the leader? Every business should have an operating system, and so should every owner. What do I mean by that? Well, you need a system to run you as effectively as you run the business. Now, when you're at a manager level, being a great manager of the business, creating competency and productivity in your team is phenomenal, is a great management system. And if you have to learn that, go back, watch other episodes, or check in with my action coach team. Then there's the operating system for the business. You know, how does the business operate? And if you've not met an action coach, that's where we stall the action coach business operating system, ABOS, right? But for you as an owner, there's a reason why you need a system to run you as effectively as you run the business. Now, what do I mean by this? Well, let's think of it this way: when you're a manager, you're highly needed. You're needed in the business. When you step up to leader, you're still needed in the business. You're working 24, 7 in your brain, but you're doing those 40, 60 hours a week of actual work where people need you, you got to show up, you got to do all the things. When you step up to owner level, okay, when you become the owner of the business. Now I want to give you a preface here, what I mean by owner. Do you ever read that book, The Four Hour Work Week? That's a lot, right? I know it seems facetious, but here's what I mean. So if I'm coaching you, let's say I'm your business coach, right? I'm meeting with you either an hour every week or an hour every month, and I'm technically running your business. Okay. I know that day to day you're involved, but mentally, psychologically, overall, I'm running your business. So when you step up to owner of the business, you move from that general manager when you're less than a million to managing director, if I use the UK term, when you're growing to 10 million. When you're growing to 100 million, you're the CEO of the business. When you get past that, when you appoint a CEO, you move into the role of chairperson or coach. So you become the coach of your CEO. Now, when you become the coach of your CEO, you're essentially moving to a position where you are working one hour a week, up to one hour a month, if it's if you get them there over a period of time. And I have some CEOs of companies of mine where I only work with them one hour a month. They don't need me every week. I built them, they are good, they're strong, they're capable once a month. All they need me is chairman, okay? Or as coach, if that makes sense. So, what does that mean? It means that we have to get to the disciplines of being an owner, the owner operating system, if that makes sense. So we got to look at six areas. Time, gotta be one, okay? So, one of the biggest challenges I have with business owners when I get them to either a passive exit, like being the chairperson, or the financial exit when they sell, is they don't know what they're gonna do with their time. They lose it. And I've I've seen too many companies that are ready for sale where the sale doesn't happen because the owner doesn't know what they're gonna do with their time. Like it's my baby, what am I gonna do? No, we don't want to be there, we wanna be in a different place. So the six disciplines of owner operating system, okay? Number one, time. Number two, focus. Number three, leadership. I'm gonna discuss each one. Number four, decision making, number five, learning, and number six, energy. So when you move to the owner operating system, the first thing I want you to understand is that energy becomes a big part of it. Getting yourself fit again, getting yourself healthy, doing that sort of stuff. It can become a major focus of yours where you now got the time to get back to fitness and health. Okay. Second one, okay, learning. You've got to get into learning different things. As an owner, I want you learning investing. I want you learning how to buy companies. I want you learning how to buy real estate. I want you learning how to start trade the stock market. I want you learning investing more than you've ever learned before, okay? Because your company's making, now you ought to become the manager of the money, okay? As the operator, as the owner of the business. Because otherwise, you know what's going to happen? You're going to keep sticking your nose back in and interrupting the CEO you hired to run the dang thing. Not that I'm speaking from experience, but I may have done that historically. Yes, I did do that. So, next thing we got to do is look at your decision making. Okay, now you're a coach at this point in time. So I want you studying coaching as well if you need to. You become a coach of your CEO, a coach of your team members back in the business. You're no longer decision maker. You're now coaching people to make great decisions. So you've got to get into that part of the owner's operating system. So health, learning, uh, coaching people to decisions rather than making them yourself. Leadership now. So, what does leadership look like when you're not actually the leader? Yeah, the CEO is the leader of the company right now. You're the chairperson, you're in that role there, okay? So you can lead by introductions. Let me give you a simple example of that. So if I take my CEO and I help them meet another CEO, or I help them meet the chairman of a bank, or I help them meet a politician, or I help them meet. I'm leading by introducing rather than leading by doing it. Does that make sense? So leadership changes when you move to owner level than it is when you're at operator level. When you're the CEO, you're leading the team. When you're the chairperson, you're leading the CEO by helping them meet the right people and get that. Focus. Your focus now needs to become helping the team, helping the CEO, being a great coach, a great chairman. But your personal focus needs to shift away from a singular asset, the business, to multiple assets, your investments. So your focus is going to shift from a singular business to multiple businesses, to multiple real estate portfolios, to multiple investments. You're learning how to be a great investor and a great steward of the profitability of the company, if that makes sense. And finally, your time. Okay. When you are a CEO and you're used to being busy, all of those things, I find when people step back from it that it might give, it might take a week, two weeks, a month of so-called retirement before they start getting, okay, I'm going crazy right now. What am I going to do? So you've got to look at your time and allocate your time just as you would have during the week. Investment time, health time, friends time, relationships time, all the different things that are now on your plate as the owner. Okay. So different job, different job description, if that makes sense. The owner operating system is like a job description for you once you become the chairperson or the C or the coach of the business. So how will you measure now your leadership impact? What will be your KPIs in the business type thing? Now, I I'll admit here, I know when I first stepped back and put a CEO in place of the company, I still wanted to be needed. It it did hit me. My ego got a little bruised that someone else was able to run the company as good, and in this particular case, better than I did. There was more profit coming in once I stepped out. I was like, hey, boob, ego. Yeah. I had to get my ego out of the way and start looking at, okay, what is the result of this? Well, the result was I had to measure myself differently. I had to measure myself of how much energy do I need to put in? How well are they growing without me? What sort of things are they doing? Who can I introduce them to? How much business can I bring to them without having to do any of the work just by introductions, all of that different stuff that became a part of it? Okay. So that brings me to the weekly rhythm, reflection, planning, and review cadence. So as chair, I mean, when when you're CEO, you're asking yourself these questions, and I don't think it should shift much as a chair. What did I learn? What did I decide? And what did I delegate? That's really your CEO position. What did I learn? What did I decide? And what did I delegate? Having review time every Friday as a CEO is of vital importance, looking back over the week and going, okay, where did we get to those sorts of things? So as a chairperson, your review time should be relatively similar, especially what did I learn? What did I decide? And what did I delegate? Okay, because when you're looking at your investments, when you're looking at building wealth outside of the business, it's like you're running a different business. If you've followed my advice over the years, you've also built for yourself a wealth company. Okay, whether that's investing in other businesses, real estate, stock market, whatever it's investing in, if you've built a wealth business, then you become the CEO of the wealth business where you're managing the money, not over here CEO of the day-to-day business making the money, if that makes sense. So scheduling your energy, not just your tasks. I want to talk to you about burnout just for a second. So when you're the CEO, you most of what you're doing is giving you extra energy. When you're the CEO, you're achieving things, things are happening, things are moving, progress, these sorts of things are happening in real time. When you move into investor world, it slows down a fair bit. Okay. When you move into investor world, it's not quite as fast. The decision you made today doesn't get implemented tomorrow type thing. It's just a different pace. And so I want to make sure that you understand that that more longer-term thinking and longer-term results is a big part of that. So motion versus progress, and let's just say, you know, when if you look at CEOs that fail, right, they overwork the wrong things. CEOs that don't get results are overworking the areas that are not moving the needle. If you want to get a business to get results, you've got to work in areas that move the needle. Now, when you move to being chairperson, that needle shifts. It's a different needle you're trying to move. So you've got to go back to what are your KPIs as chairperson and document those for yourself. If you do need someone to coach you through this, reach out. We've the team will be happy to help. So if I look back at my early years of juggling everything, you know, really in the beginning of the business, versus building disciplines around the outcomes that we wanted to have in the business, to then, as chairperson, building disciplines around how did, I mean, the first discipline I had to build was how to not uh interrupt the team. I guess is probably the simplest way to put it. But building the disciplines around the growth aspect and the asset building aspect of it rather than the day-to-day running. That longer-term thinking took me a while to adjust to doing that. Um, that's why I created time blocks. I just looked at time blocks. What day of the week do I do what? Uh, in the beginning, I would have one day a week that was real estate investing, one day a week that was stock market investing, one day a week looking at beer bringing deals to the business, one day a week. It was kind of like I gave myself a focus every day so that I wasn't getting crazy about the business. And as a CEO, I know that's one of the reasons I succeeded as a CEO, that I had days of the week that were focused. I had a day that I focused on customers, a day that I focused on team, a day that I focused on the product and delivery, and a day that I focused on the numbers, and a day that I focused on the future. Out of the five days a week, it kept me really busy making sure that things happened because I gave myself focus that day. And I noticed that by time blocking it really worked. So, yeah, those five things again that I broke it down into was uh day with the team, day with customers, day on the products and services, day on the numbers, and a day on making sure the future, the vision, the planning, and all of those sorts of things. And some of that was research and learning. But that's basically the way I broke myself down as a CEO. When I moved to chairman, it had to be more a day on the real estate investing, a day on the stock market investing, a day on business investing. Like, and and I moved as chairman to only a three-day work week. I thought that was a much better way of looking at my life as chairman, the three-day week rather than the five-day week. So um building a feedback loop for yourself. Once you step out of the business on a day-to-day, you still want the reporting. I still want my CEOs reporting to me every week. Whether I look at it every week or not is a different thing, but I still want the reports to come in so that they've completed the reports, which means they've looked at the numbers, if that makes sense. So it's really important to keep them focused by you checking in on them. In the beginning, they need you weekly. Okay. When you hand it over to a CEO in the beginning, they need you every week. In most cases, they're gonna need you for a solid hour every week. Sometimes in the beginning, it's two hours every week, but they're gonna need you weekly. Gradually, you'll move to every other week. Gradually you'll move to maybe once a month. But that's essentially you being the coach of the CEO rather than you being the CEO type thing. So if you were to move to that ownership realm, what would you focus on? Where if you go back to the six things, okay? Your energy, how are you gonna get your health managed, all of those sorts of things? Your learning, your decision making, how are you gonna do that when you move to that role? Now, you might say, but Brad, I'm years away from that role. You're right. It's called planning. If you don't start planning it now, it's not going to happen. So as you get yourself into a position, and this is the biggest mindset shift I want you to have, you need to become the coach of your business. You need to become the coach or the chairperson of your CEO. When you become the coach of your business, you've built a business where you've had a passive exit where it can run without you and it can grow without you. All right, see you next week. 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. 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