Why What Got You to $1M Won’t Get You to $100M

Most entrepreneurs know how to start… but very few know how to scale.

In this episode of The $100M Entrepreneur Podcast, Brad breaks down the exact roadmap from your first $1M to $10M, $100M, and beyond. The skills that get you to your first million won’t get you to the next level—and if you don’t evolve, you’ll stay stuck.

Learn when to stop being the “rockstar” operator, how to build systems that scale, and why great CEOs shift from giving answers to asking better questions. Brad also reveals the leadership frameworks and team structure required to reach $100M+ and even $1B.

If you’re serious about scaling your business, building a high-performance team, and stepping into true leadership, this episode shows you exactly what it takes.

Listen for more.

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

The Million To Billion Roadmap

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Work to the million, I think you get that one. Build to 10 million. From 10 million to go to 100 million, now we go into scale. The challenge is somewhere on the way to that first million, you've gotta not fall in love with that behavior of you being the rock star. As you move from 10 million to a hundred million, you move from giving answers to asking questions. If your C-level executives can't teach you stuff, then you've hired the wrong C-level executives. And this is one of the things I want to tell every great business owner. Alright, so getting to your first billion in revenue. Yeah, I know this is a hundred million dollar podcast. We're gonna talk about a billion. Here's the interesting thing. Now that at Action Coach we've passed$2.6 billion in gross revenue, I really think about the fact that that hitting that first billion in one year is not too far off, and it really isn't. But I want to take you from that first million to the first 10 to the first hundred to the first bill and step you through. Let's see what level you're at so that you know exactly what the next phase looks like for you. Now, if you're anywhere uh past the first million, this first phase you'll recognize and remember. But getting to your first million in most cases is the level of work that you put into this thing, you're gonna have to work your tail off to get to the first million. You're gonna have to not only be great at working, but you're gonna have to be great at the job of the business. Like if you're a financial planner, if you want to get to your first million, it doesn't matter how hard you work if you're not good at the job, if that makes sense. You know, if you're a hairdresser and you want to make a million, you gotta be a great hairdresser. You want to make cakes and do a first million, you gotta be great at it. Now, on top of that, you gotta build a team of helpers around you. Now, you and I both know that your first business is always the hardest business. How come? Because you're learning it. Your first million's the hardest million. Why? Because you've never done it before. The first time you jump out of an airplane's the scariest. Why? You've never done it before. So getting to that first million, A, you gotta be great. B, you gotta work hard. C, you gotta build a team around you that supports you to be great and to work hard. An assistant, people doing the jobs, getting that work done. Now, the challenge is somewhere on the way to that first million, you've got to not fall in love with that behavior of you being the rock star. Okay, because to get to 10 million, you can't be the rock star. You're not, you're not gonna do 10 million in hairdressing sales by you cutting all the hair. You're not gonna do 10 million in accounting by you doing all the accounting work for your customers. The only way to get to the 10 is for you to build a team of very productive, very strong team members who deliver the product or deliver the service, if that makes sense. So when we start looking at that, it really comes back to how well are you capable of building systems? Because the first part is about you. Second part, you got to build systems. Now, at this stage, I don't need you to build anything more than a checklist, okay? I don't need you to build massive systems. I don't need you to have the best technology platforms. I don't need you to do that. I need checklists so there's consistency of delivery and consistency of performance. From there, what I want to see you actually doing is building people. Now, for you to build people, you got to build you, okay? And that's why coaching is so important. You're a manager when you're going to the first million. To get to 10, you got to step up and build all that leadership capabilities. Now, if you've not installed the management systems, by the way, talk to your action coach, install the management systems. Then you've got to install the leadership. And I want to take you through the three phases of installing the leadership systems. Leadership system area one is called the framework. What do I mean by the framework? You got to have a vision, you got to have a mission, you got to have a culture document, objectives, key results, business plans. These are the framework within which it allows you to be a great leader. Without that framework, I don't care what leadership skills you have, the framework gives you the ability to lead. It's kind of like having a boat makes you the ability to be a captain, if that makes sense. No one's at the helm if there is no boat. Build the framework first. Second, leadership skills. And this is where a lot of leaders fall down. They don't take communication training, they don't take planning training, they don't take decision-making training. All of these things, the skills of leadership, need to be learned. And it's the same as if I wanted to be great at uh bowling. I have to go learn the skills. You want to be a great leader? Learn the skills. The third thing I'll say is leadership's gotta be about your style. See, to be a great leader, you gotta move from it being a job or a career to it being a calling. Okay. What I mean by leadership being a calling, you've got to love building other people. You gotta love building people up. You gotta love the idea that you will have a long-term impact on these people. You will build people to become great, and that way they build a great business for you. So your leadership skill has to be to build more leaders. So in the beginning, you got to build great managers, okay? And remember, what is management? Productivity and competency. If you build productivity and you build competency, you'll build great managers into the business. From the next phase of that, you've got to build leadership. What is leadership? It's about passion and focus. So a reminder to score yourself on management by giving your team scores of productivity, giving your team scores of competency. It's not their score, it's your score of management. The same is true for leadership. Your score of your team's passion, your team's focus is your leadership score. It's not about them, it's about you. Okay. So get into your 10 million, build the systems, systematize the production, okay? Whether it's building a product, delivering a service, buying it, shipping it, whichever it is, you gotta make sure that is so well systematized that it can scale. Now I want to remind you what scalability is. The next sale costs less and is easier. So as we scale to 10 million, well, literally you work your way to the million, you build your way to 10, you scale to 100, and you exponential to a bill. So let's explain that, break it down step by step. Work to the million. I think you get that one. Build to 10 million, because you got to build everything to get to 10 million. You got to build the systems, build the marketing, build the team, build the reputation. You got to build all of the things to get to 10 million. From 10 million to go to 100 million, now we go into scale. Okay. So you build a leadership team. Sorry, a management team to get to 10. To get to 100, you've now got to build a leadership team. Whereas going to 10 million, you were the leader in the organization. You were the visionary. You were the one that had the ideas. You were the one that came up with all of the new concepts. To get to 100, you need other visionaries, other leaders, others that have amazing skills and can bring the concepts to fruition. So you think about that, you've become a leader. Now you got to build leaders. Now, sometimes, I'm going to be honest, you're going to have to recruit them. Slower growth means you can build the leaders. Sometimes when you have scaled growth, you're going to have to recruit leaders. Like if you've got a CMO or a managing partner or a marketing manager who is doing an amazing job, then you're sitting there and saying, okay, what do we got to do to build this? Well, this marketing manager is phenomenal for us at$2 million a year, but they're not going to get us to$100 million a year. Or this HR manager is phenomenal when we had 10 employees, but they're not a chief HR person. They're not going to handle it when we've got 500 or 1,000 employees type thing. So you got to start thinking about what got you to a million won't get you to 10. Well, guess what? What got you to 10 won't get you to 100 either. So building that$100 million team, and here's the great thing about it. Usually your$100 million team will get you to a billion. Usually the people that'll get you to a hundred will be capable of that exponential growth that goes to a billion. So you think about this way: your CFO, the chief financial officer in the organization, you bring them on board at around$10 million, and there's someone that knows how to raise capital. They know all the tax planning. They are great at it. They're teaching you every single day. And this is one of the things I want to tell every great business owner. If your C-level executives can't teach you stuff, then you've hired the wrong C level executives. As CEO, I want a CFO who's so much better at finance than I am. I want a CMO that's so much better at marketing than I am. I want a chief legal officer. Does that make sense? If they're much better than me, they can be teaching me. Now, as CEO, I want to teach you your job. I want to remind you of the four areas that a CEO needs to focus in on. Number one area a CEO has got to focus in on is customers. You've got to be investing a quarter of your time studying customers, bringing on customers, working with customers, talking to customers, learning, getting out in the field. If you don't invest a quarter of your time with customers in some way, shape, or form, you're not learning what's going on in the marketplace. It's very tough for you to make an educated decision if you're not with the customer, understanding the end user. Second, you got to be with your team a quarter of the time. It could be training your team, learning from your team, planning with your team, coaching your team, but seeing what the team sees. Again, getting out with the customers is sometimes a great way to get out with the team. You know, if you go and visit a job site, you're not just seeing what the customer sees, but you're also seeing what your staff are going through, what your managers on the job side are working through. You will learn just as much or more from them than you will from anybody else out there in the marketplace. Third thing you got to do as a CEO is be in the numbers. Look, every CEO's got to be amazing with numbers. Now, that's not just the financial numbers, it's the marketing numbers, the net promoter score, your employee engagement scores, all of the scores in the business. If you do not measure it, you cannot get better at it. There's statistics in sport for a reason. They measure everything because they want to get better at everything. And you've got to be the same. You've got to be in the numbers. Now, that could mean sitting with your marketing CMO and asking them about all of the marketing numbers, sitting with your chief sales officer going through all the sales numbers, sitting with your CFO, going through all the financial numbers. But you got to get into the weeds with the numbers, even if all that comes out of it is that you ask them the questions and then they go away and do more work on it. It's not because you need to be a genius at it, it's because if you get into the numbers, the numbers will tell you the story. The numbers will share with it. The number of times I've worked, walked into board meetings or walked into sessions with clients over the years, and they start with these stories. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Give me the numbers. We start all meetings with numbers, only numbers. If I if I hear stories, like, nope, doesn't matter to me. I don't want to hear the story yet. I want to hear the numbers. So if they beat budget, I want to go, okay, why did we beat budget? What did we do that helped us beat budget? Why did we only budget that small amount if that's what we achieved? All the questions I'm gonna ask. See, here's the thing. As you move from 10 million to 100 million, you move from giving answers to asking questions. Let me be blunt about this. Moving when you have a leadership team, they don't need guidance, they need questions. They need you to ask them the question so they come up with the answer. Yeah, when you go into a million, you need to give your team the answer. As you get further down the road, you become more of a coach than you do more of an operator. I'll give you an example of this. So when I teach my clients, one particular client, he was getting to the stage where he had all of these C-level executives, and he was still, I won't say micromanaging, but he was still telling them what to do. And I had to teach him to become the coach of them rather than the answer engine for them. So as he gave them questions and asked more questions, Alan Mullaly, who was CEO of the year twice here in the United States, Boeing and Ford, Alan Mullaly said, My biggest job is to not say anything. You know, and that's one of the hardest jobs as you move from CEO to chair or CEO to coach, is getting to the point where you say less and ask more. The more questions you ask, the more they think about it. And that's why reporting numbers, hey Presto, there's no story about it. There's just the numbers. The numbers can't lie in that particular case. So finally, once we scale to that 100 million, and that can often be back to my formula of X times Y, okay? If you haven't seen that episode, go back and watch it. But X times Y is really if you've got a$2 million operation and you want it to be a$100 million operation, you got to put it in 50 locations, okay? If you've got a 10 million and you want to be 100, you got to put it in 10 locations. Now, research should start to do it because this is the big difference between a$10 million operation and$100 or a bill, is the research and the planning. You can't get to$100 million without doing serious research. You've got to do the research. And of course, AI makes that so much simpler today than it's ever been historically. So finally, let's talk about we scale to 100, we go exponential to a billion. Exponential really looks at having partnerships. Okay. If you want to go to that bill, you need the partnerships. You need a partnership into another country, a partnership into another marketplace, a partnership. Now, this could be acquisition partnerships, it could be strategic partnerships, it could be joint ventures, but the exponential growth comes from adding partners, strategic, affiliate, joint venture. That could come through doing deals, it could come through acquisition. All of those different things is what builds you to that billion. So read my book, Billionaire and Training. Keep doing this stuff, keep coming back. Let's make a difference to your business. 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.