How to Build a Successful Brand, with Brad Sugars

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Hello, and welcome to this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. Today, we're not taking any gambles. We're going to go and talk to Brad Sugars, who's in Las Vegas, Nevada. Brad Sugars, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jim. Lovely to be here and great to join you.

Look, it's wonderful to have you because, obviously, you are voted as one of the"World's Top Coaches". You've authored over 16 books. You've got 1100 offices for the"ActionCOACH" business franchise. And you're also a father of five. So, it's an impressive portfolio, and we're gonna talk today about how you've built an amazing franchise business. We're also gonna talk about how you've managed to keep, sort of not just one, but two brands going with your"Brad Sugars" brand, and"ActionCOACH", and multiple other businesses and whatever else comes up, I'm sure it's gonna be inspirational before we ask you your tip of the day. So Brad, tell us how've you built the ActionCOACH brand and got that noticed?

You know, I think there's three major things to building a brand. Number one, is I always recruited the best of the best. I would never try and recruit people to my team that I didn't think would add value to the team in a massive way. I love the word "recruit" because I don't just hire, I "recruit". I go out and hunt for the"right people" type thing. I think the second is I've never shied away from a stage. Jim, you know, in the early days I did more than 200 events in a year. So I was on stage everywhere. And I think the third is partnering with the right people. And again, I go back to the early days, I partnered with newspaper groups, magazines, radio station groups, Chambers of Commerce. And I gave my services for free to put me in front of massive audiences and in those first two years, just the newspaper group in Australia put me in front of 288,000 business owners. If you want to be out there, you got to be out there. There's no other way to put it. You know, you wanna get noticed, you got to do something noticeable. I was giving free events back when free events didn't count. Now, in today's world with YouTube, and Google, and everything, it's very hard to make the free events work because everything's free online at this point in time. But you've got to do things to get noticed. My latest book is called,"Raise Your Hand Marketing" because when I do something, I ask them to raise their hand."Hey, let me know if you want a copy of this.""Type the word 'webinar' below if you want to get the link." You know, I want to get them to acknowledge and put their hand up and say,"Hey, I'm ready to be a part of what you do." I think the biggest thing though is if you're gonna be out there, be out there. The brand, great people, always be out there and always have the greatest partners."Business is a team sport".

I love the way that you asked people to take action and I've watched you on stage as well. You're very challenging, as a kind of presenter, come coach, which is wonderful, right? You do challenge the audience a lot as well. When did you start"ActionCOACH"? Just to give us a bit of history.

1993, August. I kicked off "ActionCOACH". Today will be our 30th birthday this August.

Congratulations. you've got um, some 1100 coaches around the world. So, first of all, I'd like you to just explain when you went to those newspapers, presumably, people like, Fairfax or Macquarie in Australia. First of all, what did you offer them? Because it's easy you saying,"Well, I just went to the newspapers and we did it." But, for those of us that haven't done that, you know, it'd be great for you just to explain, you know, if you just turn up, you make a phone call. Help us to understand how you did that.

You mentioned earlier, you know, you've got with your Vodafone, you got this subscription to see Brad Sugars. But partnering with any company is looking at it,"What is their need, want, and desire?" So for example, we work with a lot of accountants around the world and we go to the accountants and people say,"Oh yeah, I'd love the accountants to introduce me to their customer base." No accountant wants to introduce you to their customer base. They don't care about that. What does the accountant care about? More billings, more hourly rates, et cetera, et cetera. They wanna make more money. So, if I go to an accountant and say,"Listen, I'd like to show you how you can get twice as many hours of work per client that you have right now. I'd like to show you how to do that." Because if we go in and help them grow their business, then of course, they need more accounting type thing. And so you've got to put it in their best interest. Now you gonna get in the door. Getting in the door is one of my specialties. I like using "Lumpy Mail", Jim. You talked about getting noticed. My first ever "Lumpy Mail" strategy was I bought the right arm off a bunch of mannequins. My brother Craig did it for me. We've got a big piece of wood and we mounted them on it and we had a thing engraved, that was a brass plate, which was my business card, and we'd send this in a box to you and it said,"I'd give my right arm for an hour of your time." And so, I do things like that, Jim, that get me noticed and get me in front of people. I've done everything like, I had one marketing campaign where I stuck a bandaid to the outside of the envelope. An actual bandaid, like we opened them up, we stuck it on there. But the headline on there was in handwriting, you know,"Stop the bandaid solutions to your business." You know, this was back when "Direct Mail" was big. Direct mails come back, by the way, because everyone's sick of email, the mailbox is empty. So "Direct Mail" and"Lumpy Mail" as I like it. I've sent invitations to people on a silver platter. Like, I actually put a silver platter in the envelope with the invitation on it stuck to the silver platter. So, yeah, getting those sort of things and getting in the door is step one. People are so lazy trying to get in the door, Jim. They try and send a note or they send me a LinkedIn message, like,"Really?" If you want to get to see me do something, learn my favorite thing. I'm a rum drinker, and if anyone finds me a great bottle of rum from around the world and sends that and says,"Hey, Brad I bought you this bottle of rum. I'd just like 20 minutes of your time just to chat about what we do in business." There's nowhere in the world you're turning that down.

Yeah. Hey look, I love that idea of uh, yeah, getting your foot in the door. There's an old story, isn't there, of someone sending one trainer and saying,"Now, I've got my foot in the door. I'd love to come in." And they walked into that job interview with just one shoe on and they say,"Can I have my trainer back?"

We used to send bars of soap with the old saying,"If you don't know me from a bar of soap, we'd send a piece of wood with a hole in it. You don't know me from a hole in the wall." I actually had one of our companies where we had the guys doing door knocking and we got their business card made, and it was like an A3 size. So it's that, you know, about this big, and you'd walk into the receptionist and you'd say,"Would you mind giving my business card to the boss?" And they're like,"What do you mean?""Well, could you take my card out to the boss right now? I'd like to have a quick chat with them." And when it, they walk it out,"Hey, Preston, that's my commercial cleaning business." So we do it that way.

Brad, that's wonderful. And I think the idea of of doing something different, right? That it's not just email or as you say, LinkedIn which we're all getting inundated with or just a video. But now you've got, this amazing business. So you've moved from Australia up to America to Vegas. Tell us the next part of the business has been acquiring or attracting, I should say, all these franchisees. So I'd love to hear how you've done that, because getting people to buy into a franchise where they're putting money down, especially into a service business, takes some skill. So how have you done that? You've got the franchise noticed and then to be perceived to being valuable. How do you do that?

I think there's three main keys to that. Number one,"People don't buy a franchise, they join a team." So, they're joining a movement. They're joining something. Our vision of world abundance through business re-education. Our "14-points of Culture", who we are, see who you are, and why you do what you do, are more important than what you do, if you're building a team. If you recruit based on "who" and "why" and recruiting franchisees is no different to recruiting team members. No different to recruiting customers. It's all about "recruiting". You know, and it's about being proactive and having people join a team. They join a leader, they join someone. Now, when someone's buying a franchise or investing. I like the word "invest" in a franchise because it's, "ROI is more important than anything". You've got to look at what are their dreams and goals. And your business has to help their dreams and goals become a reality. Now, most of the people who join my team have an absolute passion for helping people. We give them a methodology to take their 10, or 20, or 30 years business experience and give back. Yes, they're gonna make a lot of good money by running the business. But they get to give back, Jim. The second part of it is "Marketing". Obviously, you know, you've got to do great marketing, you've got to be everywhere. You've got to do everything. I know in the UK we just launched"Business Unusual" our TV show on Amazon Prime. You've got to do all of those things and invest in it. Marketing is an investment if you do it right. When I wrote my book, "Buying Customers" or probably 12 years ago, people are like,"What do you mean buying customers?""Well, if you invest a thousand and you get 10, it cost you a hundred to buy each one.""So how many customers do you need to buy?""What amount of money are you allocating to buy them and does that add up?" No. You want a hundred customers, you're only investing a thousand. It costs you a hundred to buy each one. You're not gonna get the number of customers that you're trying to buy. And I think the third thing then in franchising is obviously, the success of the actual products, the "Franchise". The franchisees have to succeed. Our franchisees satisfaction survey done by an outside firm shows us to be in the top 50 for franchisee satisfaction worldwide. We're in the hall of fame for that. So your "franchise partners", and that's how we always refer to them. They're our "partners" in business, must love the business and love you. And I think because we're a business coaching business, the way we support them, coach them, train them, we believe franchisees and our customers come to us for four things."Community""Accountability""Results" and "Education". So if we give them the"community" and we build that "community", they might join for the business opportunity, but they'll stay for the "community" and the camaraderie of their peers. The "accountability" they get, because most business owners, I hate to say it, Jim, but their goal in life is to pay the bills, make wages. You know, that's their goal. What we aim to do is give them "accountability" to their dreams and goals."Education", because if you bring them the best education that they can't get out in other places, then obviously it changes the way they respond to you. And finally, the "results" come from those three other things.

Well, that's a really comprehensive package, And having met the "ActionCOACH" people here in the UK at one of the events arranged down here in the southwest of England, I could feel the energy and the commitment, and as you say, really everyone working towards a higher purpose, which is, you know, really what actually keeps the longevity of a business, isn't it?

Yeah, just always a reminder to people."Repeat business equals profit".

And you know that better than anybody because I mean, you've been here, it says on your website and you've got Forbes, Franchise Times, Entrepreneur Magazine Awards. So Brad Sugars, now, I do want to ask you, you have sort of been running counter to this kind of theory that the"Riches are in the niches" because "ActionCOACH", in a funny way is not just doing a particular kind of coaching for a particular sector. How can you break that rule? Or are other people wrong about the "riches are in the niches"?

Or are we breaking the rule?

That's the question. Yeah.

See, what is a niche? It's small business, the niche that we go after, because all of the big consulting companies go for the 50 plus employees or the 500 plus employees. Who's going for the person with no employees? Who's going for the people with less than 50 employees, less than 5 million in revenue a year? Who's going after them? Nobody on a worldwide scale, Jim. So maybe it is a niche, but then again, maybe I break the rule again by saying,"Our marketing is done by niching", Jim. Our marketing to tradespeople is very different to our marketing to doctors. And they're very different, again, to our marketing to accountants, and attorneys, and professions. So, maybe we don't break the rule. Maybe we just are the rule, but we're doing it in a different way. If I look at a different business of mine, we have marketing services firm based out of London. And in that we only work with accountants, lawyers, and business coaching firms. I bought half of the company because they were doing great results with our team. And we are very clear on who we work with in that business. So, yeah, maybe we're breaking the rule, but maybe we're using the rule to our advantage. I'm not sure it is a rule though, Jim, and that's something we could, gee, we could spend a whole show debating just that topic. But I do love from a marketing perspective being very niche oriented. But location is also a niche, Jim. Like, our franchisees operate in a territory of around about 10,000 businesses. So, that locality is also a niche, you know, that the niche is, that is their town, that is their home base. So, there's a lot to be said to "niching" out there. I'm not sure I would disagree with it yet, but I might challenge it.

what you've shown as well is that, as an entrepreneur you can be a little bit more open-minded and see a niche by a profile demographic or by geography rather than some slavish adherence to a formula, which is, you know, almost antithetical to being an entrepreneur in the first place, isn't it? We're not very good at following formulas. Although, you've built one with your business coaching.

I build a lot of formulas because I find teaching is a lot easier when you have formulas. I'm also a believer in the disnification of businesses, Jim. I like to think of, you know, I have a set of intellectual property. How many ways can I sell that? I can sell it with a hat. I can sell it with a water bottle. You've got your mug right there. You know, you do it the same. You have your podcast, your blogs, your books. Like, there's a lot of ways to sell the same thing to different niches. You know, some people love podcasts, some people love books. So there's different ways to hit different target audiences.

Now, there are different ways as well for people to consume, Brad Sugars. Now we've got " Brad Sugars", the brand and the website, and we've got a number of businesses including the "ActionCOACH". I'd love for you to just talk about how you've managed to have this sort of multi-brand approach. Can you talk to that, Brad? How you've done that?

Originally, there was no logic to it, Jim. I was doing seminars just as Brad Sugars, and I didn't even have "ActionCOACH", at the time. And then, when we started"ActionCOACH", about four years in, I sort of started to shelve the "Brad Sugars" brand and just go under the "ActionCOACH" brand. What I've noticed though over the years is that as the"ActionCOACH" brand grew with the sort of Gen X and boomers. The millennials didn't really relate to that brand as well. And so we could choose,"Do we go and fully rebrand, and start to move into that millennial and Gen Z, or do we stay with the strong brand that really hits the target audience that we have, or do we go the other way?" And so I reinvigorated the "Brad Sugars" brand. And the other thing is, as an entrepreneur, I can say things that I can't as CEO of the company. You know, as CEO of the company, I have to represent the company in a certain way and do certain things for our value, our stakeholders want a certain way of doing things. But the "Brad Sugars" brand can go and do things other way. If you look at someone, you know, I'm nowhere near as famous, but an Elon Musk. The "Tesla" brand is here, the"SpaceX" brand is here, that"Elon Musk" brand is here. He doesn't monetize the"Elon Musk" brand, but he probably could and should if he ever wanted to. I think, if you're good at building your brand promise, and the brand promise of"ActionCOACH" is different to the brand promise of "Brad Sugars" brand. You know, "Brad Sugars" is in business, wealth, and life skills, whereas "ActionCOACH" is a business brand. And it had to be different to say that. So yeah, we had to invest time, energy, and effort to build a different brand.

that's really interesting. And do you think there's a particular time for an entrepreneur when they can hold, if you're like those multiple brands? Because some entrepreneurs have got a business that isn't yet ready to sustain this duality of brands. Brad, what was your view on that?

You know, I go back to my definition of a business and that is a commercial profitable enterprise that works without me. If I'm still needed on a day-to-day basis to run that business, then, no. You can't move to that second brand or even a second business for that matter. it's interesting though, Jim, I built a lot of other brands. Our commercial cleaning business, our restaurants, all of those other things, our catering companies. I built those brands separate and distinct from me. I do love the idea though, Jim, that all businesses should have a figurehead. I do think that a voice, be it an employed CEO, or you know, when I sit down and look at Apple. Yeah, absolutely, Tim Cook is nowhere near as exciting as Steve Jobs was on stage, but he's still the figurehead, he's still the go-to person. Now we're seeing, you know, Microsoft's figurehead is beating Apple's figurehead vehemently in the press, and in the ways that he is running the business. You know, so I think that as you learn to build other brands, having your own brand at some point is necessary. And I've always believed that as an entrepreneur, one of the things that allows me to buy companies and all of the venture capital companies I talk with. They got to pay more for companies because the companies don't see the value they're gonna add. I don't have to pay as much for companies I buy, because the companies I'm buying into see me and go,"That guy is gonna add so much value to our organization. We want you as a partner more than we want your money." They still want my money, of course. But.

But exactly. I can see because the "Brad Sugar's brand" brings all the assets in terms of capital, growth, and market penetration, and all those other wonderful things that you've got from your courses in your books. Brad, you know, this show could talk with you for hours and I would love that, but we only have 20 minutes. So, if there was one tip that you'd like to give to, I'm gonna say, my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs. Because you've now transcended that category. I've seen a picture with you and Richard Branson. So for the rest of us, mere mortals, what would you say, as a as a, as a tip on, on how to get noticed?

Buddy, I'm definitely still a mere mortal. That speaking gig, I was in Dublin and Lady Michelle Mone spoke before me. Then it was me, then it was Sir Richard. It was the lady, the convict, and the sir, you know. So definitely still a mere mortal. Look, I think, I'll go back to something I said earlier and then top it off."Ask people to raise their hand all the time." Never do any marketing where you are looking for likes, or follows, and stuff. Ask people to say,"Hey, I'm interested." You know, for example, Jim, when this podcast is released, I'll put a picture up and say,"You won't believe the second question, Jim, asked me. Phenomenal. The answer I gave was stuff that I've never really taught in business or in seminars. If you'd like a copy of the podcast, type the word 'podcast' below." And so I will then get into a conversation. I believe that conversations precede conversions. And if in today's world you generate more conversations, you will do better. It's no more complex than that. But the other thing that I always say is that,"Your business cannot outgrow you. The more you learn, the more you earn. And as the owner of a business, if you stop learning, then your business is gonna stop growing." So subscribe to Jim's podcast. Keep listening.

Yeah, do like Brad says, subscribe to the podcast. I'm gonna put down,"I can't believe the answer he gave to the third question either. You must click, subscribe." Brad Sugars, we could chat all day. Thank you so much joining me from your sun Haven, Las Vegas, and and talking about being an entrepreneur, building a big brand, and some also personal things as well. Brad Sugars, thank you so much for joining me from the wonderful gambling city of Las Vegas, Nevada. Thank you. And taking all the risk really out of our own business with all your amazing action coaching. Thank you so much, Brad.

Hey mate, wonderful to be here. Thank you for taking the time to interview me and I look forward to a release date.

So, you've been listening to Brad Sugars, the Founder and CEO of "ActionCOACH", and me here, Jim James. And I will put his details, of course, if you still can't find Brad Sugars, then that's another matter. But I will, of course, put Brad's details in the show notes. Thank you for joining me, Jim James, and if you've enjoyed this, do please share it with the fellow entrepreneur. If you've got a chance to rate it, that'll be really fantastic on your player. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating. Now I'm gonna take Brad's advice and just ask you what was his response to question two answer on my Twitter @jimajames, what did Brad Sugar say as an answer to my question two. You can see this in the transcript or go back and hear it again. I'm gonna challenge you. Were you listening? He was saying some great things. Share them on Twitter with me. Thank you. The Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show is sponsored by a company called Prowly. Prowly is an all in one software for leveraging your public relations activities. You can use it to boost the media relations game for your business. You can find media contacts, send out press releases, and get more coverage while saving time and money on everyday tasks. Check it out Prowly.com.