Helping top corporations to stay at the top

We live in an era where respectable corporations find themselves failing, and ancient and established countries find themselves in unheard-of debt. Institutions upon which so many have relied for easy credit and employment are cutting back, and the necessity of new, innovative business success is becoming ever more vital.

And so it is his milieu that makes Brad Sugars such an interesting figure.

Australian-born, American-residing Sugars is the chairperson and founder of ActionCOACH, the world’s largest business coaching firm. With over a 1 000 offices in 32 countries (including South Africa), ActionCOACH is one of the top 100 franchises globally.

Sugars gives as his personal mission the rectification of horrible business statistics such as the one that tells us that only 40% of start-up companies are still trading after the first year and that 80% of the balance tends to fail within their first five years of operation.

Not only does he aim to alter such a failure rate (his recent worldwide lecture tour was entitled “Business is Booming”), but he is also aiming to shift paradigms of business leadership. In short, his life’s work argues for the necessity of business coaching.

“My work almost began as an accident. I owned a printing company, and I had begun to educate myself concerning fundamental business practices, so I released newsletters to my clients, who then invited me to run various seminars around Australia,” says Sugars.

“I was amazed at how many business people were simply ignorant of the absolute basics of business – they were not good at running a business. There was plenty of hard work, but often a real lack of business knowledge.”

He says that being good at one’s business does not necessarily make one good at running a business. For that, new knowledge is required.

“Being a good plumber doesn’t automatically allow you to run a successful plumbing business.

“It’s a completely different skill set; the same is true of all businesses,” Sugars explains. “Neither would experience in plumbing translate into business success.

“I have lived in a house all my life, but I could not draw up a perfect house plan.

“We know this to be true, yet often we ignore these essential facts when it comes to business.

“You have to invest in business skills in order to run a good business,” he adds.

As Sugars expanded his coaching ambit, he began to buy into various broken companies in order to turn them around, which he did with enormous success. As a result, ActionCOACH was built around his own business achievements and his burgeoning coaching career.

The results have been astronomical, with ActionCOACH now having a presence worldwide – with virtually no competition.

Its literature is riddled with the success stories of its clients.

Such success, coupled with its service guarantee of making a measurable impact on clients’ business within 17 weeks of weekly coaching, invites a host of questions, beginning with: “What’s the trick?”

Sugars says he offers no tricks, nor any quick-fix solutions.

“If anybody tells you there is only one or two important things you need to know in order to run a business effectively, they’re fooling you,” he says.

Nevertheless, he does categorise his work under three core headings: “There are three chief areas that we look to leverage: sales, marketing and management.

“In sales, we have found that there is always room for improvement, and there are many strategies that can be adopted to do that.

“With marketing, we find many businesses simply don’t do it. They’ll write up a business plan, gather capital, and when you ask where the marketing budget is, you realise they have simply assumed that the customers will come to them. In this sense, most new businesses are under-capitalised,” adds Sugars.

“In terms of management, we generally aim to take our clients from chaos to control. We often find that so many things are happening in the operation of a business that the management simply does not know about. We aim to rectify this.”

The form of the coaching comes in weekly mentorship of one hour a week. The mentoring is a large part of the service.

Sugars maintains that its scale and experience make ActionCOACH unique.

“When you sit down with us, you know that our strategies worked in businesses before we coached them. I still run businesses for a living, and I coached before I wrote anything. We have 18 500 business owners on our books and our level of data is immense,” he says.

“Added to this, is the simple fact that everybody needs a mentor, everybody needs a coach. And armed with that relationship, and access to tested business knowledge, success follows.”

ActionCOACH delineates the differences between coaching and consulting: “A consultant gives you answers, but a coach asks you questions. A coach does not play the game with you.

“To use a football analogy, a coach is obviously a coach, while a consultant is a substitute who runs on to the field with you as a particular kind of specialist. We don’t do that,” says Sugars.

Of course, the next obvious question that emerges is whether businesses can afford the cost of coaching at such a time as this. Is it a luxury that businesses can afford?

“There is more need for coaching than ever before,” asserts Sugars. “We need to find new ways of doing business; but mostly, we need to learn to adapt our businesses to the economic seasons.

“We are in a winter right now, but winter is always going to come at some point. If you can learn to adjust your business according to the seasons, you can maximise the value of each passing season, and in so doing, prepare for the future,” he adds.

On a global level, Sugars believes winter to be the time to cut back so as to restore profitability for the future, as well as to look for new ways of marketing.

“Too many of us made ourselves fat in the summer – that’s why the recession has been particularly harsh. Summers are for planting new seeds, and for hiring, not simply just to enjoy profits,” he says.

Sugars suggests that governments should take stock right now of the simple advice offered to business owners.

“You can’t spend to get out of a cycle of over-spending. Stimulus spending can be valid if one spends that money on infrastructure for the future,” he says.

“For example, in the [United States], only 12% of their stimulus went to an infrastructure spend. The United Kingdom is coming to terms with the reality that governments must behave like good citizens.”

With that in mind, Sugars has some interesting advice for South African business people and policy-makers alike: “South Africa has always had a great entrepreneurial spirit, with some great global brands, and really I would encourage businesses to continue thinking globally, and not to become insular.”

“For example, how easy is it for your business to trade with foreigners? Is your website dot.com, or dot.coza?

“Many executives have also become very comfortable in a corporate culture, and are afraid to branch out on their own,” he adds.

Sugars maintains that some of South Africa’s economic difficulties need to be approached as challenges that can be surmounted to the benefit of all.

“South Africa was saved from much of the worst of the recession because of decent banking regulations and the existence of enough fundamental business but, like many other countries, suffers from a lack of an internal market because of poverty,” he says.

“If business people can assist in creating equality, then their business can only improve.

“It is to everyone’s advantage that the whole country does well.

“A great example of this can be found in Singapore. Equality was built and at the same time a customer base was created internally. The government’s role in this is to incentivise business,” adds Sugars.

“Business, through a desire to be profitable, can create jobs. This becomes a political double-edged sword because, as a result, there is more tax revenue and fewer citizens in need of government spending.

“As for other obstacles, when the rand increases, business has to look for how that can leverage them into new opportunities for export, as opposed to merely bemoaning lost opportunities,” he says.

But Sugars constantly returns to his key theme: business knowledge.

“The best advice I ever received was from a man named Jim Rohn – read a book a week. Since then, I have read over 1 400 books on the subject of business success.

“So few people read anymore. There is no secret to success – it is all written down! The question is whether we are too lazy to access that knowledge,” he adds.

Added to Sugars’ quest for knowledge and the impartation thereof, is his belief in the value of mentorship – so much so, in fact, that he describes himself as a man with a thousand mentors!

“We have a thousand coaches at ActionCOACH and, believe me, every single one of them is pretty willing to tell you how the company should be run!” he says.

“On a more serious note, though, I think the chief mentor in my life has been my dad. He is calm, streetwise, gives blunt answers and always points out the right things to me.”

Sugars often recounts a poignant example of this kind of advice: “There was a stage when I was struggling to find good personnel which, obviously, I heavily depend on, and I mentioned this to my dad, and his response was telling: ‘You know, Brad, you get the people you deserve.’

“I realised that if I am an atrocious leader, then I get really bad people. So I have to learn to be a great leader and then I will attract top people. I have to build an awesome company that attracts awesome people,” he adds.

As for the future, Sugars’ aims function more on a personal level than one would necessarily expect.

“I want to be a good father more than a businessman. I want to spend time with my kids and enjoy life.

“For ActionCOACH, we want to continue to be one of the top franchises in the world, and we hope to be operating in 120 countries by 2012. To do that, we are going to have to work smarter, but we are all excited by the vision.

“In South Africa, we have a basic footprint, but we are going to continue to find good coaches here so that we can make an impact.”

Even a cursory glance at Sugars’ beliefs and aims seems to suggest the surety of his pioneering line of work having the intended impact. ▲

Chris Waldburger