In this era, where new technologies, business trends, and fierce competition are rapidly evolving, many business leaders look to reinvent their businesses in an effort to keep up. New business owners may find it difficult to grow without direction, and the result can be stagnation. Such business owners and entrepreneurs often require assistance from the experts who are proficient and have accumulated years of enriching experience. These entrepreneurs need a business coach.
Brad Sugars, the Founder and CEO of ActionCOACH®, pioneered the industry of business coaching through hard work, determination, and a well-organized and systemized approach that generates profits for the businesses his team works with. Through his book, ‘Pulling Profits Out of a Hat,’ he has created a handbook for adding zeroes to anyone’s bottom line.
CIO LOOK appreciates such leaders and their contributions. We are proud to feature Brad Sugars in this edition.
Leading the Way-The Story Behind ActionCOACH®
From a very early age, Sugars had an entrepreneurial spirit. He was inclined to work smarter, not harder and determined to get measurable results. In college, he managed a number of small businesses. But with incredible success at such a young age, a talent for making companies in a variety of industries flourish, people in the business community began referring to him as “The Turnaround Kid.” Business owners began to approach Sugars to work as a consultant but he soon realized such work was not his calling. He realized that coaching offered the missing component that made consultant so ineffective, and thus ActionCOACH® was established.
ActionCOACH® has served thousands of businesses and their owners around the world and in every industry imaginable since 1993, and specializes in showing business owners how to find more time, create better teams within their companies and more money on their bottom-line. Its approach utilizes fundamental business principles that can be applied to any business in any industry. Because its approach works with every industry, ActionCOACH® has been able to expand into more than +60 countries, and they are proud to say that they have coached more clients, won more awards, gained more recognition and produced more profits than any other coaching company in the world.
ActionCOACH® has a lot of offerings designed to appeal to a wide swath of its target audiences, including executive coaching, group coaching, one-toone coaching, workshops, webinars, and seminars. The company also offers its Product Ladder, which includes ActionCLUB, Assessments Online, SeminarCLUB, Business Valuation, BusinessRICH, GrowthCLUB, BookCLUB, and ProfitCLUB. Each of these offerings provides levels of investment designed to meet any organization at its current financial needs.
What’s ‘Pulling Profits Out of a Hat’ about?
“Pulling Profits Out of a Hat” is a quintessential modern business handbook that breaks down the strategies and disciplines that will help people grow any business exponentially. It’s a book that truly works if one follows the principles outlined in it. In more than 370-pages, the book outlines five disciplines designed to help CEO’s and business leaders expand the business exponentially year after year. The first is Strategy, which is defined by a business model that sets the business up for massive growth. The second is Business Development. Too many people believe that this means just marketing and sales. That’s false. Business development is about getting and KEEPING your customers. Third, it’s the discipline of People. You have to grow people in your business. If you build the people, they will build the business. Fourth, is Execution. You can have the best of everything but in this day and age proper execution sets you up for success. The final discipline is Mission, which means connectivity between people and the company. You have to build an emotional connection.
“Leadership is key, and that’s really about two things: passion and focus. We believe in staying grounded and focused, and allowing your passion for the work becomes contagious. These are philosophies that have shaped our organization,” Sugars said.
It’s these types of sentiments which makes Sugars an exemplary CEO.
Technology Integration
In the future, Sugars believes that a great portion of how business is done will be taken into online formats. Social media has and is changing things, and business owners need to embrace it or suffer. Additionally, the ability to coach remotely and in a virtual environment provides coaches with limitless opportunities, and erases the physical boundaries based upon a client’s location.
In the future, every successful professional will have a business coach. It’s a little-known fact that approximately 40% of Fortune 500 companies make use of business coaching to train and develop their executives. According to Sugars, small and medium-sized businesses also know the value of coaching. Coaching is something that all business owners and executives can benefit from. That being said, the era of exclusive in-person coaching has died. One can host meetings online, have weekly calls. There are tons of strategies that can be employed to make physical distance a non-issue. Webinars, online training, and digital coaching are becoming the norm, and ActionCOACH® utilizes all of these tools.