ActionCOACH

success and leadership and all sorts of things. So, I just became a studier, and when I got into business for myself, I was just a student of anything and everything.” “The business, itself, started purely by accident,” Sugars continues. “I was a young man when I succeeded in other business- es and people often asked, ‘How did you achieve that? What did you do different?’ I honestly didn’t think I did that much differently, but I started being asked to give talks, and when I started talking to people, they said, ‘Can you help us?’ I said, ‘I’m not sure; maybe I’ll call you every week and chat with you, because I’m too busy running my own businesses.What I’ll do is,’ and then I said the magic word, ‘I’ll coach you in business.’ “In the early days, people just wanted me to tell my story. Business ownership is one of the loneliest roads there is.When you’re the guy or the gal who owns the ACTIONCOACH Coaching works when there’s a good personality match. Skill set match, industry match – those things are not as important. What makes a good coaching relationship is where the people get along and where they can be in a relationship for a long period of time, because you’re going to tell your coaches things and be very open with them. BRAD SUGARS FOUNDER business, you don’t have anyone to talk to. You can’t talk to your spouse about your problems – you kind of don’t want them to know about them. If you worry them about things they don’t have the knowledge to help you fix, all you’re doing is making them worry about something. You don’t talk to your staff; you don’t talk to your bank manager. In fact you want to hide that stuff. It’s a lonely road. “After doing speeches in five or six countries, I started to really enjoy teaching people and real- ized that there are a lot of people who needed help with this stuff. I had an ability to commu- nicate complex things, fairly simply.When it comes to business, I always go back to Einstein’s statement: ‘If you can’t teach it simply, you don’t understand it well enough to teach it.’ I started working with business owners - showing them how to do it, because I found that if I keep build- ing these business owners, they’ll run a better business. Still, to this day, when I teach, it’s always my goal to sit down and make it simplified for people. “One day, a gentleman named Robert Kiyosaki, who’s now very famous with the Rich Dad, Poor Dad series said to me, ‘Why don’t you come and teach with me at my business school for en- trepreneurs?’ I got so many requests to speak, I thought that maybe I needed to look at this as a separate business. I started out working with coaches on my team and eventually moved to building a large franchise organization based on the fact that we wanted to expand internationally. I gave away my first franchise to someone who