The ActionCOACH Story
ActionCOACH was established in 1993. You can find our global history here.
“I’m a business coach,” says Brad Sugars. “I started in business in my teenage years. By my early twenties, it had got much more sophisticated. I’ve been teaching business, mostly from a stage but I have also written 16 books on the subject. I teach on business, sales, marketing, management, leadership, systemisation. All of the different areas of business which help someone become a great entrepreneur.”
How do you describe ActionCOACH, the business coaching company?
“ActionCOACH is the original business coaching company,” Sugars says. “We started business coaching in 1993, spread across the world. Now, we are in 80 countries helping owners grow their businesses. Working with C-level executives, we coach them on how to grow their business by growing themselves and their team. We do group programmes and one-on-one programmes; we operate at all sorts of different levels.”
“Now we have offices in 80 countries and we will do hundreds of millions in revenue this year. But it’s not really about our size, our culture is more about the size of our clients, who keep growing and adding new jobs. Each year we add tens of thousands of jobs around the world and that’s what excites us.”
Where did it all start?
“We started in August 1993,” Sugars says. “The company was launched from a spare bedroom; like most people starting out, I couldn’t afford an office. At the time I was doing seminars for people and they were asking me how could I help them? I couldn’t really consult with them all, so I started this thing called coaching where I talked to them once a week and helped them out.”
“I didn’t have the time to help people. We began to franchise when we spread into Asia. It was hard to manage the business there with employees, so we turned to a franchising operation and have never looked back.”
Franchising, he explains, became an important option for three reasons. Number one was the need for local ownership. “Like an accounting firm or a legal firm wants partners at a local level, that’s what we really needed. The second reason was because we were expanding internationally and it made sense to have local ownership but most importantly, to have the right people on the ground. We weren’t getting the caliber of people we needed as employees, because the industry was so young. The third reason is that franchising brings capital and skills to the table as you grow the business”
