Coaching & Community

Brad Sugars, ActionCOACH and what it means for an Indian MSME owner

18 September 2026 6 minute read

Coach Dhejo with Brad Sugars, founder of ActionCOACH, at the Global Conference in Goa — With Brad Sugars, founder of ActionCOACH, at the Global Conference in Goa.

Some rooms change the way you think about your own work. The ActionCOACH Global Conference in Goa was one of those rooms — coaches from across the world, all doing the same job in very different economies, and at the centre of it the man who started the whole thing four decades ago.

Who Brad Sugars is

Brad Sugars is the founder of ActionCOACH, the business coaching firm he started in Australia as a young man and grew into one of the largest coaching networks in the world, with coaches across dozens of countries. He is an entrepreneur first and a coach second, which is exactly why his material is practical rather than academic — he has built, bought and sold real businesses, and the frameworks come out of that.

The book in the photograph above is his — a playbook about how businesses actually scale. What struck me most when he spoke was not a new idea. It was the insistence on the ordinary ones: know your numbers, write your processes, build a team that does not need you, and repeat the boring things until they compound.

A business is a commercial, profitable enterprise that works — without you.

The ActionCOACH definition of a business. Read it slowly. Most MSMEs in India fail that definition on the last two words.

The ideas worth carrying home

Stripped of the stage, three ActionCOACH ideas travel especially well into an Indian MSME.

1
Mastery before growth
Destination, time, money and delivery get fixed before you touch marketing or scale. Growth on an unstable base just multiplies the mess — this is the same order we work in at Fortune Business Hub.
2
The five ways, not one big lever
Profit comes from leads, conversion rate, average transaction value, number of transactions and margin. Improve each one modestly and the compounded result looks dramatic. Owners usually chase only leads.
3
Systems run the business, people run the systems
Write the process, assign the owner, measure the output. This is the single change that converts a busy owner into an actual business owner.

Coach Dhejo holding a Take Action Get Results sign at the ActionCOACH Global Conference in Goa — Take action, get results. The whole philosophy fits on a placard.

Where India is different

The frameworks are global. The conditions are not. An MSME owner in Chennai or Coimbatore is usually running a family-owned business where decisions involve people who are not in the meeting. Receivable cycles with large buyers stretch far longer than a Western small business would tolerate. Skilled labour moves frequently, so documented processes matter more than heroic hiring. And most owners here are outstanding at the craft and have never been taught to build an organisation around it.

So the work is the same, in a different order of difficulty: cash discipline first, delivery systems next, people clarity after that, marketing last. That is the adaptation we make in every engagement.

Why I keep going to rooms like this

A coach who stops being coached goes stale. Conferences like Goa are where the frameworks get stress-tested against what other coaches are seeing, and where you find out which of your habits have quietly become excuses. Every one of those ideas comes back into the sessions I run with MSME owners in India the following week.