I am actually a franchisee of ActionCOACH and am considered within the franchise to be quite successful. However, I agree with the other report on Brad Sugars and Actioncoach by the former franchisee from Las Vegas (although he sounds a bit more bitter about his relationship with action). Brad is, in my opinion, an incredibly greedy man who is willing to say anything to anyone for the right price. It has become clear to me and many of the other coaches in Action that Brad is constantly only looking out to make more money for himself, with little concern what it might cost others. He does have an extensively bad reputation, from what I read and understand, in both Australia and the US already, that seems hard for him to shake due to the internet following him around.
But Brad aside, my main concern is that I have seen time and again Actioncoach convince people to buy this franchise who are clearly not well suited to do this. Being successful in this business takes a very unique personality, level of confidence, work ethic, and background. I just spoke to a gentleman about 2 weeks ago who bought into this franchise then was sold into the idea of buying a "firm"- a model that actioncoach has yet to see work profitably on anything resembling a consistent basis. He has now spent $300,000 from his retirement savings and is broke. The turn over rate for this franchise is alarming. I went to training with about 30 or 40 people and to my knowledge most of them are now gone - not one having successfully resold their franchise, most of them just run out of money.
Action also has a weird culture that seems to cause a great deal of fear of reprisal. It seems coaches are afraid of Brad, perhaps because he's constantly talking about how many millions of dollars he has. It's also driven into us that we must remain "Above the Line", which means any time anyone comes up with anything that's less than glowing about Actioncoach they're quickly retorted with "Hey, stay above the line buddy".
Actioncoach also collects a monthly 5% "marketing fund" royalty that never seems to develop any leads for any actioncoaches. Because of the legal language written into our franchise agreements it's very hard to make any headway when discussing this because they've included language that states they can basically use it how they see fit with no accountability to where it's going. This in my opinion is a way for Action to basically steal 5% of our revenues and there's seemingly nothing we coaches can do about it.
I will say there are many very, very good and talented people within action who are very, very good at helping business owners grow their companies. I consider myself one of them. But most who fall into this category I believe would be very successful without being part of actioncoach. I think some people are just good at being successful and it happens that they, and I, chose to join actioncoach as a vehicle to do the work we wanted to do. But since joining I've learned that most of the information that I thought was Brad Sugars' ideas was actually someone else's, Brad just decides to use them as his own. I've found most of what I thought was Brad's IP by reading and listening to Brian Tracy, who I'm pretty sure did not steal anything from Brad, if he's ever really even heard of Brad other than being paid to speak at one of his conferences.
Overall, I think actioncoach is a company that is led by a very dishonest man who, in my opinion, will never change because he's an egomaniac. I think he created and cultivates a culture of greed by some involved with actioncoach. I think it is, though, also made up of business coaches who are mostly good, honest, hard working people who honestly want to help business owners do better. I do regret buying my franchise because of the culture brad promotes and because it is clear brad and the other leaders don't really care about people - they care about money. That's not attractive to me.
I write this at the risk of potential future clients reading it. Again, I want to emphasize that my remarks have nothing to do with certain coaches' abilities to help business owners achieve their goals, but about actioncoach itself and its inner workings.
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