Grow Your Business Exponentially with “The $21.7 Billion Dollar Man”, Jay Abraham – EP 178

Interview with Jay Abraham

Grow Your Business Exponentially with “The $21.7 Billion Dollar Man”, Jay Abraham

Featured on This Episode: Jay Abraham

✅ What he does: Jay Abraham is a business executive, conference speaker, and author renowned for pioneering strategies in the direct response marketing industry during the 1970s. He was recognized by Forbes in 2000 as one of the top five executive coaches in the United States. As the founder and CEO of The Abraham Group, a marketing consulting firm, Abraham has played a pivotal role in enhancing the profitability and operational efficiency of over 10,000 clients across more than 1,000 industries globally. His expertise lies in identifying overlooked opportunities, underperforming activities, and undervalued possibilities, which has earned him the admiration of CEOs, best-selling authors, entrepreneurs, and marketing professionals worldwide.

💬 Words of wisdom: “If you do things nobody else does and you understand ways to do it nobody else does and they’re more powerful, more profitable, higher yielding, less risky, far greater strategic benefit, then all of a sudden you can run rings around people.” – Jay Abraham

🔎 Where to find Jay Abraham: Instagram | Facebook | X | YouTube | LinkedIn

Key Takeaways with Jay Abraham

• 10,000 clients in over 1,000 industries
• Why “funnel vision” is better than “tunnel vision”
• Six strategies for business growth
• The risk of relying on a single income
• How owners can prevent burnout
• Jay’s playbook for 10x-ing companies
• Jay’s rules for business growth
• Are you chasing an epic exit or building an empire?
• Elevating a Chinese candy shop to #1
• This is how you outperform competitors
• How to uncover new revenue drivers

Jay Abraham Shares Secret to Unlocking Exponential Business Growth 

Jay Abraham Quotes

“If you do things nobody else does and you understand ways to do it nobody else does and they’re more powerful, more profitable, higher yielding, less risky, far greater strategic benefit, then all of a sudden you can run rings around people.” – Jay Abraham

Resources

• Abraham.com
• Jay Abraham on Instagram | Facebook | X | YouTube | LinkedIn
• Rob Colasanti
• Stephen M.R. Covey
• Sally Hogshead
• Icy Hot
• Wesley Financial
• Dave Asprey
• Bulletproof
• FedEx

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Strategy Session 

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Read the Full Transcript with Jay Abraham

Justin Donald: What’s up, Jay? So good to have you on the show.

Jay Abraham: Justin, it is such a pleasure. I enjoyed you when I was in Austin. I found you to be uplifting, stimulating, intellectually profound. So, this will be fun. I’m here ready to do. I’m at your bidding, man, at your bidding.

Justin Donald: I love it. And thanks for the kind words. I mean, I have to echo them directly back to you because, for those of you that don’t know, anyone in the Lifestyle Investor Mastermind knows that you are with us at our annual retreat and delivered an incredible message. You and I got to do a fireside chat, and it was just amazing. For two hours, we just dove into all kinds of content. So, we get to do round two here today, and I’m just excited for the rest of our audience, the rest of my network, the rest of the people who are not part of Lifestyle Investor to learn more about you, learn more about your skill set, your secret sauce, some of the things that you do to help scale and grow businesses. And if memory serves me correctly, I think that you have like over 10,000 clients or something like that in over a thousand different industries or niches. Is that correct?

Jay Abraham: Yeah. We’ve done 10,000 different clients, over a thousand industries, and we’ve done them all over the world, and been really a fun adventure. And the dollars are pretty significant that have been recorded, that have been added in profit performance. And most of them are companies that operated at a very high level of integrity, preeminence contribution. So, they would have been leaders or on a growth path to become a leader in their field or niche. So, really quality people that were making a meaningful difference to their market, not just trying to suck profit out of it.

Justin Donald: Oh, I love that. Well, I’ll tell you what, today, I’m looking forward to really discussing some of these strategies that you’ve used over the years, maybe even get into some specific case studies. So, as I see what we’re going to embark on today, I have three goals. One of them being to shift your paradigm. To those of you watching, to those of you listening, shift your paradigm about what’s possible, both in life in general and in business. Secondly, to really look at your business and assess your business, for those of you that are in the business space and for those of you that are not, figure out ways that you may be able to tap into that, either as a side hustle or as a full-time thing, full-time gig. And then thirdly is to really look at the impact that Jay has had on entrepreneurs and the business world as a whole. And potentially what that could look like is it translates to you, to you personally, to you from a business standpoint. So, I think we’re going to have a lot of fun here today.

Jay Abraham: I agree.

Justin Donald: So, Jay, what would you say, if you had to sum it up, and I know this is tough because you’ve got so many years of experience, but if you had to sum up kind of like your secret sauce or what you see that other people don’t see because I see you as a masterful collaborator, and I would love to know what has been that outlier kind of approach that separated you from many others in the business space.

Jay Abraham: Yeah. No, it’s a wonderful question. See, there’s probably three or four integrated modules that have come together in lockstep. First is I learned early in my life accidentally that breakthroughs don’t come usually from within. They come from outside. So, I was able to come up with something that I subsequently called funnel vision versus tunnel vision but it’s borrowing success approaches from outside an industry where most of the people in that industry have never been exposed to it. So, they’re breakthrough-ish. Most people in the industry pretty much, Justin, they follow the herd. They do plus or minus, more or less better where everybody else does the same way. And all you can expect really is incremental gain. But if you do things nobody else does and you understand ways to do it nobody else does and they’re more powerful, more profitable, higher yielding, less risky, far greater strategic benefit, then all of a sudden you can run rings around people. And I learned that earlier.

I learned to work on the geometry of the business instead of working incrementally. The good example is 10 plus 10 plus 10 is 30. Ten times ten times ten is a thousand. I learned how to work on that enormous performance enhancement that could be achieved for very, very, very small risk or investment or no risk or investment. I learned about variability. This is quite profound. You do something one way, Justin, it produces X. You do it a different way, same time, same effort, same access to market, same capital, same ad, same salesperson, same lead, same buyer, it can produce 3X, 5X, 10X now and a lot more later. I learned the real way that businesses grow and there’s only three main and three advanced ones. And I won’t hold them back. You either get more buyers, you get larger units of sale each time people buy and thus more profit, you get people to purchase more often, or you get more utility value out of them. Those are the main three. Utility and frequency are just derivatives of the same thing.

And the advanced ones are you penetrate a new market or niche every year, you introduce a new product or service every year and the reasons behind it are really quite profound because I learned master-level strategy, or you acquire a product service or an access vehicle every year. And if you do those six things, your business can’t help but really grow and explode and your profit will multiply many times greater. So, I learned those things. I learned how to be what I call an exponential entrepreneur. I learned how to be what I call a 3D thinker instead of a 2D. And this is very important, and it should be a little bit thought-provoking for entrepreneurs or anybody that is aspiring to be one. Most business owners look at business in terms of revenue, Justin, minus expense equal profit.

But if you were a PE firm or a hedge fund, you wouldn’t look at it that way. You look at the yield you’re getting over and over again from the asset, the investment class. So, if you replace investment class with prospect buyers, salesperson, distribution channel, instead of looking at it static, you look at what you’re going to get over a much longer period of time, it changes the game you play versus the game everybody else plays. If you look at everything you do in business, which I was trained to do, not as spend but as an investment that you need to know both the relative yield and the relative risk on it changes everything because you start saying, “Well, this allocation of opportunity or resource or time or attention or capital isn’t really as high yielding as this and it’s much more speculative. I’m going to adjust my portfolio.” Things like that. I don’t know if that’s a little too sophisticated but that’s sort of the basis. And then the fact that I was exposed to a thousand industries gave me, what I would call, global advantage.

Most people only know one strategy. I’ve seen 500 strategy choices. Most people know one marketing approach. I’ve seen a thousand different ways to market. Most people only know one way to generate revenue. I’ve seen thousands of them. Most people don’t even understand that they have a revenue system that is driving all of their income and that system has a lot of interconnected levers in it that can be pulled much more high-yielding. And speaking of leverage, and the last thing I’ll say, and then I’ll go like that, is that the majority of people don’t realize that our personal lives, Justin, have been massively enhanced by levers, light switches, wheelbarrows, screwdrivers, brooms, push buttons that open your car, flip top cans, car jacks.

But in business, we’ve had and we always will, and we’ll have for eons to come, all these levers that nobody even knows they can pull for much higher combined yield. And when you put all that together, that’s pretty much it’s a little complicated but a secret sauce normally isn’t just tomatoes. It’s tomatoes, oregano, salt, pepper, some exotic herbs. My secret sauce is that integration.

Justin Donald: I love that. And traveling. I’ve had the exposure to all these different cultures and people and thinkers, people that are highly sophisticated. And so, you go back to Leonardo da Vinci and some people know him for the art that he does but they don’t know that he’s one of the most masterful creators of complex leveraged systems and like different pulley systems, just all these things that magnify results, right? Takes less energy, less effort to get a more profound result. And that’s what happens with business consultants like you or business partners like you, or when you gave the example of what does a hedge fund do or a portfolio management company where as a single company owner, you look very linearly versus in a portfolio, you’re looking for the collaborations, you’re looking for the leverage, you’re looking for ways to magnify, through strategic relationships.

And so, that’s why sometimes these companies get bought for crazy amounts of money, much more than what they’re producing because it has nothing to do with the companies producing. It actually has to do with the problem that that company helps the portfolio solve.

Jay Abraham: Yeah. I mean, it can have enormous strategic benefits. It can be a product service, something people buy before, during, after. Instead, it reclaims or enhances the yield you get on an investment, in a relationship, a transaction, a buyer. It can be a technology. It can be access to a niche you don’t have. It can be repurposed. We even had people buy access vehicles. Podcast, they’ve reached the market. They want discussion groups, URLs. We have a client right now that is trying to do a roll-up in logistics. And he’s trying to buy a bunch of, $5, $10, $15 million smaller logistics companies. And a lot of them have a little bit of an arrogant idea of what the business is worth. And it’s been a little bit frustrating to close the deals until I made a realization, which was shocking.

And that is that a lot of these owners start by being everything. They’re the salesperson. They’re the manager. Then they get some business and they bring people in and they go to their ivory tower and they go and play golf, and they don’t even any longer have a close relationship with the clientele. The salespeople have that but rarely do they give salespeople equity. Rarely do they give them even as generous comp as they probably deserve. And we’ve been able to hire sales forces for a pittance of what the business would go for, give them deferred large incentives based on them having a book that comes and stays, and we’re buying business equivalents for $0.04 on the dollar because the salespeople own the relationships. So, it’s looking at things from very different vantage points.

Justin Donald: Yeah, I love that. You know, it’s really fun off-air. And I want to get into the nuts and bolts here in a second but off-air, we were talking and it turns out that you literally live, I think, it’s down the road from my grandmother.

Jay Abraham: Very close.

Justin Donald: Same area, which is great. And by the way, my grandmother is brilliant. She’s hard-working. I think she’s either 88 or 89. I think she turned 89 and she goes to the gym. The time it opens every day. I think it’s at 4:30 a.m. when LA Fitness opens out there and she gets her workout in but she is super smart and just stealthy when it comes to investing. She’s done very well for herself. And so, it brings up some really fun memories. My grandfather, as I told you, used to work at the Torrance Marriott, down the road from you. And so, that brought back some really cool and really fun memories before we even get here. But one of the things that’s most important during our time here today is since we have a lot of business owners listening in and a lot of people that want to run businesses if they’re not already, I would love to dissect some actual deals that you’ve done because you’ve been masterful at solving complex problems.

You’ve been masterful at fixing underperforming businesses and you have an uncanny ability to solve for these problems, increase overall business income, but really in a way that the owners don’t see it. So, I would love to pick a few different companies. We could start with one and have you walk through what you did to increase the revenue or to grow the value or everything that kind of helped catapult it to the next level.

Jay Abraham: And it isn’t one size fits all but there are predictable processes that we use. First thing we do is we always look at these three ways we talked about. How are you targeting your market? Is that the highest and best? Usually, it’s not. If it is, are you getting the most yield out of what you’re doing? So, I’ll stop there. Because I’ve been trained in variability, it’s fascinating, Justin. Different ways of doing and seeing things can produce totally different results. As an example, we have changed a headline in an ad and quadrupled or ten times the response from the same amount of expenditure, same access to the same media. We have changed a price point and we have increased our results 50%, 60%. We have changed the proposition in the proposal in the ad, and we’ve doubled the yield.

We have added or adjusted risk reversal, taking the apprehension out of saying yes and gotten as much as 50% more. We have changed bonuses or added a bonus and doubled again. We have translated that to selling. We have tested changing subject lines in an email, changing the opening phrase you see when you hit somebody’s landing page, changing the signage at a trade show. We have experimented with what salespeople say the first few minutes they interact with somebody. As an example, we had a very large, it was a furniture store that had a very, very large advertising budget. They were getting about 1,000 lead visitations every week, and we tested 33 different ways of greeting somebody at the front door. And one of them, one of our tests, tripled conversion while producing much higher average sale and corresponding profit. And those people repurchase more often.

So, I’ve learned to test all kinds of hypotheses. We have found that when we have nothing else to sell, oftentimes there are other product or service extensions that most people who see themselves as one product don’t even think about. When you realize that, you can double, redouble, redouble again what’s called the lifetime value, the total profitability that buyer represents to you. Why is that important? Well, first of all, it makes you a lot more money per sale. But second, when you make a lot more, it gives you what’s called more allowable cost that you can allocate to bringing them in in the first place. We have found that by creating products or services people buy before or during or after, you could end up getting access before your competitor. We have found that if you sell what people buy instead, you can make, believe it or not, more money than you do from your main product.

I got a couple of examples. Years ago, I had one of the first CRM companies in the field. It was very expensive. They were in Australia. They were spending a lot of money. I got a grant for them a month on Trade Magazine, so we’re getting about a thousand leads and they were closing 3%, but it was a very expensive service. They were not closing 97%. But they’re still making enough money. And when I came in, I looked at it and said, “You’re wasting $97,000 of your $100,000 a month on unsold prospects.” I said, “CRM is not like the swimsuit models in Sports Illustrated or a Porsche automobile. They’re not doing it because they’re just trying to gate. They have a need but your product is either too expensive, too many bells and whistles, doesn’t have enough better terms.” But I said, “If we could find an accessible one that served them better, we could probably make a ton from those 97%.”

So, we went out and we found a lower-priced one that had an entry-level one. We didn’t make a partnership deal with and we made a royalty deal where we took their technology. We white labeled it, we added some bells and whistles, and we ended up that was our sell down or down sell, and we ended up making infinitely more from doing that than we ever did from the people we sold the expensive ones to, and the expensive ones all of a sudden became pure profit. So, that’s an example. Another example, which is similar, if you and I were selling a supplement for weight loss, Justin, and there’s two scenarios. One is you buy it and it’s usually a monthly process. The odds are you’re probably not going to change your nutrition. You’re probably not going to change your caloric intake, and you may not do any more exercise. You’re probably going to lose a lot more weight. And even if you do, you’re going to stop after three-plus months. That’s the average.

But when you stop, you’re probably going to do something else because you’re going to not give up. You’re going to take somebody else’s supplement. You’re going to find portion control food or you’re going to buy equipment, or you’re going to find a private trainer or a virtual group trainer. If you had all those other services available, you could make many times more from that same buyer. So, it’s thinking very differently. I’ll give you an example. When gold, this is years ago, I got started. I’ll tell you a bunch of fascinating stories. When gold first came available legally, gold was illegal and it was legal. Today, it’s $2,000, $3,000 an ounce. There was a time it was only $300 an ounce. And I had a client that was selling gold that was financed by a local bank. The bank would put up two-thirds of the financing. And those were the ads they ran, two-thirds bank financing on silver and gold.

They ran these ads in the Wall Street Journal. They ran them in Forbes and in Barron’s, all those kinds of things. And they made money. But I felt like it was a suboptimal approach. And the reason was I’ve been trained to know that the headline and the promise of an ad or a sales proposition should be ultimately the benefit to the recipient. It should be benefit-oriented. Just parenthetically, we have a great phrase that’s in one of my books. When you go to a hardware store, Justin, to buy a drill, you don’t want a drill. You want a hole. And you don’t want a hole. You want to fasten something. And you don’t want to fasten something. You want to watch your big screen 85-inch TV tonight on Netflix or UFC or whatever you want. So, back to the ranch. So, this gold company was running ads. It said two-thirds bank financing on silver and gold.

And I looked at it and I said to the guys that owned it, I think that’s a declaratory statement. It states what you do but it doesn’t state what it means to the target audience. And I said, “If I can change the ad results for no more cost, will you give me 25% of what I increase?” And they said, “Sure.” So, I tested about ten different headlines and one of them five time increased the pull of the same space, same Wall Street Journal, Barron’s. And I’ll tell you what it was. Back then, gold was selling for $300 an ounce. Remember, their ads started with two-thirds bank financing on silver and gold. It was a declaratory statement. It was a feature. It wasn’t the benefit that the feature produced. I actually wrote it on the benefit. My headline, that one said, “If gold is selling for $300 an ounce, send us just $100 an ounce and we’ll buy you all the gold you want.” Same thing but I articulated it totally in terms of the benefit to the user, the target. And that’s a good lesson.

Let me give you some other cool lessons that might be very, very interesting. You know this because you heard me but I’ll make another comment. I got started with Entrepreneur Magazine when it first started. Very fascinating. Everybody today is an entrepreneur. Back then, nobody even knew what the word meant. We had to print the Webster’s Dictionary definition on an envelope and the pronunciation because people didn’t know how to pronounce the word. But it was not a magazine like it is today. It was a member publication for $100, $150 a year, and every month you’d get a member publication that in the very middle was a 30-ish page overview report of one emerging small business opportunity, tune-up shops, lubrication shops, oil change shops, salad bars, yogurt shops, all these different things. And it would give you a very good comprehensive overview who the franchisors were, if you wanted to go it alone, what the risk was, what the investment was, the kind of income you could expect, and a lot of other minute things.

And at the end of a month, it would just go into archive. No one did anything with it. When I got there, they had 100 of these reports in archive they did nothing with. I took them, added boilerplate stuff. Just what you needed you do if you’re going to start a business to hire an attorney or get your permits or be a guerilla marketer. And we turn them into startup manuals. And the first year we did $1 million of subscription membership for the organization, and we did $9 million reselling the repurposed reports.

Justin Donald: Wow.

Jay Abraham: Yeah, but it got better. Then we took the reports and we aggregated them by topic, food-related, auto-related, service, low investment. We created $200 collections and we sold millions of dollars of that. We had an order department where people would call in to buy them. And a friend of mine was one of the progenitors, one of the first people who was masterful in strategic of turning order-takers into sales makers. He made a deal with us where he took over all the order department and started making an extra $50,000 a week just because he replaced people who were saying, “Okay. What do you want to buy?” with people who advise people on what to buy. I mean, I can go on and on and on. We got thousands of stories like that.

Justin Donald: Well, I absolutely love your stories and I feel like they’re just so relevant because any entrepreneur can take just one of these and say, “Well, hey, what if I try this out?” I mean, one of the big things you said that you did is you split-tested a lot of different strategies or a lot of different ideas. And it’s important if you’re going to do this, that you actually track the results and that you have enough optionality, you have enough tracking, you have enough I guess different features, terms, variable entries that you can really figure out what hums and what doesn’t. And I just think it’s okay to, yeah, most people are afraid to try something new. I think it’s not even okay. As an entrepreneur, we need to try new things.

Jay Abraham: Well, here’s the thing. I got started years ago. I mean, I’ve gained a lot of stature over a 40-plus-year career but I got started just because I saw so many hard-working, passionate entrepreneurs that were trying to make a difference and they accepted a fraction, Justin, of a fraction of the clients they could serve, of the product service transactions that they could create, and the benefit that those transactions could mean to their audience because they were trying to add a unique value or fill a void. And I wanted to help them. But what happens are people don’t really understand how much is possible. There’s people who struggle but then, on the other hand, there are people who are actually what we call successfully stuck and they don’t know it. They’re very content performing at above their market.

You know, maybe their market is growing at 12%, they’re growing at 25, and they think they’re pretty hot stuff and they are if you just judge in that relative sense. But if you ask what more could you do with your time, your opportunity, your dollars, your access to the market, your salespeople, your lead, your one-time sales, your multiple sales, all these things. I mean, it’s infinitely more. I mean, the reason that I’ve had so many companies that double, redouble, and double again is not that I’m that bright. I’m nothing more than an emissary who’s been exposed to such a world of understanding in not just higher performance, but higher performance combined that produces geometric and exponential and ever-compounding sort of asymmetric upside and de-risking the downside performance.

And when you realize that much more you can get, you’re on a mission, you’re on a crusade for everyone to go, “Hey, stop, stop.” Every day you can be doing so much more. And what happens? Same effort or less time or less everything or less could not just make you more money but it could create what you’re all about is far more wealth, far more of an asset that people would stand in line to buy when you’re done with it.

Justin Donald: Yeah, I love that. Well, I love your stories. I mean, they’re so fun. It’s so fun to ideate around the different strategies you’ve used, the different case studies that you’ve shared. And I know you have tons more. But one of the things I want to make sure that we really get into is the Business Hypergrowth Playbook. And some of what you’ve shared maybe it encompasses that. Maybe it’s some extra content around that but I know, basically, your bread and butter is to supercharge these companies in a very strategic and collaborative way. And you do a great job of coming up with frameworks. So, your strategies have frameworks. Your business growth has frameworks. The way that you execute has frameworks. And so, I’d love to talk about that Business Hypergrowth Playbook.

Jay Abraham: Yeah. It’s actually something I’m very proud of. It’s the latest sort of incarnation of my most sophisticated thinking brought down to such elegant simplicity that it’s inarguable when it’s presented. There’s nobody we’ve ever shared it with that doesn’t go, “That makes such good sense.” So, the concept, we call it the Business Hypergrowth Playbook. And it’s because a playbook is basically all the strategies you’re going to use to drive your game plan, which is designed to win the game you’re playing, and you got to know the game you’re playing and what the end game is but it’s based on three very simple phases. And the best part about it is that it is about the lowest risk, the highest-yielding strategy for outsized growth, prosperity, and wealth creation I think anyone’s ever explained. It takes four minutes.

So, phase one is looking at your business from three different vantage points. The first is finding low-hanging fruit and it’s very bountiful. I mean, I can go through and you watch me do it at your event and find category after category, factor after factor, lever after lever. It’s just sitting there, whether it’s reactivating older buyers and no longer whether it’s adding new products, whether it’s figuring out what to do with leads. It did all kinds of things, making sales people better. So, the first thing is low-hanging fruit. There’s two kinds. There’s one-time windfall, and then there’s recurring, significant increases you get to your ongoing revenue. That’s part one.

Part two in phase one is what’s called revenue system optimization. Everybody has a revenue system that’s driving their business. They just really have never probably looked at all the interrelated factors and elements. And when you do, you can make every one of them a little bit better, a lot better. And the combination can be hundreds of percent better. So, we do that, cost no more time, no more effort, no more investment, but a lot more yield. So, you have two different facets. The last is what you call performance enhancements quotient. It’s taking anybody who has salespeople, distributive channels, any kind of performance variation amongst anyone who is a direct factor in generating revenue and reducing the variation and raising what’s called the baseline. And there’s many ways we do that. So, that’s phase one.

But when you do that, the triple combination not only generates a ton of newfound windfall, one-time and recurring income, but it normally produces all the funding and the financing you need to go to the really the super growth mid-phase, and that’s five simple parts. Part one is maximizing. Pardon me. There’s a big difference people don’t realize between optimizing and maximizing. Optimizing is making something the best it can be. Maximizing it is making it the biggest it can be. So, you maximize by taking stuff and really letting it really blow up. Then you upgrade. Upgrade means you make your systems better. You make your skill sets better. And that’s a really easy thing to do because most people don’t even know how much higher performance is capable from all kinds of things, their marketing, their strategy, business model, distribution channels, value prop, all those things.

The next is you work on what’s called the biggest single lever you have, which is your brain, your mind, and the mind of your teams. There’s 25 or so soft skills that have been proven to increase performance results from 10% to 300%. Believe it or not, Stephen M. R. Covey has done seminal work on trust building. Everyone thinks they’re trustworthy, Justin. There are 13 characteristics of you, your salespeople, your customer service people, your technical support people, all manifest is it can be three times greater impact sales, shortening of the sales cycle. There’s seminal research. A man named Roger did on what’s called strategic communication, how you are heard. Believe it or not, there could be up to a three-time impact enhancement depending on cadence, your tonality, pausing, all kinds of things.

A woman named Sally Hogshead has this funny name but it’s her real name, has done seminal research on how you are seen. The more interesting you are, the more effective your result. There are about 25. And then there are about 600, believe it or not, mental models that exist that are determining your attitude, your behavior, your response, your reservation, your fear, your everything. And you’re not going to basically control 600 or even 60 but if you figure out the ten that are driving underperformance or tentativeness or any kind of a restriction or a constraint in you or your team’s world, and you relieve all of those, it is cumulatively geometric. Those are the first three in the second phase.

The third is basically strategic alliances, joint ventures, power partnerships, co-branding, becoming the recommended provider for organizations, referral strategies. Most people get a lot of their business from referrals, and they don’t even have one formalized, systematized referral-generating strategy in place. We know 125 just like we know over 500 strategies. So, first of all, this is phase two after you use all this money to fund it so it doesn’t cost you the kind of scary expense. And by the way, a very interesting parenthetical, I hope I’m not too confusing, everyone teaches, Justin, this 10X moonshot growth process but it’s normally referring to top-line revenue. People don’t tell you one thing about it. In order to do it that way, you got to decide who the experts are. Many of them never work together. Very expensive.

You have to have the right APIs. They’re normally technologically driven, totally different than what you’re doing now. You got to figure out what the application is. You got to be doing that concurrent to keeping your regular business going. It’s going to take longer, cost more than you ever expect like building your own house. And you’re going to have to fund it either out of cash flow, out of borrowing, or out of dilution, but it costs you nothing to get a 10X bottom line moonshot, which will fund all the others. So, now back to the middle. First stage is these three things. It’s basically low-hanging fruit optimization and performance enhancement. The second stage is maximizing, upgrading soft skills, and a mental model constraint removal. The third is strategic alliances, joint ventures, all these things.

And the last is strategic M&A. You’re buying products, services, companies, sales forces, URL, access vehicles. And the combination blows up very qualitatively and in a sustaining basis your bottom line and top. So, now you’re in the catbird seat for phase three which is it’s tale of two cities but both of them are great. You can decide to do an epic exit for a mammoth payday or you can decide to be an empire builder. That’s the concept in a nutshell.

Justin Donald: No, I love that. And again, I like how systematic you are. I like the frameworks that you’ve built. I would love to hear a company that you’ve utilized this with. I know this is basically building upon many of the strategies that you’ve used over many years, and you’re basically taking complex systems from various different times in life, errors in life, and you’re simplifying it down today. But I would love to know a company that you have utilized these strategies with.

Jay Abraham: Sure. Well, we did it with Icy Hot, and they went from 20,000 to, 20s of million in 2 years and sold for tens of millions back a very long time ago to a pharmaceutical company that didn’t even want the 500,000 repeat buyers we had, didn’t even want the thousand plus media distribution network. They were running ads for us strictly on a performance basis where we only paid for results. We did it for, I’ve got a client right now, most people who listen to any kind of a news network would know about. It’s called Wesley Financial. It’s the largest timeshare cancellation company in the world. We started out by showing them they were at a certain level, and they grew about five times over and about 18 or 24 months. And one of the big drivers were they always wanted to use TV and radio, and every time they tried at the cost they had to pay, it never works.

But they didn’t realize that I know somebody who can buy standby or last-minute medium at 85% to 90% off because there’s always going to be unsold advertising. At 100 cents on the dollar, advertising frequently won’t work, but at $0.10 on the dollar, all of a sudden it works. And they use that to blow up. And they’ve grown to where the owner had a very nice home and a very nice Escalade. Now, he’s got a 20,000-square-foot beach house. He’s got an 8,000-square-foot house behind the beach house. He’s got a beautiful house in Franklin. He’s got a jet. He’s got naming rights to the Tennessee Titans. He’s had countless offers to buy it for hundreds of millions of dollars. But that’s another example. I mean, I can give you many more.

Justin Donald: Well, I love these because they’re so practical. And these are name brands. Well, in some cases they’re name brands that people know about. In other cases, they’re name brands that people actually don’t know a lot about and maybe they will in the future or maybe it’s only a powerhouse in the niche if you were to be in that industry. I think you said over a thousand industries, but over 7,000 sub-industry.

Jay Abraham: Yeah, a lot. Over the years, a lot. You know, Dave Asprey used a variation to build Bulletproof. We helped a co-founder of FedEx start another business that he quadrupled as soon as he applied one of our techniques. I can go on and on. I mean, the beauty of what we do is that it’s universal. If there’s a word that somebody use, our methodology is portable, meaning it works almost anywhere it’s applied. You sometimes have to adjust it for the sophistication of the audience. But I’ve done it with, I mean, we took… I’ll tell you a really fun story and this is very interesting. We took a company in China that was the number nine candy company, and in two years they became number one. And ten years ago, they sold 49. That’s all they could sell is 49% for a half $1 billion to Hershey’s. And they did it by a reverse way of thinking.

They originally started coming to me for help with their marketing but they realized that in the candy business, it was distributed by about 60,000 mom-and-pop little candy shops all over China. And everybody else was trying to get these shops to buy more of their candy products than another. And that’s what this company was going to do but they realized after they learned all my methodology and the three ways to grow a business, that if instead they could help a candy shop learn how to get more buyers, get buyers to spend more, come back more often, bring more people that if they help that candy shop double or redouble even if my client didn’t get one percentage point more in percentage sales, if they doubled or tripled or quadrupled the shop, they’re going to get double or triple or quadruple theirs plus they also realized very interestingly, that if they were the only one trying to add value and everybody else was trying to siphon value, it would stand out.

And that’s what happened. It grew all these shops. The shops were grateful. They adjusted their purchase. My client went from number nine to number one. Hershey’s bought it. You know, it’s all over but I got so many stories I can’t remember them.

Justin Donald: I love it. And that to me is just there’s so much value in that because I’ve made a career of being a copycat. I find whoever’s best in class and I copy what they do. So, a lot of people think I come up with all this stuff, and I do come up with some things but the majority of what I do is I copy someone else’s proven method. And until I have it down, until I know it like the back of my hand, only then will I actually innovate that process. And that has really created a lot of success for me in various different industries but that’s my playbook. And I like learning your case studies because our community, our audience can literally copy what you’re saying and implement that into their business because it’s proven, because it’s worked.

Jay Abraham: I’m reflecting. If I look a little deer in headlights, I’m not. I’m reflecting. I think if I were to be honest, I would call myself an original synthesizer. Everyone thought I was this brilliant business sort of super brain and I think I’m well gifted intellectually but I think that really, all I was was the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. Because I would bring people knowledge that everyone else in their industry didn’t have. And a lot of times it’s not that much more sophisticated. It’s just a higher, better use than their industry knows. By the way, this is very interesting. And I learned this many years ago. You know, the concept of best practices has taken over industries. And everybody goes, “We got to get best practices.” It’s good in that. It’s good because it’s going to improve the performance standards that your business operates at, manufacture services, deploys its value, everything.

But really and truly, in terms of learning it, you might be one of the early… And to learn it maybe it gives you a 3 or 4-month advantage but sooner or later everyone’s going to do it, and then it just becomes standard operating procedure. There’s no advantage other than you’re going to have a higher level of performance as everyone will. But if you learn methodologies, strategy, business models, marketing, selling, positioning, differentiating, preemptive advantage that nobody in your industry uses, you’re going to have a huge advantage. And one of the last things I think no matter what we talk about that I didn’t cover, it’s very important, we created many different levers when I was first starting.

One of them is called the Power Parthenon of Geometric Business Growth. And the premise is real simple. Most people in a business, Justin, they depend on one single source, one primary revenue-generating activity for their totality of business. And while it can be profitable, if anything goes wrong with that, they’re screwed. And it’s very easy for something to go wrong. You could hire the salespeople away or it can be a COVID. The ad media can either get saturated or they change the algorithm. Popularity moves to a different platform. We try to get all of our clients to have not one, but as many as nine different we call them pillars, revenue sources, working concurrently. And I talked earlier, oh, I didn’t talk earlier about the 10, 10, 10. I did talk about mathematical but why we love the three way to grow business. I’m doing a little bit of a diffused A.D.D. moment probably.

If you think about this, and I have models for this, but you don’t need a model. If you increase the number of buyers you actively have by 10%, the size of the transaction they do with you by 10%, and the frequency of repurchase they come back and do with you by 10%, the combination is going to be 33% almost always across the board, and that 33% could produce double or triple of profit. But that’s not the biggest profound insight. If you double those numbers and whatever you’re at now, you got let’s say you had a thousand current buyers and you got it to 2,000 and the average person was buying $100, and you just doubled it to two, and they were buying a couple of times a year and you just double it to four, it’s not double. It’s 800% more revenue. So, when you work on this 10, 10, 10 together, it’s like that.

So, back now I was talking about the Power Parthenon. You have one source. It’s 100%. You add eight more and if each one is only 10 more percent, it’s not 10%. It could be another hundreds of percent. So, we worked on that, and we found all kinds of ways that most people don’t realize they could add to their revenue, and they could reach their market and they could hedge their bet. And then we created what was called the Nine Drivers of Exponential Profit Performance. These are the nine easiest ways and they’re incorporated in that Hypergrowth Playbook. It’s the middle part, just one of the five parts in the middle, but they’re the nine easiest shifts you can make, a small shift, huge, huge upside. Change your strategy, you change your result. Most small medium businesses are not strategic. They’re tactical. Just by becoming strategic, it’s off the chart.

Change your marketing and there’s probably 25 different implications, you change your result. Change your business model, you change your result. Change your distribution channel where you source your business, change your result. Change your use of products and services, you change your results. This one is very interesting. Why is that important? Well, if you start with a smaller entry product or service, it’s easier for a lot more people to have the first transaction. There’s an adage, Justin. The faster I have the first sale, the faster I get the second and the third. You can take a new product, add it to your normal product sale and double profit, not necessarily revenue. You can add a more expensive advanced one, put it on the end after they bought everything else, and double or redouble the lifetime value.

But what that does is give you sometimes 2 or 3 times more you can invest, not spend to get the first sale and you can basically outthink and out-strategize all your competitors. It’s how you use processes, systems, procedures. It’s how you use your ideology, your belief system. I can go on and on but each one of those gives you leverage on leverage on leverage. And I’m all about unlimited upside and de-risking the down.

Justin Donald: I love that. This is just fantastic content. You’re a wealth of knowledge, Jay.

Jay Abraham: Thank you.

Justin Donald: I would love to really just have you share where our audience can learn more about you. Where can they find you? Where can they connect? For business owners that feel like partnering with you makes sense or doing some sort of consulting might make sense? Like, where do they go?

Jay Abraham: Yeah. I mean, if your business is large enough, we’re not inexpensive and very small businesses. We just really give a lot of resources on our websites. But go to jay@abraham.com and if you’re large enough we do one one-time retainer against long-term profit sharing. We call them profit partnerships. And I love underperforming companies that have a lot of moving parts in their revenue system that they don’t even realize are underperforming. But we’ll look at anything. We have self-diagnostic documents that show people how their business really stacks up. And you met Rob Colasanti, our Vice President of Partner.

Justin Donald: He’s awesome.

Jay Abraham: And he can basically show the impact analysis of what it might be minimally worth, but we’re looking for opportunities all the time. But we’re looking for quality companies that are either preeminent or they want to be preeminent. And the value they create, the benefit they add, the purpose, they’re like what do they call it? The raison d’exist like the reason they exist is to make their market better off because their company, product, service, people are in their life. If you’re in alignment, I’d love to talk. You just go to jay@abraham.com and we’ll see but I enjoy it. I hope I added some value today.

Justin Donald: Oh, you certainly did. This was absolutely wonderful. And I love ending every podcast episode with a question to the audience. So, to those of you watching, to those of you listening, what is one step that you can take today to move towards financial freedom and to move towards a life that’s truly on your terms, right, one that is not by default but by design? So, what one technique, strategy, tactic can you take from Jay today to move you towards a positioning that helps you live your life’s purpose? Thank you so much. And we’ll catch you next week.

Jay Abraham: Thank you.