How to use strategic marketing to become a market leader

00:00It's very probable, not even possible, that the way you're doing it, the market you're targeting, the way you're targeting them, the offers you're making, the ways you're monetizing it, what you're doing or not doing to extend or expand or perpetuate that monetization is a fraction of a fraction of what's really possible. Most people are trained to default towards one source of revenue. They're trained to accept results as given. A lot of people in business,

00:37they focus most of their time on bringing a buyer in, not on how to make the buyer more profitable or find a lot more residual value, ongoing profit from that relationship. Most people are trained in very traditional revenue generating thinking. They don't look at alternative ways to accomplish it. Most people don't realize you can have multiple approaches going concurrently.

01:09Most people who get a lot of their business from things like word of mouth or referral don't recognize, they accept it as organic, reactive, episodic, intermittent. They don't realize they could have up to 125 different strategic, proactive, systematic ways to get a lot more referrals. I mean, just a lot of things out. You're listening to the Growth Manifesto podcast, where we host in-depth interviews with business leaders, authors, industry experts, and entrepreneurs with a singular focus around business growth.

01:42At the end of each podcast, we want you to walk away inspired, to think bigger, and to have actionable takeaways you can apply to improve your business. Each episode is like a masterclass on a key topic, so make sure to browse the episodes to find the topics that are most relevant to your biggest business challenges today. This podcast is brought to you by Web Profits, a digital growth consultancy that helps challenge your brands drive growth in a complex and fragmented digital landscape. You can find out more about Web Profits at webprofits.io. Now, let's get into it.

02:13Today, we're talking with Jay Abraham, CEO and founder of the Abraham Group. He is a marketing legend that has helped more than 10,000 clients in more than 1,000 industries solve complex problems and drive significant growth through a different way of thinking. His clients include people like Tony Robbins and Damon John, companies like AT&T and FedEx, HBO, Baskin-Robbins, Shell, the list goes on. And he's helped to generate over $20 billion

02:45in sales across his career. He's helped more companies, businesses, and entrepreneurs than anyone else in the world. I first actually heard about Jay in the late 90s. I was in my early 20s. And his thinking literally changed how I approach everything I do in business. So I'm really excited about this one. Today, we'll be talking about how to become a market leader by thinking a bit differently about how you approach the marketing side of things and the business side of things. And just quickly, before we get started, make sure to go ahead and hit that subscribe button so you get the latest episodes as soon as they're released. Let's get into it. Welcome, Jay.

03:19Alex, thank you for inviting me. I look forward to the conversation. Well, let's get straight into it. How do you think about business and marketing? And why do you think that your thinking has helped so many companies over the decades? Because it's helped a lot. Yeah. Well, I mean, the answer is probably grounded, founded in what I'm the strongest at. I've had the unexpected good fortune of being involved in over a thousand industries worldwide, not businesses.

03:53And it's given me an enormously broad, deep and uniquely expansive understanding of all that's possible, all that's possible in business strategy, business models, marketing, advertising, value creation, strategic alliances, a lot of things that most people who spend a life in one or two industries wouldn't fathom. And I've gotten to try out an enormous amount of hypothesis and

04:23beliefs into the real market. And I've had to do it through translation on worldwide sort of forums. And it's given me an understanding of things that transcend the way most people think about it. I've got a much more expansive sense of what you can do, how you can do it, where you can do it, why you can do it, what all is possible. And most people just don't have the, they don't have the empirical experience to understand and appreciate more possibilities.

04:56One of the things that you talk about is to look for solutions to business problems, but within other industries. So why is that so important? Well, it's important for a number of reasons. First of all, if you study breakthroughs throughout history, the majority of them did not come from inside the industry. They came from outside. People would look at something and realize they could translate it or apply it to a totally different application. Easy examples, fiber optics redefined telecommunication, but it wasn't created in telecommunication.

05:33It came from aerospace and somebody borrowed it and adapted and adopted it. Federal Express created a whole industry by borrowing from the United States the hub and spoke check clearing process that the Federal Reserve Bank, our banking system used to make sure people didn't bounce checks. checks. Rogaine came from pimple medicine. Viagra came from heart medicine. Ballpoint pen. I don't have my pen. I've lost my pen temporarily. Ballpoint pen or roll on deodorant was borrowed

06:10from each other. So that's the first distinction. The second is the concept of best practices is frankly and actually flawed because usually you're learning the best practices from a a vertical industry. And by and large, they're going to be incremental. They're going to be incremental. They're not going to be explosive practices. They're things that everyone else is doing a little bit better, worse, best practices. They're not the best breakthrough practices. They're not the highest, best, safest, fastest, most profitable, efficient, effective.

06:45They're just the best practices that an industry has discovered. When I got started, I realized, excuse me, I'm on an airport and right on the runway and a lot of planes take off, I learned that there's a lot of higher, better, faster, safer, more powerful, profitable, productive ways to do things that other industries do commonplace, but people in a different industry are never even exposed to. So it's much, it's sort of, there's the basis for it. And so you talked about explosive growth, right? And, you know, you often talk about the fact

07:21that companies are successfully stuck with above market performance. Yes. But the order of magnitude, like significantly higher profits is frequently possible. Right. So what do you mean by that? Well, I mean, it's exactly that. If you are making money and you are making more money than most of the other companies, people, professionals you're competing against, you're a happy camper. But it's very probable, not even possible that the way you're doing it,

07:57the market you're targeting, the way you're targeting them, the offers you're making, the ways you're monetizing it, what you're doing or not doing to extend or expand or perpetuate that monetization is a fraction of a fraction of what's really possible from the time, the opportunity, market access, advertising, interaction. And when you realize how many better ways you can do it, it's very possible to make ads produce. I mean, there's plenty of

08:31research. I have lots of case studies. You can make an ad double, redouble, redouble. It's either quantitative or qualitative or both quantitative and qualitative result, meaning you can get an add to do up to 21 times more yield, more results, more response, more numbers if you know how to do headlines, risk reversal, positioning changes, credibility, value creation, proof elements,

09:03bonuses. You can convert more people when you get a prospect. You can get people to buy more at the point of sale. You can get them to buy longer. You can get them to buy things from you even if you don't have more than one product to sell by making partnerships. You can penetrate lots of different markets. You can not just go to media or not just knock cold on doors. You can find all kinds of companies, influencers, media, organizations, associations that have access to the same market

09:36and partner with them. You can take methodology that you have perfected that you only use in one market or in one application and license, partner, profit share, savings share with us. I go on and on and on, but those are a few. Yeah. And so, Les, what do you think, I guess, is the reason that like quite a lot of companies aren't like thinking like this or they don't even consider this? Is it because they're stuck in their vertical and they're having a look at their competition and they're going for incremental improvement?

10:10Mostly, and most people are trained to default towards one source of revenue. They're trained to accept results as given. A lot of people in business, they focus most of their time on bringing a buyer in, not on how to make the buyer more profitable or find a lot more residual value, ongoing profit from that relationship. Most people are trained in very traditional revenue-generating thinking.

10:48They don't look at alternative ways to accomplish it. Most people don't realize you can have multiple approaches going concurrently. Most people who get a lot of their business from things like word of mouth or referral don't recognize. They accept it as organic, reactive, episodic, intermittent. they don't realize they could have up to 125 different strategic proactive systematic ways to get a lot more referrals i mean just a lot of things out and so what do you like are there

11:22a few things or like what does it take for a company to become truly great like the fedex's of the world right you know so what does that take for a company well it takes it takes a lot And it takes a little. You have to understand what I call the strategy of preeminence, which is to establish your product company people in the eyes of the target audience is the only viable solution, the most trusted advisor for life, the only source they could possibly go to

11:53or choose. In order to deliver on that, you have to be willing to give them advice that is different and more relevant. You have to be able to understand and express and articulate and verbalize what they really want more of, less of, the reason why they're trying to really get what it is you offer, your product, your service does for them in a better, clear, more powerful way that resonates other than other people. You have to see yourself as somebody who

12:25has a moral responsibility, an obligation and the privilege to try to help everyone in the market that you can serve better than your competitors, not because you want to be the most successful, but you want to be the most impactful and make and create the most value for your audience market. You've got to look at your role in the market on many dimensions. I think I tell people you have to see the relationship you have with the buyer and have them be seen as a client, not a customer.

12:57And the reason why, I think in Australia, they do more of that actually. But if you look at a definition of a customer, it's somebody who buys a commodity or service. If I call you a customer, I'm saying, hey, Alex, I'm no better than a generic commodity or a service. If you look at somebody who is a client, the definition of that is somebody who's under the care, the protection, the well-being of another. If you're going to be preeminent, you have three categories of clients you have to serve. The first and the primary one are certainly the ones who pay you. The other two

13:32are the people you pay, your employees, your team members, your colleagues, and your advisors. You have to be committed to grow and develop them and their success. You want everyone to be collaborative. You don't want to just squeeze everything you can out of people. You want to grow and develop everything you can within them. So their value, their contribution, their passion, their collaboration is off the charts. Those are a few things. And there's quite a lot there, but it is also simple in the fact

14:04that you want to be the company that provides the most value and solves the biggest problems and that thinks a bit differently to the rest and so that you stand out. and so that you're seen as the obvious choice. Is that right? Like, is that a good way of summarizing it? Obvious choice, the only choice, a permanent choice, even if you only sell something one time, that they can always turn to, they can always refer to, they can always trust. So you talk a lot about strategy.

14:36Strategy, like, is one of those kind of esoteric words sometimes where there's no real definition, but there's 100 definitions and there's lots of different ways of thinking about it. How do you think about strategy? How do you define strategy first? And then actually, how do you think about it? Well, to me, strategy is the overall big long-term game plan you're playing and everything you do tactically are activities, efforts, anything that is designed to advance and enhance the long-term game.

15:09it's it's not it's it's how you think about your role in the life of the market that you're serving and what you're trying to accomplish it has to do with how you're seen as far as your marketing positioning has to see what your business model is it has everything and then everything else you do is designed to feed to that most people are their strategy is that they're being tactical They just do things intermittently. They don't have everything integrate together, the left and the right.

15:42You know, a person in the business doesn't correlate. There's no congruency. People are playing a short game instead of a long game. They do things for the moment. They run ads more just transactionally. But strategy is a long-term game that you're playing, and everything you do needs to be based on that. And so like how important is it for growth, you know, just to have like a solid, strong strategy? Well, I would say it's all important.

16:15I mean, in the world today where you've got enormous quantities of generic competitors and then you have enormous alternative ways to get the same result that your category of business offers, you have to be able to play a longer game. If you got to know, what am I going to do? I mean, there's five facets that I think, and I see if I can remember, I haven't used this for a long time, of business wealth. One is having certainty you're going to have current income. The other is having certainty you've got a constant flow of future income.

16:48The other is finding opportunistic windfall income. And the other is finding a lot of fulfillment, psychic, emotional income that you and your whole team gets out of being on a mission and a crusade in behalf of the market you're serving and the value you're creating for them or the protection you're establishing or the enrichment or the entertainment, whatever your product service does. does. And the last is the asset value you're building. And if you're not playing that whole integrative game and playing it relative to your competition, playing it well above the

17:25maddening crowd, there's no way you'll win. And today, if you don't have a fabulous and a sustainable and a defendable and a preemptive and a preeminent strategy, the odds of staying vibrant, viable, successful, profitable is very low. I mean, I'm loving your answers, by the way. They're very complex answers, but they're very simple as well. But I know for the listeners, there's a lot, you know, so like, like, but I think if someone is listening, they should probably

17:56hit the rewind button a couple of times and hear some of like your answers again, because like you cover so many things in a very short sentence structure. So it's really, really impressive. But let me ask you a question, right? Sure. Can you separate the marketing from the business within the strategy? I think marketing is an extension of your strategy. And if you don't market, your business will not grow. You grow or die. You're either a multiplier or a diminisher of everything you do.

18:30your place in the marketplace, your innovation, your contribution, your value creation, your benefits to the market. But I think, no, it's all integrated. The big problem with most people is they operate silo-like and modular-like, and there's no integration, there's no sophistication and thought. It's pretty basically, let's see. And they also, I would say this, there's a concept,

19:05there's two concepts. There's a 2D thinker and there's a 3D thinker in business. And Alex, a 2D thinker is somebody who looks at the business in terms of revenue minus expense equals profit. It's very static and it's very transactional. A 3D thinker looks at one more dimension, residual yield. They don't look at, okay, I'm going to run $100,000 of ads. I'm going to get $400,000 of sales. So now I've got, if it's an annualized, I got a $4 million business,

19:39theoretical. And after expenses, I make 200 grand. The 3D thinker says, I am investing in assets, buyers who will pay a residual return on investment over and over again if I strategically know how to mine, manage, monetize, and perpetuate the relationship. It's a whole different way of

20:09thinking. So if a company that's been established now for a while, they've hit their growth goals for a decade and now they've hit like a point of, they've come to a point where things have started to become flat from the growth perspective, right? What would you advise them to look at to really change the trajectory of their growth again? Well, I mean, first of all, are you driving it by one revenue approach? If the answer is yes, how much experimentation have

20:39you done to make that more powerful? How many more approaches could you add? We try to get most of our clients to have nine different sources of generating revenue from their market, penetrating all kinds of different aspects. We use a military concept called force multiplier effect, which is going at it from many different avenues at the same time. I would say, how many different product service offerings do you have? I'd say, what else do you know about

21:13the buyer that you could be offering other related products. I'd ask, what do they buy before, during, after, instead of what they buy from you? I'd ask who else has a trusted relationship with them that you could basically partner with and could take your product service to their market and reciprocally, you could take their product or service to your market. I would ask, do you get any of your business from referrals or word of mouth? If so, do you have even one formalized systematized referral generating strategy in place? If not, we know 125 of them. And I can go

21:48on and on, but those are a few. And I'd also say, what are you doing on R&D, research and development? Are you researching your competition? What do you know about those strengths or weaknesses? I would say, what do you try to develop as far as new products or new sources of products? What do you know about your buyer that you're not doing? What are you researching and developing and trying in terms of marketing messaging and the vehicles. Then you've got three ways to grow a business. As I said, you increase the number of buyers, you increase the size of the

22:19transaction and thus the profit per transaction. You increase the frequency or the utility, meaning how many more ways you can make ethical profit off of that buyer. And then you've got three advanced ways, Alex. You can penetrate a new market or niche every year. You can introduce a new product or service every year. And that new product or service gives you enormous advantage. You can use a modest one to start a relationship and make it easier than maybe what your main product or service sells for. Get a lot more people to start that you can then move to larger

22:53buyers. You can take new products or service and add it to the normal product to double or redouble the profit per sale. You can get an advanced expensive product and use it to extend the profitability, the lifetime value. You can get certain products that you go back to unsold prospect or inactive buyers and re-monetize them. It was just a ton of things you can do that nobody thinks about. And there's a massive list for people that are stuck. You should transcribe it or just actually have a little transcript and actually just document that because there's a

23:25lot of ideas. Obviously, you should get all the Jay stuff because it's amazing. There's a couple of things that like you mentioned, the first is competition. How much should companies look at their competition in general? If you don't know who you are competing against and you don't know how they are competing and you don't know why people are buying from them rather than you, and you don't know where they are competing and you don't know why they are doing what they're doing and you don't know how well they are doing, how can you imagine you're going to

24:01outperform them. I mean, most people operate in a vacuum. We almost laugh, although a fine line, a gossip, a thin line between pathos and humor, sometimes we just cry. Any new client I make answer a 200-question assessment, most of them can't answer it all, but there's a huge portion on competitive knowledge. What do you know about your competitor? Where do they market? What's their positioning, higher, lower? How do they do it? Why do people buy from them instead of you?

24:32Why do they buy from you instead of them? Where are they strong at? Marketing, product, support, positioning, brand, and why? And most people just go, I don't know. Okay. And so you want to be across it and you want a systemized way to stay across it. Is that right? It's more than right. It's vital. It's mission critical if you want to be more than mediocre. So you're looking at the competition from one side to understand them. But on the other side, you don't want to do the best practices and to do what everybody else is doing. So to your earlier point, you want to be looking across industries and how other companies are approaching certain problems.

25:10That's where advantage comes from. And I mean, in all of business, you want advantage, ethical advantage, but you want total advantage. You want to know how to be more relevant. You want to be more irresistible and unbeatable in what you say. You want to be able to reach them from access vehicles nobody else does. So you have advanced access. You want to be able to make your product have more perception of value and deliver it, whatever that perception is. You don't want to be mediocre or generic.

25:42I mean, all these things are not just mandatory. They are necessities if you want to be more than an average business in a very competitive world. What do you think about the importance of a brand in terms of a company's success and growth? And how does that kind of fit into kind of some of the marketing tactics like special offers and risk reversals and all that compared to brands? I think everybody associates with different categories, but different representative positions.

26:18People result, they relate with people that have the highest technology, people that have the coolest looking, people that have the more status, people that have the greater value pricing, people that have a certain category of people that tend to be their audience. people that, you know, have greater service support. And I think you have to figure out what is it that you can offer your market that you and your company can deliver in a way that the competition doesn't.

26:50Because if all you do is offer everything that everyone else does the same way, then you have no advantage. If you're offering that which no one offers in ways nobody offers, you have tremendous advantage. And so like a lot's changed in the last 20, 30 years, right? in terms of the competition, the accessibility to the market through the internet and so on. And so in that space, how do you really stand out? Is it to really understand the customer, to run the qualitative surveys?

27:24Yeah, you better are. Alex, the more you understand the mind of your market and you can put into words what they feel that they want more of, less of and why and how, and they see that you really get them. You understand that at a deeper level, that's one thing. Second is the more you give them reasons why that make sense of why they should deal with you, why you are a better choice, why you are doing more, caring more, protecting more, contributing more, the more that you make the proposition harder to say no to,

28:02the more that you have peer confirmation, the more you have influencers who endorse you legitimately, all those things make a big difference. So before you spoke about the strategy of preeminence, right, is to be seen basically as the only choice, right? is that done through content, through creating content that answers questions? It's holistic, Alex. It starts with a belief system that you're going to basically be,

28:36you're going to provide them and whatever the niche that you're focused on or the approach or the positioning with, you're going to be, you know, the greatest possible choice because, and you can answer the because. And it is integrative. It's not just trying to append a one trick pony tactic to get advantage. It's having congruity and authenticity. I am set up to be, frankly, very elevated in the entrepreneurial niche. People come to me and they

29:10expect me to know more than other people. They expect me to be able to assess better. They expect me to give them better strategy, marketing, advertising. They expect me to be something of a masterful thinking partner and being able to identify issues they're not even aware of that are going to be implications or opportunities. They're expecting me to care more about them than about myself and give them advice they can trust. They're expecting me to protect

29:44their downside and not let them make wild, dangerous, overly expensive commitments that might go bad. They're expecting me to help them think at a deeper level than they do themselves. And I have to live up to that expectation because that's the brand perception that I created. And that's done across the company, across all your messaging, across any company, across any education.

30:16People have to express that in their communication. You know, when there's opportunities to, you know, to do things beyond, we do it. When there's problems, we try to resolve it better than others. You know, I have certain clients that I'll start with and they have setbacks and I have to be I don't have to, but I will waive my fees or actually lend them money sometimes because I believe in them. And you have to believe in the people you support.

30:49It can't be superficially about making money. In our lives, Alex, in business, we are rewarded in direct proportion to the quantity, quality, and consistency of problems we solve for others and opportunities we make possible. And people that go into business to make money usually fail because you're only making money as a byproduct of making an impact. and the impact can be profitability, savings, enjoyment, prestige, protection,

31:24but you have to know the game you're playing and you can't sell people on it if you can't authentically and congruently deliver on it. That's great. I've got a few strategic slash tactical. I'm probably getting that part wrong, which I'd just like to speak about because I know that you have a lot and I just want to just cover a few of them. So the first one, it's a simple one, but it's got complexity in it, right? It's risk reversal, right? And like you were the first person I ever heard that from. And, you know, after that point, pretty much every internet marketing course I ever bought

31:57had special, like, like had kind of the guarantees and bonuses and all that. But the risk reversal thinking applies across all businesses. Is that right? This risk reversal approach. If you think about it, here's the concept in a nutshell. Joe, anytime any two people engage in any kind of transaction for any reason, it can be business. It can be fraternity, friendship. It can be love. It can be first stage love. It can be deeper love. It can be, you know, having an intimate relation. It can be getting married.

32:32It can be deciding to have children, everything. There's risk associated. And the risk normally is two kinds. There's known tangible and there's intangible unknown. And if you can, first of all, identify the levels and the layers of risk that exist in anything you're trying to do in business and all your life, but in business, and you can mitigate, eliminate, reduce, overcome them in behalf of the market and make it easier to say yes than no, make the proposition irresistible,

33:08you're going to win a lot more times than lose, and you're going to outperform the competition. That doesn't understand that, but it's inherent in the human condition. We're worried. You know, when I have to talk to somebody about doing a long-term expensive commitment and engagement to me, they have apprehension, they have uncertainty. So the first thing I will do is ask them questions no one's ever asked them. Then I will give them some of my materials that blows

33:39their mind and shows that I understand it. I then will probably give them my 200-question questionnaire that makes all kinds of connections for them, and they can't answer most of them, and they realize that they have been compromised and never known it. Then I'll let them talk to people that have already, you know, been benefited by me in very significant financial and professional and personal ways. And then I will make it incumbent on them to solicit me

34:13because I don't want to be pushing them. But, I mean, you need to know what game you're playing. So when you talk about risk reversal, you're really not just talking about to provide some kind of like a money-back guarantee. Is that right? Because everything which you've just provided is providing some value up front, not it's 100 grand a year or say 500 grand a year. And if you're not happy. Yeah, it's much more dimensional. It's much more integral. It's much more holistic. It's much more related to creating certainty, to protecting them over yourself, and to wanting the relationship to be one that is much more appropriate on their side than even yours.

35:05And not wanting it just for the money. You got to look at their best interest always first and foremost. And if their best interest isn't served by doing it, I mean, a part of preeminence, I didn't go there, but you have a responsibility to never sell somebody more than they should buy or less in less quantity, quality, combination or frequency. Not because you're going to be denied profit, but because they will either be denied the optimal result. Right. And I think this is a really solid point is, you know, how can companies find ways to reduce the potential risk for their clients without having to offer some kind of a money back guarantee?

35:45I mean, they could offer the guarantee. I mean, that is one way, but there are quite a lot of other ways that companies can provide that experience up front. No, I mean, you can make it, I mean, you cannot allow someone to buy from you until they've gone through a series of validations, verifications, due diligence that you help them do. Try out your company, your product. There's a myriad of ways, but the point is most people don't do any of them. That's a great point.

36:16The next one, you talk about upside leverage. What do you mean by upside leverage? Well, I mean, the concept in his simplest analogy is, as most people know, that there's two kinds of cholesterol that affect the body, the bad kind and the good. If you have too much of the bad, you're dead. The good kind negates it. Well, there's two kinds of leverage or gearing, as you would say in Australia. the kind that you incur with your fingers crossed in the hope that if you're buying an asset,

36:51you hope it will either appreciate or cash flow enough to service the debt or make the investment pay off short or long term. If you're investing in something like more space or equipment or employee or raise or anything else, you're hoping that will yield you a result, a dividend. Nobody writes a check in business if they don't really deep down consciously or subconsciously expect it to make a profit for them. So, I mean, that's the basis of it. And I don't think most

37:29people think that way. So, you know, everything you do, you're playing a game for, you know, So everything in life is about what kind of return are you getting? I believe every one of us is an investor in all aspects of our life. And we want to be actually more like a hedge fund investor. They go after outsized profits and minimal downside. They're going after what's called asymmetric profit. They're going after alpha. We're all human hedge funds or corporate hedge funds, whether we know it or not.

38:04We're allocating all kinds of the equivalent of asset classes in our portfolio, whether it's opportunity costs, whether it's where we market, whether it's how we develop and grow our people, whether it's our minimal or maximum product offering. And we're expecting to be invested looking for alpha, which is beyond market performance. And yet we don't even know what our allocation is to this. We don't know the risk associated. We don't know what we're getting out of it yield wise.

38:36And we don't even have a clue what outsized performance is supposed to look like. So how could we even get close to getting it? So how do people start to really think about the potential, the potential of what's possible, right? Because it's that first point that you just said, they don't even know what's possible. And so how do they even start to get to that point where they're like, wait, I'm getting, I'll say, 5% increase this year.

39:07It's a lifelong lament because I've been blessed to see it for myself experientially and through all kinds of alternative industries I've gone in. I think they have to travel outside. You know this, Alex. Traveling broadens the mind. If you travel outside of your city to other parts of your country that have different climates, you see different topography, weather, dress. If you travel

39:41outside your country to other countries, you see different climates, food, ethnicity, religion, architecture. If you travel outside of your continent, you see that far more expansive. But when you travel outside your industry, you start seeing possibilities. I think you've got to be committed consciously. I was accidentally thrust into it, but you got to all the time start studying other industries. Force yourself to examine and to study things. Get on

40:19a search and search things you're not involved in. Search other industries, search other categories. You need to understand what other people are doing, how they're doing it. Every friend, every colleague, every relative, every church member, every health club member that you know, ask them if they're in another industry, interview them. Ask them to tell you how their industry works, what they know about, how they sell, who they sell to, what they sell, what they're selling approach learn everything you can about everything you can because that will give

40:51you what you you secretly want which is absolute ethical advantage that curiosity isn't it it's having that curiosity that hunger curiosity hopeless curiosity i haven't heard that statement before hopeless curiosity like as in like you're going in it and you just don't know where it's going to go and it's always there you don't care because you know that if you do it right it'll always produce pay dirt and pay days for you. That's a great, great point. The next thing I

41:21wanted to quickly discuss is maximizing underperforming assets. You talk a lot about, you know, to find value in things that are completely underperforming or actually under utilized. Can you talk about that? Because I think it's a fabulous point that is across every company? Well, Jesus, I mean, I'll take it internal, external. So every company has some way, they got a revenue generating system. So first thing is we have something called revenues, revenue system optimization. We look at the revenue system and we question every facet.

41:57We know, are you targeting the right, the right category of market, the most qualitative, the most responsive? How are you targeting it? Where are you targeting? What's the message you're targeting? What's the offer or the way you're trying to evoke a connection? What are you doing when you have that connection? What are you doing to convert that connection to monetization? What do you do afterwards? How do you do it? How many other ways could you do it? Then inside you say,

42:29okay, what other things does your buyer buy before, during, after? How can you sell that to them? Who else sells that? Could the people that sell other things be your partner? Could you buy those kinds of businesses to compliment it since you're selling to it? Then you say, okay, if I have a lot of salespeople or a lot of distributors or a lot of franchisors, franchisees, there's variation. Different people are performing at different levels and most people don't break it down. If you have 10, 20, 100 salespeople, they're not all going to be the

43:03same. Some are going to be stronger in one thing, weaker in others. Some are better at opening accounts. Some are better at selling different products. Some are better at holding margins. Some are better at selling multiple products. Some are better in conservation. Some are better at selling to different industries. You need to figure out who's better at what and why and how and how much better and figure out how to get either of them to teach everybody else what they know that others don't, or if they're many times better, how to be a specialist and only do that one thing and pass them to other people. If you have unsold prospects, you need to figure what

43:37else you can go back and monetize them. If you have inactive buyers, you've got to figure out to monetize those. If you see within the core of your business, an accidental, significant category of people that seem attracted to you, doctors, you know, bicyclists, triathletes, anything, then you want to go after that because you intentionally are appealing to them. If you have methodology, processes, techniques, systems, procedures that outperform your

44:12competitors, but you're only operating in a limited geography or market, and it could be used by lots of other people, you want to be able to identify what they are, quantify it, and then sell, lease, profit share, train people, license people to do that. You want to basically see how many other ways you can penetrate different niches of the market. You want to see if you got control of competitive businesses and consolidating them with economies of scale and eliminating duplicated functions and brought them all into one location.

44:48If you can make a lot more profit, you want to see if you can buy them without putting any money up front and letting them buy themselves. I mean, it's all kind. I can go on and on and on and on and on. I love your answers, Jay. Oh, man. Is there like a way that a company can start to document or to create like a list of their resources or their assets so they can start actually kind of predictably thinking about this, right, instead of just saying, hey, of course,

45:19what do I have? I've got all this. seem like. Yeah, we had, we had a years ago, I don't know if I still have it, a, an asset, an intangible, intangible asset, sort of a inventory list. And we have a 200 question assessment that makes you look within your business. And I wouldn't mind giving it to you to give away to people. I don't know if I can find the inventory because I don't do a lot of this anymore. But yeah, I mean, the answer to everything is yes. And, but also the answer to your question is they must, because if, why would you be, here's a really interesting question, Alex.

45:54Why in the world would you want to be in business and dedicate your career or your life or all your investable capital or your income expectation or your wealth and security expectation or your retirement expectation or your lifestyles, you know, support or your sense of purpose and fulfillment to something that was going to vastly underperform its capacity. It makes no sense,

46:27does it? No, it doesn't make sense. But I think a lot of company, people who start companies, they get to a point where it just becomes so busy within it that they kind of lose their passion. They don't have their joy anymore, which you talk about. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I absolutely agree. And honestly, it's tragic because there are very, very few companies, large, small, doesn't matter the type, size, scope. They couldn't really perform it at such heightened level of everything, impact, profitability, contribution, but they don't know it's possible.

47:05And really, I'm an anomaly. There are very few people like me, and you found me in the 70s. I'm very mentally agile, and I hope my prowess is significant, but I'm a very unique anomaly. Almost nobody you'll ever meet would be able to freely discuss this and be able to realistically, empirically relate to this from real life experiences. You've got a lot of theoretical people teaching one trick bony tactics. You got people that have been exposed to someone like me trying to utter their interpretation.

47:40But what I stand for is I'm on almost a mission myself to try to force people while I'm still on this earth to really do a lot more with any business they have, any practice professionally, any startup, any businesses they invest in. Because why would you want to do less? and this is the thing and you know just for the listeners and the viewers um he's right um he's a very unique individual in terms of how he thinks about marketing and business and you know so what

48:11we've been doing right now is just scratching the literal surface of the depth of content that Jay's actually produced over the years um and it's hard to find people that can can really put things into perspective and to show you possibility, possibility, and to give you confidence and to give you permission. And this is, I think, the one thing which you're awesome at, fantastic at, is to find joy. Find the joy like your life's work. You should be able to derive so much passion, purpose,

48:44sense of possibility, fulfillment, and liberation, if you do this right, from the kind of things that I'm talking about here. And why do you think so many people are stuck? You know, because there's so many people stuck. They're stuck in the day-to-day. They're stuck and they're scared. There's three reasons, and I would dare say to people listening to your podcast or anybody's podcast aren't guilty of some of these. If you remember the days when bookstores were around,

49:17you could walk into a bookstore, Alex, and there might be two very long aisles on psychology. it psychology, relationships, sexuality, parenting. And then you'd go to the end and there'd be this much on business, marketing, advertising, strategy, negotiation, because most small, medium business people are islands. They don't really, for whatever reason, I don't know why no one ever showed them the correlation between expertise, higher performance methodology, and their bottom line, but a small number of people get that. Whatever number of people

49:53watch and listen and loyally subscribe and embrace yours, that's great. But most people, first of all, don't even see the correlation. The second is they get it, but they don't know how to execute it, or it's not real to them, or they think it'll only work in certain places. Also, truthfully, most people, they have the retention. When you are exposed to anything normally, whether it's a seminar, a book, consulting, a conference, your retention is about 5% of what you hear.

50:34And sadly, the more innovative, the more nominal you're the guy, somebody like myself, you'll retain about 3% because your mind will be tripping out half the time and you won't even hear what's said. Well, if you only retain 5% or 2.5%, the odds of you understanding how to apply it, implement it, put it all together, connect the dots is very low. Secondly, when you try to do it, it is an analogous, Alex, to a little baby trying to learn to walk, talk, eat, poop, ride a bike.

51:10They're terrible and they fail. And if you do something the first time based on an erroneous or a limited understanding and you try to apply it and it fizzles or backfires or doesn't do anything, your tendency is to is to recoil and go back to status quo. So you never try it again. So that and and most people follow the herd. You know, we are herd oriented. Most people got into their field because that's the market they were raised in.

51:41They work for somebody, then they start a business, and they only know pretty much plus or minus what that business does. And they don't really understand that the real breakthrough is the real opportunity, the real advantage, the real power of profitability comes from not thinking like everybody else. Fabulous points. And I think this is a really good place to kind of end the podcast, which is a shame because I really enjoy speaking with you. But just for the listeners who want to find out more, like this information, is it still available for sale from you?

52:15I sell things and we sell programs that are available on my website and we sell them through some other places. And anybody can go to Abraham.com and find them. And there's lots of goodies. And if somebody, I mean, I'm always looking for real businesses that are already, you know, significant enough that they have, you know, critical mass velocity, infrastructure, and a reasonable amount of success already. And I get involved with them. I'm not inexpensive, but I get, you know, a nice one-time fee against profit

52:48sharing for all that I add. And I'll give you that. They can just connect me at jay.abraham.com. And I'd like to hope, I always hope that I give a lot of insight, a lot of different kind of value than everyone else. A lot of reality checking where people, you know, I like to say that what I do more than anything else is give people what I call a paradigmectomy, change their worldview,

53:19put it on, flip it on its ears so they think differently about everything. That's awesome. And I can't speak highly enough of Jay's expertise. It's something I said at the very start, I stumbled across Jay back in the late nineties. And luckily for me, because it's literally changed how I think about every business I do and it's different. And even though I can ship as much as I could, it's not the same as actually having the source actually help you. So Jay, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This has been a fantastic conversation.

53:50And I'm sure that all the listeners will get a lot of value out of this. And if you're a listener, make sure that you check the transcript and just listen to this a few times because the depth of Jay's answers is vast. And so there's a lot. Thank you very much. Thanks, Jay. Thanks for listening to the Growth Manifesto podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please give us a five-star rating on iTunes. For more episodes, please visit growthmanifesto.com forward slash podcast. And if you need help driving growth for your company, please get in touch with us at webprofits.io.